The Water Will Come

Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

      

About the Author

Rolling Stone editor and award-winning author Jeff Goodell writes on modern environmental and energy issues. His other books include How to Cool the Planet, Sunnyvale and Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.

Summary

Imagine a Future Apocalypse

Consider this scenario of a possible future catastrophe: In a hurricane, a 20-foot [6-meter] storm surge engulfs most of Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach. Sea levels, up more than a foot since the early 2000s, make South Florida susceptible to such surges. Hundreds die – some in the panic after the false news of a reactor breach at the Turkey Point nuclear power station. Miami’s lackluster sea defenses fail quickly. The waters rise, swamping buildings and bringing crocodiles into the dying city. Miami becomes a popular place to go diving – a modern real-life Atlantis.

“Sea-level rise…will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.”

Sea-Level Rise

The science of climate change – global warming, melting ice sheets, rising seas – says this fictional future scenario is possible. Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and Hurricane Sandy’s 2012 pounding of New York foreshadow such disasters. Rising sea levels will exacerbate storms’ effects. At a posh event about sea-level rise hosted by the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce, one broker complained of a “fear-fest” when University of Miami geologist Hal Wanless talked of catastrophic sea rise levels of 15 feet by 2100. Predictions vary: US National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) scientist James Hansen, the “godfather of climate change science,” estimated 10 feet [3 meters] of rise by 2100 if people keep burning fossil fuel at the current rate. Scientists update the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast every six years. Its 2013 prediction of a roughly three-foot sea rise by 2100 didn’t take account of rapid ice-sheet melt, which may push the rise to more than six feet, swamping coastal and low-lying land. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) reported in 2017 that sea rise could range from one foot to more than eight feet by 2100.

“To minimize the impact of sea-level rise…stop burning fossil fuels and move to higher ground.”

The 20th century saw a six-inch [15-centimeter] rise in sea-level; the rate of rise will accelerate in the 21st. To halt it, people must stop burning fossil fuel. Existing CO₂ will linger in the atmosphere for millennia, and that will keep temperatures artificially high. Banning fossil fuels would limit the temperature rise to about 3oF [1.7°C] above preindustrial levels. Continuing to burn them would cause a catastrophic 8oF [4.4°C] rise and cause a sea level rise up to 13 feet over time. Burning existing fossil fuel reserves would eventually cause the drowning of most coastal cities.

“Mobile barriers are to sea-level rise as condoms are to sex: a device you use to protect yourself in a heated moment.”

Some 14,500 years ago, during the so-called Meltwater Pulse, North America’s Laurentide ice sheet and Antarctica’s glaciers melted. Sea levels rose dramatically. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is older than the biblical story of Noah, refers to a flood, perhaps at a time around 5600 BC, when the rising Mediterranean broke through into the Black Sea. Over the eons, sea levels have fluctuated hundreds of feet due to changes in Earth’s orbit causing ice ages to come and go. At the end of the last ice age, seas rose 13 feet in a century. Then, land bridges connected Britain to Europe, Scotland to Sweden, Thailand to Indonesia, and Asia to North America. Now, instead of Earth’s orbit being at fault in ice melting, human activity that warms the planet is causing a premature thaw and rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

“When the oil and gas barons of Russia and Brazil make money, they have been sinking it into Miami, a city that is literally drowning [from] combustion of the fossil fuels that made them rich.”

Florida, USA

Pearly grains called “ooids” dissolved to form the porous limestone of South Florida’s once-submerged Atlantic Coastal Ridge; now five million people live on it. South Florida’s native Calusa people were adept at “engineering with water.” For millennia, they lived in harmony with the rising sea until they died of European sailors’ smallpox in the 1700s.

In 1890, the City of Miami’s founder, railroad lobbyist Julia Tuttle, built a house on the ridge. Early settlers drained lower areas of the Everglades to get arable land for free. The 1909 dredging of the Miami Canal preceded the draining of the Everglades. Mosquitoes infested the sandbar of Miami, but promoter Carl Fisher saw its potential. In exchange for land, he funded John Collins to complete a bridge across Biscayne Bay. Hacked clear by poor black laborers, dredged up as muddy sand, and reinforced with rock and mulch, Miami Beach rose from the slime. Spurred by “boosterism,” greed and lax regulation, real estate boomed – until a Category 4 hurricane’s 10-foot storm surge in 1926 left 113 people dead. The market collapsed. Eventually, Florida’s hopeful development dreams resurfaced.

“Of all the hard decisions people who live on vulnerable coasts will have to face, the most difficult one is the idea of retreat.”

Nobody takes ownership of the risk of sea-level rise, while Miami homeowners play financial and emotional “real estate roulette” in calculating when to sell. Politicians fear crashing Miami’s economy by frightening away foreign condo investors. The mismanaged US National Flood Insurance Program effectively subsidizes at-risk property and tempts civic leaders to tamper with flood-zone designations. There looms the difficulty of what Miami artist Xavier Cortada calls a “graceful retreat” from the coast for people whose only equity is their threatened homes.

“Can I get a few more years out of this place, or should I dump my condo on the beach now? Virtually everyone… in Miami makes this calculation.”

The Melting Ice

American climatologist Jason Box studies changes in Greenland’s ice sheets, where massive glaciers are melting much faster than expected and opening up a “new climate land” of untrodden ground. Box predicted the rapid 2012 Greenland melt, partly by factoring in the effects of soot from US wildfires and China’s coal-burning settling on the ice and lowering its albedo – or, reflectivity – thus allowing the sun to melt glaciers more quickly. Antarctica holds seven times more ice than Greenland, but melt proceeds at a quicker – and even accelerating – pace in Greenland. With warming affecting the temperatures of the Arctic air and the Antarctic sea, melting ice itself causes climatic “feedback loops,” leading to heat waves and faster melting. The Earth has a fixed quantity of water. Its mean level relative to land fluctuates as ice ages lock it up or release it. Land levels change due to “glacial rebound.” Undersea currents like the Gulf Stream plus expansion stemming from warming both inexorably affect sea levels. Alaska’s economy relies on fossil fuels. Temperatures are rising twice as fast there as in the rest of America. Security implications loom, with Russia and China among the nations eyeing the Arctic’s trillion-dollar oil, gas, and minerals. Russia sends fighter jets to Alaska’s edge, test-fires missiles off Greenland and, in 2007, planted its flag 10,000 feet down in the seabed under the North Pole.

“The difference between three feet and six feet is the difference between a manageable coastal crisis and a decades-long refugee disaster.”

Barriers Against the Sea

In Venice, Italy, water collects and pools in the Piazza San Marco before high tide. After a storm surge swamped the fifth-century city in 1966, engineers pondered solutions. In 1994, they suggested the high-tech, $6 billion MOSE barrier. The acronym, which stands for “Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico,” was deliberately designed to invoke Moses, the Bible’s great “parter of the waves.” Plagued by corruption scandals and spiraling costs, the barrier was only partially complete by 2016. Wageningen University climatologist Pier Vellinga called the ambitious project “a Ferrari on the seafloor.” MOSE likely will fail to protect the city. Fancy barriers only buy time – and not much of it.

“Most of the water that will drown… coastal cities will come from…Antarctica and Greenland.”

In Rotterdam, Holland, the massive infrastructure project called the Maeslant Barrier stands ready to hold back storm surges – like the killer one of 1953 – coming up the Rhine from the North Sea. The modern city’s public squares – known as “water parks” – act as basins for surging waters. Social attitudes in Rotterdam tend toward living with water instead of fighting it. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy flooded more than 88,000 New York buildings and killed 44 people. Sandy focused minds on protecting the city. Construction on the first stage of a 10-foot-high reinforced concrete barrier should begin in 2019. The barricade is part of a proposed “Big U” that may eventually gird Lower Manhattan and shield wealth-generating areas like Wall Street. New York’s low ground – with its subways and electrified infrastructure – remains vulnerable to Hudson River estuary flooding, which rising sea levels only exacerbate.

For “low-lying nations…climate negotiations were not about economic competitiveness or a global power play. They were about life and death.”

Nature pays little heed to barriers which failed tragically during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and in the 30-foot tsunami that overtook Kamaishi, Japan. Measures like the US federally-funded Living Breakwaters project provide more innovative approaches to absorbing wave energy and filtering water. Yet, relying on vast, slow-to-build ramparts may breed complacency and delay thoughts of leaving the coast or learning to live with the oncoming ocean.

Greenhouse Gas

Attendees at the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015 rejoiced as nearly every nation committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to reduce warming. The foreign minister of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Tony de Brum, influenced many leaders. Still suffering after effects of nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958, his low-lying Pacific nation of more than 1,000 tiny coral atolls now faces erasure by rising seas as its crops die due to salinization. Subsidies from the US military haven’t improved the infrastructure and leave sea defenses crumbling. In return for letting the US military use the Islands’ atolls, the Marshallese get to live and work in the United States.

“Geoengineering puts faith in the magic of technology.”

In 2015, at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, then-Secretary of State John Kerry heard that sea-level rise threatens to leave the vast base inoperable in as few as 20 years. But the Republican Virginia legislature “effectively banned the discussion of climate change,” and blamed “recurrent flooding.” Driven by gas-funded ideology, Congress hushes Pentagon concerns about at least 704 coastal military bases. A 2003 Department of Defense report called climate change a bigger threat to US security than terrorism. Kerry calls it a “weapon of mass destruction.”

Drought catalyzed unrest in Syria and drove up food prices in Egypt, leading to the Arab Spring uprising. While rich nations refuse liability for emission-caused loss, the number of climate refugees is growing, maybe to 200 million by 2050, says the International Organization for Migration.

“The United States… elected a president [Donald Trump] who believed climate change was a hoax and would soon fill his cabinet with climate change deniers of every stripe.”

West Africa

Throughout West Africa, coastlines erode, soils become salt saturated and clean, fresh water dwindles. Lagos, Nigeria, a rapidly growing megacity of up to 21 million people, is divided sharply between rich and poor. Most of Lagos is about five feet above the sea. The condos of the new city of Eko Atlantic – built by alleged corruption kingpin Gilbert Chagoury’s company – will cosset the wealthy. Built on dredged-up seabed, the new city – with its own security force, schools, power plant and water supply – will shelter behind a 25-foot concrete seawall. In an example of “climate apartheid,” extended families in Lagos’s water slums, like Makoko, live in stilt-built shacks. By 2050, three million to eight million Africans may flee the drowning city.

“Human beings have become a geological force on the planet, with the power to reshape the boundaries of the world in ways we didn’t intend and don’t entirely understand.”

The Pump Option

Partly due to developers Scott Robins and Philip Levine, expensive residences fill Sunset Harbour on the low side of Miami Beach. After Levine became mayor in 2013, he charged chief city engineer Bruce Mowry with mitigating the impact of sea-level rise. Mowry installed large pumps to serve low-lying areas plus one-way valves to limit seawater backing up through the sewers. The system worked well in 2014 for so-called “king tides,” unusually high spring tides, but Hurricane Matthew’s 2016 surge overwhelmed it. Other measures underway involve raising entire streets. Samples of floodwater pumped into Biscayne Bay show levels of fecal bacteria hundreds of times higher than state limits. Germs, viruses and algal blooms flourish in cracked sewer pipes and saturated septic tanks. In extreme flooding, septic tanks and coffins float out of the ground. While creative Miami architects design schemes to “work with nature,” the nuclear industry seems to ignore the risk. Despite concerns about the vulnerability of its cooling apparatus to sea level rise, Florida’s Turkey Point nuclear power station recently received approval for two more reactors.

“I got a very nice view of two 40-year-old reactors perched on the edge of a rising sea with millions of people living within a few miles of the plant. It was as clear a picture of the insanity of modern life as I’ve ever seen.”

Toms River, New Jersey

After Sandy’s storm surge battered Toms River, New Jersey, stakeholders rebuilt the town exactly as before. In some flood-hit places, the state or federal government will buy out the residents. In Summer Haven, Florida, for example, wealthy residents sued the county and forced it to maintain their flood-damaged road. People must apply evolved human intelligence to avoid catastrophe and mitigate the worst effects of climate change. They may find it hard to believe in the coming inundation, but, inevitably, coastal cities will drown.