More crocodile tears

Earth Island Journal, Summer, 2009

Once you're finished feeling bad for the petrol-crats, you might want to turn your sympathy to the suffering bankers on Wall Street.

As if being submerged by billions of dollars of bad debts from mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, and other dodgy investments weren't awful enough, the financiers in lower Manhattan (who have long provided capital to the fossil fuel industry) may find their offices underwater someday soon.

According to a recent paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, a predicted slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents will cause sea levels along the eastern seaboard to rise twice as fast as the global average. By 2100, average sea levels are expected to rise anywhere from seven to 23 inches. That's bad news for the US's financial center, which lies barely three feet above water. Researchers say that the bottom tip of Manhattan will have a 10 percent chance of flooding in any given year.

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Call it delayed karma.