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30-May-06

Sea Change coming for Everglades 

Updated 6/5/2006 3:05 PM ET By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY FLAMINGO, Fla. — The road to Paradise Prairie, site of a grand plan to develop cheap land in a drained Everglades, was supposed to go through this former fishing village. That plan went bust decades ago, and the future here looks very, very soggy. Now, Flamingo stands as the gateway to a more likely destiny: the coming century of global warming, one that climate researchers warn will bring higher temperatures, extreme weather and sea levels rising high enough to doom this toehold on the tip of South Florida. GOING HAYWIRE: Huge climate shifts happen like a boat tipping To experts studying such rising water levels, "Flamingo is kind of a canary in the coal mine," says Fred Herling, National Park Service planner for the Everglades and Dry Tortugas parks. Still covered in a gray mud from last year's hurricanes, Wilma and Katrina, condemned cottages and decrepit motel rooms await the wrecking ball at Flamingo, which now is primarily the site of an Everglades National Park recreation center. In an effort to reverse damage, the park service is embarking on a $7.9 billion, 35-year plan to restore the park's 1.4 million acres of federally protected wetlands and 10 million acres of the surrounding Everglades. Man-made levees interrupt the natural, freshwater flow that defines the dry and wet seasons, and efforts to drain the wetlands by cutting canals to the coast have opened the door to the rising sea, says geologist Harold Wanless of the University of Miami. The sea level has risen 9 inches in the past century on Florida's southern coast, a rate six times faster than the per-century rate over the previous 2,400 years, Wanless says. The trend is expected to accelerate because of warming, which would expose the coast to even worse storm effects. "It is not unreasonable to conclude from what we know now that a 3- or 4- or 5-foot sea level rise in this century is more than likely" for Flamingo and Cape Sable, Wanless says. Cape Sable, a curved shield of sand and prairie that comprises Florida's southwest corner, is the southernmost point of the U.S. mainland. No part of Everglades National Park is higher than 8 feet. Nationwide, other coastal locales face similar changes. "We could see the total devastation of our coastal system" of barrier islands and overdeveloped seaside communities, Wanless says. Temperatures on the way up The levels of so-called greenhouse gases, which are the naturally occurring and man-made gases that capture heat in the atmosphere, are at their highest in at least 650,000 years, according to a study published last year in Nature magazine that examined Antarctic ice cores. "Right now, given our accumulation of greenhouse gases, we are inevitably committed to a certain amount of climate change, even if we stabilized emissions today," says climate scientist Gerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. And if the world keeps on burning fossil fuels at its current rate, which is the "business as usual" scenario used by those studying climate changes, atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations will double by 2100, according to the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland in College Park. In April, an analysis led by Duke University climate researcher Gabriele Hegerl examined climate sensitivity, an indicator of how temperatures will respond to this doubling of greenhouse gases. Based on reconstructions of climate over the past 700 years, the analysis downplayed some disturbing possibilities, finding it unlikely that temperatures would rise more than 12 degrees. "But we are still pointing towards a substantial change," Hegerl says. Her analysis suggests the average temperature is more likely to increase about 5 degrees worldwide. Today, hundreds of research groups are studying the global effects of temperature increase in coming decades and centuries. A group led by Meehl and colleague Claudia Tebaldi has published comparisons of global climate models that look at the difference between conditions from 1960 to 1990 and projections for 2080 to 2099. So under these projections, what does the USA of 2100 look like compared with recent decades? •Temperatures. As one might expect, temperatures are warmer, but some regions are hotter than others. Overall, average temperatures nationwide could jump 4 degrees or more, a bit below the global average. In the high plains and mountain west, average temperatures may jump 7 degrees. The smallest jump, around 3 degrees average increase, comes in tropical parts of Florida such as Flamingo. Hundreds of climate scientists and representatives of nations, including the USA, signed off on a 2001 report by the United Nations that said temperatures would increase, most likely driven by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. Some scientists disagree. In a speech last year at the University of Michigan, Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson called predictions "grossly exaggerated." On the other hand, at least as many scientists, including Tim Flannery, author of this year's The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, argue that mainstream models more likely underestimate changes, saying temperatures probably will get much hotter. •Frost days. The Pacific Northwest in particular will see fewer days when the thermometer falls below freezing. Seattle may see as many as 50 fewer days. In the Midwest and Southeast, the number of frost days drops by 10 to 20 days a year, driven in part by a shift of high-pressure air on Canada's western edge, which acts to funnel relatively cooler air across the Great Lakes. •Heat waves. They will be "more intense, more frequent and more long-lasting," Meehl says. Models show Southern and Western states will have more intense heat waves than the rest of the country. Parts of those regions may experience three or more heat waves in a typical year, compared with one now. •Rain and snow. New England may get 5 inches more of rain and snow in a year than it does now, and parts of the Southwest could see a decrease by the same amount. "The intensity increases everywhere," Meehl says. "You can have fewer events in an area, but when it does rain, it rains hard." One concern is that arid places may have a higher risk of flash flooding. •Sea level. The Environmental Protection Agency projects an average increase of sea levels by 2 feet nationwide by 2100. An analysis by climate researcher Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona-Tucson suggests a 3-foot increase is more likely. That's bad news for low-lying New Orleans and southern Florida, including Flamingo and Miami. Worse, unless global warming is stabilized, increased temperatures will have locked in enough heat by 2100 to inevitably raise sea levels 20 feet by 2600, Overpeck says. "Climate affects everything, so there will be tremendous dislocations," says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Growing seasons and everyday life, from house design to water quality, will be affected. "It is important to put these shifts in the context of the past," Schmidt says. "The last time temperature shifted globally (9 degrees during the last Ice Age), New York was under a mile of ice. In the next hundred years, we'll see maybe half that shift in temperature, and maybe that and more. "Think how much change we'll see," he says. Where to start The biggest unknown in looking ahead to 2100, Meehl says, is how much carbon dioxide humankind will pour into the atmosphere. "Every day that goes by without stabilizing concentrations of greenhouse gases means we have a bigger commitment to more climate change in the future," he says. And despite increased interest in recent years in hydrogen-fueled cars, windmills and biofuels made from plants, it's very unlikely people won't be burning coal, oil and natural gas in coming decades, says Jae Edmonds of the Joint Global Change Research Institute. There's just too much of the stuff, especially coal, too easily extracted from the ground to expect humanity to stop burning fossil fuels, he says. "High oil prices alone won't solve the problem," Edmonds says. "Society will choose one way or the other how to deal with climate change. We may back into it. Or it may be a conscious choice." Princeton's Robert Socolow promotes a "wedge strategy," calling for society to concentrate on the most promising technologies to cut carbon emissions. Options include wind power, nuclear energy, biotech fuels, storing carbon dioxide underground, even turning a biofuel-producing USA into the "Saudi Arabia of sawgrass," Edmonds says. "But the point is there is no obvious silver bullet, a single technology that is going to solve every problem," Edmonds adds. "So, we need to look at all of them." Some experts, such as James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, foresee political breakdown and chaos. But most, including Edmonds, think of climate change as an uncertainty-plagued risk-management problem. People didn't deal with acid rain, remove lead from gasoline or start protecting the ozone layer until the benefits of doing so were understood. Everglades project Until a 1920s land bust in southern Florida, Flamingo was poised for prosperity as it waited for the Everglades to be drained and a highway to be built to connect Miami to Cape Sable. Would-be land barons envisioned building a city named Chevalier, sugar cane plantations on the cleared land called Paradise Prairie and a railroad that would bring cargo from ships that passed through the new Panama Canal, says Seth Bramson, official historian of the Florida East Coast Railway. Now the chief concerns for the area are to restore boating and lodging facilities for national park visitors and to make the facilities more able to withstand hurricanes, Herling says. Debate over whether global warming is creating more intense tropical storms worldwide has little bearing on Flamingo's revival. "We can't tell visitors we're not going to restore the park because of concerns decades away," Herling says. The plan to restore the Everglades rests on the assumption of a 1-foot rise in sea level by 2100, says Everglades National Park chief Dan Kimball. Monitoring of the restoration will allow adjustments in how the work proceeds. But some everyday adaptations already are taking place. Docks no longer will be nailed into place but will be yoked to pilings, allowing them to float freely during storms. Guest cottages wrecked by 9-foot waves from last year's hurricanes may be replaced by semi-permanent "yurts," Herling says, tented structures with parts that can be taken apart and stored as storms approach. By 2100, Cape Sable and Flamingo, onetime aspiring gateways to paradise, probably will be under water, Wanless says. The rise in sea level means Cape Sable probably will be broken up into spits of land and open water, he says. "Once climate change gets moving, there's always a lag. It's like leaving the fridge door open — things don't melt right away. But we're doing things right now that will affect us the rest of the century and beyond."

online:  http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2006-05-30-everglades-globalwarming_x.htm  

 

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