January 23, 2007--The Gulf of Zwerling

Maybe global warming isn't such a bad thing after all.

I'm not just talking about how, when the last of the ice cap melts, some of us will have valuable waterfront property--though that's nothing to be sneezed at. I'm thinking about the various other new ways to make a buck off of this inconvenient truth.

But wouldn’t you know it, the German's are already ahead of us in this regard, and so I write now to alert Americans to the fact that we may already have a Global Warming Gap.

You've probably been hearing about some of the El Niño-caused storms that are lashing northern Europe. One such report from the NY Times is linked below. For example, last week, again in Germany, a storm meteorologists named Kyrill generated hurricane-force winds of up to 125 m.p.h. and rain so heavy that many roads were flooded and rivers overflowed their banks.

Though that is news enough to report, especially since it forced Condoleezza Rice to cut short a visit with Chancellor Angela Merkel—I suppose a plan for Iraq will have to wait until the winds calm down--what I took note of was how the German weather folks came up with Kyrill as the name for the storm. Did they, as we in the U.S., have an alphabetic list of names prepared in advance so that when they got to the K Storm they whipped out Kyrill?

Actually, no. They have a much, much better method.

In Germany, for a price, you can have a storm named for you.

Here’s how it works, for just $256 (don’t ask me how much that is in Euros) they will name a low-pressure storm system after you. And, here’s the real brilliance, for a little more, $385, you can give a name to a fair-weather high-pressure system. (The storm names are cheaper because with El Niño and other forms of climatic crises powerful low-pressure systems come around more frequently these days—it’s a simple matter of supply-and-demand.)

All right, the German’s are a step ahead of us with this. But with good-old American know-how we can close the gap in a nanosecond and really cash in. Here are a few suggestions (I assume you might have some more of your own):

So all the glaciers on Greenland melt and sea level is now ten feet higher. That means in, say, New York City, my apartment on 9th Street and Broadway is waterfront since the levels of the East and Hudson Rivers have risen. The new bodies of water are much too wide to anymore call them rivers. They are more like gulfs or estuaries. So we’ll need to come up with new names for them. And, since I assume you’re following my thinking, we can put a price tag on that.

How much should we think about charging to name The Gulf of the Upper East Side (we’ll obviously also need these kinds of more formal geographic names)? Clearly more than for The Gulf of the Lower East Side.

Since I like the sound of The Gulf of Zwerling, here’s my bid of . . .