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Florida’s sea levels are increasing faster than the global rate — an astonishing six inches in the past 25 years in Miami — due in part to ocean currents in the area. Saltwater inundation of the city streets — so-called sunny day flooding — is up 400 percent since 2006. A greater proportion of hurricanes are reaching catastrophic intensities, with the potential to drive a deeper and more destructive storm surge farther inland. And more intense rainstorms are producing precipitation at rates that exceed the carrying capacity of the drainage systems — a problem exacerbated by a water table that is being pushed up by the encroaching sea.
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| Photo: Stephen B. Morton, The New York Times |
Unlike in New York or Netherlands, there is no known way to stop the surging seas from affecting southern Florida. The area lies on top of porous sand and limestone, so dikes and seawalls are ineffective in keeping the water out. The highest elevations along the densely populated coastal ridge from Fort Lauderdale south are generally at or below 25 feet, while the Florida Keys and inland locations closer to the Everglades sit much lower at three-feet elevation or less.
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| The very low topography of southern Florida is evident in this color-coded shaded relief map generated with data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. The image on the left is a standard view, with the green colors indicating low elevations, rising through yellow and tan, to white at the highest elevations. In this exaggerated view even those highest elevations are only about 60 meters (197 feet) above sea level. For the view on the right, elevations below 5 meters (16 feet) above sea level have been colored blue, and lighter blue indicates elevations below 10 meters (33 feet). This is a dramatic demonstration of how Florida’s low topography, especially along the coastline, make it especially vulnerable to flooding associated with storm surges. Planners can use data like these to predict which areas are in the most danger and help develop mitigation plans in the event of particular flood events. |
Recently updated projections expect the region to take on an additional foot or so of seawater by 2040, and up to seven feet by 2100. But that inundation will not happen at a steady pace. Once certain thresholds are crossed, seawater would start encroaching upon Miami’s metropolitan area from the ocean side and the Everglades side. And many areas kept dry by canals or higher topography would experience flooding as saltwater overtops barriers. For the low-lying Florida Keys, just a modest rise of two feet — potentially expected by 2050 — would inundate 70% of the islands. That’s why officials in Monroe County, which includes the Keys, have dared utter the word “retreat” when referring to flood-prone neighborhoods. That would have been unthinkable for a political appointee to say just a few years back.
For greater Miami-area leaders, the short-term solution is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on climate adaptation measures, such as installing machinery to pump (polluted) water back into Biscayne Bay and raising streets and roadways to keep them dry. The process has been far from smooth, with some homes now seeing worsening floods from water that runs off the raised streets and pumps that malfunction during power outages. The region is projected to take on an additional $4 billion by 2060. Miami’s master plan, if implemented, would protect the city from five-year storms. The Netherlands’ Rotterdam, by contrast, is protected against 10,000-year storms.
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Resilience has its limits in Florida — big time.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) who is always more interested in demonizing gay kids (DeSantis is proud of his "Don't Say Gay" initiative) than worrying about things like the viability of Miami surviving into the 22nd Century intends to throw more money at the problem. He has allocated hundreds of millions of mostly federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan (COVID money) to protect the state from the surging seas. With matching funds at the local level, the investment will top $1.2 billion. But $76 billion is needed statewide by 2040. We’re not even 2% of the way there.
There’s an argument to be made for climate adaptation spending that can prolong the environmental viability and economic vitality of some of these fastest-growing regions of the country. But all this resilience spending seems to be a mere bandage in the face of what’s coming.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underscored last week the need for a clean-energy transformation. If we can reduce emissions and limit global warming to an average of 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit), we will still experience intense effects from climate change, but the onslaught from rising seas will be far more manageable. If we fail to do this, all that resilience spending in Florida will be for naught. And we are currently failing miserable at reaching this target. According to NOAA's 2020 Annual Climate Report the combined land and ocean temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.13° F (0.08° C) per decade since 1880; however, the average rate of increase since 1981, 0.32° F (0.18° C) has been more than twice that rate.
Keep that in mind as elected officials continue to refuse to address the root cause of climate change. DeSantis recently pledged not to address the state’s carbon footprint, saying, “When people start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways. And so, we’re not doing any left-wing stuff.” Yeah, wouldn't want to protect those millions of liberal-leaning voters from Fort Lauderdale south, would we? Meanwhile, President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which would have catalyzed cuts in carbon and methane emissions, remains stalled in the Senate.
We cannot afford this business as usual. In the words of author Jeff Goodell, “The Water Will Come.” And our dollars won’t just be soggy. They’ll be submerged.
Paraphrased from: John Morales' original, Voices Across America
Opinion: Why climate resilience strategies won’t save Florida
By John Morales
March 9, 2022 at 1:05 p.m. EST, The Washington Post
Opinion: Why climate resilience strategies won’t save Florida
By John Morales
March 9, 2022 at 1:05 p.m. EST, The Washington Post
John Morales is an editorial fellow for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and chief meteorologist at WTVJ (NBC6) in Miami.
Rising Sea Levels Seen as Threat to Coastal U.S.
From the original (March 2012, Phillip's Natural World)
About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.
If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.
By far the most vulnerable state is Florida, the new analysis found, with roughly half of the nation’s at-risk population living near the coast on the porous, low-lying limestone shelf that constitutes much of that state. But Louisiana, California, New York and New Jersey are also particularly vulnerable, researchers found, and virtually the entire American coastline is at some degree of risk.
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“Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force while we do almost nothing,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, an author, with other scientists, of two new papers outlining the research. “We have a closing window of time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas.”
The project on sea level rise led by Dr. Strauss for the nonprofit organization Climate Central appears to be the most elaborate effort in decades to estimate the proportion of the national population at risk from the rising sea. The papers are scheduled for publication on Wednesday by the journal Environmental Research Letters. The work is based on the 2010 census and on improved estimates, compiled by federal agencies, of the land elevation near coastlines and of tidal levels throughout the country.
Climate Central, of Princeton, N.J., was started in 2008 with foundation money to conduct original climate research and also to inform the public about the work of other scientists. For the sea level project, financed entirely by foundations, the group is using the Internet to publish an extensive package of material that goes beyond the scientific papers, specifying risks by community. People can search by ZIP code to get some idea of their own exposure.
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| After a 15 foot (5 m) sea level rise Miami, Key West, St. Petersburg, and Fort Myers are completely flooded. |
While some coastal governments have previously assessed their risk, most have not, and national-level analyses have also been rare. The new package of material may therefore give some communities and some citizens their first solid sense of the threat.
Dr. Strauss said he hoped this would spur fresh efforts to prepare for the ocean’s rise, and help make the public more aware of the risks society is running by pumping greenhouse gases into the air. Scientists say those gases are causing the planet to warm and its land ice to melt into the sea. The sea itself is absorbing most of the extra heat, which causes the water to expand and thus contributes to the rise.
The ocean has been rising slowly and relentlessly since the late 19th century, one of the hallmark indicators that the climate of the earth is changing. The average global rise has been about eight inches since 1880, but the local rise has been higher in some places where the land is also sinking, as in Louisiana and the Chesapeake Bay region.
Sea Levels Could Rise a Foot by 2050
The rise appears to have accelerated lately, to a rate of about a foot per century, and many scientists expect a further acceleration as the warming of the planet continues. One estimate that communities are starting to use for planning purposes suggests the ocean could rise a foot over the next 40 years, though that calculation is not universally accepted among climate scientists.
The handful of climate researchers who question the scientific consensus about global warming do not deny that the ocean is rising. But they often assert that the rise is a result of natural climate variability, they dispute that the pace is likely to accelerate, and they say that society will be able to adjust to a continuing slow rise.
Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group, said that “as a society, we could waste a fair amount of money on preparing for sea level rise if we put our faith in models that have no forecasting ability.”
Experts say a few inches of sea level rise can translate to a large incursion by the ocean onto shallow coastlines. Sea level rise has already cost governments and private landowners billions of dollars as they have pumped sand onto eroding beaches and repaired the damage from storm surges.
Insurance companies got out of the business of writing flood insurance decades ago, so much of the risk from sea level rise is expected to fall on the financially troubled National Flood Insurance Program, set up by Congress, or on state insurance pools. Federal taxpayers also heavily subsidize coastal development when the government pays to rebuild infrastructure destroyed in storm surges and picks up much of the bill for private losses not covered by insurance.
For decades, coastal scientists have argued that these policies are foolhardy, and that the nation must begin planning an orderly retreat from large portions of its coasts, but few politicians have been willing to embrace that message or to warn the public of the rising risks.
Organizations like Mr. Ebell’s, even as they express skepticism about climate science, have sided with the coastal researchers on one issue. They argue that Congress should stop subsidizing coastal development, regarding it as a waste of taxpayers’ money regardless of what the ocean might do in the future.
“If people want to build an expensive beach house on the Florida or Carolina coast, they should take their own risk and pay for their own insurance,” Mr. Ebell said.
The new research calculates the size of the population living within one meter, or 3.3 feet, of the mean high tide level, as estimated in a new tidal data set from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the lower 48 states, that zone contains 3.7 million people today, the papers estimate, a figure exceeding 1 percent of the nation’s population.
Under current coastal policies, the population and the value of property at risk in that zone are expected to continue rising.
The land below the 3.3-foot line is expected to be permanently inundated someday, possibly as early as 2100, except in places where extensive fortifications are built to hold back the sea. One of the new papers calculates that long before inundation occurs, life will become more difficult in the low-lying zone because the rising sea will make big storm surges more likely.
Only in a handful of places have modest steps been taken to prepare. New York City is one: Pumps at some sewage stations have been raised to higher elevations, and the city government has undertaken extensive planning. But the city — including substantial sections of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island — remains vulnerable, as do large parts of Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey.
Warming waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have increased the prevalence of diseases that are turning sea stars to mush and killing lobsters by burrowing under their shells and causing lesions. The outbreaks are so lethal that at least one species of sea star has vanished off the coasts of Washington and Canada's British Columbia.
Changing the Chemistry of Earth’s Oceans
The oceans have always served as a sink for carbon dioxide, but the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution, especially over the last 40 years, has given them more than they can safely absorb. The result is acidification — a change in the chemical balance that threatens the oceans’ web of life.
In earth’s history, there have been many episodes of acidification, mainly from prolonged volcanic eruptions. According to a new research review by paleoceanographers at Columbia University, published in Science, the oceans may be turning acid far faster than at any time in the past 300 million years.
Changing something as fundamental as the pH of seawater — a measurement of how acid or alkaline it is — has profound effects. Increased acidity attacks the shells of shellfish and the skeletal foundation of corals, dissolving the calcium carbonate they’re made of. Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Ocean acidification threatens the corals and every other species that makes its living on the reefs.
The authors tried to determine which past acidification events offer the best comparison to what is happening now. The closest analogies are catastrophic events, often associated with intense volcanic activity resulting in major extinctions. The difference is that those events covered thousands of years. We have acidified the oceans in a matter of decades, with no signs that we have the political will to slow, much less halt, the process.
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Where Was 'The Martian' Filmed?
One of the latest speculative forays to the fourth planet is The Martian, Ridley Scott's Oscar-nominated flick about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who winds up stranded on the planet's surface and must figure out a way to survive alone. To approximate Mar's dusty red environs, Scott shot the movie's exteriors in Wadi Rum, in southern Jordan. Also called the Valley of the Moon, the 278-square-mile protected area looks about as Martian as you're likely to find on Earth.
It is rare to find plant fossils intact, let alone plant fossils that go back at least 15 million years and relate to a modern pesticide. The species, Strychnos electri, can be traced to two flowers encased in amber for at least 15 million years.
New Research adds to a body of evidence suggesting that a warming climate may have particularly marked effects for citizens of the country most responsible for global warming in the first place, namely, U.S. East Coasters.
More on this story: Enhanced Atlantic sea-level rise relative to the Pacific under high carbon emission rates.
Monster Hurricane Irma Barrels Toward a Florida Landfall Currently Forecast for the Fort Myers area
Monster Hurricane Irma Barrels Toward a Florida Landfall Currently Forecast for the Fort Myers area
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