The title of the Times’ article quoted above is stark and unequivocal. There is no attempt to “qualify” it or explore “both sides” of the issue. There is no attempt at “debate,” nor is there any concession for “doubt.” The unleashing of billions of tons of carbon pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere is heating up the planet, melting the Earth’s polar and land ice shelves, causing ever-increasing flooding that is now permanently inundating the American coastline. Period.
For decades, as the global warming created by human emissions caused land ice to melt and ocean water to expand, scientists warned that the accelerating rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline.
Now, those warnings are no longer theoretical: The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes.
Tidal flooding in Norfolk, Virginia, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Tybee Island, Georgia (all profiled in the Times’ article) has reached well beyond the occasional “nuisance” and is now a fact of life in those cities. Collectively, sea levels have risen to the point all along the East Coast such that many simultaneous instances of uncontrolled flooding are now imminent with only the slightest shift in the tides. These floods may range from a few inches to several feet deep, but they wreak havoc on developed coastal areas, stopping traffic, preventing drainage runoff, and submerging lawns, cars and basements. Floods also poison fresh water wells with salt and other contaminants as they wipe out forests and entire coastal ecosystems.
Local governments are sounding the alarm in places like Miami Beach, where the encroachment of human-induced coastal flooding has prompted that city to raise its own streets and elevate its sea walls. Local officials from both political parties are making their voices heard with increasing urgency as their communities’ very existence are under threat:
But the local leaders say they cannot tackle this problem alone. They are pleading with state and federal governments for guidance and help, including billions to pay for flood walls, pumps and road improvements that would buy them time.
Yet Congress has largely ignored these pleas, and has even tried to block plans by the military to head off future problems at the numerous bases imperiled by a rising sea. A Republican congressman from Colorado, Ken Buck, recently called one military proposal part of a “radical climate change agenda.”
But it’s not exactly “Congress” that has been ignoring the pleas of local coastal communities. It is the Republicans in Congress, who owe their existence to the campaign donations of fossil fuel conglomerates such as those owned by Charles and David Koch, and oil companies who fostered an insidious campaign of climate “denialism” for the past three decades. It is the Republicans in the statehouses, like Governor Rick Scott of Florida, who sold out their states to energy interests that as tribute demand absolute fealty to the now-laughable idea that climate science is “unsettled,” or that the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists about the cause of global warming reflects a liberal “political agenda.” The article notes that of those in Congress who express doubt about the man-made causes of global warming, “almost all” are Republicans. Several of those Republicans also parrot crackpot conspiracy theories claiming that the science itself was “invented” simply to justify “greater governmental control” of peoples’ lives.”
Meanwhile, the pitiless reality continues to wash ashore. The Times’ article describes the situation in Norfolk Virginia as particularly acute, as the land underlying the city itself is slowly sinking, adding to the impact of the floods. The Obama Administration provided a grant of 100 million dollars needed in order to safeguard a small part of the Norfolk region from disastrous repeated flooding, but the size of that grant in and of itself demonstrates the sheer magnitude of the problem facing the U.S:
[P]rotecting a single neighborhood from rising water can easily cost tens of millions of dollars. Sea walls and streets may have to be raised, or movable gates built along waterways so they can be closed at times of high water.
While the Obama administration is trying to create a few showcase neighborhoods, there is no sign Congress is prepared to spend the money that cities and states say they need: tens of billions of dollars just to catch up to the current flooding problems, much less get ahead of them. Norfolk alone, a town of 250,000 people, has a wish list of $1.2 billion — or about $5,000 for every man, woman and child in the city.
It seems that no one in the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress wants to contemplate the terrible consequences of failing to protect these coastlines. That would require them to concede that solving the problem will require vast amounts of revenue and a complete abandonment of their “tax-cutting” dogma. Even the repeated warnings from the military that such flooding constitutes a national security threat have failed to move the GOP to take any action. Donald Trump, the Republican Presidential nominee, has vowed to scrap the recent climate accords reached in Paris which would cut global carbon emissions, apparently with a view toward “Making America Great Again.”
The Times article, well worth reading in its entirety, describes how coastal research has developed in tandem with the gradual warming caused by greenhouse gases, leading scientists to repeatedly update their projections as to the amount of flooding we can expect.
In 2013, scientists reached a consensus that three feet was the highest plausible rise by the year 2100. But now some of them are starting to say that six or seven feet may be possible. A rise that large over a span of decades would be an unparalleled national catastrophe, driving millions of people from their homes and likely to require the abandonment of entire cities.
The ice sheets in both Greenland and West Antarctica are now melting at a record pace. The entire Chesapeake Bay region of the U.S. is under threat of rising seas, as are the coastlands of Louisiana and Florida. Without assistance from the Federal government, local communities in all of these regions are facing an impossible situation. They have neither the resources to cope with the costs of continual, catastrophic flooding nor the wherewithal to raise the kind of money necessary to ward it off.
What exactly is it going to take for Republicans in Congress to wake up?
More here from Diarist yingyang.