U.S. Can Learn from Florida Climate Change Response
Viewpoint: U.S. Can Learn from Florida Climate Change Response
By Bloomberg Editors | May 27, 2014
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Adapting to climate change is such a daunting task that it can be hard to know where, or how, to begin. Here’s one answer: in southeastern Florida, with yellow foam earplugs.
The plugs are needed to keep out the din of the South Florida Water Management District’s pumping station, with its 400-horsepower pumps submerged in the Miami River. They are capable of changing the direction of the river, ensuring that it always runs toward the ocean, as it’s supposed to, draining storm water. Gravity used to do the job, but with sea level rising — it’s up at least 8 inches (20 centimeters) from what it was a century ago — gravity doesn’t always do the trick.
Florida’s state and national politicians, including Governor Rick Scott and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, are free to question whether climate change exists. Local officials don’t have that luxury. When it floods, people call city hall.
The need for a practical response, requiring both pumping stations and political cooperation, makes South Florida ground zero (sea zero?) in the debate over climate change. Its public officials, elected and otherwise, are showing how adaptation is not only necessary but also possible.
Miami Beach, for example, is installing 80 underground pumps to deal with the increasingly frequent “sunny-day floods” that inundate the western side of the island city during high tides in the fall and spring. The Miami-Dade County is reseeding mangroves behind the beaches and preserving coastal wetlands to soak up intensifying storm surges. Engineers in Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach are experimenting with new designs for “backflow preventers” to keep seawater from rushing into public pipes but still allow freshwater to flow out.
Southeastern Florida is facing the symptoms of climate change sooner than most places. Other effects identified in this month’s National Climate Assessment — persistent drought in Kansas, say, or frequent wildfires in Alaska — could be decades off.
Rising seas are a problem for other places, including New York Harbor; Norfolk, Virginia; and Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. But Florida’s flat landscape, barely above sea level, makes it instantly vulnerable. Even in the best of times, before climate change, modern life here has depended on one of the world’s most extensive public plumbing systems. The lower third of the Florida peninsula is laced with canals and levees designed to manage its abundant water (South Florida gets some 60 inches of rain a year) for agricultural irrigation, human consumption and drainage.
Except during powerful storms, the system has worked reasonably well. But sea-level rise is throwing a wrench in. Sunny-day floods and backward-flowing drainage canals aren’t the only challenges. Saltwater has also been getting into the drinking water. The city of Hallandale Beach, north of Miami Beach, has had to abandon six of its eight wells. When South Florida’s shallow freshwater aquifer is diminished — as during the drier winter months — seawater easily flows in through the porous limestone below. City and county officials have learned the importance of keeping the aquifer always full to maintain a healthy supply of freshwater.
As they have become amateur hydrologists, local officials have also banded together. Six years ago, the leaders of Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach counties formed the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact to share strategies, make joint plans and speak with a more unified voice to the state legislature. All four counties, which are as different politically as Miami Beach and Palm Beach are culturally, have approved the group’s plan.
Among the plan’s 110 resolutions are efforts to improve local flood maps and identify “adaptation action areas” — spots most vulnerable to sea-level rise — so as to tailor building codes and other ordinances accordingly. Climate-change mitigation is also part of the picture. The counties pledge, for example, to use more clean energy, increase use of public transit and bicycles, and provide incentives for saving energy.
These efforts won’t do much to reduce rising emissions of global greenhouse gases. But they can affect public perception of the problem, and help show to deal with it. The region’s efforts have already attracted official visitors from as far away as Durban, South Africa, and Legazpi, Philippines.
Because while climate change is global, the response to it is local. For its annual summit, scheduled for early October in Miami Beach, the compact has invited representatives of Caribbean island nations. Maybe a few members of the U.S. Congress could attend, too — to see what productive cooperation on climate change looks like.
–Editors: Mary Duenwald, Michael Newman.
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news.../27/330045.htm
Rise of Sea Levels is "the Greatest Lie Ever Told"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...ever-told.html
"The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker.
If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.
Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".
When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.
Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.
One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".
When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.
•For more information, see Dr Mörner on YouTube (Google Mörner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview "Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud"; or email him – morner@pog.nu –to buy a copy of his booklet 'The Greatest Lie Ever Told'
Fined, frozen and now jailed
The Marine Fisheries Agency was certainly onto a winner when it enlisted the aid of the Assets Recovery Agency in its ruthless war against our fishermen. In December 2007 Charles McBride and his son Charles, from Kilkeel in Northern Ireland, were fined £385,000 for under-declaring catches of whitefish and prawns in the Irish Sea, threatening the loss of their homes and boat. But the Assets Recovery Agency, using powers designed to recover money from drug dealers, also froze all their assets. To pay the fines, the McBrides tried to borrow against their assets. Now, for this effort to pay the fines, Liverpool Crown Court has sentenced the two men to two and three months in gaol for “contempt of court”.
Blown away
The Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, timed his jibe impeccably last week when he said that opposing wind farms is as “socially unacceptable” as “not wearing a seatbelt”. Britain’s largest windfarm companies are pulling out of wind as fast as they can. Despite 100 per cent subsidies, the credit crunch and technical problems spell an end to Gordon Brown’s £100 billion dream of meeting our EU target to derive 35 per cent of our electricity from “renewables” by 2020.
Meanwhile the Government gives the go-ahead for three new 1,000 megawatt gas-fired power stations in Wales. Each of them will generate more than the combined average output (700 megawatts) of all the 2,400 wind turbines so far built. The days of the “great wind fantasy” will soon be over."
The Pentagon Wants to Tackle Climate Change -- But Congress Forbids It
The Pentagon Wants to Tackle Climate Change -- But Congress Forbids It
Mark Strauss
Today 10:35am
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As rising sea levels begin to engulf naval bases and extreme weather exacerbates conflicts worldwide, the military has sounded the alarm that climate change poses a long-term threat to U.S. security. The GOP response? It passed legislation that blocks funding for any Pentagon program that tackles climate change.
Just prior to Memorial Day weekend, the House of Representatives stuck an amendment onto the National Defense Authorization Act, which stipulates that:None of the funds authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to implement the U.S. Global Change Research Program National Climate Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report, the United Nation's Agenda 21 sustainable development plan, or the May 2013 Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order.
In other words, don't even THINK about initiating programs to prepare for the potential impacts of climate change, either in the United States or abroad.
The amendment, which was approved by the Republican-controlled House in a 231-192 vote, was introduced by Rep. David McKinley (R-WV), who said:Our climate is obviously changing; it has always been changing. With all the unrest around the global [sic], why should Congress divert funds from the mission of our military and national security to support a political ideology. This amendment will ensure we maximize our military might without diverting funds for a politically motivated agenda.
Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Bobby Rush (D-IL) wrote a letter in strong opposition to the amendment, saying:The flat earth society is at it again....The McKinley amendment would require the Defense Department to assume that the cost of carbon pollution is zero. That's science denial at its worst and it fails our moral obligation to our children and grandchildren.
http://io9.com/the-pentagon-wants-to...ong-1581721471
