Government Reports Warn Planners on Sea-Rise Threat to U.S. Coasts

Sea level rise and other changes fueled by global warming threaten roads, rail lines, ports, airports and other important infrastructure, according to new government reports, and policy makers and planners should be acting now to avoid or mitigate their effects.While increased heat and “intense precipitation events” threaten these structures, the greatest and most immediate potential impact is coastal flooding.." Is there a deliberate design flaw in the Economic & Judicial systems of rule and law which ignore Reality, lopsidedly benefiting corporate greedy guts? Where science and facts play second fiddle to the power of the Mouth backed by money? Is the current status quo in energy science the best 21st Century Intelligence has to offer?

There is not an intelligent being alive that could not understand Natural Capitalism with justice based on natural laws, facts and unfettered science; where human life comes first and foremost, the primary factor upon which justice and profit is gaged: the greater the health and prosperity of all, the greater the justice and profits for all (simple numbers game). So who CHOKED THE SYSTEM, on top of scientific suppression of advanced energy systems from the late 1940's (Evolving Advanced Energy Systems without which Human Life Cannot Survive) ?

Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down, while their taxes, gas and energy costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted realms, as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.

NYT March 12, 2008
Government Reports Warn Planners on Sea-Rise Threat to U.S. Coasts
By CORNELIA DEAN
Sea level rise and other changes fueled by global warming threaten roads, rail lines, ports, airports and other important infrastructure, according to new government reports, and policy makers and planners should be acting now to avoid or mitigate their effects.
While increased heat and “intense precipitation events” threaten these structures, the greatest and most immediate potential impact is coastal flooding, according to one of the reports, by an expert panel convened by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Another study, a multiagency effort led by the Environmental Protection Agency, sounds a similar warning on coastal infrastructure but adds that natural features like beaches, wetlands and fresh water supplies are also threatened by encroaching salt water.
The reports are not the first to point out that rising seas, inevitable in a warming world, are a major threat. For example, in a report last September, the Miami-Dade County Climate Change Task Force noted that a two-foot rise by 2100, the prediction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “would make life in South Florida very difficult for everyone.”
But the new reports offer detailed assessments of vulnerability in the relatively near term. Both note that coastal areas are thickly populated, economically important and gaining people and investment by the day, even as scientific knowledge of the risks they face increases. Use of this knowledge by policy makers and planners is “inadequate,” the academy panel said.
“It’s time for the transportation people to put these things into their thought processes,” Henry G. Schwartz Jr., a member of the National Academy of Engineering and chairman of the panel, said in an interview. The 218-page academy report, “Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation,” was issued Tuesday and is available at http://www.nationalacademies.org/.
Noting that 60,000 miles of coastal highways are already subject to periodic flooding, the academy panel called for policy makers to inventory vulnerable facilities — “roads, bridges, marine, air, pipelines, everything,” Dr. Schwartz said — and begin work now on plans to protect, reinforce, move or replace on safer ground. Those tasks will take years or decades and tens of billions of dollars, at least, Dr. Schwartz said. “We need to think about it now,” he said.
The multiagency report, a draft assessment, is one of a series aimed at helping policy makers around the nation do just that. The 800-page draft, “Coastal Sensitivity to Sea Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region,” was posted last month for public review at www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-1/public-review-draft/. It focuses on the area from Montauk Point, Long Island, to Cape Lookout, N.C.
Produced by a collaboration among agencies that also included the United States Geological Survey, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Transportation, the report offers three estimates for sea level rise by 2100: about 16 inches a century, a rate it said has already been exceeded; about two feet, an estimate many scientists regard as optimistic, and up to three feet — something the report says would be catastrophic for wetlands and other coastal features but which is “less than high estimates suggested by more recent publications.”
The academy report cited similar estimates.
The multiagency report cited as an example the Port of Wilmington, Del. The report says that if sea level rises by two feet or even a bit less, 70 percent of port property will be affected. Meanwhile, it says, comparable sea level rise would leave almost 2,200 miles of major roads and almost 900 miles of rail lines in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and the District of Columbia “at risk for regular inundation.”
The Academy report made similar points, noting for example that airports in many large coastal cities are built in tidal areas, often on fill, making them “particularly vulnerable.” In metropolitan New York, Newark and LaGuardia are particularly vulnerable, Dr. Schwartz said.
Some experts have suggested that additional fill could be brought in to keep pace with rising water, just as many beaches are kept alive today with periodic infusions of sand pumped from offshore. But S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal expert at the geological survey and an author of the multiagency report, noted in an interview that necessary quantities of high quality fill may not be readily available where they are needed.
In that case, he said, policy makers would have to consider constructing immense systems of coastal armor or accept the need for “strategic retreat.”
As a first step, the academy report said, transportation officials must realize that climate patterns that prevailed in the past “may no longer be a reliable guide for future plans.” Instead, it said, they should incorporate climate change into their plans for capital improvements, maintenance schedules, emergency preparedness and so on.
The panel also recommended changes in the National Flood Insurance Program, a federally-subsidized program for coastal properties. Among other things, the report said the maps the program uses in setting rates are “woefully inadequate” because they do not reflect the influence of climate change.
“Part of our problem is one of scale,” Dr. Schwartz said, because climate experts are far more confident about global trends than they are about predicting local effects of climate change. “What the transportation people needed was not what the climate science could provide, so they did not talk,” he said.
The academy panel recommended that the Department of Transportation organize interagency efforts to focus on adapting to climate change.
But acting on climate threats may be difficult, the E.P.A.-led report said. For one thing, it is impossible to predict the timing and magnitude of possible impacts. It also said that “institutional inertia is a key barrier to change,” especially when officials confront decisions about “whether and how particular areas will be protected with structures, elevated above the tides, relocated landward or left alone and potentially given up to the rising sea.”