Beachfront Property They Really Don’t Want

I spent the other evening looking at animated and interactive maps, each showing vulnerable coastlines facing rising seas. One showed virtually all of Holland underwater, and downtown Manhattan didn’t look so good. San Francisco and Puget Sound lost sizeable downtown areas to surging seas, but in the United States, nothing looked quite as bad as Florida. The above projection, by the way, comes from NASA. Since most of these maps took a 100 year view, many are assuming that we’ll “figure it out by then.” But one map allowed you to play with the sea rise figures, and even at lower levels Florida was feeling lots and lots of pain.

South Florida seems to be mostly toast (the Keys are gone), or rather very much under water soggy toast, but even the Everglades, from which the State draws much of its fresh water supply, was brackish as sea water penetrated these sensitive wetlands. “‘I don’t think people realize how vulnerable Florida is,’ Harold R. Wanless, the chairman of the geological sciences department at the University of Miami, said in an interview last week. ‘We’re going to get four or five or six feet of water, or more, by the end of the century. You have to wake up to the reality of what’s coming.’

“Concern about rising seas is stirring not only in the halls of academia but also in local governments along the state’s southeastern coast… The four counties there — Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach, with a combined population of 5.6 million — have formed an alliance to figure out solutions… Long battered by hurricanes and prone to flooding from intense thunderstorms, Florida is the most vulnerable state in the country to the rise in sea levels.

“Even predictions more modest than Professor Wanless’s foresee most of low-lying coastal Florida subject to increasingly frequent floods as the polar ice caps melt more quickly and the oceans surge and gain ground… Much of Florida’s 1,197-mile coastline is only a few feet above the current sea level, and billions of dollars’ worth of buildings, roads and other infrastructure lies on highly porous limestone that leaches water like a sponge.” New York Times, November 9^th.

When you come to think of it, just looking at the United States without feeling horrible about the South Pacific island nations that will disappear or the tens of millions of displaced people in coastal Bangladesh, so many regions of our nation will be screaming for federal aid over the coming years. A storm surge here, a wildfire there, a prolonged drought over there, too much rain and flood up there… We’ve already seen the clamor, and we’ve already seen initial resistance – such as the demand from the Tea Party that Superstorm Sandy victims figure it out without federal assistance (until the GOP donors on Wall Street turned the tide) – against paying for “the other guy’s problems.” Think we have budget strains now?

We can see the scientific ramifications of global warming by playing with these interactive maps. What fewer folks are focusing on are the political ramifications of shifting resources and impaired environments. I’ve already blogged on how the Russians, who will pick up millions of acres of additional farmland and access to valuable minerals and oil as the tundra melts, are laying new claims to new Arctic resources. There will be other nations that will just disappear (the island states noted above), hundreds of millions if not over a billion persons whose access to food will decrease and exposure to new diseases and insects with increase, and new battles within and without nations over water and arable land.

The United States itself stands a good chance of fracturing into pockets of self-interested regions no long willing to pay for the woes of lesser states. The South will be slammed particularly hard by climate change because of already-warmer temperatures and a vast coastline that is pretty close to sea level for many miles inland. The Midwest is feeling the drain of our biggest aquifer (the Ogallala) as levels of drought intensify, and Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and California forests are burning up. If political polarization is not settled by an overwhelming shift in demographics expected as soon as the next Census, that polarization may only heighten the desire of local regions to become autonomous from the rest of the nation.

No one knows what the future will bring, but with the exception of the Civil War, Americans have been pretty good about rallying together to face military foes. This time, however, the “enemy” is nature (caused by our failing to moderate burning fossil fuels) and there are very, very big cracks in the very notion of American unity. All this will likely happen, if at all, well after I am gone, but I fear for the legacy I have left for my son and future generations.

I’m Peter Dekom, and at some level addressing the cause of this coming debacle is a whole lot cheaper than facing the ultimate debacle itself.