In the last two weeks, Toronto has experienced two violent but short-lived rain and windstorms. These punctuated events are unlike anything seen in the past except when we have been on the receiving end of large cyclonic storms coming up from the Gulf of Mexico or from the northeast Atlantic Ocean. At both weather events, the rain bursts caused extensive flooding on Toronto streets while the wind felled hundreds of trees across the city. I was driving to a dinner event in the aftermath of one of the storms, and a 30-minute commute took over 2 hours because of felled trees, downed power lines, and hundreds of non-functioning traffic lights. I never did get to the dinner because the event was long past by the time I arrived at my destination. I suspect we will see more of these weather events in the years to come as the atmosphere warms and becomes more turbulent in the mid-latitudes of our planet.
Speaking of the latest environmental insult, Donald Trump this week signed an executive order revoking an Obama-era directive aimed at protecting the oceans off America’s coasts, the coastlines, and the waters of the Great Lakes. Being National Ocean Month the President asked the nation to “reflect on the value and importance of oceans” and then immediately focused on extracting its resources whether oil and natural gas, fish, and anything else he could think of that could be removed from this invaluable resource.
For Trump, National Ocean Month is a time to strengthen federal waters for national security, to lay claim to an exclusive economic zone larger than the land mass of the United States, and to reduce America’s dependence on imported energy. No mention of conservation. No mention of environmental stewardship. No mention of biodiversity. No mention of plastic pollution. And of course no mention of climate change and rising sea levels. It seems appropriate that he chose this tone and renunciation of Obama-era conservation initiatives since it was only a year ago during a previous National Ocean Month that the President announced America was pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. This ongoing disregard for reality fits with the President’s own litany of denial and lies about almost everything.
As Trump ignores the reality of what is happening to the oceans off his shores, a new federal government report issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a subset of his Department of Commerce, states that coastal areas of the United States are under siege from an increase in flooding events by as much as 60% over the last 20 years. Cities on the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts are the ones most affected including these top five: Boston, Atlantic City, Sandy Hook, Sabine Pass, and Galveston.
The same report notes that flooding events associated with high tides set new records in 2017. And rising sea levels along America’s coasts with or without strong storm or hurricane activity are leading to compromised coastal infrastructure including shoreline erosion, washed away roads, extensive property damage, and saltwater intrusion into freshwater aquifers.
The report further states that in 2017 more than 25% of the U.S. coastal areas recorded record-breaking high tide flood days. In fact, because the level of flooding has become so frequent, NOAA has set a new higher elevation threshold for future flood reporting. This change in reporting will probably suit the anti-climate President who, if he should read one in the future, can then claim that there are fewer flooding event days than in the past which means climate change is hogwash.
Of course, changing how flood days get measured and reported doesn’t speak to a growing economic reality. In the latest study from the Union of Concerned Scientists, it reports that 2.4 million American homes and businesses worth more than $1 trillion are at risk from flooding as the century progresses, amounting to 15% of all coastal real estate in the country. A link to the report entitled “Underwater,” is provided.
You would think that a President, who in his business life has been a property developer, should be concerned about his own personal real estate holdings along America’s coastlines as well as properties overseas. But in his acknowledgment of National Ocean Month, Trump appears to be in denial of the reality of changes his own administration is reporting as the climate changes.
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Southwestern Australia is home to Perth, the country’s fourth largest and one of its fastest growing cities. It will be most impacted as progressive drying takes hold in that region of the continent. The model predicts a 40% decline in rainfall. With autumn and winter the growing seasons for this region of the country, any decline in rainfall represents a significant challenge to farms as well as cities and towns. Today Perth relies on desalination for 50% of its freshwater supply having invested in two projects. With this model it appears that the two plants may not be enough for the city’s future survival. But what will farmers and small towns do with a decline in rainfall?
Why are NOAA scientists confident about this climate simulation? The new model bears a striking resemblance to actual data collected from weather observations from 1981 to 2012 (see the top two maps below). This gives the scientists considerable confidence in the model’s projections to 2060 (see the bottom map).
NOAA tested both natural and human derived climate drivers. Natural causes include volcanic eruptions and changes to solar radiation levels striking the Earth. Neither impacted precipitation levels. But introducing changes in levels of GHGs and aerosols did.
It should be noted that all of Southern Australia has witnessed a steady rainfall decline since 1970. This new research may provide the answer to why it is happening and we are the prime cause. So the science NOAA is delivering comes from the United States and not Australia. That’s because evidence of climate change is something that Australia’s current Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, chooses to ignore as he kills initiatives to deal with GHGs and defunds his own government’s research in the field.
Poor Australia. Not only will they be victims of climate change but also victimized by the poor judgment of their political leaders.
Things You Should Know About Fort Bragg, California
For a century the people living in Fort Bragg used a local beach as their city dump. Residents would take glass, appliances, old cars and other household materials and chuck them over the cliff on to the beach where the tides would work their magic over time. Today Glass Beach, as it is known, is part of MacKerricher State Park with no dumping allowed. But the end result of unrestricted human behaviour can be seen in the picture below.
This unnatural beauty required considerable effort to reach the condition it is in today. In 1967 the beach was closed. In 1998 the California Coastal Conservancy got the private owners of the site to sell it to the California State Park system. Now cleaned up of all of the non-glass and ceramic trash what remains is a beautiful outcome from a ghastly human habit of treating the ocean as an unlimited place to dump garbage.
Things You Should Know About Port Orford, Oregon
The local Starbucks and other coffee shops may be playing a role in changing the chemistry of the ocean off Port Orford, Oregon. A study published in July 2012 shows that caffeine is polluting seawater off the Oregon coast. The caffeine isn’t just coming from coffee shops. In fact the research shows that sewer and septic runoff are the principal causes of the pollution. Despite sewage and wastewater treatment plants in place any time a heavy rainstorm occurs the capacity to manage the water volumes is inadequate. The result, an increasingly caffeinated coastal ocean.
Many plants are natural caffeine producers but none of the caffeine found in oceans of the Pacific Northwest appears to be naturally derived. It is coming from caffeine in our beverages, foods and pharmaceuticals. And if caffeine is showing up in coastal waters then what other human produced chemicals are accompanying it?
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