sea level rise

GOP Mayor: “Let’s Talk About the Octopus in the Room”

http://www.zastavki.com/eng/Animals/Under_water/wallpaper-92725.htm

An octopus in a parking garage? It’s a sign of the times.

Jim Cason, the GOP mayor of Coral Gables, Florida, wants us to talk about climate change: “‘We’re looking to a future where we’re going to be underwater, a great portion of South Florida,’” Cason said. ‘For all of us down here, this is really not a partisan issue. We see it. We see the octopus in …

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Reflections on the Coastal Commission’s Implosion

The Implications of the Decision to Fire Charles Lester – and the Decision Not to Explain It

As Rick Frank insightfully discussed earlier this week, the California Coastal Commission has fired its former executive director, Charles Lester. Readers interested in more background information and analysis should read Rick’s post, as well as the excellent reporting by Tony Barboza and others from the LA Times. (And anyone who wants to hear about it …

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Saving California’s Beaches

New expert report offers recommendations for shoreline armoring management

As California’s beach goers and residents well know, erosion and climate change are already impacting the California coastline. Eighty percent of California’s coast is actively eroding, and the latest science projects that sea levels may rise up to 5 additional feet along much of the coast by the end of this century. Higher sea levels …

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Tracking Coastal Adaptation

Implementing CA’s Innovative Sea Level Rise Planning Database

Higher sea levels are already affecting California’s 3400 miles of coastline, millions of coastal residents, economy, buildings, and critical infrastructure. Yet, oddly enough for a state that is a worldwide leader in climate change mitigation, California has only recently begun to focus seriously on sea level rise adaptation. Recent reports have cited a lack of preparedness …

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Climate Change Adaptation Strategy: Can California Do More?

Is Increased Reliance on the Public Trust Doctrine an Essential Part of Effective State Adaptation Policy?

I often tell students in my Climate Change Law and Policy course that adaptation–that is, how we can best adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change–is the poor stepchild of the debate over greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.  By that I mean that climate change mitigation (i.e., how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) generates far more …

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In Harm’s Way

Millions of people are in the path of rising seas. The time for action is now.

The NY Times has run a series of articles in the past few days dealing with disaster issues.  Taken together, they highlight the urgency of government action to protect populations in harm’s way. One article dealt generally with the threat posed by sea level rise. Miami is something of a poster-child for these problems, given its …

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Sea Level Rises, Premiums Not So Much

Congress apparently just couldn’t resist restoring subsidies for coastal homeowners.

The President has now signed an important modification of the flood insurance program.  The changes are hard to understand, in part because the bill changed an earlier 2013 law that itself amended the basic statute.  So you have to work through the whole sequence to see what is going on. Before I go into more …

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Poll Shows Vast Majority of Americans Favor Sea-Level Rise Adaptation. Now, Time to Start Planning.

Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Center for Ocean Solutions recently released the results of a survey finding that the majority of Americans favor proactive sea-level rise adaptation actions. According to the survey results (margin of error: +/- 4.9% at the 95 percent confidence level), 82 percent of the Americans surveyed said …

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Climate Change’s Bipolar Personality

Climate change is literally bipolar, impacting both the northernmost and southernmost parts of the globe. But the pace and effects of warming differ at the two poles. At the northern end of the world, impacts are already dramatic. The Economist has a special feature on the Arctic, which provides an especially clear explanation of why the …

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Feeling the Heat

The forecast for the end of this century seems to be getting worse.  New measurements, reported by E&E here, indicate that Greenland is shedding ice rapidly — and Antarctica is also shedding: Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are shrinking three times faster than they were in the 1990s, and their contribution to global sea …

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