October 9. Miami's Day of Reckoning.

On October 9, the Earth, sun and moon will align just so to create a King Tide, the highest tides of the year.   In Miami, all eyes will be on the rising seas.

On high tides or in the event of storm surge, Miami streets are awash in sea water.  Storm sewers back up or the ocean can simply rise up through the porous limestone bedrock. 

There's something of an epiphany under way in south Florida.  For years sea level rise was ignored.  In Miami, the construction industry is still buzzing building condos and shopping malls.  Now the obvious can no longer be ignored.  What will come of it is unclear.  No one has any ideas yet how to hold back the sea, particularly when it rises beneath your feet.

For more of the soggy future in store for Miami, check out this article from Rolling Stone.

In North Carolina, meanwhile, science is girding for a battle with the state's political caste to get the truth out about what sea level rise means for coastal residents.  The state boasts a string of low-lying barrier islands, many of them featuring grand southern mansions and high-end resorts.  There's a lot of wealth tied up in the state's coastal properties and the rightwing legislature is loathe to put property values at risk by loose talk about storm surges and sea level rise.

North Carolina legislators tried to limit state scientists from forecasting anything more than 8 inches of sea level rise this century but the scientific community dug in its heels.  The legislators then fell back on a compromise, a new report limited to a 30-year time frame.

The report will anticipate a foot of sea level rise by 2045 and, while the rate is expected to increase significantly in the second half of this century, the legislature doesn't want to hear about that.

Legislating Against Sea Level Rise - What Crazy People Do in Government

North Carolina is firmly Republican and its legislature is just as firmly crazy.   Crazy as in detached from reality, liberated from reason, unhinged.  From Scientific American:

"...the meter or so of sea level rise predicted for the NC Coastal Resources Commission by a state-appointed board of scientists is extremely inconvenient for counties along the coast. So the NC-20 types have decided that we can escape sea level rise – in North Carolina, anyhow – by making it against the law. 


Here’s a link to the circulated Replacement House Bill 819. The key language is in section 2, paragraph e, talking about rates of sea level rise: “These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly. …” It goes on, but there’s the core: North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises.

So, even if the state's scientific advisors and coastal commission turn out to be right on the money, it doesn't matter.   The government has decreed that sea level rise in North Carolina by 2100 will be a maximum of 8-inches - or else.  Who are you lookin' at, boy?

Climate Change - North Carolina Gets It

Several years ago I attended a wedding in BC.   The groom's parents were a well-to-do couple from North Carolina.  He was a retired university professor, his wife was similarly accomplished.  As we chatted one of them mentioned their prized possession - a heritage home on the waterfront of one of their state's fabled coastal islands.  I asked them what was being done in their community to prepare for the onslaught of climate change and I was surprised to learn they had heard nothing about it.  It took them by surprise also.

Well, that was then, this is now.   There aren't too many North Carolinians now who aren't very familiar with the ravages of sea level rise.   According to the Charlotte Observer, coastal North Carolina is mobilizing for what is poised to be an increasingly costly struggle to hold the ocean at bay.

Water is rising three times faster on the N.C. coast than it did a century ago as warming oceans expand and land ice melts, recent research has found. It's the beginning of what a N.C. science panel expects will be a 1-meter increase by 2100.

Rising sea level is the clearest signal of climate change in North Carolina. Few places in the United States stand to be more transformed.

About 2,000 square miles of our low, flat coast ...is 1 meter (about 39 inches) or less above water.

At risk are more than 30,500 homes and other buildings, including some of the state's most expensive real estate. Economists say $6.9 billion in property, in just the four counties they studied, will be at risk from rising seas by late this century.

Climate models predict intensifying storms that could add billions of dollars more in losses to tourism, farming and other businesses.

While polls show growing public skepticism of global warming, the people paid to worry about the future - engineers, planners, insurance companies - are already bracing for a wetter world.

"  Sea-level rise is happening now. This is not a projection of something that will happen in the future if climate continues to change,"   said geologist Rob Young of Western Carolina University, who studies developed shorelines.

...The Outer Banks, some scientists predict, could disintegrate into a string of high spots - Avon, Buxton, Ocracoke - reachable only by boat.

If storms punch new inlets through the islands, the brackish sounds and wetlands that serve as vital nurseries for Atlantic coast seafood species would turn into open saltwater. Predatory fish would pour into previously protected waters. Marshes would migrate inland or drown.

...It seems implausible that an almost imperceptible rise in the sea - about the thickness of two nickels a year - could cause such havoc.

But it took only an 8-inch global rise to threaten the iconic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which was 1,500 feet from the Atlantic when it was built in 1870. By 1999, when hydraulic jacks gingerly nudged the striped brick tower inland, waves crashed at its foundation.