“We’re going to get a meter and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

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Posted on October 8, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Found a special report in the Pulse section of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this morning regarding the imminent flooding of our coastal communities because of rising sea levels. The expected rise by the end of the century is at least one meter, a bit over three feet. These articles describe what will happen in some of our coastal cities — La Guardia runways under water and waves lapping at the new Freedom Tower at Ground Zero in Manhattan, famed Florida beaches and their mansions gone, salt water contaminating the state’s drinking water, no more Everglades, New Orleans a little bitty Old French Quarter surrounded by water, and on and on.

This is what scientists agree is already in the system, what we are no longer able to do anything about if we stopped the human contribution to global warming right this minute.

Thus the quote that is the title of this post, the statement coming from Andrew Weaver, climatologist at the University of Victoria.

Back where I have been living in the DC area, already islands in the Chesapeake Bay have disappeared, or are about to, while future storm surges will take more of the bay coast and flood National Airport.

As this article says, the floods that inundated parts of the New York subway system this summer could become daily occurences. Bye, bye, dynamic wealth-generating economy of New York City.

Agricultural lands of California flooded with salt water. Irrigation systems that made the southern California deserts one of the nation’s bread baskets, gone, as the rivers that feed them dry up. In the San Joaquin delta near San Francisco, salt waters will ruin croplands. Bye, bye, dynamic wealth-generating agricultural economy of California.

“Sea level rise is going to have more general impact to the population and infrastructure than almost anything else that I can think of…”

So said S. Jeffress Williams of the US Geological Society in the Journal-Sentinel article.

Now these articles list some of the options for addressing the crisis, all of them requiring real government commitment at all levels and eye-popping amounts of tax dollars over several decades.

Hear anyone addressing this yet? The Iraq war is going to cost in excess of one trillion dollars, and lots more if we stay a few more years.

It is mentioned at the bottom of the article that an abrupt end to our use of fossil fuels would be the cheapest way to deal with this, though the seas will rise three feet or more in any case. Stopping greenhouse gas emissions now, however, will keep the sea levels from continuing to rise in the next century. Remember that if Greenland’s ice sheets completely melt over the next couple centuries, the Empire State Building will be an island and much of Florida will be gone.

So will most of what we have known as US society.

Think how long it takes to build a freeway or a light rail system or a sky-scraper. Think how long it will take to move people away from coastal areas, to deconstruct buildings, developments, and infrastructure, and ‘retreat’ or rebuild farther inland. It will take decades, and we are not even having a national conversation about it.

Where will the airports go? What will we do with the enormous political resistance to moving away from the coasts? Who will decide which areas get seawalls and levees to ward off the inevitable, and which areas are left to the rising seas?

Which presidential candidate has addressed this crisis? On the other hand, when was the last time you heard religious leaders, teachers, and other ‘moral leaders’ address this coming crisis?

CNN is going to have a special on Oct. 23 & 24, entitled, “Planet in Peril.” Looks scary and I plan to watch and comment on it. Maybe you would like to get into the conversation here by adding comments afterwards.

I think of those people along the coasts of Indonesia and Thailand who, when the ocean was sucked out in advance of the tsunami, went down to look and walk on the suddenly enormous beach, while animals, some people who had read about this phenomenon and understood what it meant, and at least one indigenous community fled inland. So here we are once again, population in coastal areas rising rapidly still, staring out at the disaster about to wash over us and wipe out everything in its path, mesmerized, frozen, unable to read the warning signs flashing at us from all directions.

We humans have a hard time dealing proactively with catastrophe. But this one is coming; it is predicted and inevitable. Don’t you think it’s time to start the dialogue about what we are going to go?

Don’t you think it’s time to stop our denial that we can reverse global warming/climate change drivers without being inconvenienced, without taxes going up, without policies that mandate changes in carbon emissions, without rethinking development and all we assume about our US way of life — and soon?

Because it is already very, very late.


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