Earth 2100 Page #7

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The Pentagon today held closed door

meetings to discuss climate change.

Our top story tonight,

the President is announcing

the cosmic shield project

which alms to halt the disintegration

of the Greenland Ice sheet.

Imagine that you are the

president of the United States,

and you have word that Greenland is going

to collapse in the next ten years,

adding seven meters to sea level.

I'm not saying that is happening today.

I'm saying imagine that were to happen,

and you were told that

technology exists to stop it.

Wouldn't you be tempted to use it?

It didn't take long

for the world to agree.

A technology existed that could

stop the Ice sheets from melting.

It should be used.

Hundreds of jets from all around the world

were spraying a mist of sulfur dioxide

into the atmosphere.

The gas would form particles which would

shade the Earth and temporarily cool it.

This is your solution of last resort.

You say all belts are off,

we are just going to intervene

in this system with reckless abandon.

For a year, there were

these spectacular sunsets.

But what are the other

consequences of those things?

Maybe it would cool the Earth,

maybe it would cool it too much.

That might be a disaster

in the opposite direction.

Maybe it would cause some other environmental

problem that we don't foresee today.

The Earth cooled.

But that was the least of it.

Tonight in Washington, there's debate

on whether to follow China and Great Britain

and cease flying cosmic shield missions.

We've learned that in all

aspects of engineering,

there are unintended consequences.

The Surgeon General

testified before Congress today

on the health effects of further...

The cloud was burning

off the ozone layer.

Once that was gone, every living creature would

be exposed to a massive dose of radiation.

The experiment was halted.

Once they stopped spraying the gas,

the Ice sheets continued to melt,

but now at a quicker pace.

Sea level rise would soon be

measured in feet, not inches.

If you end up with several

meters of sea level rise,

you change life as we know it.

In New York, watchdog groups are now

suggesting storm surge barriers may be too low.

Josh and the other engineers

were working around the clock

to try to build the barriers even higher.

But we all knew we were

in a race against time.

Society is not set up to

deal with rapid sea level rise.

It would be a catastrophe of -

a magnitude we've never experienced.

One of our political leaders

said not too long ago

that the American way of

life is non-negotiable.

We're going to discover the

hard way that when you don't

negotiate the circumstances that

are sent to you by the universe,

you automatically get assigned a new

negotiating partner named reality,

and then it will negotiate for you.

You don't even have to be in the room.

A vicious nor'easter is

headed up the East Coast.

It is expected to hit New York

on the high tide this afternoon.

Storm surge could be over 20 feet.

As the storm approached, the engineers

started closing the entire bay wall.

It absolutely had to work or

the city would be devastated.

It was terrifying.

Then the winds picked

up and a gate got stuck.

That's a nightmare scenario,

getting stuck halfway shut.

Because the water will pour in

and flood the city.

A team was assembled to

manually close the gate.

They would have to go out

into the harbor by boat.

I asked Josh not to go.

I begged him to stay safe with me.

But this was his project.

He had to see it through.

Preliminary reports that

one of the gates in the Great Barrier

has failed to close.

We're a waiting

confirmation from the mayor's office.

It was high tide when the storm hit.

Flooding in subway

tunnels throughout...

Four, five, and six trains are affected.

The streets were fling with water.

The mayor has made the

decision to evacuate City Hal.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

Seeing truly catastrophic flooding.

The tide comes in

and on top of that, the surge.

The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels

are fling with seawater...

When New York began to flood,

it would be total chaos.

There's an evacuation

order in effect for...

The Office of Emergency

Management says we have to evacuate.

We've got a problem.

The subway is full of

seawater and it will shut down.

What do people do?

Authorities are now telling anyone

still in the city

to remain calm and stay inside.

Outside, the storm raged.

All I could do was wait

for Josh to come home.

When I heard the knock on my door, I knew.

He died a hero, they said.

But that was no comfort.

I called Molly and she wept.

She wanted me to come live with her.

But I couldn't leave.

I just couldn't leave.

...looking at four

or five feet of water.

We could see the worst

of this storm by 3.00 AM.

New Yorkers are going to

wake up in a very different city tomorrow.

As the sun rose the next day,

It was clear that both my city

and my life had been destroyed.

Battery Park fills up with seawater.

Lower west side - lower east side.

Brooklyn, Queens is flooded.

Kennedy Airport's flooded.

Newark Airport's flooded.

It's all gonna be underwater.

In the coming days,

when the waters receded,

the city was filthy and everything

that could rot was rotting.

People wanted to leave.

But for many of them,

there was nowhere to go.

How welcoming will people be when

New York or Boston sink under water

and all those people, in their millions,

come to New England or to Pennsylvania?

How welcoming will people be?

I packed my things and

set them at the door.

But I didn't leave.

I suppose you could

say I was stubborn.

And I was needed at

Bellevue more than ever.

There were millions who

needed someone to care for them.

As the seas rose, the wealthy

moved uptown to higher ground

and hired private companies

to pick up the trash.

But in the low-lying slums,

tap water was contaminated.

People were so poor they ate only

once a day, If they ate at al.

When people are hungry and

people are malnourished,

as you continue to have

displacement with floods,

there's no doubt that's a perfect setup

for certain types of infections.

I was working the late shift

when the first case came in.

A young man with a

cough and a high fever.

And then I noticed the

blisters all over his body.

Was this the virus

I had seen years ago?

Another case of Caspian fever...

Health officials have issued

a statement, asking people to avoid public...

All New York City

schools have been shut down.

Representatives from the CDC...

This virus is cause for concern.

Within a week, over 20 were dead.

People on the streets wore masks,

avoided each other.

The air was ripe with panic.

...reminding citizens to wash

their hands and cover their mouths.

You would shut down factories.

You would shut down trade.

You would shut down commerce.

Everything would shut down.

Death toll from

Caspian Fever has now reached 107.

The virus continued

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