| THE WATER WILL COME Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World Jeff Goodell Boston: Little, Brown & Company, November 2017 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-0-316-26024-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-316-26024-X | 340pp. | HC/BWI | $28.00 | |
I won't try to give a complete list here because, even now, almost everything built on any seacoast is at risk. That includes the cities on the east coast of the United States up to New York City, as already noted in my review. Military facilities in the same range are also subject to periodic flooding, and it is no secret that the Pentagon views global warming in general as a "threat multiplier" — something that will make conflicts both more likely and harder to deal with. But here is Jeff Goodell telling in more detail of his experience at Norfolk:
"Naval Station Norfolk is at risk because of a number of factors, including the subsidence of the land the base is built on and the slowdown of the Gulf Stream current, which brushes up against the coast here (as on the rest of the mid-Atlantic coast, sea levels are rising in Norfolk roughly twice as fast as the global average). All it takes is a rainstorm and a big tide, and the Atlantic invades the base—roads are submerged, entry gates impassable. When I visited the base during a nor'easter one December, there was water everywhere. It splashed over my boots as I stood at the edge of the base, looking over the gray water of Willoughby Bay. On Craney Island, the base's main refueling depot, I saw military vehicles up to their axles in seawater. It pooled in a long, flat area near Admirals' Row, where naval commanders live in magnificent houses built for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, which was held on the grounds here. There is no high ground on the base, nowhere to retreat to. It feels like a swamp that has been dredged and paved over—and that's pretty much what is is. Norfolk—and the smaller cities nearby, sometimes known collectively as Hampton Roads—is the heartland of the US military. It's just an hour's drive from the Pentagon. There are twenty-nine other military bases, shipyards, and installations in the Hampton Roads area, and most of them are in just as much trouble. At nearby Langley Air Force Base, home to several fighter wings and headquarters of the Air Combat Command, base commanders keep thirty thousand sandbags ready to stack around buildings and the runway so they remain usable at high tide. At Dam Neck, another navy base, they stack old Christmas trees on the beach to keep the shoreline from eroding. At NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, where satellites are launched into orbit, plans are already in motion to move the launchpads back from the beach. "Military readiness is already being impacted by sea-level rise, and it's just going to get worse," Virginia Senator Tim Kaine told me. How much worse it's going to get, and how fast, Kaine would not say, in part because he doesn't want to start a stampede out of the region, and in part because no one knows for sure." For now, the strategy is just to buy time. Since the mid-1990s, the navy has spent about $250 million to build four new double-decker piers at the base, but that would do nothing to save the many roads and buildings and runways on the base, all of which are critical infrastructure and all of which are in danger. But a base like Norfolk is not just barracks, piers, and ships. It is the hub of an entire ecosystem that has grown up around it during the last century—fuel suppliers and electrical lines and railroad tracks and repair shops and reasonably priced housing stock and decent schools for the children of the men and women who are stationed there. You can't just move all this to some random spot on the coast of New Hampshire. "You could move some of the ships to other bases or build smaller bases in more protected places," said Joe Bouchard, a former commander of Naval Station Norfolk. "But the costs would be enormous. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars." – Pages 192-3 |
Hundreds of billions of dollars to preserve one complex of thirty naval facilities in the Newport News area. That's without mentioning other nearby facilities like Langley AFB or Wallops Island. Nor does it consider the residential and commercial facilities in the affected area. Expand your view to the world as a whole, and you begin to understand the scope of the problem of sea-level rise.
Now recall that sea-level rise is only one aspect of the damage climate change is already causing. We saw another aspect (again) in the summer of 2017 when unprecedented rainfall and the storm surge from Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, Texas.
Finally, consider that climate change is just getting started. Are you worried yet? Or do you still imagine that mitigation will be far more costly than adaptation?
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.