The Message No One Wants To Hear
It is better to have eyes wide open now than to be unprepared for what is on the horizon
A few days ago on a zoom meeting, I said to a man who lives on an island in Maine, that 2023 was the year climate change hit Antarctica and he laughed as though the South Pole was too distant a region to affect him.
Days later MSNBC reported about the glacier activity that scientists have been observing. I have been following developments on scientific websites and social media but when the reports from mainstream media have headlines such as 2 degrees, 40 feet: Scientists who study Earth’s ice say we could be committed to disastrous sea level rise, it’s a wake-up call louder than any previously issued, in advance of the 2023 Climate Agreement meetings commencing n November 30 in Dubai.
“We might be reaching these temperature thresholds that we’ve been talking about for a long time sooner than we were thinking about years ago,” said Rob DeConto, the director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Earth & Sustainability and an author of the report. “And it may be that the thresholds for some of these processes that can drive really rapid ice loss are lower than we were thinking just a few years ago.”
Without a dramatic turn in the pace of climate action, those factors could leave humanity “facing rates of sea-level rise way outside the range of adaptability,” DeConto said. source
“might”??
Last week, in the town of Araçuaí, Brazil, Taylor Swift was giving a concert at a temperature that rose to 112.6 degrees Fahrenheit, during the days of spring, the highest ever recorded in the country. More than 1,000 fans fainted at the concert in Rio de Janeiro, where the heat index reached almost 140 F.
Nov 30 coincides with the date of a Climate Change Summit on the Boothbay Peninsula
The summit is a welcome indicator that local people are ready to take climate change seriously but most of the talk that I am hearing about is the conversation we should have been having decades ago and reflects an inability to absorb the message coming out of the scientific community today. The most recent developments in climate change will be delivered in a new report from world leaders at the Dubai Climate Agreement summit. It’s a message coastal communities do not want to hear but things will go better for us if we absorb the message than if we ignore it.
Fire and Ice
I try to visualize how water flows, filling up the deepest parts first before moving on. Boothbay is in the northern hemisphere, where glaziers in Switzerland are also shrinking at an alarming rate. The seas are rising all around us from every direction at a hitherto unanticipated rate while In other parts of the world, temperatures are pushed up against what is habitable for humans.
It’s difficult to fully understand that we have to change our plans and our lifestyles. Even if we can comprehend the seriousness of the situation intellectually, in the rhythm of daily living, it seems too unreal to be true.
But warm water is flowing underneath glaciers and destabilizing the polar environments. When ice changes into water it can move rapidly and so we who live in coastal communities cannot afford not to pay heed while we still have time to plan for the greatest challenge facing humanity in eons.
The future is not written in stone but some changes become inevitable as the cause and effect of past inaction when humanity didn’t heed the warnings. We are living a step behind when we need to be a few steps ahead.
As the impacts of climate change continue to unfold, the Boothbay Region Climate Action Team (BRCAT) is proud to announce a community meeting aimed at fostering collaboration and planning for a sustainable future. The meeting invites everyone from various walks of life to join hands and voices in addressing critical environmental concerns that affect us all.
For more information and to RSVP, please contact Brclimate@gmail.com
Coastal dwellers are being forewarned. The sooner we incorporate the reality of our rapidly changing planetary environment, currently taking aim at us, the longer we have to process the inevitable outcome of nature’s interaction with man’s technology. News coming out of the scientific community is that the Paris Agreement of 2018 had it all wrong. The estimates of sea level rises have changed from 3 feet to 10 to 40 feet of sea level rise and the threshold of when the change might occur is lower than previously thought. the whole world is waiting for the dam to break and there is no clear idea of when that will happen.
It’s a hard pill to swallow
If we accept the inevitability that scientists are speaking about, the communities we love may soon be gone forever. That’s a hard pill to swallow but if we do It makes no sense to build large housing developments in coastal areas when in a few years the coastal inhabitants may be in need of refugee shelters inland. Think about how we will manage the evacuation and relocation, while at the same time managing our current housing shortage. The only way to do that without building more housing is to put a halt to the short-term rentals that are causing the housing shortage everywhere in the world and return that housing to the local populous that must still live here until other plans are ready.
This awareness taking place across the globe will impact the tourist industry but there is no escaping that when the message coming from the scientific community is “Disasterous rising seas are inevitable and we don’t know when it’s going to break.” Scientists are not talking about sustainability, they are saying that glacier warming is nearly beyond the point of adaptability.
Doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reasons
Back in what seems like the distant past, in the year 2022, the Maine Legislature enacted ambitious plans to address a housing shortage as attributed to the “underproduction of housing”, rather than the most obvious cause, short-term rentals. The Maine Legislature’s master plan for managing the entire state’s economy includes chartering the Maine Space Corporation which would use the public school system as its industrial training facility, and doing nothing about short-term rentals.
The Maine Space Corporation will build its launching facilities on the coast. Is the scientific community making such plans living in a bubble dome?
In 2022, the Maine Legislature transferred authority over municipal ordinances from the local government to the state and mandated housing “priority zones” in every Maine municipality, zones where there are no restrictions on housing density. The all too obvious purpose is to house the populace displaced by the short-term rental industry. In 2023 I am hearing about many developers taking advantage of the subsidies for affordable housing in Midcoast Maine, which in the short time span since the Maine Legislature enacted the HP 1489 has become a fool’s investment. It is time to stop all subsidies for developments on the coast and require subsidized housing developments to be located inland as they will be needed to house coastal refugees if and when the glaciers break loose.
Considered in its original context, the 2002 plan encompassing the entire state is antithetical to everything that is historically characteristic of Maine, but in light of the ominous message coming from the scientific community, the priority zones are a humanistic solution for handling refugees, with the one aforementioned major change- no subsidies for developments in coastal areas, which means no priority zone mandates either as it makes no sense to use what little time we have left to deal with the pending transformation building homes that may end up as an underwater theme park. No one knows how much time there is to prepare but we do know that if the seas suddenly rise to the levels some are talking about now, it makes sense to redirect the flow of investment inland, where there are other threats coming from climate change but not as inevitable as the threat coming from rising seas.
The world’s coastal communities include many of the world’s wealthiest communities. Much of that wealth will be irretrievably lost. The owners of expensive shoreline properties may find themselves coastal refugees and if they are lucky they will be able to live in a unit in a concentrated housing zone development located in what is now inland.
What this community needs now is a scientific visualization of what our region looks like if oceans rise 3 feet, 10 feet, and 40 feet so that we can have an idea about what we are dealing with.
Once we process the new reality, the news is not all bad. There are advances in technology that address climate change. I often mention Will Lockett because he does not flinch at reporting the bad news but also covers the technology being developed that can help to deal with it. There are also others. I wish it were not true to say “These are interesting times.”
May you have a happy Thanksgiving.
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