"I Wish I Had Better News." Yeah, I'll Bet.

Sea level rise is probably going to be one of the two, perhaps three greatest climate change impacts we'll experience in the U.S. and Canada over the next few decades. The good news is that sea level rise won't be an equal opportunity scourge. Poor people don't tend to own homes that front on the high water line. Choice waterfront property has always been the preserve of the wealthy. Think the star-studded shoreline of Malibu.

However, rich or poor, we'll all be affected somewhat by sea level rise this century. It's going to cost governments, provincial and federal, a load of money to replace infrastructure and manage the retreat from the sea. Can't be helped. There's absolutely no point arguing with the sea.

Places with the sort of beaches that draw hordes of tourists will be severely effected. Think Florida or the Aloha State. In Hawaii they're very worried and for good reason.


Seasonal high tides are typically around 2.5 feet, but this year has been enhanced by several anomalies. Warm water from El Niño has warmed the Eastern Pacific and is now sloshing back to the west, combining with warm water gyres spinning off the equatorial region to each add several inches to the tide. To top it off, a south swell coincided with the peak of the high tide.

“When you stack them on top of each other, you start to see record-breaking water levels,” [Waikiki beach management coordinator Dolan] Eversole says. “They’re anomalies, they’re not permanent, but they all happened to coincide at the same time.”

Seasonal high tides are typically around 2.5 feet, but this year has been enhanced by several anomalies. Warm water from El Niño has warmed the Eastern Pacific and is now sloshing back to the west, combining with warm water gyres spinning off the equatorial region to each add several inches to the tide. To top it off, a south swell coincided with the peak of the high tide.

The stacking effect has led to unprecedented tides. “Our NOAA tide gauge in Honolulu Harbor set the highest-ever recorded non-storm water level in April of this year,” Eversole says. “We broke that record in May, and we broke it again in June. We could potentially break it for the fourth consecutive time in four months (on Friday).”

In places like Waikiki, coastal development prevents what Eversole calls the landward migration of beaches. “The beaches naturally want to move landward with the increased sea level, but we’re not allowing them to do that, so they’re narrowing,” he says. “The beach just narrows to nothing.”

That’s bad news for Waikiki Beach, an economic, social, iconic, and natural asset for Oahu. “Waikiki is the engine that drives our economy, and the beach is a big part of that,” Nakasone says.

Hawaii does not have any long-term engineering plans to keep water out and is largely “screwed.”

“The heat that’s already embedded in the ocean is going to give us, by some estimates, at least 500 years of sea level rise, even if we were all to disappear tomorrow. I wish I had better news.”