Adapting to sea level rise could save trillions

Climate Central

Floods already pose major problems for coastal communities each year. Those issues are only likely to grow as oceans continue to rise, due in part to climate change, threatening millions of people and trillions of dollars in infrastructure. But new research suggests that building levees could stave off huge losses at a minimal cost.

Coasts are home to more than 1 billion people across the globe and up 310 million of those live in a 100-year floodplain. In addition, $11 trillion in assets also sit below the 100-year flood mark.

The slow creep of sea level rise is putting more and more of these people and assets at risk. Since the start of the 20th century, sea levels have risen roughly 8 inches. That number is also expected to increase into the next century as ocean waters warm and expand and more water is added from melting glaciers.

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday projects sea levels could rise from 9 to 48 inches by 2100. The wide range of uncertainty is due to the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which appear fairly stable but if they were to start melting, could contribute as much as 25 inches to sea level rise.

The study projects that even with conservative economic and population growth, $17 trillion in coastal assets could be sitting below the 100-year flood level by 2100. In a wealthier, more populous world, that number would balloon to $210 trillion.

While these factors have been considered individually in previous studies, this is the first time sea levels, including contributions for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, have been modeled in relation to both population growth and coastal development over the course of the 21st century. The results show that unless something is done, coastal flood could cause catastrophic losses every year.

“If we don’t adapt to sea level rise, the consequences will be quite dramatic through the 21st century. Up to 5-10 percent of global GDP will be damaged in 2100 on a yearly basis,” Jochen Hinkel, a senior researcher at the Global Climate Forum, said in an interview.

In the high-development, high-sea level rise scenario that translate to nearly $19 trillion in losses annually. In comparison, the entire U.S. GDP in 2012 was $15.68 trillion.

Levees offer a simple defense against flooding. The new research estimates that it would cost $12-71 billion a year to build levees high enough to keep pace with rising seas.

Though flooding would still cause damages just as it does today, Hinkel said it would be a fraction of the cost.

“It’s a very ambitious project they’ve taken on and it’s a good attempt to address something of importance,” said Bob Kopp, a Rutgers University climate scientist not affiliated with the study. “They don’t account for all of the local factors so the details of the picture are going to get a little grainy if you zoom into a global model.”

Those missing details could reduce some of the benefits of levees while also increasing the costs of flooding.

Land is sinking in coastal areas due to groundwater use and oil and gas extraction could leave certain areas such as the Gulf Coast facing greater costs for flood protection. In addition, changes in tropical cyclone activity due to climate change and other natural fluctuations were not considered.

Large storms have the potential to top barriers and cause catastrophic damage and loss of life. Hurricane Katrina caused $125 billion losses with much of that in New Orleans where levees were unable to keep back the storm surge.

Kopp said that illusion of safety could actually increase the potential for even more devastating losses in the future.

“If you build dikes, people feel safe and move into the exposed area and that increases the amount of infrastructure,” he said. “If your dikes slip up, you increase your losses even more.”

The overall cost of protecting coasts could go up or down depending on other adaptation measures as well. Though the study only examined levees, other coastal flood protections range from restoring wetlands and beaches, which in some cases are a more affordable alternative, to building more costly large barriers that can be opened and closed like those located on the Thames near London and outside Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

In New York, discussions are ongoing about the proper amount of protection needed in the wake of Sandy. Levees, wetlands, sea walls, and mechanical barriers as well as softer adaptation options like stronger coastal permitting and improved flood evacuation maps have all been considered as part of the city’s sustainability plan.

Despite these obstacles, Hinkel said protecting coasts should not be viewed as a challenge.

“The research shows that there is an opportunity in acting,” he said. “We have looked at the fuller picture, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to look at local decisions that need to be taken.”

Kopp agreed, saying that the geographical, social, and economic details in each community will ultimately inform the actions needed to be taken to protect against rising seas.

Nature can, selectively, buffer human-caused global warming, say scientists

As the globe warms, ocean temperatures rise, leading to increased water vapor escaping into the atmosphere. Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, and its impact on climate is amplified in the stratosphere.

Credit: © magann / Fotolia

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Can naturally occurring processes selectively buffer the full brunt of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities?

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Yes, find researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins University in the US and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

As the globe warms, ocean temperatures rise, leading to increased water vapor escaping into the atmosphere. Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, and its impact on climate is amplified in the stratosphere.

In a detailed study, the researchers from the three institutions examined the causes of changes in the temperatures and water vapor in the tropical tropopause layer (TTL). The TTL is a critical region of our atmosphere with characteristics of both the troposphere below and the stratosphere above.

The TTL can have significant influences on both atmospheric chemistry and climate, as its temperature determines how much water vapor can enter the stratosphere. Therefore, understanding any changes in the temperature of the TTL and what might be causing them is an important scientific question of significant societal relevance, say the researchers.

The Israeli and US scientists used measurements from satellite observations and output from chemistry-climate models to understand recent temperature trends in the TTL. Temperature measurements show where significant changes have taken place since 1979.

The satellite observations have shown that warming of the tropical Indian Ocean and tropical Western Pacific Ocean — with resulting increased precipitation and water vapor there — causes the opposite effect of cooling in the TTL region above the warming sea surface. Once the TTL cools, less water vapor is present in the TTL and also above in the stratosphere.

Since water vapor is a very strong greenhouse gas, this effect leads to a negative feedback on climate change. That is, the increase in water vapor due to enhanced evaporation from the warming oceans is confined to the near- surface area, while the stratosphere becomes drier. Hence, this effect may actually slightly weaken the more dire forecasted aspects of an increasing warming of our climate, the scientists say.

The researchers are Dr. Chaim Garfinkel of the Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University and formerly of Johns Hopkins University, Dr. D. W. Waugh and Dr. L. Wang of Johns Hopkins, and Dr. L. D. Oman and Dr. M. M. Hurwitz of the Goddard Space Flight Center. Their findings have been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, and the research was also highlighted in Nature Climate Change.

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal References:

1. C. I. Garfinkel, D. W. Waugh, L. D. Oman, L. Wang, M. M. Hurwitz. Temperature trends in the tropical upper troposphere and lower stratosphere: Connections with sea surface temperatures and implications for water vapor and ozone. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 2013; 118 (17): 9658 DOI: 10.1002/jgrd.50772
2. Qiang Fu. Ocean–atmosphere interactions: Bottom up in the tropics. Nature Climate Change, 2013; 3 (11): 957 DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2039

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Freelance writer Marlene Cimons is a former Washington reporter for the Los Angeles Times who specializes in science and medicine. She writes regularly for the National Science Foundation, Climate Nexus, Microbe Magazine, and the Washington Post health section, and she is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. Cimons contributed this article to LiveScience’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

For months after Hurricane Sandy sent nearly six feet of water surging into her home in Long Beach, N.Y. — an oceanfront city along Long Island’ s south shore — retired art teacher Marcia Bard Isman woke up many mornings feeling anxious and nauseated. She had headaches, and inexplicable bouts of sadness. She found herself crying for no apparent reason.

“I would feel really sad, and that’s just not me,” she said. “I felt like the joy was out of my life. I still haven’t recaptured it.”

What Isman is experiencing is one of the little-recognized consequences of climate change, the mental anguish experienced by survivors in the aftermath of extreme and sometimes violent weather and other natural disasters. The emotional toll of global warming is expected to become a national — and potentially global — crisis that many mental health experts warn could prove far more serious than its physical and environmental effects.

“When you have an environmental insult, the burden of mental health disease is far greater than the physical,” said Steven Shapiro, a Baltimore psychologist who directs the program on climate change, sustainability and psychology for the nonprofit Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR). “It has a much larger effect on the psyche. Survivors can have all sorts of issues: post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, relationship issues, and academic issues among kids.”

A report released in 2012 by the National Wildlife Federation’s Climate Education Program and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation predicted a steep rise in mental and social disorders resulting from climate change-related events in the coming years, including depression and anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, suicide and widespread outbreaks of violence. Moreover, it estimated that about 200 million Americans will be exposed to serious psychological distress from climate-related events in the coming years, and that the nation’s counselors, trauma specialists and first responders currently are ill-equipped to cope.

“The physical toll has been studied, but the psychological impacts of climate change have not been addressed,” said Lise Van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist and one of the report’s authors. “We must not forget that people who are physically affected by climate change will also be suffering from the emotional fallout of what has happened to them. Others suffer emotionally from a distance, especially those who are most keenly aware of the perils we face, or as in the case of children, those who feel especially vulnerable. And the psychological damage is not only over what is happening now, but what is likely going to happen in the future.

“This kind of anticipatory anxiety is especially crippling and is increasingly being seen among climate activists — in some cases rising to the level of a kind of ‘pre-traumatic’ stress disorder,” she added.

Moreover, society can expect to experience a collective sense of sadness, anger and defeat as it confronts the inevitable, and possibly irreversible, long-term environmental effects of global warming, and the failure to prevent them, according to Van Susteren.

“We are undoing millions of years of evolution, and the situation is a catastrophe,” she said. “Climate activists on the front lines are desperate to convey this to the public, but are told to be wary of paralyzing people with fear. Compounding the issue is that people often generally are not ‘good’ at knowing they are anxious, or, if they do, often don’t know why.

“Because of the magnitude of the problem, and the fact that our leaders are not responding commensurate with the threat, feelings of vulnerability are repressed and cause unseen psychological damage,” she added.

The report emphasized that certain populations would be more at risk than others, including the elderly, the poor, members of the military, people with pre-existing mental-health disorders, and especially America’s 70 million children.

The report compared what children may be feeling today to the distress suffered by American and Russian children over the threat of the nuclear bomb in the 1950s during the Cold War era, saying that climate change could have the same destructive impact. “Some children are already anxious about global warming and begin to obsess, understandably, about the future, unmoved by the small reassurances adults may attempt to put forth,” the report said.

The report recommendedthat the federal government draft a plan to enact a large-scale response to the mental-health effects of global warming, including public-education campaigns, increased training for mental-health professionals, and developing mental-health incident response teams.

Despite the nation’s experiences with previous natural disasters, “the scientific data show that what lies ahead will be bigger, more frequent, and more extreme than we have ever known,” prompting potentially dire mental-health impacts, the report warned.

“Many people will experience an inordinate risk and their minds will be changed because of it,” Shapiro said. . “Although some people may come out of it stronger, experiencing a trauma can totally change the way you function.”

A striking image of Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn as Hurricane Sandy approaches on Oct. 29, 2012.
Credit: Carlos Ayala

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Isman certainly would agree. “Initially, I was numb, running on adrenaline,” she said.

“There was a delayed reaction. I didn’t realize what was going on with me emotionally.”

For starters, she and her husband, Michael Clark, had to cope with $125,000 worth of damage to their house and the loss of two cars. “When the surge hit, I was standing on the steps to my basement and heard this roar,” she said. “I looked toward the sound and, literally, a wave of water came into the basement. Within two minutes the basement was nearly filled to the ceiling. It stopped at the second step before my kitchen.”

The couple spent the first week after Sandy camped out in a dark, cold house without water, electricity, or working toilets. After that, they moved in with friends until their toilets were functioning again. Still, living conditions were extremely difficult. The hurricane had wrecked the local sewage plant, contaminating the flood waters that entered her basement. Also, Long Beach imposed a curfew, and blocked bridge access into the city to prevent looting. “No one was allowed in without an ID,” Isman said. “The rules were necessary and kept us safe, although at the same time, it did make things more complicated and stressful.”

Isman’s emotions “were all normal reactions to a life-shattering situation,” says Dr. Laurie Nadel, a psychotherapist who started the group and who lost her own Long Beach home to the storm. “I knew there was a need for a safe place for people to come and talk about what they were going through. It can be very isolating. You need a place where you can share and normalize your experiences with other people.”

Members of Psychologists for Social Responsibility worry that continued inaction on climate change will only bring more of the same. The group recently wrote to Congress, urging lawmakers to address climate change to avoid a mental health catastrophe.

“Without such action, the impact of heat waves, extreme storms and floods, droughts and water shortages, food production problems, lessened air quality, sea level rise, and displacement from homes and communities is likely to pose significant mental-health challenges to millions of Americans and billions of others worldwide,” the psychologists wrote in their letter.

The resulting stress and rise in mental illness likely will “harm interpersonal relationships, make people less able to work constructively or do well in school, and ultimately injure the day-to-day functioning of our society and our economy,” the group told Congress. “Hurricane Katrina demonstrated all of these outcomes in microcosm to the American people, and an ample body of research strongly predicts such severe psychological and social consequences.”

If you’re a topical expert — researcher, business leader, author or innovator — and would like to contribute an op-ed piece, email us here.

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To be sure, while it is possible for survivors to recover emotionally, “there is significant sudden loss that needs to be processed,” Nadel said. “There is physical loss, there is emotional loss, and there is social loss.”

Meanwhile, if the world’s nations do not contend aggressively with the dangers posed by a warming planet, “we will have to deal with the reality that we are living in unpredictable, unstable and volatile times when it comes to climate change,” Nadel said. “When I talk to people in other countries who’ve been living with natural disasters their whole lives, they don’t expect the phones to always work, and they understand that people may not show up on time because a tree might have fallen on the road. They accept that emergencies are part of life and out of their control.

“Their social rhythms have adapted, and that’s what we’re going to have to do,” she added. “We will have to shift our mindset to accepting uncertainty and unpredictability, and develop a different belief system about what we’ll have to contend with when the order of things changes.”

The author’s most recent Op-Ed was “The Microbes in Your Gut May be Making You Fat.” The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on LiveScience.