Where are America’s Drowned Cities?

By Robert Zubrin

Global warming lengthens the growing season and increases net rainfall worldwide. The enrichment of the atmospheric carbon dioxide accelerates the rate of plant growth. These are all very positive developments, both for humanity and for wild nature. As a result of climate change, the Earth is becoming a more fertile planet.

Nevertheless, say the representative of the green movement, economically destructive -- and highly regressive -- carbon taxes must be imposed, because otherwise global warming will result in catastrophic floods of coastal areas. This assertion is quite problematic because global warming has been going on for four hundred years. We can know this with certainty, not from the doubtful claims of researchers who assert that they can measure average global temperatures to within a tenth of a degree, but from readily available historical accounts. Civil War buffs are familiar with the massive snowball fights engaged in by Confederate armies stationed as far south as Georgia, and everyone who has read Dickens encounters tales describing much more severe winter weather in mid 19th-century London than anything we see today. If we read back further in time, we hear of a world that is much colder still, with the Thames freezing up regularly, sometimes for months on end, during the 1600s......This map, comparing Boston’s coastline in 1630 with that of modern times shows the inconvenient truth. None of colonial Boston has been lost. Far from it; the city’s coastline has expanded considerably.....Read more