By Mike Corones December 15, 2014
It has always struck me as an odd contortion of logic that the same voices that condemn the crippling effect that America’s mounting debt will have on future generations should also turn such a willfully blind eye to issues concerning the physical world in which those same generations will live.
On Friday, Alister Doyle and Ryan McNeill added another chapter to Reuters’ Water’s Edge series on the crisis of rising sea levels. While earlier installments focused on American issues with subsidence, “the process by which geological forces and the extraction of groundwater cause the land to sink,” last week’s report highlighted the global reach of fluctuating sea heights.
As this graphic shows, a Reuters analysis of 50 years worth of tidal readings reveals that in some parts of the world, tides have increased by almost three feet, with the U.S. Gulf Coast and East Coast joining Southeast Asia as the regions most dramatically affected. Globally, about 200 million people live within 30 miles of the sea, with at-risk areas ranging from big cities to fishing villages.
Also earlier this month, in another act of comprehensive journalism, ProPublica and The Lens released an interactive report titled Losing Ground. In it, they report that Louisiana is drowning and that most of the southeastern part of the state could be underwater by 2100. This problem, says the report, is compounded by the effects on the Mississippi River Delta due to “climate change, drilling and dredging for oil and gas, and levees on the Mississippi River.”
Why should you care? This impending disaster has a little something for everyone. Both the series from Reuters and the report from ProPublica and The Lens are replete with data and are certainly worth a read, but here’s just a taste of the range of implications:
- According to the Reuters analysis, at least $1.4 trillion worth of at-risk real estate is located along America’s shores, and at least 5.6 million jobs are found in areas at risk of hurricane-related flooding.
- This Reuters graphic helps visualize how the $7 billion that U.S. taxpayers have spent dumping sand into eroding coastlines since 1990 has been distributed, and Losing Ground describes Louisiana’s $50 billion plan to save the coast.
- In October, the Pentagon released a report highlighting the security concerns entailed in climate change.
Disappearing coastlines and rising tides hit the superfecta: they hurt the environment, they are bad for business, they are bad for government, and they pose a national security risk. Surely one of these is important enough to care about.
http://www.reuters.com
