Climate change is a catastrophic threat, and we wanted to create some cautionary images showing how coastal cities could be affected. We asked an artist to draw how New York City would look when devastated by flooding from rising sea levels, but sadly he made global warming look like pretty much the best thing ever.
It wasn’t our intention to make climate change look awesome, but unfortunately that’s what happened. For chrissake, the artist drew people riding jet skis up and down 5th Avenue. Shit, and all the taxis are fun gondolas now. This completely fails to depict the unthinkable destruction global warming will cause.
Maybe our instructions to the artist were unclear. We should have specified, “Make sure it seems bad that New York City is submerged in water,” but we thought that went without saying. Nobody’s going to reduce their carbon emissions after seeing drawings of people surfing across Times Square.
Whoa, it would be pretty cool to ride a whale. Do you think you could train a whale to be a bus? Global warming is obviously terrible, but commuting on whales would be pretty cool.
It wasn’t cheap to commission these drawings, so we felt like we needed to go ahead and publish them. But just try to keep in mind that climate change is a serious problem. The actual effect on NYC wouldn’t be nearly this freaking badass. It would look scarier, and everyone would hate it. You’re just gonna have to take our word on that.
