Danger zones: The coastal East

[next_migration]

In the last post I talked about the fact that the ecological collapse of the Southwest is already starting. That process is now irreversible, given the long-term drought that is the predicted result of climate change. At most, a wet year here and there will put off catastrophe for a few years; it will not reverse the trend that must, probably sooner than we think, lead to the virtual abandonment of overgrown desert cities such as Las Vegas. The climate-related problems other threatened regions of the U.S. face are not quite so imminent, but because they are grave, Americans would be wise to avoid moving to those regions, and to consider moving out if they are already there.

 

 

The second of these most unsustainable regions encompasses the parts of the southeastern coast at lowest elevation, primarily southern Florida and southern Louisiana. Southern Florida is a bigger crisis-in-waiting because the population density and value of at-risk infrastructure are much greater, but southern Louisiana is also worth paying attention to for its potentially devastating environmental and cultural effects. Both, as we will see, are guaranteed to suffer major losses.

The southern end of Florida, as well as some land further up along the eastern coast, is very flat land at a very low elevation. Large portions would be underwater after five meters (less than 17 feet) of sea level rise, and the vast majority of the area is less than ten meters (ca. 33 feet) above sea level. Important coastal cities including Miami, Naples, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach are even lower in elevation, with much of their land only one to three meters (3 to 10 feet) above sea level, as are many smaller communities that now derive much income from the tourism and retirement industries.

The relatively small sea level rise we’ve seen so far is mostly due to the fact that warmer water takes up slightly more space than colder water, just as hot air takes up much more space than cold air (stick a balloon in the freezer for an example). Increasingly, though, the melting of glaciers around the world directly or indirectly adds water to the oceans. The IMBIE Team, a major research consortium studying ice melt in Greenland, recently reported that ice loss had been close to the “high-warming” scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their report was released little over a year before rain fell on the highest point in the central ice sheet for the first time ever recorded. As time passes, more and more of Greenland’s ice will become the Atlantic Ocean’s water. The West Antarctica ice sheet is in a similar condition.

So far, only a minute fraction of those two ice sheets has melted, and their contribution to observed sea level rise is measured in millimeters. However, either of them would raise sea level by several meters if it melted completely. Those glaciologists who do not think we have already triggered unstoppable melting of these ice sheets generally think that that outcome could be avoided if we all, the entire planet, quickly stopped increasing the carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. Sad to say, it appears that that will be politically and culturally impossible (except in one circumstance—a global thermonuclear war followed by nuclear winter—which we can only hope the Powers That Be are not contemplating as an alternative to out-of-control global warming). In the long run, substantial sea level rise will be effectively unavoidable.

Therefore, much of southern Florida, including the Everglades and the region’s largest cities, can be expected to cease to exist as a land mass in the climate-change future. Local authorities are far from accepting this dire verdict. Political leaders in Miami-Dade county encourage more inland building and elevating roads and houses with fill. The Army Corps of Engineers proposes a six-billion-dollar, six-mile-long, 20-foot-high seawall, but it would only protect the downtown and, significantly, the financial district. For political reasons an effort may be made to save Miami for a while, but it is hard to imagine our declining and tax-phobic society building enough infrastructure to hold back the ocean from the entire southern end of Florida, or maintaining it even as fossil fuel supplies decline.

Even if that could be done, because the rock under this land and the surrounding sea floor is porous limestone, salt water would permeate it and seep up through the rock, polluting freshwater supplies. This is already happening today, as is flooding at high tides in which seawater is forced up through sewers into the streets, which would surely be worsened if those streets were actually below the new sea level. Coastal flooding is becoming more frequent not only in Florida, but in other coastal regions, as NOAA reports. Much greater flooding is expected in future; for example, NOAA in 2021 predicted that there would be four to seven high-tide flood days for Virginia Beach, in the Miami area, that year, but 10 to 55 such flood days in 2050.

According to typical predictions of how long major sea level rise will take, even the lowest-lying coastal cities have several decades yet before they could be inundated, and the higher land farther inland will have centuries. However, quality of life and access to uncontaminated water for human and agricultural use will decline long before the land goes completely underwater. Housing values should decline in parallel to this trend, or in advance of it as buyers foresee the future to come. As usual, as these crises progress, elite members of society are likely to focus more on preserving their privilege than the basic health and economic security of the poorer classes. There is also reason at this point to wonder whether projections for the melting of Greenland and West Antarctica could prove to be as conservative as the projections regarding future heat waves and floods. Things might get worse faster than expected.

Except, again, in the event of a nuclear winter, southern Florida cannot be saved in the long term. While bits of the coastline of New York, South Carolina, and many other states will someday be lost, this whole area will entirely cease to exist, and will then likely be underwater for millennia. Tragically—for the region harbors a vibrant human culture as well as beautiful scenery and unique ecology—it has no long-term future. Nobody should move there and add to the problem, and younger people who own homes there should strongly consider moving away while there are still suckers willing to buy them.

Southern Louisiana is in a similar predicament for somewhat different reasons. It is losing land at a far faster rate than Florida, not because the sea is rising but because the low, flat coastal land is sinking. Heavy fossil fuel extraction has caused subsidence, and human control of the Mississippi River prevents the region of the delta from being built up by regular inundations of silt as would have happened in the past. Additionally, wetland forests that used to prevent coastal erosion have been destroyed. As a result, as Craig Colten’s analysis of land loss mapping showed, well over 1800 square miles of Louisiana land have already been lost in less than a century, and loss of another 2250 square miles in the next 50 years is predicted.

Furthermore, southern Louisiana is the home of “Cancer Alley.” Its political domination by chemical and fossil fuel companies, which are already killing its people without consequence, will ensure that future flooding carries a heavy load of poisons. Sadly, it is also the home of a rich, unique local culture, which will be highly threatened as the environmental situation worsens. People from that region should start making arrangements now to protect their lives, culture, and health, because the state government clearly has little interest in doing so.

 

The third most unsustainable part of America is the entirety of the heavily urbanized band along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States, most of which, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, is still gaining population at the expense of inland, more sustainable regions. Portions—sometimes large portions—of major coastal cities including Boston, the New York megalopolis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Norfolk, Charleston, Jacksonville, Tampa, and New Orleans will be underwater or regularly flooded within a few more meters of sea level rise, as would many smaller communities. As noted above, a few more meters of sea level rise is virtually certain to happen sooner or later. Thus, trillions of dollars’ worth of coastal real estate and infrastructure will someday go underwater, unless possessed by communities rich enough to build seawalls and inflict flooding on their less wealthy neighbors instead. Its value will plummet decades earlier, when every significant storm comes to mean a foot of water in the streets.

This may be compared to drought in the Southwest in two critically important ways. First, it isn’t only speculation based on computer modeling; it’s happening now. The U.S. Global Change Research Program, in their 2014 assessment, reported that between 1958 and 2012, the percentage of precipitation that fell as “very heavy events” increased in the Northeastern region by 71%, far higher than in any other region. New York City was recently inundated by severe flooding after so-called 1-in-200-year rainfall from Hurricane Ida.

Second, it will get worse, maybe much worse. What was 1-in-200-year rainfall before climate change will be much more frequent in future. Warmer air holds more moisture, and warmer ocean water spawns stronger hurricanes. Unless something changes soon, we’ve seen less than half, perhaps much less than half, of the temperature changes that we’re causing. Recall that the IPCC says the more the temperature rises, the faster the number of extreme or unprecedented events will rise. That means that we will see not just more very strong hurricanes than we are used to, but someday, hurricanes stronger than we have ever seen before.

Other cities near sea level, such as Houston, will be ever more susceptible to devastating floods as stronger hurricanes combine with higher tides. Flooding will become a greater problem in all coastal cities, not just the lowest-lying. NOAA predicts, for example, that high-tide flood days in Boston (whose official elevation is over 100 feet above sea level) will increase from 11 in 2020 to somewhere between 45 and 95 in 2050; the record to date was 22. This would be burdensome and costly to say the least.

Moreover, a recent report in The Nation highlighted that, though there is no complete database of American landfills or their contents, probably close to 50,000 landfills are located along coasts. Prof. Noah Sachs, interviewed for the report, noted that coastal landfills are “typically located in places which couldn’t be used for anything else, because they are low-lying, water-soaked, or flood-prone.” Many older landfills are unlined, though clay and plastic liners will eventually break if subjected to enough stress from flooding, and many contain dangerous industrial chemicals or radioactive waste, which may not be documented anywhere, much less publicly. Rising seas will flood these landfills and pollute the waters encroaching on many communities with chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects or congenital disabilities, and other health problems.

In most urban areas outside southern Florida, there will in theory be room for residents to move a little inland or to higher ground. Perhaps New Yorkers are pictured as continuing to go about their business, living above the first floor, abandoning flooded subways, and walking to work in wading boots, as the fun Rutger Hauer movie Split Second depicted people doing in post-global-warming London. One difficulty, of course, is that the rich would rapidly acquire higher-elevation domiciles for themselves as the need arises, leaving the most flood-prone housing to the poor and working classes, and vigorously resist any efforts to redistribute housing stock so that the victims are able to relocate.

If all of these cities wished to build seawalls sufficient to protect themselves (while destroying smaller neighboring communities by forcing water in their direction), from where would the resources come, either the financial resources or the physical supplies and energy required? Neither as individual communities, nor as a nation will we have the available resources to build infrastructure to hold off the entire Atlantic Ocean, even if the alternative is economic disruptions and losses that ultimately cost the country more than the hypothetical cost of the infrastructure.

If a national Manhattan Project-like response is dreamed of, consider the problem of political polarization, which I will address at much more length later. Those cities may hold a large fraction of the nation’s population but they are represented by a small fraction of the Senate, which is increasingly dominated by rural Republicans who explicitly identify residents of those cities as not Real Americans and claim or perhaps even believe that their states receive an unfairly large share of federal services. Those senators won’t raise their constituents’ taxes to help New Orleans, or Baltimore, or New York City. And indeed that might be the wisest decision, if climate change will continue to progress in future centuries so that the gigantic infrastructure we might build to hold off the 2120 ocean would be overwhelmed long before 2220.

Therefore disruptions to business as usual may be expected for any coastal community. The mega-cities have the additional problem that they are heavily reliant on long-distance shipments of food and other goods. The foodshed analyses of Julie Kurtz and colleagues found that especially in the Northeastern region and southern Florida, there is not enough farmland and pasture in the states surrounding the big cities to feed their populations. Constant shipments of food from other regions or continents are necessary to provision a megalopolis, to say nothing of large-scale imports of finished goods such as clothing, shoes, furniture, medical products, etc., which are no longer commonly produced in American cities for local use, as they once were.

Receiving such shipments requires that climate change or resource crises do not severely disrupt the production or shipping of the goods (e.g., vegetables grown in California’s irrigation-dependent Central Valley); that climate disasters do not disrupt the ability to receive shipments, e.g., by destroying bridges or closing ports; that local businesses continue to have adequate funds and access to credit to buy the goods; and that trade is not cut off because of political conflicts or war. As of this writing, many industries are suffering from prolonged supply chain disruptions due to a pandemic that, compared to many historical examples, has been relatively mild. As climate change and resource depletion bite harder, reducing agricultural yields and increasing the price of both produce and fuel to transport it, the ability to keep complicated and lengthy supply chains working smoothly may further decline, as may the ability of poorly-paid or unemployed city dwellers to pay for the goods on which they are dependent.

Sustainability experts John W. Day and Charles Hall, whose 2016 book I have emphasized as a source, presume that all areas with large urban populations will face these kinds of sustainability problems. While they evaluate the eastern coastal areas as a most-threatened red zone because of the additional impacts of sea level rise, hurricanes, and economic disruption, they also depict the entire Great Lakes region, ranging from Chicago to Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Rochester, most of Michigan, and the eastern half of Wisconsin, extending southwest to St. Louis, as dark orange, meaning a hot spot for unsustainability. The primary rationale seems to be that the region has many fairly large cities.

However, cities in the western two-thirds of that region are surrounded by enough crop and pasture land that Kurtz et al. calculated that by adopting a less meat-heavy, 20% omnivorous diet, the metropolitan areas could be fully provisioned from farms within 250 km (150 miles) or less. That includes the Chicago metro area, despite its large population, because of its close proximity to a large amount of the world’s most productive farmland. Even if agricultural productivity in the inland regions declines somewhat, these regions should usually have enough to feed their populations.

By contrast, Kurtz et al. found that very large populations in coastal areas with little agriculture—New York, Los Angeles, Miami—would have to draw food supplies from a radius of at least 500 to 1000 km, or even more than that given today’s meat-rich diet. The sheer size and complexity of the supply chain required represents a real vulnerability. I do not suggest people adopt strict locavorism as an ideological principle. However, the potential for fossil fuel depletion and other issues to worsen shipping disruptions should be taken seriously. Moreover, the potential for serious political violence in the near future—which I will discuss later—means that dependency on food from a distant region dominated by a different faction could be dangerous. The ability of a region’s population to survive on what that region can produce could be a significant source of security.