At the 35,000-foot level, climate change remains a matter of loud dispute among Republicans.
In the undercard portion of last Wednesday’s CNBC presidential debate, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham pushed the GOP envelope and acknowledged that “we’re heating up the planet.” Likewise, former New York Gov. George Pataki declared it “not appropriate” to think that human activity isn’t at least partially to blame.
But those are outlying opinions, offset by hardcore skepticism expressed by Republicans closer to the front of the pack.
Donald Trump, for instance, has called climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, who are out to sabotage the U.S. industrial base. In an interview with conservative firebrand Glenn Beck, recorded just before last week’s debate, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said that climate change wasn’t science, but a Sierra Club-generated religion.
Such is the high-altitude situation among Republicans. At sea level, however, the view is much different. Take, for instance, Jason Buelterman, mayor of Tybee Island on the Georgia coast.
Last Sunday, Buelterman had returned from a trip to New Hampshire, where he participated in Rising Tides 2015, a conference on the coastal impact of rising sea levels in the United States, aimed at local government officials. It was a non-partisan event, but Republican attendees – count Buelterman among them — outnumbered Democratic ones.
Forty-eight hours after the mayor returned, Tybee Island made a little history. On Tuesday morning, a 10.47-foot high tide swamped much of the island and U.S. 80, the only road that links 3,000 residents to Savannah and the mainland.
It was the third-highest tide on record. But that doesn’t really tell the story. Those higher tides in 1940 and 1947 were produced by surges from hurricanes.
No such storms struck the Georgia coast last week. We would have noticed. The king tides on Tuesday and Wednesday were the product of the moon making a closer-than-usual pass, a stiff wind, and rising sea levels.
That last condition is the result of climate change. Heated water expands and ice caps melt. Volume increases.
“It’s unfortunate that we had this incident with the tide, but I think what it has done is gotten people’s attention all over this state,” Buelterman said. “I can’t think of another island anywhere that is completely cut off from the mainland for hours at a time.”
What happened on the Georgia coast last week was predicted last year by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report, which said that “clear evidence” of rising sea levels would increase flooding throughout the coastal United States.
A U.S. 80 that is covered with water three or five times a year now might see that happen 35 to 40 times a year by 2050. Much of it would be “nuisance” flooding, the report said. Which might have applied to Tybee Island last week, except that it didn’t.
“We had to have a helicopter on standby, we had the Coast Guard on alert in case we had a heart attack. The school’s shut down,” Mayor Buelterman said in a phone interview on Thursday. That’s slightly more than a nuisance.
During his 10 years as mayor, Buelterman said he’s been pushing for a rebuilt and raised U.S. 80 – “doing everything short of a hunger strike.” But his argument has been based largely on the vulnerability of the mostly two-lane road, and thus his tourist-heavy island, to traffic accidents. A rising sea is now another argument in his favor. Maybe a strong one.
“All this money gets spent to get people to work 10 minutes faster. We have an island that’s inaccessible. This is a safety issue. That should be the priority,” Buelterman said.
Tybee Island is addressing other issues as well. “I got a fairly dysfunctional city council to vote unanimously to plan and budget for 14 to 20 inches of sea level rise by 2060,” said Councilman Paul Wolff. “That was in 2010.”
An inventory of at-risk infrastructure followed. The road to the mainland was named a top priority. Another: Three freshwater wells. The wells themselves are sealed, which protects them from saltwater swamping. But the electronic controls need to be raised.
This kind of work is occurring up and down the Georgia coast, often courtesy of federal grants, often with the help of University of Georgia researchers and the state Department of Natural Resources.
“The state of Georgia has scientific data that demonstrates the need to plan for an increase in sea level rise at a rate of one meter for the next 100 years. This data comes from NOAA’s tide gauge at Fort Pulaski, Ga.,” said DNR spokeswoman Mary Kathryn Yearta, in an email.
This is the same state Department of Natural Resources that, earlier this year, reported that climate change – and the study did use that term – could put Georgia wildlife on the move over the next three or four decades. In some cases, the destination will be extinction. Think songbirds.
The point is that, yes, you may have GOP presidential candidates who prefer to dispute volumes of data about climate change. Possibly, they are obliged to constituencies on higher ground.
You may even have governors and state lawmakers, in Georgia and elsewhere, who prefer to duck cause-and-effect by declaring themselves non-scientists. When you acknowledge a problem exists, you tacitly admit an obligation to fix it. And that could be expensive.
But you do have a class of people on the Georgia coast who see things with their own eyes and their own gauges. They are mayors, council members, county commissioners, scientists and even government bureaucrats. Republicans as well as Democrats.
Moreover, an official arm of state government says now it possesses evidence that climate change is real.
The sea is rising, and not everyone can wait for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to change their minds.
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