Environmental Intersection by George Lindemann

Under current projections, the Atlantic would swallow much of the Florida Keys and Miami-Dade in a century, according to experts at a sea-level rise summit

In this file photo, a picnic table in Everglades National Park sits in high water after a tropical storm dumped a ton of rain on South Florida. Extreme weather conditions and rising sea levels brought on by global warming could have a catastrophic effect on the state of Florida which will be ground-zero for global warming in the United States. David Walters / Herald Staff

By Curtis Morgan The Miami Herald

The subject of global warming has become so politically unpalatable over the last few years that neither party mentions it much anymore.

A conference on climate change sponsored by Florida Atlantic University made it clear that ignoring the threat has done nothing to slow it down — particularly in South Florida, which has more people and property at risk by rising sea levels than any place in the country.

The two-day summit in Boca Raton, which wrapped up Friday, painted a bleak and water-logged picture for much of coastal Florida.

Under current projections, the Atlantic Ocean would swallow much of the Florida Keys in 100 years. Miami-Dade, in turn, would eventually replace them as a chain of islands on the highest parts of the coastal limestone ridge, bordered by the ocean on one side and an Everglades turned into a salt water bay on the other.

Ben Strauss, chief operating officer of Climate Central, an independent research and journalism organization, warned that much of the southern peninsula south of Lake Okeechobee would be virtually uninhabitable within 250 years.

“There’s good reason to believe southern Florida will eventually have to be evacuated,” Strauss told some 275 scientists and climate and planning experts from government agencies, insurance companies, construction experts and other businesses likely to be impacted by rising seas.

While scientists can’t yet predict with certainty how fast and high seas will eventually rise, there is no disputing South Florida will be ground zero for the earliest major impacts, said Leonard Barry, director of FAU’s Florida Center for Environmental Studies.

“The sky is not falling, but the waters are rising,” he said. “We need to recognize that, prepare for that and begin to address it.’’

Four counties — Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe — have begun to do that under a 2009 agreement to work together studying how to mitigate and adapt to the myriad ripple effects of rising seas.

Though it might take a century or more to flood people out, scientists warned that potential impacts will come long before in the form of increasing damage from hurricane storm surge and flooding, rising insurance rates and shrinking freshwater supplies as sea water taints coastal wells.

If the rate of rise increases, as some new studies suggest, all those impacts could come sooner — in decades, not centuries.

University of South Florida oceanographer Gary Mitchum said data from worldwide tide gauges suggest the sea level rise might be speeding up, jumping from about two millimeters a year from 1950 to 1992 to three millimeters since.

That amount, a little bit more than a tenth of an inch, adds up quickly in low-lying South Florida, according to expert analysis.

Six more inches, for instance, would compromise half of the South Florida Water Management flood control gates at high tide, potentially worsening flooding losses. Seven inches would consume 30 percent of Big Pine Key. At a foot, 60 percent of Monroe County’s land would disappear. At three feet, 85 percent would be inundated — along with a large swath of coastal Miami-Dade and Broward.

Overall, according to a “Surging Seas” report produced earlier this year by Climate Central, Florida easily ranks as the most vulnerable state to sea-level rise, with some 2.4 million people, 1.3 million homes and 107 cities at risk from a four-foot rise, according to the report. Louisiana, by comparison, has 65 cities below the four-foot mark.

Miami-Dade and Broward alone have more people at risk than any state except Florida and Louisiana, Strauss said. Lee and Pinellas counties also are at high risk.

It’s not just coastal areas either. Low-lying inland cities like Hialeah and Pembroke Pines could be flooded out by a rising, saltier Everglades.

Daniel Williams, an architect and post-disaster planner, said he envisions a future where Miami-Dade would be confined to islands on the highest points of an ancient coastal ridge that runs along the coast. Inundated homes and building along the coast might be left behind to serve as reefs.

The Climate Central study projects that under current trends, the most vulnerable areas could see increased flooding as early as 2030. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international science panel, estimates the average sea level could rise from seven inches to about 24 inches by 2100 but notes it could be higher under some scenarios.

James Beever, a principal planner with the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council, said the changes can already been seen in Florida’s landscape.

Some salt marshes, he said, had already moved inland by the length of a football field. In the Everglades, mangroves have also marched inland, as salt water transforms freshwater marshes.

“The things you read about in the literature that this is going to happen, it’s already happening,’’ he said.

 

Down among the pipes and pumps and gauges, amid the incessant cacophony of the water works, talk of rising sea levels no longer resonates as some distant and esoteric political squabble, irrelevant to a city’s delivery of basic of public services.

Two more feet, said Hollywood City Commissioner Dick Blattner, and his city’s water plant no longer functions. Hollywood’s waste water treatment plant, he said, has 20, maybe 25 years before the projected sea level changes render it useless.

Those are the realities that ought to trump mindless chatter about global warming on cable television. Of course, city and county commissioners trying to fill the holes in this year’s piddling budgets aren’t particularly anxious to contemplate a massively expensive crisis a couple of decades away. Nor do they want to get drawn into the ferocious U.S. debate between climate scientists and climate deniers over whether the burning of fossil fuels has contributed to global warming.

Except, no matter the cause, the earth’s getting hotter. Ice caps are melting. The warming ocean’s expanding. South Florida, built to 20th Century sea level specifications, can’t simply ignore the water lapping at its infrastructure.

Just last week, Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, a revered climate skeptic, funded in part by climate-denier sugar daddy Charles Koch, admitted that his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team’s study of global temperature readings had come up with findings that coincided with research he had previously doubted.

“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warmingÿ values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.,” Muller wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”

“Even if people don’t accept the science, there is plenty of evidence that something is going on. Just look at the facts,” said Blattner, a member of the Broward County Water Resources Task Force. “I have been bringing this up for months.”

The Hollywood commissioner said the older cities clustered along South Florida’s coastline must start planning for the inevitable problems. Low-lying neighborhoods will be inundated unless local governments find some new way to get rid of storm waters. Blattner worries that his city’s most prestigious neighborhood, the Lakes area, faces perpetual flooding.

Cities must find new well fields in the western reaches of South Florida before the encroaching sea pushes salt water into the local aquifer. “Plans should be developed now,” he said.

Without some planning, and soon, coastal cities like Hollywood, with waste-water plants on sites that were chosen back in the middle of the 20th century, are headed toward an utter dysfunctional system, without the means to treat or get rid of its own sewage.

Not much help will be coming from Tallahassee, where climate denial has been embraced as a political truism. But local governments can’t dawdle, hoping the skeptics are right and the thermometers are wrong.

Last week, Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions released a study on the specific effects higher temperatures and the rising sea would have on coastal towns and on city services. FAU, using Pompano Beach as a model, calculated that the costs to salvage water and sewer services would be counted in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Hollywood may be even more vulnerable.

The water task force is composed of elected officials and technical experts from around the region. “The technical folks get it,” Blattner said. The politicians, he said: not so much.

Among the political leaders (with the notable exception, he said, of Broward County Commissioner Kristin Jacobs), “I have not seen any willingness to address this.” Blattner wants city and county governments in South Florida to devise regional water and sewer plants designed to deal with the rising sea levels. Instead, individual cities are planning and building separate utilities, oblivious to the coming crisis. His committee has seen plans for water treatment plants that will be located, he said, in areas that are clearly “doomed.”

“Buildings will go up, plaques will be installed to recognize the vision of local officials,” he said. Except that vision will be very short sighted.

One of the most pressing problems facing South Florida today...