Thread by @gauravsabnis

I've lived in NYC for 11 years and visited it often for 5 years before that. The effect of climate change is being felt everyday every year by us. On so many parameters. In every season. Hurricanes hitting NYC were a once in two decades things. Now we get 3 a year.

https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1501076322231087106

Fall and spring are so erratic. The only "proper" fall we had was in 2020 and it did make us all wonder if it was because of reduced emissions. Because even winter that year was the most "normal" in a decade.

Hot days though, they keep growing. We've had 75F Christmas Eve.

Imagine that. The place you know from Home Alone 2, Miracle on 34th Street "white Christmas" had a 75F/25C Christmas. Not just once but a few times.

Gone are the days when the temperatures changed gradually. Now it goes from arctic cold to tropical humid in less than 24 hrs!

Places that never got flooded even during Sandy are getting flooded. Experts say it's because the city, to its credit, built defenses to avoid those areas getting destroyed again by floods. But the water had to go somewhere. It flooded newer parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan.

The Billion Oyster Project is a great initiative. But people don't realize that as necessary as it is, it isn't enough.

Do y'all know about this project? Manhattan used to have a massive wall of billions of oysters around it. And many other boroughs too.

Until Europeans came, it was a natural wall. The Lenape, Pauw, etc did harvest and eat them. Who wouldn't? But in sustainable numbers. The oysters served like a flood wall for centuries.

Then comes Murrca. The oysters were under two fold attacks. Construction & consumption.

Construction as in, to make docks, piers, terminals etc, and also the U.N. I believe the last major oyster wall destruction was to build the UN HQ.

Btw UN never gets flooded. It's built up high for all those useless diplomats to chill out in and not stop wars.

Then the eating part.

Mind you, there is nothing wrong with eating oysters sustainably. But in the NYC immigrant explosion as well as restaurant culture taking hold, they were scraped away in a matter of decades. Cos it was an easy way to make a living as an immigrant.

This project has already put 75 million there and it's a great one. But all it does is restore protections from 400 years ago. Not a defense for future & ongoing climate change. If water levels keep rising, NYC is going to get battered so bad. Already is.

billionoysterproject.org

I don't even have to go beyond this weekend to talk about erratic never before fluctuations. From freezing weather to 75 to again freezing weather in just 4 days! That's not spring or winter. It's something else.

Half of all the oysters in the world, IN THE WORLD were in NYC waters. Something like a thousand SQ km of oyster reefs. Some oysters a foot wide!

We ate them, used their shells for construction, poisoned them with pollution, and killed them as well as many of us.

Here's a fun roundup of how oysters are integral to NYC history.

thrillist.com/eat/nation/oys…

Funny fact. Pearl Street's name is literal. That's where the Lenape put a lot of oysters with pearls. You wanted pearls, you went to Pearl Street!

NYC already has a ridiculously high amount of wildlife and diversity for such a densely populated concrete jungle.

But until the Europeans came, it was other worldly. Lenape warned settlers to keep their kids safe from lobsters, I read in a book. Aing?? Little lobsters??

That's because remember, lobsters have no theoretical upper growth limit. Until Europeans came and even for decades later, there were lobsters the size of alligators in NY Bay! So if curious kids went swimming or wading, lobsters could consider them predators and pinch hard!

Imagine going snorkeling and coming face to face with a 10 foot lobster! You'd need to change your wet suit, lol.

But yeah, there was a ridiculously higher biodiversity in NY Bay. In another universe, the whole area is probably a wildlife and marine preserve.