we don't spend enough time facing how we are going to deal with the results. Found this in my files while looking for something else.
Yet
another letter in the local paper this morning with the theme that
Global Warming in a figment of overheated liberal imaginations. And
the remarks of that noted conservative and game show host Pat Sajak.
“I now believe that global warming alarmists are unpatriotic
racists knowingly misleading for their own ends.” What climate
change has to do with racism or patriotism eludes me.
First
I got cranky and then I had an epiphany similar to the one I had
several years ago. It doesn’t really matter why the glaciers are
melting and the seas are rising. HOW ARE WE GOING TO DEAL WITH THE
RESULTS? Maybe if we quit arguing about the whyfors and the wherefors
and start thinking about the cost of dealing with the one foot or
more rise in ocean levels that some are predicting in the next
century then the cost of cutting back on emissions to slow it will
look relatively cheap.
I
live in Oregon. We don’t have a lot of beaches and the ones we have
get smaller and further apart as you go north. We already get
significant erosion during hard winters. High winds and high tides
combine to take the sand right out to sea. So we’ll probably lose a
lot of the beaches we already have and the seas will start to
undercut the sandstone cliffs that have houses on top of them. What
about the coast aquifers? They’ll probably fill with salt water
that much faster. The coastal streams are already tidal but the salt
water will probably go further in and stay longer affecting those
ecosystems.
And
what happens to state road 126 between Eugene and Florence? The strip
between Florence and Mapleton is barely above river level in some
stretches. And since the road is built on former marshland it sort of
goes up and down in waves as it is. Do we lose the highway or spend
millions to try and shore it up?
Our
main coastal highway is Route 101. It cuts close to the beaches on
some of the low lying stretches. What happens when the sea rises and
the beach goes away leaving the road bed vulnerable to storm damage?
All together now. Spell giant sinkhole.
We’re all ready having
problems from the other direction. Took a few decades but now we’re
discovering that basalt may be one tough rock but its structure makes
it prone to large scale erosion during very wet winters. That and
erosion makes soil, soil attracts plants, plants have roots, roots
loosen rock. You get the picture.
Stretches
of roadside cuts have and are being sheathed in chicken wire to try
cut down on the rock falls. Lots of chicken wire. And on the other
side of the highway it cuts damn close to the edge of the sea cliffs.
This highway was built long before the era of semis, RV's and big ass
SUV's. There are some stretches with literally no shoulders.
Our
only port capable of handling big cargo ships is at Portland, seventy
miles inland. The Columbia Bar Pilots are the only pilots in the
world who go out in helicopters when the weather is too rough for
their pilot boats. These are highly trained and experienced men and
women who hold masters papers. They could skipper a ship anywhere in
the world. And they lost a pilot in several years ago. He was trying
to make the transition from the freighter to the base ship in bad
weather and didn’t make it. They don’t call the Columbia bar the
Graveyard of the Pacific because we like to exaggerate. The Port of
Portland is literally one the hardest ports to reach in the world.
But it’s the only game in town between Frisco and SeaTac.
Believe
it or not there is a port in Lewiston, Idaho. Thanks to locks on the
major dams you can ship freight from the interior to Portland on
barges powered by tugboats. Between the freeways and the barge
traffic on the Columbia, Portland handles freight for a large section
of the country. Will a rise in sea levels make the bar easier or
harder to handle? There was a temporary spike in agricultural traffic
when New Orleans was out of commission after Katrina. What happens
when the other Gulf and South Eastern Ports get hit with Katrina
reruns?
What
happens to cities like Miami as the sea rises? Hell what happens to
the whole state of Florida? It may not be flat as a pancake but it’s
damn close. The highest place in the state is about 345 feet. Heck
we’re higher than that here in Springfield. If parts of Oregon
flood out we can up sticks and move down the Willamette Valley or
east of the Cascades. And that’s only a couple of million people.
There’s more than that in Miami-Dade County alone. Where are they
going to go? And that’s just one metro area. The whole state has
nearly sixteen million people. Expand that to the whole Gulf Coast
and the Southern Atlantic seaboard.
Of
course while each side is trying to convert the other to its point of
view they don’t have to come to grips with the result. I believe
that it’s time to quit arguing about the how and concentrate on the
what. Once we start brainstorming the costs of the worst case
scenarios of rising seas maybe we’ll start to realize that while it
doesn’t matter where the green house gases are coming from, there
are some sources that are more open to control than others. If we
think switching to other energy forms and slowing the destruction of
the seas and forests is expensive and disruptive just imagine trying
to relocate the population of Florida or Bangladesh.
No comments:
Post a Comment