Stakeholders Help Plan Florida's Survival

Most of Florida has an elevation not much above sea level, and I've seen more than a few maps illustrating a largely submerged peninsula. Not surprisingly, the state government is trying to do something to help slow the warming, the melting, the resultant rise of sea level. This article describes the two-phase project that aims toward reducing the state's greenhouse gas emissions. Now beginning its Stage Two, the governor has assigned a 21-member Action Team to come up with a list of recommended actions.

The process will be facilitated by the Center for Climate Strategies, which is "working in 16 states to build consensus and develop comprehensive action plans."

The Center was quoted about its role in the process of helping the Action Team make the most worthy recommendations:

"We are not advocates for particular approaches with vested interests, and we do not take positions on policy or legislative issues. We assemble and facilitate complex decisions among diverse stakeholder groups."

Designers, planners and serious thinking about climate change

Two university teachers in planning and design wrote an article in the current Harvard Design Magazine titled Design for Rising Sea Levels. In spite of its title, the most important subject of the article is "our apparent inability to comprehend change that occurs not in dramatic steps, nor at a steady linear rate, but rather exponentially, starting out with a low slope that steepens over time."

This inability to comprehend is, most disappointingly, shared with the people who are responsible for planning the spacial and physical changes to the infrastructure and facilities we depend on as residents of our local areas. Sea level rise is an apt climate change impact to use because the preponderance of projections for how fast it will rise make it seem like not much of a threat. When most planners accept a pace of a foot of rise over the next 40 years, there's not much urgency there. A few sea walls, some levees, some pumps...no problemo.

But such estimates ignore the low percentage risks that the sea level might rise much faster than that. The two authors, Jonathan Barnett and Kristina Hill, have studied the actions of local planners and have concluded that for the most part, climate change has not yet shown up on their radars.

As far as we can tell, most designers and planners aren’t thinking seriously about climate change in the U.S. unless they work closely with the insurance industry, which is dropping tens of thousands of East Coast customers and raising rates on the rest, in part as a result of climate predictions. Ecologists all over the world also know that it’s a very big deal. The World Bank knows. But building and landscape architects, engineers, and planners don’t seem to have connected the dots. Jonathan, the other author of this article, worked on the first reconstruction plan for New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and saw the devastation from a storm surge that could have been prevented if the flood walls had been properly constructed. He became frustrated with the many comments from people outside New Orleans that the city had simply been built in the wrong location and ought to be a write-off, and he began to wonder what would happen if we applied the same standard to other places. Biloxi and other Gulf Coast cities also suffered severe damage from Katrina and Rita. Key West had flooding comparable to that in New Orleans from Rita. If we looked around the country at other vulnerable cities, we’d have to write off many more than New Orleans.

As I've blogged repeatedly in the past, the authors point to the insurance industry as the real bellweathers of change in perspective. They recommend that government policy-makers begin working with insurance companies to implement realistic planning for coastal areas subject to sea level rise.

By working with large insurance companies, government regulators could encourage rationality when either the private sector or public agencies make major investments in coastal urban futures. Important dialogues could begin about how to share the significant investment costs of adapting coastal areas to sea-level rise and new flooding patterns. Because they would bring insurers and institutional leaders together, these new investment and cost-sharing discussions provide a way to allow flexible design and planning solutions to emerge that would be insurable, politically feasible, and recognize the need for social equity in how citizens are protected from immediate and longer-term dangers.

This article makes it clear that even with minor sea level rise and occasional storm surges, the planning required to protect low-lying infrastructure is far from simple and affordable. The impacts on natural and man-made systems will be far-reaching. This is not the time for local planners to be sitting back and waiting for more dire predictions to come from climatologists. The changes are happening now and even best-case forecasts deserve serious mitigation efforts.

Sea Level Rise in a Countywide Plan

In a previous article I questioned whether my home county of Marin was looking closely enough at the impacts of sea level rise on the local built environment including homes, businesses and transportation routes. After having read through the latest draft of our new Countywide Plan, I feel a bit more at ease. I'm not sure if I had much to do with the incorporation of these statements, having grilled one of the county planners about the department's consideration of this elephant under the carpet, but at least the Plan acknowledges the looming danger. It does not, though, make any definitive declarations of zoning changes or plans for levee development. Such changes, when sea level rise is regarded as a conceptual future risk, would no doubt create a political firestorm with business owners, homeowners and Marin's lucrative real estate industry.

Again, I'll go on record to say that nothing in the Plan acknowledges the potential of amplifying feedbacks to speed up sea level rise beyond one meter by the year 2100. The next iteration of the Plan will surely include a reassessment. So here are a few excerpts from the Countywide Plan that other county governments might be interested in seeing:

The Role of Science
Achieving and maintaining sustainability requires keeping up with science. At times, land use and other public policy decisions operate within an institutional framework that does not reflect current scientific information. This is understandable as cutting edge science is always on the move. For example, the multiple causes and effects of climate change, described below, are now well established and current land use decision-making needs to reflect the link between fossil fuel consumption and sea level rise. Keeping up with science is an underlying principle of this Plan. Towards that end, employing evidencebased strategies combined with up-to-date scientific knowledge will provide sound guidelines for taking care of the land, our communities, and the generations that will follow us.
***
Are threats from environmental hazards increasing?
Many structures lie in hazardous areas, and land for new development may be even more hazardprone. With most easily buildable land already developed, construction increasingly is being proposed on the remaining marginal lots with difficult access and steep hillsides which are subject to slope instability and are vulnerable to rapid changes in fire behavior. Bluff erosion is threatening coastal homes built when bluff edges seemed safely distant. Vegetation that can fuel fires has increased because
natural fires have been suppressed, and residential development continues to encroach on wildlands. Proliferation of impermeable surfaces, alteration of natural drainage patterns, and the effects of climate change have increased the frequency and severity of flood events, and estimates indicate that sea level could rise as much as 36 inches by 2100. Maps 2-9 through 2-15 are utilized by the County in reviewing land use activities proposed in areas with hazard potential.
***
EH-3.3 Monitor Environmental Change. Consider cumulative impacts to hydrological conditions, including alterations in drainage patterns and the potential for a rise in sea level, when processing development applications in watersheds with floodin or inundation potential.

With increases in sea level due to global warming, flooding is predicted to increase in the future. Locating development in flood-prone areas can expose structures to damage and create risks for inhabitants in the immediate and surrounding areas.
***
EH-3.k Anticipate Sea Level Rise. Work with the U.S. Geological Survey, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, and other monitoring agencies to track bay and ocean levels; utilize estimates for mean sea level rise to map potential areas subject to future inundation (including by updating information about watershed channel conditions and levee elevations); and amend the Development Code to incorporate construction standards consistent with the policies of BCDS’s Bay Plan for any areas subject to increased flooding from a rise in sea level.
EH-3.l Limit Seawall Barriers. Limit repair, replacement, or construction of coastal sea walls and erosion barriers consistent with Local Coastal Program requirements, and as demonstrated to be necessary to protect persons and properties from rising sea level.

EH-3.n Plan for Sea Level Rise. Consider sea level rise in future countywide and community plan efforts. Consider revising Marin County Development Code standards for new construction and substantial remodels to limit building or require elevated buildings and infrastructure or other applicable mitigations in areas that may be threatened by future sea level rise as shown on maps released by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission in February 2007.
EH-3.o Seek Levee Assistance. Pursue funding for levee reconstruction in those areas threatened by sea level rise, including but not limited to Santa Venetia.

Hard Choices for Local Government

If your community or region is going to prepare itself for CC impacts, it's going to need local politicians who are willing to educate themselves and advocate energetically in the face of more immediate issues. We're lucky to have a couple of staunch, environmentally informed local supervisors on our board of 5 members. Unfortunately 2 does not give them a majority vote.

The Marin Countywide Plan is being updated and one of the most contentious issues is the zoning of several hundred acres adjacent to an old but still operating rehabilitation center for boys, called the St. Vincent Home. Most of its property consists of a flat meadow between highway 101 and the San Francisco Bay - land that is vulnerable to sea level rise and that the county's Planning Commission had zoned as part of the the Bayfront Corridor where no development is to take place. That parcel of land is also one of the last remaining available areas where low-cost and senior housing could be built in the county.

If climate change looms as a serious threat in Marin's future, even more immediate is the dramatic demographic shift that will happen as we Boomers reach our senior years. Unless more senior housing is provided, many of us will be forced to relocate to other areas within the next 20 years. The over-65 demographic is by far the fastest growing one in Marin, and there has been a strong movement to reclaim the St. Vincent property from the Bayfront Corridor zoning.

Yesterday I attended the Board of Supervisors hearing where this zoning question was debated. Over 140 citizens made verbal comment, with environmentalists standing up for preserving the zoning and most of the seniors and low-cost housing advocates speaking for building out on the property. It was a wonderful demonstration of democracy in action. Too bad "our" side lost.

Yes, we do need to provide for the aging population, and yes, a levee could be built to protect the new development from a 1-meter rise in the level of the Bay. But these facilities will not help reduce Marin's huge ecological footprint by taking vehicles off the roads. The units will be isolated from any shopping areas or medical services and I'm sure more imaginative and convenient solutions could be found for locating the same facilities.

Most significant to me, though, were the fact that the County now acknowledges the threat of a 1-meter sea level rise and the quote by my local supervisor, Charles McGlashan, who told a reporter, "We are fighting, in my view, a race against potential extinction." Yes, those could very well be the stakes.

And as to the 1-meter sea level rise, I'm following up with McGlashan's aides to find out if that threat is being applied to the rest of the County's coastline. If it's recognized as a threat to a large, currently uninhabited wetland and meadow, it should certainly be considered as one in the many inhabited and developed coastal locations.

Submergency! Three-foot sea level rise ahead.

More scientists have just come out and told it like it is. The AP story by Seth Borenstein is less about what its title says - Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History - and more about the certainty of two dozen climatologists that the sea level will rise by at least 3 feet no matter what we do to slow global warming.

Global warming — through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding — is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

There are discrepancies between the scientists' estimations of when the 3-foot rise metric will be reached; some say 50 years, some 100, and some 150. However long it takes, the sea will be rising up to that point, maybe inch-by-inch, maybe in larger steps.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what — the question is when."

Sea level rise "has consequences about where people live and what they care about," said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. "We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost."

This is why I'm most concerned about sea level rise. It affects almost everything and everybody and it's not temporary. The sea goes up...it's gonna stay there a good long time. And as it goes up, how do we know what to plan for? Will it stop at 3 feet of rise? Not necessarily or even probably. Some climatologists can envision a 20-foot rise and more.

As Joe Romm and Jim Hansen keep telling us, SHUT DOWN COAL EMISSIONS. Somehow, today, preferably yesterday, but tomorrow at least. Joe is a bit more optimistic than the least optimistic of the scientists interviewed, but he admits we're using up our window of opportunity to get the energy producers and governments to put a lid on coal. As Joe explains:

My point — and I think Hansen’s point — is that the “when” (i.e. the rate of change) matters a lot! One meter by mid-century would be an unmitigated catastrophe. Sea level rise would have to average 9 inches a decade from now to 2050, implying seas rising over a foot a decade by then — which could continue for centuries. Who could adapt to that?

Strong actions to limit further emissions starting today — what Hansen calls the alternative scenario — can limit total warming from preindustrial levels to about 2°C, which should keep sea level rise below one meter per century. That’s a disaster, but a slow-moving one, leaving time for some adaptation. And if we were lucky, the rate might be well below a meter per century.

A closer look at sea level risk for the San Francisco Bay region

In previous articles I've pointed to sites like Future Sea Level, which focuses on the prospects and impacts in the San Francisco Bay region and the National Environmental Trust page that shows animations of several major U.S. cities being inundated by rising seas. These give you the general idea, but can't tell you much about incremental sea level rise because the sensitivity of their maps to vertical elevation are so crude. With low vertical resolution, it's difficult to estimate just how much damage will be done a by "minor" sea level rise of, say, one meter.

One of the presenters at the California Climate Change Conference this past Monday was Noah Knowles, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, based in Menlo Park, CA. He presented some new maps of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Delta that provide a much more accurate assessment of the risks of inundation due to sea level rise. Here's the PDF of his presentation with samples of their maps. Below is an image of San Francisco showing the Embarcadero and downtown areas.


Using photogramettry - where aerial photographs taken from six different angles were digitally processed to yield maps with vertical scale accuracy of 10-20 cm - combined with tide data, he described the current situation where, on a daily basis, about 500 square kilometers of tidal land and land protected by levees are below water level at high tide. With a 1-meter rise in sea level, that area would increase by 30% and would - under the current circumstances - be inundated at high tide. That would include all of the levee-dependent islands and agricultural lands of the Delta and much developed land surrounding the Bay including much of our highway system.

Glacial Earthquakes? Uh-oh

Risk assessment for the impacts of climate change must be an active, ongoing, constantly-updated process. We're learning all the time, especially about feedback systems that affect the speed of change.

Here's an example of where the risk assessment for sea level rise is suddenly requiring a significant adjustment. The quickening pace of ice breaking off from the Greenland icecap means that our current estimates of sea level rise are both too low and too slow.

Thanks to Dave Roberts at Gristmill for pointing to this article in the Guardian (UK):

Melting ice cap triggering earthquakes

· Estimates of sea-level rise out of date, say scientists
· Religious leaders pray for planet at Greenland glacier

And from The Independent (UK) via Climate Ark, this ominous quote:

The accelerating thaw and the earthquakes are intimately connected, according to [Finnish scientist Veli Albert Kallio], as immense slabs of ice are sheared from the bed rock by melt water. Those blocks of ice, often more than 800m deep and 1500m long, contain immense rocks as well and move against geological faults with seismic consequences. The study of these ice quakes is still in its infancy, according to [American polar expert Robert Correll], but their occurence is in itself disturbing. "It is becoming a lot more volatile," said Mr Vallio. Predictions made by the Arctic Council, a working group of regional scientists, have been hopelessly overrun by the extent of the thaw. "Five years ago we made models predicting how much ice would melt and when," said Mr Kallio. "Five years later we are already at the levels predicted for 2040, in a year's time we'll be at 2050."

Wetland restoration - in time or too late?

The San Francisco Bay is rimmed with barely above sea level landfill where marshes used to be. Wetlands and estuaries are important buffers against storm surge and many tens of thousands of acres around the Bay now have residential, commercial and transportation infrastructure build on them. Many more acres have been serving as salt evaporation ponds.

Now SF Gate reports that a local environmental group founded 45 years ago - Save the Bay - just issued a report urging local governments to put a plan together to restore over 36,000 acres of wetlands by the year 2050. The land to be restored has been purchased over the past decade, but now over $1.4 billion needs to be raised for the actual restoration.

This is an entirely right and noble process, but you can see how slowly it is planned to progress, and you can get an idea of the cost of restoring wetlands. All of the current wetlands - including these newly restored ones - will be submerged if the sea level rises, of course.

New Orleans lessons, continued...

The New York Times has been publishing a series of stories leading up to the 2nd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, following the "recovery" and storm defense improvements that have been - and are still - taking place. The article includes a collection of maps by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) that show projected flood security for the different areas of the city.

I looking at New Orleans' situation as a loose model for what other metropolitan regions may go through when they become identified as potential victims of major storms. New Orleans is special, of course, because so much of the city and its outlying neighborhoods are below sea level. As the sea level rises, other coastal areas will find themselves in a similar situation, and their citizens will have to go through the stressful decision making that current NO residents and dealing with.

“If people were looking for a quick and easy answer — is it safe? — there is no easy answer,” said David E. Daniel, the president of the University of Texas at Dallas and the head of a panel that monitors the corps’ investigation of the Katrina disaster.

Some can live with thoughtful uncertainty more comfortably than others. Marion LaNasa, a homeowner in Lakeview, said he loves New Orleans and cannot imagine being happy anywhere else. “If you were really smart, would you stay?” he asked. “Probably not. But there’s more to life than assured comfort and no risk.”

As far as the work being done, chiefly by the USACE, much has been done, but there's plenty left to do and no gS Army Corps of Engineers (uarantee that another strong storm won't be able to overcome new and reinforced defenses.

Col. Jeffrey A. Bedey, commander of the corps’ Hurricane Protection Office, acknowledged that the work so far has been piecemeal, because the scale of project is so enormous. The drive to provide protection against that 1-in-100 storm by 2011, Colonel Bedey said, is more thorough.

He said the maps that will predict the impact of that work, which could be published before the end of August, “should show Upper Gentilly looking very good,” and much of the rest of the city besides.

And so, he said, the analysis that many people will have to make is, “Am I really willing to take the risk between 2007 and 2011” that no big storm will overpower the work done so far?

That requires more than an analysis of risk; it requires a calculus of hope. And it is not a question that needs to be asked only in New Orleans. It is the same question that comes up when a steam pipe in New York City explodes or a bridge 1,200 miles up the Mississippi from New Orleans collapses. Getting infrastructure right is hard, and keeping it strong takes vigilance. And that means safety, uncomfortably, is a relative thing.

Acting Locally - My home turf

As I've posted before, I live close by the San Francisco Bay, about 30 feet in elevation above where a small creek enters an estuary of Richardson Bay. A good part of Mill Valley is flat, barely above sea level, as are many other residential and business neighborhoods in Marin County, and some sections of the one main traffic artery that runs north-south through the county - Route 101, "the redwood highway."

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission has done some studies of the impact of sea level rise and reported early this year on its findings. Relevant to where I live, it tells us (according to the Independent Journal, the county newspaper):

Sometime over the next century huge shoreline swaths of Marin, including Hamilton Field, Highway 37 and the Tamalpais Valley could be under water if global warming causes the bay to rise by a meter, according to the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

Additionally, wild and extreme swings in the climate brought on by warming could have an impact on Marin's water supply.

There's an illustrative map of my immediate environs (I live in the upper left corner) and where the new water would spread with a one-meter rise in sea level. I know the intersection below my house would be under water at high tide, blocking one of two main thoroughfares into Mill Valley.

The county is already warning that our once-secure local water supply (unlike most of the state, we have never needed to pipe in water from a distance) is now proving inadequate to supply the growing population of mostly high-priced homes and landscaping. So we face the expense and experimental nature of a desalination plant on the Bay shore.

Over the course of the 25 years I've lived here, I've watched weather maps from the rest of the nation and confirmed for myself that our weather is among the most stable and mild. When that changes, we will surely notice.

This report from the U.S. Geological Survey describes the impact of an El Niño-generated rise in sea level on the S.F. Bay Area in the winter of 1998.

Throughout the first week of February 1998, high winds and heavy rains combined with abnormally high tides to wreak havoc in the San Francisco Bay region. The Pacific Ocean surged over parking lots and the coastal highway at San Francisco's Ocean Beach, and whitecaps up to 6 feet high splashed over the city's waterfront Embarcadero for the first time in recent memory. Elsewhere, U.S. Highway 101 north of the Golden Gate Bridge was flooded by as much as 4 feet of water from San Francisco Bay, and other low-lying areas around the bay were also swamped, forcing hundreds of people to flee their homes.

So it's not like we haven't been warned by experience. To our credit, Mill Valley has a helpful Web site about disaster preparedness. Though it doesn't address sea level rise, it does provide good instruction for preparing for wildfires, floods, landslides, storms and earthquakes.

"There's no one responsible for sea-level rise."

So says a frustrated David Holland, who directs New York University's Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science. And right now, according to an article in the Washington Post, no one has developed a computer model that can predict when sea level will begin to rise more rapidly, or how high it will rise.

Since the most serious contributor to rising sea level is the melting of glacial ice on Greenland and Antarctica, computer models must be able to account for the complex movement of these ice sheet across the unknown terrain that lies beneath them.

Without those models, scientists are left to guess on the timing and severity of sea level rise, and with estimates varying between the IPCC's forecast "that it would rise between 7.8 inches and two feet by the end of the century" and more catastrophic warnings that both ice sheets could slide into the ocean entirely, under certain conditions, policy makers are unable to move ahead with any planning to prevent or mitigate future coastal damage.

Worst case, as stated by Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University professor of geosciences and international affairs, is "if the Greenland ice sheet disintegrates, sea level would rise about 23 feet. If the West Antarctic sheet melts, as well, it would add an additional 17 feet or so." Such a scenario would wipe out coastal civilization as we know it. And no one can say, for certain, that such a scenario is impossible.

Uncertainty, Science and the Press

I rely on RealClimate to untangle much of the confusion around reports of global warming and climate change. This confusion - as described in this classic case concerning the melting of the Greenland ice cap - is often generated by the biases and ignorance inherent in press coverage.

As my preceding article explained, there is alway uncertainty in forecasting, and there is definitely uncertainty in any attempt to predict the weather - whether it be for the next decade or this afternoon. But misinterpretation of scientific findings introduces even more uncertainty in the minds of citizens, who read or hear conflicting reports and then decide not to trust any of them.

A deep core sample of the ice in Greenland found the "oldest pure DNA ever" and the reports published in Science magazine included some mentions of historic ice cap melting some 125,000 years ago when the sea level was some 6 meters above what it is today. Some press accounts of the Science article interpreted those mentions as meaning that forecasts of the impact of current Greenland meltoff were overblown, exaggerated.

RealClimate provides a more accurate explanation of the original study, which is consistent with the IPCC findings regarding the ice cap. So we're back to considering the possibility that a Greenland meltoff, combined with similar melting of the Antarctic ice cap, the melting of many smaller mountain glaciers around the world and the expansion of the ocean itself due to warming may - MAY - still result in at least a 6 meter rise in sea level.

The Advancing Beachfront

As sea levels rise - perhaps slowly, perhaps precipitously - and as storms become more powerful and more frequent, the idea of owning beachfront property would seem to be imbued with some kind of time limit.

The comfortable cottage sitting across the strand of sand from the Gulf of Mexico looms like a tasty morsel dangled in front of an increasingly hungry scavenger. Having driven Highway 90 from the Louisiana border to Gulfport 18 months after Katrina, we saw the coastline scoured clean, with the occasional cement stairs leading nowhere and the live oaks barren of leaves and branches. Yet every few miles we'd pass and active construction site where a defiant owner was insisting on rebuilding exactly where his previous abode had been annihilated. Stubborn? Proud? Or is this plain old stupidity?

An article the New York Times on June 21 included the estimate that at least one quarter of U.S. beachfront homes would be destroyed by rising seas and storms by 2060. I'd put strong emphasis on "at least" since I witnessed the total elimination of beachfront homes by a single storm landfall, and most global warming projections see major storms reaching not only the usual Florida and Gulf coasts, but farther up the East and even West coasts where residents of seaside communities and developments have always felt safe from Nature's wrath.

More from the NYT article:

Though most of the country's ocean beaches are eroding, few coastal jurisdictions consider sea level rise in their coastal planning, and still fewer incorporate the fact that the rise is accelerating.
- - -
Few coastal residents want to see their towns walled off and surrounded by water. And few want to elevate their houses by 20 feet or more, as flooding experts are beginning to recommend in some coastal areas. The approach favored by many scientists, a gradual retreat from the coast, is a perennial nonstarter among real estate interests and their political allies.

As Alex Steffen points out at WorldChanging,

The first-order problems brought on by global warming -- beach houses washing away, sure, but also crop failures, water shortages, floods, catastrophic wildfires, much more severe hurricanes, the spread of new diseases -- should freak us out and give us pause. But they are not necessarily the worst impacts we'll see.

Indeed, there are impacts that go far beyond the specific catastrophes and point to the loss of species, cultures and whole populations, not to mention what we here in America think of as our way of life. As Steffen say, "...climate foresight is no longer a luxury and, one way or another, we all live in New Orleans now."

Chris Mooney on Readiness

Chris Mooney (Washington correspondent for Seed magazine, owner of the blog The Intersection, and author of the forthcoming book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming) wrote this article for Truthdig, which does a great job of putting the imperative of preparing our most vulnerable coastal cities from storm damage into words.

As things stand now, there's plenty of evidence that more powerful storms are more likely to visit not only the usual suspects on the Gulf coast and Atlantic coast of Florida, but are also more likely to reach further north than we've come to expect. Locations such as Long Beach, California and Rhode Island have been hit by large storms in the past - at times when infrastructure and population were much less than today. Some key quotes:

The estimated damage total if the devastating 1926 Miami hurricane were to occur today is a staggering $164 billion

As the National Hurricane Center notes, as of 1990, 85 percent of U.S. coastal residents had never experienced a major hurricane landfall. Since that time, the number of these inexperienced residents has only increased, as what some hurricane scientists dub our “lemming-like march to the sea” has proceeded apace. Today, 53 percent of the U.S. population lives within 50 miles of a coastline.

And this sensible proposal:

Let’s move now with a national project to protect our most vulnerable areas against hurricane devastation, not just for the present, but with an eye toward our globally warmed future. We can prioritize by starting with the most exposed places and then moving down the list.

"The Cost of Holding Back the Sea" - EPA, 1991

The Environmental Protection Agency responded to the threat of global sea level rise in 1991 with an analysis of the costs of protecting vulnerable coast-side communities, wetlands, properties and facilities. The report, titled Greenhouse Effect and Sea Level Rise: The Cost of Holding Back the Sea. This report demonstrates that the EPA fully recognized the threats of global warming when George H. W. Bush was still in office. It's full of interesting statistics, charts, tables and drawings. The techniques and technologies it describes haven't changed much in the past 16 years...

Possible responses fall broadly into three categories: erecting walls to hold back the sea; allowing the sea to advance and adapting to it; and raising the land

...though the value of the dollar and the value of property located in coastal areas have certainly changed a lot. The total cost the report projects ($270-475 billion) looks laughably small today. Probably, current satellite mapping allows for a much more accurate assessment today.

From the abstract of the report we get some impressive numbers, which may still hold fairly accurate if corrected for the amount of coastal development that's happened since 1991. (Think of how much dot com money must have gone into building homes on the coastline):

We estimate that if no measures are taken to hold back the sea, a one meter rise in sea level would inundate 14,000 square miles, with wet and dry land each accounting for about half the loss. The 1500 square kilometers (600-700 square miles) of densely developed coastal lowlands could be protected for approximately one to two thousand dollars per year for a typical coastal lot. Given high coastal property values, holding back the sea would probably be cost-effective.

The authors offer some cautions for implementation and the ultimate solution:

The environmental consequences of doing so, however, may not be acceptable. Although the most common engineering solution for protecting the ocean coast• pumping sand• would allow us to keep our beaches, levees and bulkheads along sheltered waters would gradually eliminate most of the nation's wetland shorelines. To ensure the long-term survival of coastal wetlands, federal and state environmental agencies should begin to lay the groundwork for a gradual abandonment of coastal lowlands as sea level rises.

I'll be looking around to see if there's a more up-to-date assessment by the EPA, but in the meanwhile, this report serves as a good overview and intro to the challenge that we face in dealing with even minimal sea level rise.

Melting Ice. Can we afford to take our time?

Thanks to the excellentClimate Progress blog for calling my attention to the following.

Though it's not by any means the only serious impact of climate change, rising sea levels are probably the impact most directly linked to that change. Only the most hardened skeptic would refuse to connect global warming with melting ice caps. And only a boob would refuse to admit that those melting ice caps contribute to rising seas and the damage they will cause to human habitation.

Scientists have been following the freezing and thawing of the Arctic ice and lately it's been bothering them a lot because of the seemingly accelerated pace of thawing and the shrinking size of the winter freeze. Until recently, most scientists felt comfortable with a forecast that the ice cap would exist at least until 2040, but doubts have arisen and more money is now being allocated for deeper study.

From now until March 2009, as part of the International Polar Year, 63 nations will funnel $1.7 billion into polar research, aiming to determine which changes in the frozen landscape are natural, which are man-made and which, if any, are preventable. "There's been a rallying cry," says Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado. "We have to figure out how to tell policymakers, and the public, where and when to expect a big change."

So far, the studies don't look good. In mid-March, the journal Science devoted a section to the polar regions that was uniformly depressing: lower latitudes pollute pristine pole, read one headline. Another paper warned that Greenland and Antarctica are shedding 125 gigatons of ice per year, and though the southern continent has picked up some new ice from increased snowfall, it's not enough.

Hopefully, some of that $1.7B will help get scientists the equipment they need to keep up with the changes that are so swiftly happening. Compared to spending for, oh let's say the military, expenditures on the tools for measuring and forecasting worldwide flooding is pitifully small.

Despite the publicity around the IPY, scientists still have limited access to the technology they need. The U.S. Arctic Research Commission recently published a wish list of monitoring equipment, topped by icebreakers (America rents some ships from Russia and Sweden), a better sensor network of buoys and river gauges, and satellites.

And here's a boondoggle: the US did not contribute funding to the launch of the radarsat-2 satellite that will be necessary to analyze the changes in the ice cap in the coming years, and as one scientist claims, he's "not aware that any federal agency has a budget to buy" its data after 2009.

Why do I get the feeling that governments are gonna screw things up again?

Climate Frogs in your own backyard

I live in Marin County, California. Though it's rarely referred to as a peninsula, it could claim that description, with the Pacific Ocean defining its western boundary, the San Francisco and San Pablo Bays defining its eastern boundary and the Golden Gate Bridge crowning its southern end. Western Marin is separated from the rest of the county by a spine of coastal hills and Mt. Tamalpais. Much of the county has been preserved as park land, open space and agricultural trusts, and most of that land makes up West Marin. There is little land there for development and its population is very small. But most of that limited development is either vulnerable to sea level rise or on land that is vulnerable to landslides or forest fires - the byproducts of weather extremes.

East Marin is much more populous, but its residential and business areas are likewise vulnerable to climate change. I've begun to research county planning to find evidence that, in this region of above average education and income, some forward-thinking precautions are being taken. Slides and fires are perennial threats everywhere in California, and all residents have been informed for years about best practices to reduce risk from these threats. But sea level rise has been all but ignored. In fact, this past March marked the first time that the problem has been brought up for public discussion.

March 2007
Hearings before the Planning Commission on the Marin Countywide Plan are currently taking place. The Commission has recommended that the Baylands Corridor be expanded to protect a larger portion of the interior coast. Using Bay Conservation and Development Commission maps on potential sea-level rise, the Commission has recommended removing high-density development potential from areas subject to future oceanic flooding.

One quarter of humans vulnerable to sea surge

Just to put a rough number on the portion of humanity that might decide to move to higher ground (or build some pretty damn impressive sea walls), a new report from a team at the U.S. Geological Survey reveals that

More than 1 billion people live in low-lying areas where a sudden surge in sea level could prove as disastrous as the 2004 Asian tsunami

Add to that the number of people living less than 100 feet above current sea levels and you get a quarter of the world's population.

But just to provide some perspective to Americans, the article ends with this tidbit from Usery:

A 30-meter surge in Florida would leave the whole state covered except for a little plateau area.

Does this mean that we can expect sea surges and/or tsunamis that rise up to 100 feet? Well, sort of...

The team also found that a 100-foot (30-meter) rise in sea level would cover 3.7 million square miles of land worldwide. A rise of just 16 feet would affect 669 million people and 2 million square miles of land would be lost.

Sea levels are currently rising about 0.04 to 0.08 inches (1 to 2 millimeters) each year, making it unlikely such a scenario would suddenly occur across the globe, Usery [E. Lynn Usery, who led the team] said.

But he said 10,000 years ago sea levels rose 20 meters in 500 years -- a relatively short span -- after the collapse of the continental ice sheets.

"It can happen in a short period of time if we look at the historical data," Usery said.

Using a 500-year example is probably not going to motivate many people at the 50-plus elevation to move. But that billion who are within range of a good-sized tsunami (admittedly not a climate-related event, but becoming more of one as sea levels rise) should seriously be considering a change of scene. The problem for the vast majority of these people is that their livelihoods depend on being at sea level.

Santa Cruz looks ahead

Santa Cruz, California, located on the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Monterey, is known for its local political activism. It's probably one of the most progressive localities anywhere, so it should come as no surprise that it's ahead of the curve in preparing for a rising sea level.

In this article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, we learn some helpful stuff for climate frogs. For instance, someone has been surveying cities and their governments to find evidence of climate impact preparation.

"People are worried, there's a readiness to take action, but hardly anything is being done," said Susanne Moser, a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who surveyed 300 planners, public works engineers and other officials from city and county governments.

Santa Cruz is rare, but is not alone as a California city planning mitigation projects. The article points to Sonoma, Berkeley and San Luis Obispo as other cities with global warming plans. But planning is only in its earliest stages, with little practical traction yet.

Those surveyed said it's tough to act due to lack of money and other obligations.

"It's not that they need better information," Moser said, "it's that few have time to think about it. There's too much else on their plate"

And we learn about other bureaucratic obstacles to planning and implementation.

Complicating the problem is that responsibility for coastal management — protecting homes, providing water, preserving natural habitat — is spread over multiple state agencies, state commissions and local governments.

Moser's survey has prompted the writing of new legislation in California to create mandated planning across the state.

Legislation proposed by Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, would force cities to better prepare for impacts associated with climate change, such as sea-level rise, by revising local plans and seeking state funding for communities to understand, mitigate and adapt to climate change.

"We're learning quickly how important it is to expand the climate-change discussion to include preparing for future impacts, while also working today to reduce consumption that results in global warming," Laird said in a statement.

It's interesting to note that Santa Cruz is planning for what some consider to be worst-case scenarios - the melting of icecaps on both Greenland and Antarctica.

Most of Santa Cruz will be submerged if Antarctica and Greenland's ice sheets calve or melt entirely, a scenario that climate scientists say will play out in anywhere from 100 to 1,000 years if current trends continue.

Mission Street would be the shoreline if glacial melt follows even the more
conservative projections of some researchers, causing sea levels to rise 70 feet.

It's called "displacement"

Ghoramara is a delta island in India, one of thousands of similar islands called the Sundarbans. It sits at the merging of the Ganges river and the Bay of Bengal, and like countless other sea-level chunks of land, it is either sinking or being flooded or both at the same time. Since 1969, Ghoramara has lost half of its acreage to the sea.

On the leading edge of climate change vulnerability, the local government has been taking action by displacing the farming and fishing families whose land is disappearing from beneath their feet. In this NY Times story (registration required), we learn:

Hundreds of families have already been forced into a displaced people’s camp on Sagar, a neighboring island, which itself has shrunk by one and a half square miles in the last five years, according to the Jadavpur University study.

It's not like they've got the displacement process figured out. And so far, we're just talking about the effects of what may be "early" climate change, where sea level rise has been slow, large storms still rare.