Meanwhile, the oceans are also not rising uniformly at the same rate. Since much of the increase in sea level at this point is coming from expansion of warmer water, the increase in lower latitudes, like along the Florida and Gulf of Mexico, is greater than further to the north. That explains why the lower reaches of Miami Beach are now flooding even during average high tides, requiring the city to spend tens of millions of dollars to install pumping systems to try and push the rising water back out to see before it comes up through storm drains and floods low-lying business streets.
According to climate expert Harold Wanless, a leading climatologist based at the University of Miami, Greenland's mile-thick ice sheet, which holds enough ice to raise oceans by 23 feet, is melting at a rate that doubles every seven years, and together with increased melting of ice in Antarctica, could produce a 20-foot of sea rise by the end of this century. Meanwhile, he warns that seas could rise by as much as 2 feet, instead of just inches, by 2040, which is just 23 years off.
That two feet of sea level rise, he notes, would make future storm surges catastrophic, allowing the water pushed ahead of a major storm, which can range as high as an added 15 feet or more, to surge right over urban areas like Brooklyn, NY, much of Boston, and most of Miami. But the rising seas would actually destroy those cities much sooner, he notes, simply by pushing salt water into the aquifer under coastal cities, which would rot out city utilities like sewers, water lines and electrical conduits.
Unfortunately, Wanless notes that there's not much that can be done to protect Miami and other cities on Florida's peninsula from such a threat. Much of the peninsula, recall, is really just the remains of a giant coral reef that was all under water as recently as 2.5 million years ago. The problem is that because the "bedrock" of the peninsula is former coral, it is like a dried sponge, full of holes and entirely porous. Pick up a chunk of it, hold it to your lips and blow, and air comes whistling out the other side. Building a dike on such a base would do nothing to keep out the water, as it would just go under the dike and percolate up on the landward side.
That said, while southern Florida may be toast by 2100, something could be done to stave off disaster for cities like New York, Boston, perhaps the San Francisco metropolitan area, and even Los Angeles and San Diego. That something would be building dikes -- kind of like Donald Trump's "big beautiful wall" on the Mexican border.
Such dikes would have to be more than beautiful. They would have to be huge, like the massive dike that holds the North Sea at bay from overrunning Holland, much of which is already some 15 feet below sea level. As in Holland, they'd have to be supported by massive and costly pumping stations, too, running all the time, to keep seeping seawater from sneaking under the walls, like desperate immigrants under Trump's planned Mexican wall.
That said, it would make much more sense to take all that money that Trump wants to waste on walling off Mexico, and apply it to at least pushing back the demise of America's great coastal cities.
Of course, a better use still would be to put that money to use working to develop new renewable energy sources that could reduce US dependence upon the fossil fuels that are propelling climate change and raising sea levels, but it might be a bit of a leap to get climate denier Trump and his climate denying cabinet to do that. Still, it should be clear even to Trump, a New Yorker after all, and a developer who owns a bunch of expensive properties located at near sea level, that something needs to be done to stave off disastrous flooding in cities along all US coast lines, or at least those where it is determined that dikeworks would be feasible.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
4
3
2
