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Rising Seas, Rising Awareness
Climate change threatens to drown Maryland's coasts and islands, but it's not too late to act
Here's an idea: Why don't the residents of Smith Island - at the fragile center of the Chesapeake Bay - rent a few scuba-diving suits and hold a town hall meeting under water?
Scientists say a huge part of the Chesapeake region could be below water in a few decades due to rapid global warming. So why not practice up? Just grab a few wetsuits and goggles and rehearse for the aquatic life to come.
A similar rehearsal took place last week in another island area: the archipelago nation of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Sitting at underwater tables, atop underwater chairs with fish darting about, the country's president and Cabinet ministers held a "global warming summit" to ask the world to stop the rising seas that could eventually submerge their entire country.
But as TV networks broadcast this bizarre meeting back to the U.S., you could almost hear the "tsk, tsk." We comfortable Americans tend to view really big catastrophes - things like famines and tsunamis - as far-away matters involving people usually too poor or under-educated to plan better.
This mindset helped blind us to the pre-Hurricane Katrina dangers of New Orleans. And it's blinding us today to the shared threat of climate change in places like Smith Island, not to mention Manhattan Island and most of south Florida.
Smith Island - just 80 miles east of the White House in the main stem of the Chesapeake - is home to 300 fishermen, artists, boat-builders, shopkeepers and retirees. The island covers four square miles and is, on average, less than 2 feet above sea level.
If, thanks to global warming pollution, the Greenland ice sheet continues its satellite-verified meltdown, then Smith Island will almost certainly disappear even faster than the Maldives and faster than several much-publicized South Pacific island nations. The whole eastern third of Maryland, in fact, is in big trouble, from Ocean City to Solomons Island to Annapolis. James Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, says we'll be measuring sea-level rise in meters by 2100 if current trends continue.
That's a lot to take in, for sure, and skepticism might be the natural response to such climate predictions. So don't take it from Greenpeace or Al Gore or even James Hansen. Listen instead to Allstate Insurance Co.
In 2006, Allstate announced it was no longer issuing new homeowners' policies in states up and down the East Coast. In Maryland, the company shut its doors to new customers across 11 eastern counties, including parts of Anne Arundel and Prince George's counties. Why? First, the company said, sea levels are definitely rising worldwide based on irrefutable science. Second, Atlantic hurricanes are getting bigger and more intense as the planet warms. Hence, Smith Island and much of the rest of eastern Maryland just aren't good insurance risks anymore, Allstate acknowledged. The potential for catastrophe is too great.
Allstate is not a Republican corporation. It's not a Democratic corporation. This is rational private capital talking. The idea of an underwater town hall meeting near Smith Island seems less alarmist when a major insurance company is abandoning customers just a stone's throw from our nation's capital.
Thankfully, the Maryland General Assembly has done its part on global warming. It passed a statute last spring mandating a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions statewide by 2020. But like the tiny nation of the Maldives, Maryland can't solve global warming by itself. The U.S. Senate must pass an even stronger federal carbon cap by mid-December, ahead of international climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark. With a congressional bill in hand, President Barack Obama must then go to Copenhagen and push China and the rest of the world for a strong global treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.
The good news is that this Saturday, for the first time ever, activists from Maryland and the Maldives - as well as Greenland, Australia and myriad places in between - will be speaking with one voice on global warming. The much-heralded "International Day of Climate Action" involves more than 4,000 events in more than 170 countries, including a "human circle of hope" outside the White House. (Learn more at www.350.org/dc).
And while there's no word yet about an aquatic town hall meeting at Smith Island, there are rumors of wetsuits and goggles available for loan from the president of the Maldives. It's time to follow in his wake.
14 Comments so far
Show AllIn 2007, the IPCC estimated SLR (sea level rise) at 1.5ft by end of century. A year later, that estimate was doubled. The best estimate I've seen today, at realclimate org (search for 'sea level' and take the second offering) is 3 ft to 6 ft by end of century. The higher estimates do a better job of incorporating what we know of ice field melting in Greenland and West Antarctica. But I believe the true eventual estimate will be 8 ft by end of century, and 3 ft in as little as 20-30 years. Furthermore, that first 3 ft is going to happen, and there's already nothing we can do to prevent it, since it incorporates the substantial lag between the melting and internal destrengthening of an ice field, and its actually flowing into the waters below.
This means that substantial Real Estate holdings will be revealed to be worthless, possibly in as little as 5 years. That's because they become worthless when everyone agrees not to buy them, and that will happen long before they actually slip underwater.
The whole GW controversy has been remarkable in the way everyone, including the scientists themselves, has gone overboard with conservatism. The result has been an unbroken stream of negative news 're-assessments' almost comical in its reliability. On GW topic after topic, when you ask scientists and policymakers to give their worst case assessment for the next 5 years, you find in 5 years that the KOOK on the left, the crazy-man yelling doom, was correct. For example, five years ago, if you had said the Arctic was going to ice-free at end of summer within 20 years, you would have been called a kook. Today, accepted science. Five years ago, methane pipes due to melting Arctic permafrost were someone's radical idea. Today, accepted. And this last isn't included in any SLR calculations anywhere, even though it has the potential to radically change the equation for the worse. Add methane to the equation, and SLR of 10-15 ft by end of century are not unreasonable.
Given the unbroken stream of negative re-assessments from IPCC and others, I think global SLR of 8 ft by end of century is quite reasonable. People should be getting out of real-estate in the affected areas now. While acting conservative on predictions has worked for everyone involved, scientists, politicians, businessmen, etc, we are now at the point where the real victims are revealed, young homeowners who didn't know the property they were buying was already rendered worthless by a SLR that (for the first 3 ft) is all but certain and nearterm. And, once again, the value of property is not based on its true present value, but on its agreed-upon value. Once the public at large incorporates the knowledge that the first 3 ft of SLR is real, inevitable, and nearterm, which could happen in as little as 5 yrs, a LOT of property is going to be valued worthless. So, who is speaking for THESE people, these young homeowners, who are about to be victimized by everyone elses zeal for conservatism about GW? We live in a CYA culture, even our scientists.
Excellent post. i have similarly pointed out the steadily increasingly alarmist scientific consensus, as field reports consistently outstrip the "worst-case" scenarios of previous scientific consensus.
The one caveat i would offer is this:
As Snydly repeatedly points out here at CD, based on human reading of geologic history, warming spikes have been regularly followed by sudden cooling. There may be some reliable mechanism for this; Snydly postulates that the shift of mass caused by melting polar ice transferred into oceans, may lead to tectonic shifts causing a spate of volcanism, spewing massive amounts of atmosphere-altering gases and particulates into the atmosphere.
Either way of course hugely disruptive to our fragile civilization.
"Scientists say a huge part of the Chesapeake region could be below water in a few decades due to rapid global warming."
They do not. The latest best estimate is back to about 1 ft this century. The past few years' average is 1.1 mm/year - that extrapolates to... about 4 inches in the next few decades.
Greenland has stopped melting, Antarctica is still increasing in ice mass, and arctic sea ice (which actually doesn't affect sea levels) has been recovering for 2 years now and the long-term trend is back in line with what the models originally predicted prior to 2004.
I don't understand why people feel they need to distort the science to make a case for action now. When we get caught doing it, it reduces our credibility and the credibility of the movement.
There's enough *real* evidence of global warming that we shouldn't be making stuff up.
I would say that its your credibility that is in question.
'Greenland has stopped melting'? On what planet? This will certainly be news to the glaciologists studying Greenland's ice shelf.
'Antartica is still increasing in ice mass'? The opposite is true, as measured by polar orbiting satellites. East Antartica is increasing in ice, but West Antartica, which includes the Ross Ice Shelf delicately perched over the oceans, is decreasing in ice. And, overall, Antartica has been warming for the last 5 decades, according to a Nature article published last january. When you say 'increasing in ice mass' you really mean in extent, which is not the same thing at ALL. One reason the sea ice is increasing in extent is because LAND ice is melting and falling into it, and that DOES increase sea levels.
Again, I would point you to RealClimate org and their sea level rise discussion. The IPCC estimate of 1.5 ft doesn't account for ANY EFFECT BY GREENLAND AND ANTARCTICA. But, they quote an estimate that DOES, and the difference is startling:
"The first paper to really try and assess the future limits on dynamic ice sheet loss appeared in Science this week [Sept 2008]. Pfeffer et al looked at the exit glaciers for Greenland and West Antarctica and made some back of the envelope calculations of how quickly the ice sheets could dynamically drain. Good news: they rule out more than 2 meters of sea level coming from Greenland alone in the next century.... Bad news: they can’t rule out up to 2 meters in total. In summary, they estimate that including dynamic ice sheet processes gives projected SLR at 2100 somewhere in the 80 cm to 2 meter range, and suggest that 80 cm should be the 'default' value. This is remarkable in a number of ways - first, these are the highest estimates of sea level rise by 2100 that has been published in the literature to date, and secondly, while they don't take into account the full uncertainty in other aspects of sea level rise considered by IPCC, their numbers are significantly higher in any case."
Estimating SLR without accounting for ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica (which is continuing and accelerating: what planet are you on?) is like estimating the cost of your groceries without accounting for the items that have calories. Yet, that is precisely what IPCC did in 2007 when they estimated a 1.5 ft SLR by end of century. That number, which you just called an OVER-ESTIMATE, is laughably small, and they revised it almost immediately. Seriously, its YOUR credibility at stake here.
An excerpt from Sept of this year: "Reporting this week in the journal Nature researchers from British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bristol describe how analysis of millions of NASA satellite measurements from both of these vast ice sheets shows that the most profound ice loss is a result of glaciers speeding up where they flow into the sea.
The authors conclude that this 'dynamic thinning' of glaciers now reaches ALL latitudes in Greenland, has intensified on key Antarctic coastlines, is penetrating far into the ice sheets' interior and is spreading as ice shelves thin by ocean-driven melt. Ice shelf collapse has triggered particularly strong thinning that has endured for decades.
Lead author Dr Hamish Pritchard from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) says, "We were surprised to see such a strong pattern of thinning glaciers across such large areas of coastline – it's widespread and in some cases thinning extends hundreds of kilometers inland. We think that warm ocean currents reaching the coast and melting the glacier front is the most likely cause of faster glacier flow. This kind of ice loss is so poorly understood that it remains the most unpredictable part of future sea level rise."
From another article:
"In 2006, a team of researchers used data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to infer a SIGNIFICANT LOSS OF ICE MASS over West Antarctica from 2002 to 2005. The GRACE satellites do not measure changes in ice loss directly but measure changes in gravity, which can be caused both by ice loss and vertical uplift of the bedrock underlying the ice.
Now (2009), for the first time, researchers have directly measured the vertical motion of the bedrock at sites across West Antarctica using the Global Positioning System (GPS). The results should lead to more accurate estimates of ice mass loss."
The article goes on to say that the losses aren't as high as the 2006 article had projected, but were still significant. Bottom line: Antarctica is losing ice, particularly over West Antarctica. You can't fool a polar orbiting satellite, making gravity (mass) measurements, but you CAN fool people making 'extent' measurements into thinking the mass is increasing. It IS increasing in extent. But its getting thinner so overall mass is down.
Estimates vary.
The waves are eating away at the beach twenty yards from our condo.
I grew up in Hawaii, on Oahu. Last week, I walked along Waikiki Beach, as I had as a youth. Only, about one-fourth of it is no longer there. There is a concrete catwalk that you walk on, perched right over the ocean, and the waves that hammer it are saying that catwalk is going to be gone in a few years. Meanwhile, at Kailua Beach Park, 80-100 year old ironwood trees are washing into the ocean. People say its because of construction of a harbor (only the harbor's been there for 50 years): I'm pretty sure its SLR (sea level rise).
A lot of taxpayers money is going to be spent on beach renourishment, seawalls, etc.
On Oahu, they are building a $5 billion rail system to connect Honolulu. About half or more of where it will be running, will be underwater if sea-levels rise by 3 feet (including all of Waikiki). My opinion is that 3 ft of rise is not just likely, its inevitable, and I think in the near-term, within 20 years. The unfortunate fact is that this SLR should be in everyones thinking, certainly any city planner about to spend $5 billion.
It should be obvious that today's sea level rise reflects last centuries warming. The system has mass, and much structural underpinning must melt away before an ice-sheet slides into the ocean. Similar dynamics are present in the way an avalanche works, and for the same reason, ice can sustain significant internal structural stresses before finally giving way. Given todays level of warming, tomorrows sea level rise is 3 ft, easily. The real reason to protest today, is to prevent tomorrows warming, and the day AFTER tomorrows sea level rise, which could be 8 ft by centuries end. By then I expect people would have learned to factor it into their thinking.
As I mention below, in my opinion (given the accelerating release of bad news on this topic in the last few years and the conservatism displayed by scientists on GW generally), the first 3 ft of sea level rise is done, over. If we act now, we can prevent another 5 ft by end of century.