See how rising seas will affect any coastal city in the U.S. If your zip code doesn't work, click "see map."
100 Years Rising is a project of the public radio program BURN: An Energy Journal.
"Storms are getting more powerful, and the current scientific thinking is that's going to continue.... We are not coordinated at different levels of government, and time is running out."
Miami is drowning while the powers that be look away
Low-lying south Florida, at the front line of climate change in the US, will be swallowed as sea levels rise. Astonishingly, the population is growing, house prices are rising and building goes on. The problem is the city is run by climate change deniers
Scientists disagree over whether climate change is altering hurricanes. It is impossible, when looking at one storm, to know whether global warming had an impact, but researchers see a trend.
Josh Kurz imagines this ad for a future condo complex off the Louisiana coast.
Repurposing abandoned oil rigs for off-shore living was an idea that took off in 2050. Fifty years later, off-shore living (or "off-coast" as it is called now) is big business and developers have started building them from scratch. FIJI 2 is the most famous of these off-coast living spaces, home to almost 800 residents.
Nearly 20 percent of Miami-Dade County faces inundation with just one foot of sea-level rise, an increase we could see by 2050.
-Erika Spanger-Siegfried on "The Equation" blog at the Union of Concerned Scientists
Spanger-Siegfried's post is subtitled, "A state's race against the sea." She writes:
Flying into Miami, I was struck once again: my god, this place is wet. From the air, the roads and towns seem to dissolve into the Everglades; Southern Florida, a swamp at heart. And when you’re flying in for a sea-level rise summit — a meeting where people are planning for tides three feet higher, and more, this century — that low, flat, waterlogged land, with structures piled high along the thin margin that meets the sea, looks so imperiled.
And, of course, it is, and in uniquely perilous ways. Low-lying Florida faces rising sea level along its extensive coastline, water encroaching from both the Atlantic and the Gulf coasts, and up through the Everglades. But large areas of Florida, including the southern-most counties, sit on porous limestone bedrock, which allows water to move relatively freely beneath dry land, and to infiltrate up to the surface; in this way, water rises from below. So, unlike the Netherlands, which through a combination of engineering feats and water-tight bedrock is largely able to keep the North Sea at bay, the water in Florida is rising and it can’t be stopped.
Spanger-Siegfried says Florida's situation is grave, but not without some hope.
Architects re-envisioning Miami as a “future-proof” city. Legal experts anticipating the onslaught of challenges as homes become too risky to inhabit and impossible to sell. Ecologists studying how the Everglades can be helped to keep up with rising seas. Water managers preparing for the loss of public drinking water sources as saltwater infiltrates groundwater. Engineers tackling the challenges of defending against and, in other cases, accommodating the rising water. Community activists engaging new groups in the challenge.
Flood waters have forced Russell Gelvin to rebuild his house in Louisiana. Twice. The Mississippi Delta is sinking at the same time the ocean is rising. In Louisiana, that puts a lot of petrochemical plants at risk. Reporter Reid Frazier went to Louisiana for BURN.
If you truly believe in global warming, you’re going to have an issue being in real estate in South Florida.
-William Hardin, professor of real estate at Florida International University, in the Miami Herald
Florida is flat, and low, and the ocean is rising, so lots of South Florida will be underwater before the end of the century. Some areas will be flooded in a matter of decades. But when, exactly? And which areas?
Those questions create a shaky foundation for a real estate market. Reporter John Dorschner of the Miami Herald talked with real estate pros and scientists who watch sea levels. "The financial stakes are high," Dorschner writes.
The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, a joint effort of four county governments, calculates the area could lose as much as $4 billion in taxable real estate with a one-foot rise in sea level.
At three feet, the loss could be $31 billion — escalating from there, perhaps at an accelerating pace unless governments and/or the private sector act to reduce carbon and other gases warming the water and atmosphere that in turn melts the ice caps and causes sea levels to rise.
Josh Kurz imagines a blockbuster film from the next century. Have a look at his poster for "Simone," named after the massive hurricane in 2050 that wipes out half of Miami.
Sea level is changing and it is going to keep changing regardless of who or what is causing it ... and we're going to have to deal with it.
William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a 10/30/13 NPR story about the effects of Hurricane Sandy on insurance rates.
It's been a year since Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast, and NPR's Christopher Joyce reports that twice as many people in New York will now be requeired to buy flood insurance. On top of that, changes in federal law make it look as thought insurance rates could go up -- dramatically.
NPR also offers up this one-year-later slideshow about clean-up and rebuilding in the wake of Sandy.
And Dean Olsher narrates a walking tour of Breezy Point in Queens, where, he says, rebuilding has a long way to go.
Twenty years after my first visit to Greenland, I returned to Greenland with my partner, Neal Conan, who recorded and narrated the sounds of the Jacobshavn Glacier melting and calving, and to contemplate the demise of ice which is the natural air conditioner of the world.
The following are some of my notes from this adventure.
theartofmadeline
2087
dededos
yousharknotpass
kaledo-art
prguitarman
gummygunk
ellievsbear
jacobvanloon