BBC Future has a grim look at what is happening now in Florida: Miami’s Fight Against Rising Seas. Not a hundred years from now. Not 50 or 30 — now.
The first time my father’s basement flooded, it was shortly after he moved in. The building was an ocean-front high-rise in a small city north of Miami called Sunny Isles Beach. The marble lobby had a waterfall that never stopped running; crisp-shirted valets parked your car for you. For the residents who lived in the more lavish flats, these cars were often BMWs and Mercedes. But no matter their value, the cars all wound up in the same place: the basement.
When I called, I’d ask my dad how the building was doing. “The basement flooded again a couple weeks ago,” he’d sometimes say. Or: “It’s getting worse.” It’s not only his building: he’s also driven through a foot of water on a main road a couple of towns over and is used to tiptoeing around pools in the local supermarket’s car park.
Ask nearly anyone in the Miami area about flooding and they’ll have an anecdote to share. Many will also tell you that it’s happening more and more frequently. The data backs them up.
The article by Amanda Ruggeri is a wide-ranging look at Miami Beach and the surrounding areas as rising seas bring more and more King tides, low lying areas can’t drain, streets flood, sea walls fail, and more. This is one of the richest cities in the U.S. — if they can’t cope, how are the rest of us going to make out in the years ahead?
This passage is especially damning:
The Florida governor is a climate change sceptic and has directed attention away from the issue. Former employees have said they even were told not to utter the phrase “climate change”. Ignoring the issue now appears to pervade the highest levels of US government: the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief doubts whether carbon dioxide plays a primary role in climate change, while President Trump recently signed an executive order overturning emissions-slashing regulations. Draft versions of the White House budget propose cutting the EPA budget by 31% and employee numbers by 20%, as well as steep cuts to Noaa – including 26% of the funds from its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and entirely eliminating the Sea Grant programme, whose Florida section brings together 17 different universities to study sea level rise challenges and solutions.
NOAA has a sea level rise mapping tool (At least for the the moment — the Trump regime will probably eliminate it once it comes to their attention.) Ruggeri is fascinated to see how just a small rise can have huge effects in the flat landscape of the area.
Billions of dollars of real estate are going to be flooded, even in a best-case scenario. While Ruggeri doesn’t come out and flatly say it, a lot of the denial is driven by money — those who don’t want to pay for measures to build resiliency, those who don’t want to take the steps needed to fight climate change, those who want to avoid any mention of it while they cash in now while they can.
It’s stupid on steroids. Ruggeri tries to put some optimistic spin on it, but rising seas have no pity.
Read The Whole Thing. You may want to March for Science on Earth Day April 22, or the Climate March the next weekend, April 29.