What Jim Carroll Saw Coming
Original archive: 2022-12-19 — 23 Trends for 2023 : #13 Peak Carbon.
In his 2022 “Peak Carbon” discussion, Carroll argued that the energy transition was being driven by falling solar costs, improving batteries and the shift to electric transportation. That was an energy-economics argument, not a detailed forecast of how coastal cities would redesign flood defenses. This voyage extends that environmental theme to the practical choices cities face as climate conditions change.
What has changed in the real world
Climate adaptation is not a single invention. It involves designing buildings, roads, water systems and public spaces for conditions that can change during their useful lives. A drainage pipe installed today may still be in service decades from now, while a coastal road may encounter a rising baseline sea level. Cities must therefore combine projections with local geography and the costs of being wrong. The question is not whether a forecast gives a perfect number, but how to make long-lived decisions robust to several plausible outcomes.
Carroll’s past discussion of climate-related and urban change provides a historical frame for treating adaptation as an operating issue, not only an environmental slogan. Scientific assessments quantify ranges rather than a single guaranteed outcome. The IPCC’s figures for global sea-level rise help explain why planning cannot stop at today’s shoreline. Yet local conditions differ: land can subside, storms alter the height of water and infrastructure can be exposed in ways a global average does not capture.
A fact that changes the scale of the question
The IPCC assessed 0.15–0.23 metres of likely global mean sea-level rise by 2050 under a very-low-emissions scenario, relative to 1995–2014. The original source is Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, AR6. The distinction behind the number or capability matters just as much as the headline: Global average rise is not a local flood-height prediction; land movement, storms, tides and exposure also matter. The point of introducing the fact here is to show the actual scale of the machinery, knowledge, data or infrastructure involved in this particular voyage. It is not evidence that the imagined 2040 destination is inevitable.
2040: one possible destination
An imagined scene, not an account of an event that has happened.
Walk along a waterfront in 2040. A new park includes space designed to flood safely during exceptional tides, while electrical equipment sits above an identified risk elevation. Residents receive timely warnings, and older buildings have varying degrees of protection. Elsewhere in the city, shaded streets and cooler roofs reduce some heat exposure. The scene is not an assurance that every adaptation will succeed. It shows how a city can build options into ordinary investment decisions.
One image captures the possibility: A coastal district redesigns drainage, heat protection and buildings around a new risk map. The conditions behind that image deserve attention. A future built around this capability would also change work, trust, operating costs or personal choices for someone outside the technology industry. That is why this voyage is less about predicting the arrival date of a device and more about understanding the environment that would let it matter. Different communities and businesses could arrive at the same destination at different speeds, or choose a different route altogether.
The detour that could change everything
Retrofitting existing districts is expensive and politically contentious. Future risks depend on emissions, local development and infrastructure maintenance. Protective works can transfer flooding to neighbouring areas, while insurance prices may change faster than municipal budgets. Communities also face difficult questions about what can be protected and when relocation becomes a serious consideration.
There is no requirement that technical progress and adoption advance together. People may welcome one application and reject another. The most persuasive future is the one that survives comparison with cheaper, simpler or better-understood alternatives. This is also where the archive has value: an old idea can be supported in direction while the timetable, commercial model or surrounding institutions evolve in ways that could not have been obvious at the start. That history deserves to be told rather than edited into perfect hindsight.
The next chapter is still being written
Watch whether cities use transparent local risk maps, fund maintenance and revise standards as evidence changes. The key metric is reduced damage and vulnerability over time, not merely the number of climate strategies published.
The practical test is this: Keep climate scenarios separate from local engineered adaptation outcomes The question for the people making choices today is not whether the imagined 2040 scene is visually convincing. It is whether emerging evidence alters a real decision: where to invest, what to build, which safeguards to demand, and which assumptions should be checked again next year. How will cities adapt when the old assumptions about weather no longer hold? The answer is not locked in. That is what makes tomorrow a voyage worth taking.