You can’t miss it. Every time there’s a king tide, coastal areas of South Florida flood. From Fort Lauderdale to South Beach, streets and parking lots and lawns are inundated. The city of Miami Beach is spending millions of dollars on pumps and construction projects to fight the rising seas.
“The most important thing for this century is to get ahold of climate change, we will have a catastrophe on our hands if we don’t,” said Harold Wanless, the chair of the University of Miami Department of Geological Sciences and a recognized expert on climate change. “It’s not going to turn around, we’re in for tens of feet of sea level rise and the only question about climate change is how fast is that going to occur?”
The projected climate “catastrophe,” and the Trump Administration’s denial of climate science, were perhaps the primary reasons thousands of scientists marched in cities around the world last weekend. Philip Stoddard of FIU was among them. In addition to being a professor at Florida International University, Stoddard is also the mayor of the city of South Miami.
“What the White House does today matters, what the EPA does today matters, does the EPA regulate greenhouse gasses as pollutants or do they just open the gates, that’s the question,” Stoddard said. “If we don’t cut down on carbon dioxide emissions and methane emissions in our atmosphere, we’re going to cook ourselves.”
President Trump famously said climate change is a Chinese hoax and he appointed a climate denier, Scott Pruitt, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt is among those who don’t believe the burning of fossil fuels is causing global warming, he has said the United States should back out of the Paris Climate Treaty, and he supports Trump’s proposal to cut his own agency’s budget by 30%.
Wanless says that’s a horrible idea. He’s been studying sea level rise for 50 years.
“Government does get too big sometimes and we’re way in debt in our government and we have to do something about it, but this climate change thing is going to totally overwhelm us so we have to be so careful,” Wanless said.
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President Trump has kept his promise to reverse Obama-era environmental regulations on clean power, signing an executive order to boost the coal industry. Critics say all it does is allow coal mines to once again dump pollution into streams.
“I am taking historic steps to lift the restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion and to cancel job-killing regulations,” Trump said when he signed the executive order.
Coal jobs have been declining for decades, critics say, and they’re not coming back because the market has shifted to natural gas. So it’s smarter, some say, to boost the clean energy sector. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice is melting at unprecedented rates, last year was the hottest ever recorded, and warming oceans are killing coral reefs worldwide.
Slashing the budgets of the EPA and of NOAA means less capacity to enforce existing environmental laws, fewer resources to monitor the planet to track climate conditions, and much less research into climate change and possible solutions for it.
Federal spending into those areas supports thousands of jobs, which could also be lost in the proposed cutbacks.
In our back yard, sea level rise driven by climate change is threatening the Everglades and our drinking water supply. Salt water is intruding into the aquifer on which civilization here depends.
“Our communities are threatened by this silent rising of the water tables underneath us, at least on Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale you can see it coming, people in in the suburbs have no idea what’s rising beneath them and what it’s going to do to them,” Stoddard said, citing his own city’s issues with a rising water table.
In South Miami, rising water could lead to unusable septic tanks.
So advice for President Trump? Environmental advocates are begging him to heed the science. They say the United States doesn’t have to choose between job creation and conservation, it can do both things simultaneously.
