Contemporary climate change is the nature that cities make. This nature is a social nature, a second nature, “a hybrid condition” (Burnham et al., 2016; Pollini, 2013). Contemporary climate change is not “natural,” in other words, subject simply to the internal properties of the biophysical sciences, as crucial as these sciences are to urban climate research and, as we shall see, this chapter's main themes. It is also subject to what we know from the social sciences—to the “market failures” of unpriced pollution, for instance, no less than to the “slope failures” of water-drenched ravines. As one group of biophysical researchers observe: “Greenhouse gas emissions are influenced by a wide range of complex social, political, and environmental factors (population growth, geopolitics, technological innovations, etc.) […] [which] are difficult to predict” (Mauger, et al., 2018b, p. 10).

Contemporary climate change is the most significant socio-natural product of the Anthropocene, created from the steady carbonization of urban economies that first began in the United Kingdom in the mid-eighteenth century with the Industrial Revolution. It is largely the result of cost-minimizing enterprises with new technologies removing concentrated forms of latent energy (early on surficial coal, now various forms of deeper oil, coal, and gas) and then, decade after decade, diffusing that energy into the atmosphere though production, circulation, and consumption, where it accumulates far faster than it can descend back into oceans, soils, forests, and other “sinks.” The atmosphere, no less than land, is now a geopolitical space of this second nature (Uloa, 2017).

The manifestations of accumulation—atmospheric and capitalist—are unmistakable: global warming, rising sea levels, more extreme weather patterns and events, and fast-changing ecosystem dynamics, all of which make contemporary life more vulnerable. At the risk of oversimplification and the elision of many crucial issues, these manifestations and vulnerabilities in Seattle are disproportionately related, in various ways, to the unjust impacts of water—a thematic focus first broached in Chapter 1 and developed further here.