In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus calls a man who builds his house on the sand "foolish." But if he has government-subsidized flood insurance and other disaster insurance and can make money on increasingly scarce and increasingly coveted waterfront property, maybe he's not so foolish.
This National Geographic article does a good job of explaining the dilemma of coastal development in an age of sea-level rise. The topic is especially volatile in North Carolina, where beachfront property and the associated tourism industry drives the state's economy. Down at the beach, where fishing is not as profitable as it once was, beach rentals, beach stores, restaurants, and beach real estate constitute a multi-billion dollar business. It's no wonder that people get upset when scientists talk about abandoning the Outer Banks to let the barrier islands reconstitute themselves as they migrate westward.
But the rise of the sea, the narrowing of beach fronts, and the shifting of the sand islands seem inevitable. One does not have to have a long memory to remember beaches that were far wider than they are today. At many beaches, the protective dunes have disappeared, and porches or entire houses are falling into the surf.
The photos accompanying the National Geographic article are especially convincing: The beach is moving beneath our feet and beneath the pilings that support the houses we like to rent and enjoy. The photo of N.C. 12 following Hurricane Irene, which severed Hatteras Island in five places, shows the futility of maintaining a major roadway built on shifting sands.
When I traveled to the Outer Banks a few months ago, I traversed the temporary bridge that carried automobile traffic over an inlet that had not been there a few years ago. As I drove, the ocean poured beneath the raised road, and the wind blew away the protective dunes. Looking out at the ocean and the salt spray mixed with sand that churned the air, I had no confidence that the highway could win its battle against the sea.
North Carolina is defined in part by the Outer Banks, jutting out like a too-prominent chin into the Graveyard of the Atlantic, making a prodigious target for hurricanes and tropical storms traveling from the Caribbean northward. Beaches provide the only reliable economic engine in eastern North Carolina, where tobacco and pine trees no longer drive the economy, small towns wither and unemployment is often twice the state average.
North Carolina cannot afford to abandon its beaches, but as the National Geographic's graphic shows, a one-meter rise in sea level will sink long stretches of the Outer Banks, changing the state's shape. The state's role should not be to simply rebuild N.C. 12 each time a storm rolls over it but to find ways to help the tourism industry adjust to the changes that surely seem inevitable.
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
The cold just keeps getting colder
This has nothing to do with global warming, but it may have to do with aging. I have found in recent years that I am far more sensitive to cold than I used to be. I just don't tolerate the cold the way I once did.
I vividly remember my early years, playing outdoors no matter how cold it was. All of my friends did the same. None of us had bulky down jackets, and rarely did we wear hats or gloves, but we managed to play football or soldier or cowboys for hours on end with temperatures in the 30s or lower. At school, we would skate on frozen-over puddles that were so solid, we never cracked the ice.
As a teenager, I walked down through the woods to the creek, which had frozen over, and I walked on the creek ice as if it were a paved hiking trail, clear of the brush and briers that clogged the banks. I recall spending hours there, all alone, oblivious to the dangers. If I had fallen through the ice, there was no one to help me out, and I likely would have frozen to death long before anyone found me. I doubt that I told anyone where I was going. In those days, we just went, and we came home when we tired of what we were doing.
I rarely wore gloves as an adolescent, and the gloves I wore to make snowballs quickly became soggy. Now, I need gloves simply to take the dog for a walk around the block on a day in the low 40s.
There's no doubt that I am more sensitive to cold. I have new sympathy for elderly folks (more elderly than I) bundled in layers of sweaters while keeping the thermostat on 82. I hope I am spared that sort of loss of control over body temperature, morphing into a cold-blooded animal, but I can see how it can happen.
The earth might be warming, but the cold just keeps getting colder as I grow older.
I vividly remember my early years, playing outdoors no matter how cold it was. All of my friends did the same. None of us had bulky down jackets, and rarely did we wear hats or gloves, but we managed to play football or soldier or cowboys for hours on end with temperatures in the 30s or lower. At school, we would skate on frozen-over puddles that were so solid, we never cracked the ice.
As a teenager, I walked down through the woods to the creek, which had frozen over, and I walked on the creek ice as if it were a paved hiking trail, clear of the brush and briers that clogged the banks. I recall spending hours there, all alone, oblivious to the dangers. If I had fallen through the ice, there was no one to help me out, and I likely would have frozen to death long before anyone found me. I doubt that I told anyone where I was going. In those days, we just went, and we came home when we tired of what we were doing.
I rarely wore gloves as an adolescent, and the gloves I wore to make snowballs quickly became soggy. Now, I need gloves simply to take the dog for a walk around the block on a day in the low 40s.
There's no doubt that I am more sensitive to cold. I have new sympathy for elderly folks (more elderly than I) bundled in layers of sweaters while keeping the thermostat on 82. I hope I am spared that sort of loss of control over body temperature, morphing into a cold-blooded animal, but I can see how it can happen.
The earth might be warming, but the cold just keeps getting colder as I grow older.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Blame warming for the cold? Huh?
Blame the cold weather on global warming? That's the contention of a new meteorological society report as explained in a New York Times opinion piece. If that's not creative science, I don't know what is.
I'm willing to concede that the Earth's climate is changing (and give credit to the scientists who have abandoned the phrase "global warming" for "climate change"), but contending that warming causes cold is more than my liberal-arts mind can grasp. This warming-causes-cold theory seems as shallow as the anti-climate-change crowd's pointing to a one-day low temperature as proof that the Earth isn't warming. There's a difference between weather and climate, the scientists say, and I understand that. A cold snap does not constitute a new ice age, nor does a heat wave (like the ones those same scientists blamed on global warming) constitute proof that Earth is turning into Venus.
Maybe this week's snowstorms and the early snowfalls in several parts of the United States and Europe are nothing more than anomalies. Maybe we'll return to "normal" (whatever that is) next year. For all the publicity their forecasts have received, the climate scientists have not had a particularly good track record in providing "results" of global warming. For the last two years, scientists predicted more and larger hurricanes as a result of global warming, but those forecasts fell flat (thank goodness!). This year, not a single hurricane made landfall in the United States. The predicted rise in sea level has not risen to expectations.
Instead of reading catastrophe into every wrinkle in temperatures or rainfall, we should concentrate on what we all should recognize as true: Industrial development has sharply increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We humans breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. More carbon dioxide in the air is not good for us, so we should do all that we can to limit carbon dioxide emissions. We don't have to prove the verity of global warming or climate change to agree that lowering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good policy.
That's a lot easier to sell than the theory that warming causes cold.
I'm willing to concede that the Earth's climate is changing (and give credit to the scientists who have abandoned the phrase "global warming" for "climate change"), but contending that warming causes cold is more than my liberal-arts mind can grasp. This warming-causes-cold theory seems as shallow as the anti-climate-change crowd's pointing to a one-day low temperature as proof that the Earth isn't warming. There's a difference between weather and climate, the scientists say, and I understand that. A cold snap does not constitute a new ice age, nor does a heat wave (like the ones those same scientists blamed on global warming) constitute proof that Earth is turning into Venus.
Maybe this week's snowstorms and the early snowfalls in several parts of the United States and Europe are nothing more than anomalies. Maybe we'll return to "normal" (whatever that is) next year. For all the publicity their forecasts have received, the climate scientists have not had a particularly good track record in providing "results" of global warming. For the last two years, scientists predicted more and larger hurricanes as a result of global warming, but those forecasts fell flat (thank goodness!). This year, not a single hurricane made landfall in the United States. The predicted rise in sea level has not risen to expectations.
Instead of reading catastrophe into every wrinkle in temperatures or rainfall, we should concentrate on what we all should recognize as true: Industrial development has sharply increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We humans breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. More carbon dioxide in the air is not good for us, so we should do all that we can to limit carbon dioxide emissions. We don't have to prove the verity of global warming or climate change to agree that lowering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good policy.
That's a lot easier to sell than the theory that warming causes cold.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Volcano might affect more than airlines
The cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland that disrupted air travel all over Europe got a lot of attention from the news media, which interviewed folks stranded at airports in Britain and Europe. The ash was so thick that it threatened aircraft. Ash particles, it was feared, could be sucked into the intake of jet engines and cause the engines to stall or rip apart.
The angle on this story that got almost no attention was the possible impact on global weather. Today's News & Observer carried a column about the catastrophic impact a sixth century volcanic eruption had all over Europe and the Middle East. Enough volcanic dust blown into the upper atmosphere can shade sunlight, leaving a pale, moon-like sun at mid-day, according to historical documents. The sixth century was not the last time a volcano caused weather changes in faraway places. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in the western Pacific resulted in a much colder winter and much shorter summer in North America.
I haven't read any comparisons to the Icelandic volcano (whose name no one outside of Iceland can spell or pronounce) to Krakatoa, but surely there must be some analogy. Maybe we won't have a dimmed sun or a ice on rivers that had never frozen before, but the massive dust cloud that grounded airlines for about a week would seem likely to have some impact on temperatures. The scattering of light-reflecting particles in the atmosphere has even been suggested as a solution to global warming. The trick would be getting just the right amount of atmospheric dust — enough to slow global warming but not enough to initiate global freezing.
While travelers are celebrating being able at last to get out of or to Europe, some folks should be thinking about the long-term impact of this volcano, which is reportedly still spewing its innards into the atmosphere. The lack of attention to this important angle baffles me.
The angle on this story that got almost no attention was the possible impact on global weather. Today's News & Observer carried a column about the catastrophic impact a sixth century volcanic eruption had all over Europe and the Middle East. Enough volcanic dust blown into the upper atmosphere can shade sunlight, leaving a pale, moon-like sun at mid-day, according to historical documents. The sixth century was not the last time a volcano caused weather changes in faraway places. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in the western Pacific resulted in a much colder winter and much shorter summer in North America.
I haven't read any comparisons to the Icelandic volcano (whose name no one outside of Iceland can spell or pronounce) to Krakatoa, but surely there must be some analogy. Maybe we won't have a dimmed sun or a ice on rivers that had never frozen before, but the massive dust cloud that grounded airlines for about a week would seem likely to have some impact on temperatures. The scattering of light-reflecting particles in the atmosphere has even been suggested as a solution to global warming. The trick would be getting just the right amount of atmospheric dust — enough to slow global warming but not enough to initiate global freezing.
While travelers are celebrating being able at last to get out of or to Europe, some folks should be thinking about the long-term impact of this volcano, which is reportedly still spewing its innards into the atmosphere. The lack of attention to this important angle baffles me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
