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.
