Climate Change Retrograde – A Noble Experiment against Intensive Flooding

Climate Change Retrograde – A Noble Experiment against Intensive Flooding

As Time Marshes On: Trusting Nature or Environmental Vandalism?

The realities of climate change disasters are literally reshaping Earth’s geography. Depicted individually in the press, the scope of intensity and frequency of such climate change decimation is beginning to overwhelm environmentalists, physicists, urban planners and those national leaders not mired in “make a really bad problem so much worse” conspiracy theories. It does seem that leadership often requires “going against the grain of popular sentiment.” In the United States, that MAGA followers even in the most severely climate change impacted states, continue to marginalize climate change driven disasters as “mere cycles” … an unsustainable belief that is already coming to haunt these bastions of scientific and medical denialism. MAGA leaders are mostly sheep, unwilling to lead.

While national MAGA (aka, the Republican Party) fight federal legislation aimed at saving the nation from the accelerating damage from such disasters, it is red state governors who add, so to speak, fuel to the seriously damaging, wrong-headed denialism. While red states seem to bear the brunt of climate change disasters in heavily populated areas, MAGA voters do not want to hear about that. They know “something” climate-related is happening – they can see it either in the resulting mass destruction or at least the exploding cost (where still available) of homeowners insurance – but they have other priorities, mostly responding to fabricated issues embellished by conspiracy theories, where lower taxes for the “job creators” (false), extracting government from regulatory expertise, Christian dogma mandates a “culture war,” and deporting immigrants loom larger. Dis- and mis-information define their world. But most Americans, especially younger voters, have long since noted that the climate change amber alert is turning red fast.

“This hurricane season has… amplified another disturbing trend: misinformation about catastrophic weather extremes… For example, social media users have falsely claimed that Hurricanes Helene and Milton were created or steered by human technology. Such lies generate mistrust and anger, which are too often directed at meteorologists who work to save lives by providing accurate scientific forecasts warning those in harm’s way to evacuate.

“Technology capable of creating or steering hurricanes does not exist outside of science fiction, or perhaps the lairs of cartoon villains. Humans shape extreme weather in another way: When we burn fossil fuels such as oil and gas, we release heat-trapping greenhouse gases that act as a blanket abnormally warming our planet. Scientists know that this human-caused warming is the real reason hurricanes such as Helene and Milton have become more dangerous.” Andra Garner, associate professor and climate scientist in the department of environmental science at Rowan University in New Jersey, October 23rd, Associated Press.

Leading red state governors, notably Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott, continue to focus on individual disasters and federal relief programs, and cling stubbornly to the “God will save us; he promised never again to impose a global disaster on us after the Great Flood” evangelical mantra or a notion that we will recycle to effectively, that old “Great America” of times long past… ineffective bandages for a major life-threatening wound. As death tolls mount, we should be acutely aware that Mother Nature’s messages are global, which brings me to a killer torrential rain in Spain and a bizarre fallback to a nature experiment in southwestern England.

Joseph Wilson and Teresa Medrano, writing for the October 31st Associated Press, describe the damage from the worst rains in memory across Spain (a reality in other parts of Europe) at the end of October: “Flash floods in Spain turned village streets into rivers, ruined homes, disrupted transportation and killed at least 95 people in the worst natural disaster to hit the European nation in recent memory.

“Rainstorms that started Tuesday [10/29] and continued Wednesday [10/30] caused flooding across southern and eastern Spain, stretching from Malaga to Valencia. Muddy torrents tumbled vehicles down streets at high speeds while debris and household items swirled in the water. Police and rescue services used helicopters to lift people from their homes and rubber boats to reach drivers stranded atop cars… Emergency services in the eastern region of Valencia confirmed a death toll of 92 people on Wednesday. Two additional casualties were reported in the neighboring Castilla La Mancha region, while southern Andalusia reported one death.” Washed away villages an infrastructure, added to impassable streets in major cities have rewritten Spain’s topography.

But in rain prone England, there are areas of vastly increased intensity of rain driven flooding. It got so bad, with massive flooding literally making farming and living almost impossible in the Steart Marshes in coastal Somerset, England, the best efforts to stop this overly repetitious cycle of destruction – sea walls, tidal barriers and sandbanks – were no longer viable or affordable solutions. As Rory Smith, writing for the October 22nd New York Times tells it: “[On a traditional salt marsh on] a tendril of land curling out from the coast of Somerset, in southwestern England, a team of scientists, engineers and conservationists have embraced a radical solution…

“In a project costing 20 million pounds (around $26 million), tidal waters were allowed to flood the Steart Peninsula in 2014 for the first time in centuries…Rather than attempting to resist the sea, the land was given back to it. It was, in the words of Alys Laver, the conservationist who oversees the site, a ‘giant science experiment’…A decade on, its results might offer a blueprint for how some parts of Britain — and the rest of the world — might adapt to the reality of climate change… And so, as the sun rose on Sept. 8, 2014, the tide was allowed to flood the peninsula. Water flowed through a new gap, about 220 yards wide, and then into channels and rivulets that, from above, looked like the veins of a leaf. The land had been surrendered. The experiment had begun.” Before the floodgates were opened, the land was prepared to handle to flow with specific channels and berms carved into the area to reflect what a viable salt marsh would need.

A decade later, the newly flooded area resisted the most intensive rainfall: “The marsh acts as a natural and hugely effective bulwark against flooding, absorbing and slowing tides before they can encroach inland. Even last winter — the wettest anyone in the area could remember — the village at one edge of the peninsula did not flood. Paths through the marsh remained passable. A steep bank, covered with grass and significantly higher than the old flood wall, now borders the river… The area is also a haven for wildlife. Bird-watching blinds with giant windows offer glimpses of godwits, plovers, oystercatchers, egrets and herons. A growing population of avocets — black-and-white wading birds with distinctive, curling beaks — has gathered around the pools of brackish water.” AP. Carbon absorption, from both the new grasses and the soil itself, skyrocketed. Free roaming cattle feasted on new, rich plant life. Simply, this small experiment worked.

While this is a difficult solution in many regions – government buyouts of largescale real estate clearly complicate implementing such solutions on a global scale – climate change problems require multiple and massive solutions if we are truly going to adapt the Earth to this existential threat to us all. This is one solution that must be included in our climate change resistance.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am both tired from and angry at this stubborn resistance to necessary and “we can do it” solutions from major global climate change deniers and marginalizers, particularly in a nation that was built around finding solutions… the United States of America.