Sea Level Rise Could Flood Many Cities
2007-09-23 02:31:14 GMT
Sept. 22) - Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first
American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch
pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists
are predicting. In about a century, some of the places that make
America what it is may be slowly erased.
University
of Arizona Northeast: A map created by University of Arizona
scientists, based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey, show areas
in the Northeast that would become flooded if the the sea rose one
meter.
Global warming - through a combination of melting
glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding - is
expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It
will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases,
several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.
Rising
waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new
money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big
city airports and major interstate highways.
Storm surges
worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich
politicians - the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the
Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida
favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.
That's
the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The
Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of
Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Few
of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with
the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years,
others say 100, and still others say 150.
Sea level rise is
"the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist," says Benjamin
Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in California.
"We're going to get a meter and
there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria
climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It's going to
happen no matter what - the question is when."
Sea level rise
"has consequences about where people live and what they care about,"
said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied
the issue. "We're going to be into this big national debate about what
we protect and at what cost."
This week, beginning with a
meeting at the United Nations on Monday, world leaders will convene to
talk about fighting global warming . At week's end, leaders will gather
in Washington with President Bush .
Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.
And
it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes an even
greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms and
regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher and
more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.
Martin
Bernetti, AFP / Getty Images Scientists laid out a timeline of the
planet's future in April. 2007: The world population surpasses 6.6
billion as more people now live in cities than in rural areas, changing
patterns of land use.
All told, one meter of sea level rise in
just the lower 48 states would put about 25,000 square miles under
water, according to Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for
the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. That's an area
the size of West Virginia.
The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.
The
Environmental Protection Agency's calculation projects a land loss of
about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the Eastern and
Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and
South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland areas like
Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers of at-risk
land, according to the EPA.
This past summer's flooding of
subways in New York could become far more regular, even an everyday
occurrence, with the projected sea rise, other scientists said. And New
Orleans' Katrina experience and the daily loss of Louisiana wetlands -
which serve as a barrier that weakens hurricanes - are previews of
what's to come there.
Florida faces a serious public health
risk from rising salt water tainting drinking water wells, said Joel
Scheraga, the EPA's director of global change research. And the
farm-rich San Joaquin Delta in California faces serious salt water
flooding problems, other experts said.
"Sea level rise is
going to have more general impact to the population and the
infrastructure than almost anything else that I can think of," said S.
Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey coastal geologist in Woods
Hole, Mass.
Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville, a scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said
he figures the seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the
century. But he tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet
just in case.
Williams says it's "not unreasonable at all" to
expect that much in 100 years. "We've had a third of a meter in the
last century."
The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.
"It's
like sticking your finger in a pot of water on a burner and you turn
the heat on, Williams said. "You kind of get used to it."l