Looking across the wreckage in the wake of Hurricane Irma, Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson drew a simple conclusion.
“… the Earth is getting hotter. This storm is another reminder of what we’re going to have to deal with in the future.”
But Nelson is senator of a state where Gov. Rick Scott is simultaneously seeking federal assistance for hurricane damage, supporting changes to the law that would eliminate planning for climate change, and even helping to write climate change out of Florida’s school curriculum. It’s why Nelson says that Republicans are “denying reality.”
Florida is the lowest-lying state—by a lot. The highest point is Briton Hill, just a few miles south of the border with Alabama. The average elevation across the entire state of Florida is less than 100 feet. For the population centers, it’s even worse. Jacksonville averages 16 feet. Fort Meyers is at 10 feet. Miami is just six feet—or two yards. Any member of the Miami Heat could stand on the waterline and still be taller than most of the city around them. Naples is at three feet. Marco Island, overrun with high-priced vacation homes crowded McMansion to McMansion, is officially at zero elevation.
Add to those incredible numbers Florida’s prime position to catch both tropical storms riding the wave all the way from Cape Verde and home grown monsters off the Gulf, and the result is a state that’s singularly sensitive to climate change. As the effects of climate change become more and more evident, their effect is going to be felt hard, and often first, in Florida.
And still, Florida voted for Donald “Chinese Hoax” Trump in the last election. And handed control of their state to Rick Scott who, in the best of times, has ignored the potential results of climate change, and in the worst of times …
He faced a wave of criticism in 2015 after the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that state employees had been discouraged from using the terms “climate change” and “global warming.” One state official even refused to utter the words in a public hearing.
Florida is a state where climate change is going to have a huge impact. And it’s a state that’s doing almost nothing about it.
Some localities are at work on the problem.
Even before Hurricane Irma flooded the streets deep enough to sweep away cars, the city of Miami Beach committed to spending $100 million to raise street levels by two feet. The $100 million construction is just phase one of a project expected to run at least $500 million as the city adds a complex system of barriers, pumps, filters, and massive amounts of fill material.
The design — featuring a street and sidewalk perched on an upper tier, 2 ½ feet above the front doors of roadside businesses, and backed by a hulking nearby pump house — represents what one city engineer called "the street of tomorrow."
Some property owners are worried that raising the streets will channel more water to the surrounding area, but Miami Beach has to do something. For the last few years, they’ve been experiencing “sunshine floods” in which, despite a lack of stormy weather, the city’s streets are still submerged to the point where spotting a fish gliding over the pavement is not unusual. The flooding is most severe during periods of “king tides,” particularly high tides that generally occur in the spring. But while Scott and Co. are careful to blame the flooding only on such tides, the fact is that the blue sky floods are a new thing, exacerbated by a ocean that’s rising and growing warmer. Sea levels are already up by around eight inches when compared to the 19th century.
Miami Beach is planning on a two-foot elevation increase, based on a recent study that indicated the area could face that amount of sea level rise by 2060. If that rise occurs, Marco Island will be gone. So will several low-lying Keys like Big Pine, whose low elevation resulted in being overrun by a punishing storm surge in Irma.
While it’s good to see Miami Beach doing something, even if it’s on the side of addressing the results rather than the cause, that study showing a two-foot rise … is not the only study.
The most recent projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicate that if emissions continue on their current trend, sea levels could continue to rise another 39 inches by the end of this century.
Three feet. That’s doesn’t sound so terrible. Sure, more of Florida would disappear. Mar-a-Lago would be flooded at high tide, which is less satisfying that it sounds because at the end of the century, Donald Trump won’t be around to see it.
But even half of that amount would have a devastating effect.
By 2050, 26 major U.S. cities will face an “emerging flooding crisis.” Globally, storm damage could cost cities from Hong Kong to Dhaka to New York trillions annually unless adaptation measures are taken. According to Climate Central estimates, 150 million or more people are currently living on land that will either be submerged or exposed to chronic flooding by 2100.
Right now thousands of people are displaced from their homes in Florida. They join tens of thousands more who are still waiting out the damage in Texas, or who are permanently without a home after their rental property or uninsured property went under. Some of those are people who, in turn, were already uprooted by Katrina.
And all of them are just a start on the great masses of people who will be sent seeking new homes as the water comes in. As much as it it would be nice to think this problem will hit gradually—a millimeter this year, another the next, taking out a few homes at a time—that’s not how it works. Harvey and Irma and Katrina. That’s how it works. And, unfortunately, that’s how it will keep working.