Richard W Smith, oceanographer and ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador interviews John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute and author Moving to Higher Ground: Rising Sea Level.
Rising Seas
Climate change and rising sea levels are changing the boundary lines of our world, and, if left to continue at their current pace, pose considerable financial, ecological, and societal threats.
So how can we combat rising tides in order to build for a better and more resilient future?
To discuss the issue of rising sea levels, the ramifications they cause, and how we can mitigate their threat, oceanographer and ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador Richard W Smith sat down with John Englander.
John Englander
John Englander is the founder of the Rising Seas Institute, a nonprofit “think tank and resource center” to advance the understanding of potential solutions to future flooding.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:01:13] I’m Rick Smith, the ideaXme Oceans ambassador, an oceanographer and aquatic chemist with Global Aquatic Research.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:01:25] Today, I’m joined by John Englander. He’s an oceanographer, author and a renowned sea level rise expert who helps businesses and communities adapt to a rapidly changing climate. His best-selling book, High Tide on Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis has been listed by Politico as one of the top 50 books to read. He has a new book coming out April 6th this year, Moving to Higher Ground: Rising Sea Level and the Path Forward. He’s the founder and president of the Rising Seas Institute and was previously the CEO of the International SeaKeepers Society, The Cousteau Society and The Underwater Explorers Society.
John Englander’s History of Oceanographic Work
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:02:00] I’d like to explore the relationship between humans and coastlines. I would also like to take a deep dive into your history of oceanographic work and experiences. John, please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you started this very interesting and inspiring career in oceanography.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:02:22] Thanks. I’m glad to. My path is very unconventional, but I think more and more, everybody’s path these days is unconventional. So, it’s perhaps the normal now. I studied Earth Science (or Geology, as it was called at the time) in college and economics – and I was also a scuba diving instructor. This was back in 1972 to kind of date me or age me. The ice ages or the Pleistocene, more properly, or paleo geology was the title of the course. Ancient geology fascinated me because I understood for the first time that ice ages were a recurring cycle in Earth’s history and that as the ice sheets waned and grew, that sea level moved up and down 120 meters, about 400 feet and that just kind of blew my mind. Then when I was diving in the Bahamas and the clear water, I was a diving instructor during summer breaks from college, I found an ancient sea level 200 feet underwater and suddenly this clicked. Now, I didn’t think it would change in my lifetime. Fast forward and I had decades in the diving industry after I graduated college and then I led a group to Greenland in 2007. It was there that it all kind of came together, that I realized, wait a minute, we are seeing sea level change, the early stage of it and this is something that human civilization has not experienced.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:03:55] The last time sea level was higher was 122,000 years ago when it was seven meters or 25 feet higher than today. So that blew my mind and I decided to write a book, but that took a lot more research. Somebody said it was kind of like my doctorate course in effect, which I never did. But writing the book is like that, of course, it’s a thesis that is reviewed and vetted. That’s been my path. It was kind of one thing leading to another, as happens for so many of us.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:04:30] It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of your lifetime diving and probably have a huge number of experiences, I’m really interested, as an oceanographer, in some of the work that you did with The Cousteau Society and Jacques Cousteau. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:04:48] Sure, Cousteau died in June ’97. I was very involved in the diving industry, which he helped create, but he had kind of gone off on his own path for years, but we gave him an award. I was chairman of a group called Ocean Futures at the time, started by the diving industry. I got Jacques to come over to Orlando, Florida, in January of that year; this was a culmination of some meetings we’ve had where he was going to receive this award. We spent some time together and to my surprise, he asked me to become CEO of The Cousteau Society, which was just something I never would have expected. But I sold my dive business in the Bahamas and Jacques and I spent, I guess, three days, almost day and night talking to each other. Unfortunately, by the time I started working for him, he was in the hospital and three months later after that, he passed away. It was a turning point in my life because here was a guy that probably taught more oceanography to more people than anybody else ever. As you may recall, he had this regular TV program that was just fascinating and he had a great perspective because he’d been doing this for more than 70 years. It’s hard to believe. He died at age 87. So, it was a real privilege and inspiration and got me to think of the world differently. He had a unique perspective, and I was privileged to share some of that.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:06:24] I know from some of my own personal experiences diving, I’m a recreational diver as well. We will be talking about sea level rise today, but I’d just like to give a quick shout out to diving in coral reefs and I’d just like to say that for me, they’ve been some of the best opportunities I’ve ever had.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:06:30] What is the current state of diving with some of the changes we’ve been seeing in the ocean today? We’re not going to go too much into this, but things like ocean acidification and warming, just parts of the ocean changing as we know it, how are people adapting to that as divers?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:07:06] Well, I’m not involved in the diving industry anymore, and in fact, it’s been a year since I did my last dive. So, I still dive occasionally, but having thousands of dives, mostly in the warm waters of the Bahamas, et cetera as well as being under the polar ice cap and in many places in the world, diving has changed quite a bit but the magic of being weightless and the exploration aspects of diving, I think will always be there.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:07:32] The reefs have certainly changed, as you’ve just alluded to, from the warming temperatures, from the excess nutrients that we’re putting in the oceans, the various diseases, pathogens that are getting in, the algaes, the changing ecosystem from the demise of sea urchins which used to eat the algaes that suffocate the reef. So, most of the sea urchins are gone. Most reefs today are covered by this brown green algae or they’ve turned white from coral bleaching. There have been a lot of things happening to coral reefs, which were a special aspect of the ocean for people like you and me and millions of people, of course, tens of millions of people.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:07:32] Cousteau reminded me, back to Jacques for a moment, that the coral reefs naturally died off five times in the planet’s history as part of the great die offs. One of the things we must realize is that our perspective of time is narrow. A few centuries or a few thousand years, perhaps from records or our own lifetime, which is decades at most and the planet has gone through some natural changes and sea level and the ice ages are a great example, which we’re going to get to. But we’re now in a new era, as we’re going to see.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:08:56] So there were natural climate changes. There were natural changes to the ocean, like the coral reefs that had no impact by humans. But now we’re in a new era and that’s what’s critical to appreciate and put in perspective. The natural changes which were part of geologic biologic history and now what’s happening that’s different, that’s triggered by us and how can we see that? Can we see where things are headed so that we can begin adapting while there’s still time?
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:09:25] So let’s talk a little bit about the problem. We’ve got huge amounts of humans that live within a certain distance of the coastlines and we have rising sea levels. Let’s talk and explore a little bit about that problem. Can you frame it for us? And then we can start to talk about some of the science.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:09:41] Sure. In fact, I’ve got a few slides I’ve pulled together, and I’ll tell your viewers how to get a set of slides at the end of this talk, because this may warrant them going a little bit deeper. But if I can, let me share a screen and take you through just four or five slides, which will give a visual to my description of how sea levels have changed and what it means for the coastline.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:10:30] So this is a NOAA graph, colourized just to show mean sea level scenarios for the year 2100 on the right-hand side. It starts off with sea level going back to 1800 on the black line on the left. So, it’s a big picture, but it’s for a couple of purposes. Sea level has been rising a little bit in the last century or two. That’s the black line. Now we know that things are changing quickly and we’ll talk about Antarctica and Greenland in a minute, the source of the major rise and there are different projections and that’s what those different colored lines show and they show anywhere from two feet to eight feet, from a little over 60 centimeters to a little over two meters. That’s a huge span, of course. It’s unprecedented which is important here to understand. We’ll talk about why it’s hard to predict and why our tendency is to underestimate sea level rise in the current era.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:11:54] So this looks back to the last Ice Age, which was 20,000 years ago, the peak of the last ice age. It’s dramatic in what it’s going to tell us. Sea level was 390 feet – 120 meters – lower than present. It rose, not smoothly, not even in a smooth curve, but in a couple of steps. The most recent one was 11,000 years ago when it changed slope rather quickly.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:12:20] If we’d been in any of those yellow three arrows, the inflection points, and had looked to the recent past and thought we could predict what was about to happen, we’d be wrong because of the inflection point, the change in slope. This is a really simplified diagram, but it is based upon lots of scientific data. Sea level got to the present level about 6000 years ago, that’s when it seems to have leveled off and that’s pretty much human civilization. If you think about it, the written record goes back about 6000 – 8000 years. So, we’ve tended to believe sea level had stabilized and for all appearances it had. But the purpose of this slide is to show that sea level has naturally changed almost 400 feet.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:13:11] If we melt all the remaining ice on the planet, we’re going to raise sea level another 212 feet to give us a sense of what’s at stake here. So, let me just give a few other perspectives now. This chart is a chart I put together. It’s in both my prior book, The High Tide of Main Street and in the new one, Moving to Higher Ground. It’s 400,000 years from left to right. The present is on the right-hand side. The green graph is carbon dioxide, what we think of as a greenhouse gas, so color coded to remember. Red is temperature or heat, again, easy to remember and blue is sea level. There are a few things to notice in this that for the 400,000 years shown here and going back two and a half million years, there’s been a natural change in all three parameters, carbon dioxide, ocean temperature and sea level.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:14:10] You can see the peaks line up and they’re rather evenly spaced between 95,000 and 125,000 years. That’s because of a solar cycle or orbital variation the Milankovitch cycle. Without getting technical here, the point is that there was a natural reason why the Earth’s temperature changed repeatedly for millions of years. It’s about every hundred thousand years and it’s about a 20/80 split, just rounding things off for simple numbers. Carbon dioxide rose. Temperature rose, and sea level rose as the ice melted for 20,000 years – and then fell for 80,000 years, and you can see that repeating pattern, that’s without human influence. Now what’s changed is in the upper right of this graph, the green line, CO2, has broken out of 280 parts per million and is now at 414 parts per million, 40% higher than in millions of years.
Thermal Expansion of Water
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:15:13] With that extra carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, as we call it, the temperatures are warming and in fact, the red is starting to tick upward. As the world gets warmer, the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica melt and there’s also thermal expansion of seawater. Because of that ice melting and because of the oceans just expanding slightly as they warm, sea levels are starting to rise. Now what becomes quite clear with this graph is that there was a natural climate change that we think of as the ice age cycles, but now we’ve broken out of that. The huge increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of burning fossil fuels in the last century or two is starting to cause the warming. That principle was proven in 1859, predicted even earlier than that. It’s easy to demonstrate that carbon dioxide traps heat and we are in uncharted territory and sea levels are rising. These lines stay in synchronization over hundreds of thousands of years. Therein lies the problem, because if temperature and sea level follow the green line at all, we are going to see great flooding, because these lines for a couple of different principles of physics tend to stay in synchronization – all three lines as they have throughout geologic history. There’s just a lag time for the carbon dioxide to cause the warming and for the warming to melt the ice and to raise sea level.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:16:53] So, one or two more slides and then we’ll get back to the conversation. Two slides to show the increasing rate of sea level rise. Since we’ve kept records in 1880, global average sea level has risen about 1.7 millimeters a year. That’s about a sixth of an inch. That rate has doubled in the era for which we have satellite records of sea level, starting in 1993. In the last decade, the rate is now increased to 4.8 millimeters a year, almost triple what it was for the last century. So, you can see by the changing slope there, designated by those dotted lines, that the angle of slope is increasing significantly.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:17:42] As a final graphic. We’ve had satellite sea level measurements only since 1992. We just launched the sixth in a series of satellites to do the precise measurement of sea level, but this line shows quite clearly that starting from 1993, the rate was two millimeters a year, which would be eight inches a century, if it just went straight line. Then it increased to three millimeters a year, which would be 12 inches over the course of a century.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:18:17] For the last decade, it’s at 4.8 millimeters a year, which would be 19 inches over a century. Just 19 inches this century would be hard to adapt to. But the problem is the increasing angle of slope, the acceleration. This line is not stopping. In fact, it’s accelerating. The doubling time is shortening. Some people say it’s going to become exponential growth. We’ll see if that happens or not. But the clear point is the rate of sea level rise is accelerating, and that has big implications for the coastlines, to your question.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:18:52] So that’s kind of the graphic part of this talk. Knowing that sea level moves up and down naturally 400 feet is surprising to almost everyone. That was, again, not caused by humans, but now we have changed the composition of the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide is trapping more heat. It’s measurable with strange effects from more wildfires to more rainfall, because the oceans are evaporating more. The most significant physical single factor is that as sea level goes up foot by foot or centimeters by centimeters or meter by meter, the coastline is going to move and we’re unprepared for that. We don’t see it because we’re prepared to look for storm damage and extreme high tides, king tides, flooding from everything from storms to rain to runoff, but it’s the incremental change of sea level per year, which presently, as I say, is on the order of a fifth of an inch, five or six millimeters. We don’t see that, but it’s like a drip filling the bucket. It’s the accumulation.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:20:33] This is great, let’s go back to your video and I’ll ask some questions about this.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:20:49] So we’re talking about sea level rise. For people who live along the coastlines, there’s this interesting disconnect where they’re worried about how far the sea is going to creep in and we’re looking at rates at which it goes up. So how can we transcend those two differences and what types of regions, especially around the US, are going to see the sea creeping into coastlines the most from this this kind of rise? How far can it come in from things like just an inch or two of sea level rise?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:21:23] Well, with an inch, we’re probably not going to notice anything, frankly. But it’s the accumulation, as I say, it’s like the drip filling the bucket or the bathtub, is a good way to think of it. In terms of the metrics, and let’s not limit it to the US, let’s think of this globally, even though we can designate the US as well. It’s a bit counterintuitive that for each foot or meter of higher sea level, coastal experts say that we can get up to 300 times the inland incursion, in other words, if sea level moves up one foot or about 30 centimeters, it could go in inland at 300 feet or 100 meters, that’s huge. It seems counterintuitive, but it depends upon the coastal topography, the profile. So, in places like Florida, it’s one thing, but up through the Carolinas and even up into New England and around the Gulf Coast, we have a very shallow slope.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:22:23] In places like California, we have an abrupt slope generally, and often, significant bluffs or cliffs. So, people there may be 30 feet above, but harbors and marinas are down at sea level, of course, or navy bases and airports. So, there’s huge vulnerability to higher sea level. Again, we tend to miss it because right now it’s fractions of an inch and we’re looking for the next 10-foot wave from a storm or even the extra foot of flooding from a high tide. But it’s that drip, drip, drip filling the bucket. It is changing and it is going to change.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:22:58] The other counterintuitive thing is that when you go inland, whether it’s here in Florida or most places on the southeastern United States, it rises steeply at the beach berm, the sand dunes. That’s how coastlines build up. But then it falls off to the west of that, down to an Intercoastal Waterway or marshlands or up tidal rivers. And so, the flooding doesn’t first happen right at the coast like it does during a storm, which is, again, counterintuitive. In many places, just 50 feet in from the water you may be 20 feet up, but you’re going to go back down to sea level as you get out toward the Everglades here in Florida, but the same thing happens up through New England with the cranberry bogs or even through the Carolinas with the swamp and along the Gulf Coast. So, it’s all rather counterintuitive.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:23:55] We have this visual of sea level hitting the shore because of a storm wave that may be 10 feet high. That’s going to cause erosion, but it’s the incremental erosion that happens without a storm that’s changing the coastline and sea level, again, has been stable for 6,000 years. So, it’s not going to change in our lifetime very much but even if it changes a foot or two, or three or four, or a meter or so, that’s going to have an impact.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:24:29] It will first be seen at docks and marinas and places where we’re at a critical height, supposedly above high tide. That’s already changing because at these extreme high tides follow roughly a 19-year tide cycle. A tide goes daily and then lunar monthly and then peak annual and then following an 18.6-year cycle for tides. So, they’re a little magical on their own or mysterious. But sea level has not changed much in the thousands of years of human history and civilization, and so we’ve got to think in different levels.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:25:09] We’ve got to think about temporary flooding from a storm, how a tide cycle seems to be getting higher, but that’s really reflecting that base sea level is inching upward and pushing the tide cycle upward. While the southeastern United States has more vulnerability – from Seattle, Washington, to Vancouver, Canada, to San Diego to Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles, we have coastal vulnerability all over the world and there’s some countries that have it even worse, from Vietnam to Bangladesh to Indonesia to India and parts of China. There are huge cities with, I mean, literally 15 or 20 million people that are not anticipating sea level rise in their planning.
We need to adapt in advance of the flooding
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:25:58] My contention is that we need to adapt in advance of the flooding because most buildings and infrastructure last 100 years. So, you can’t wait for the water to rise and then say, now we’re going to build everything five feet higher. Now is the time to start planning for higher sea level to come because it’s inevitable that melting in Greenland and Antarctica is getting faster and faster. I take a lot of groups there on fact finding trips to Greenland to see what’s happening. Its mind boggling how big it is. I mean, it’s the size of the eastern United States. It’s got two miles of ice on it. Antarctica is seven times bigger than Greenland. Combined, that’s where 98 % of the world’s ice is. If it all were to melt, sea level will be 212 feet or 65 meters above present. That would take at least 500 years to happen, probably maybe a couple thousand years, though we couldn’t tolerate even three meters or ten feet of sea level rise at present. We need to start planning in advance.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:27:02] I’ve seen the devastation that even a few feet of rising in this case, the Great Lakes, which have seen some really high-water levels and record levels in the past few years, I’ve seen the devastation that can do to people’s personal property, to their homes, their family homes, to businesses, the economy, industry. So, it really has all these kinds of snowballing effects.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:27:27] I’m glad you brought up the Great Lakes because there’s a lot of misunderstanding that even though we have ship going traffic to the Great Lakes, of course, there’s over a dozen locks that allow both ships to get from sea level through the St. Lawrence Seaway and up to Lake Ontario, as far as Lake Superior, I guess. The Great Lakes are between 250- and 600-feet above sea level, we tend to forget that. Although there is some height increase in the water level, as you just pointed out, Rick, as you know, that’s either from more rainfall, which we’re getting through more evaporation on a warmer planet or perhaps melting glaciers in some places. That’s happening all over the world from there to the Himalayas to the Alps, again in a warming planet. So, lake levels are changing a little bit, and that’s certainly an issue but they’re going to be much more stable than sea level because I don’t think you’re going to see more than a foot or two rise this century, maybe a little more, but sea level could be 10 feet and is accelerating.
Alteration of the Hydrologic Cycle
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:28:33] I think that’s interesting and it goes back to what you were talking about, coastal planning. This is something I wanted to get into and I know we’ve got many layers to unravel here when we’re thinking Great Lakes, we’re still looking at an overall alteration of the hydrologic cycle, but we’re seeing it manifest itself in different ways, changing precipitation patterns versus what you were talking about, large amounts of sea ice coming from Greenland and coming from western and possibly eastern Antarctica and adding to the total volume of water in the ocean.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:29:09] I assume that there are also very different planning strategies. So, in the Great Lakes, we tend to get high water on the order of every 25 to 30 years. So, you have devastation during that time and then it goes back down again and then you’ve got kind of a period of time and then you wait another 25, 30 years and it goes back up. There are also these overarching management levels in terms of how much water do we let, say, out of the Moses-Saunders Dam. Obviously, there’s not a dam in management for the ocean where we can do anything about this volume of water in there.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:29:45] So let’s think about planning. You have people’s personal lives. You have economic activity, you have industry. I mean, not only do people live on the shoreline, but there are a lot of power plants on the shoreline because water intakes for cooling and things such as that. So, what’s kind of your general overarching strategy or message? Is it just about moving inland? Is it about hardening our shorelines or is it about some mix of strategies that are tailored to the specific regions that are going to adapt? What does this involve?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:30:24] The latter. Different places require different adaptations and it’s going to range from building things higher in some places, seawalls, in some cases, putting things on floats. It’s going to take a whole new attitude of engineering in the coastal environment. Fortunately, back to the lakes for just a moment, lakes are going to be relatively stable – lakes and rivers. I think there’s going to be a resurgence of interest and values and shipping and commerce back into places like the Great Lakes because they’re going to be relatively stable compared to what’s happening in the ocean. The idea that the ocean will be meters higher, let’s just take three meters as a good place to think ahead to, that’s 10 feet roughly. That’s going to change coastlines big time. The Great Lakes will be unaffected by that, of course, and other lakes around the world. There are places we’re going to probably build huge dams to try and control ocean level, but those will be massive projects. But the simple fact is that, as we saw in one of those earlier graphs, I showed ocean height moves up and down regularly 120 meters or 400 feet. Whether we get 10 or 20 feet this century, we will see – and it partly depends on what we do with restricting greenhouse gas emissions and how we make our energy from fossil fuels.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:31:55] There’s enough heat in the oceans already that even if we went 100 % renewable energy today, never burnt any more petroleum, natural gas or coal, we’re still going to get sea level rise because we’ve already warmed the oceans, one degree Celsius roughly, which is almost two degrees Fahrenheit. That extra heat in the ocean means that the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica will get smaller. As they get smaller, sea level will rise to heights we’ve just never experienced as a society. So, we do have to start planning in advance because it’s everything from building codes, to unlocking our ingenuity.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:32:37] Perhaps, there’ll be technologies and methods of building and materials to deal with the corrosive environment as we put more things on floats. For all human civilization, we’ve assumed that sea level was a benchmark, you know, we talk about the height of property above or below sea level, right? I mean, as if it’s a datum and it’s a zero point, as if it’s unchanging. Well, we’ve already seen in the last 30 years that it’s changing, you know, and the whole concept that sea level is not a standard reference point like a surveyor’s marker, but itself is changing, is a really challenging concept from surveying to property rights to what you’re financing with banks, to how you design things.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:33:27] We’re not thinking ahead yet because, take an example, when you design a bridge, you figure out how many cars or trucks can be on it, figure out the weight and you decide what the total weight load of the bridge is. Then you add in a big factor of safety, usually double or more the weight load that you calculate for the bridge. We’re getting confused because we’re saying, well, we know that sea level is going to rise at least a meter, let’s say, and think we’re going to design to that, that’s dumb. If you’re not sure if sea level is going to rise one or two meters, you better start designing for three because you need the margin of safety, because we’re building everything on the coast from nuclear power plants to oil refineries, as I think you mentioned, but also homes and businesses and ports and harbors and marinas and power plant cooling systems and things like that. These things last for at least 50 years, in most cases, one hundred years. You look around town and find bridges and aqueducts and water systems and things like that. Those were started a century ago typically and so we’ve got to get ahead of the curve.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:34:39] We’re talking about real long-term planning, right? So, we don’t have to continue to do things over and over and be in this constant state of reacting to these big changes we’re seeing. I assume it is necessary for local, state and federal governments to come up with a concerted plan together. For example, if you have, an apartment block in New York City that is protected by a large wall, that is great but we want to protect the entire city, not just a small area.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:35:12] So how do we start to bring this together? How do we offer incentives? How do we protect the individual experiences, homes and businesses while we adapt to this? And I know it’s a mix of strategies and it’s based on the area and this should also be mixed together with reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, I assume, because that will overall extend out how long our planning will be good for, how fast we need to adapt.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:35:46] So what are the types of incentives that you can give coastal communities to encourage them to take action against this threat? This could be an opportunity for them.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:36:05] They are all good questions and there’s a lot wrapped up there. So, in terms of the incentives, the first thing we’ve got to start with is an awareness of what could happen and hardly anybody appreciates the range of sea level that’s happened historically and what we’re now seeing happening faster and faster because of the melting of Greenland and Antarctica. We need to get a common awareness of the magnitude of what can happen, because I don’t think it’s all officials, I don’t think it’s just government that has to deal with this. Government will adapt better when the people understand what’s at stake here and right now. Most people either think climate change is a hoax, as we’ve heard or they think that if we just get plastics out of the ocean or deal with other environmental things, that somehow climate change will go away, and that’s not true. Or they think that if we do the very important work of getting off fossil fuels and slowing the rise in greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, that will stop sea level from rising, and that’s not true because we’ve already stored so much heat in the ocean.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:37:20] So the first thing, without getting scientific about it and detailed, we need a growing awareness in the public that even at the current increased heat level, we’re going to melt a lot of ice and the sea is going to rise. It’s kind of analogous to: nobody must tell you every day or me every day that I could live another hour or another 40 years, which is the truth. I could go and get a life insurance policy and say I’ve got, you know, 26 years probably to live or whatever the number is. We’ve all seen those projections, but we know that life’s unpredictable and we plan accordingly, we buy life insurance, we do estate planning. We do things to take care of our family so that if something tragic happens to us tomorrow that we understand that the government doesn’t do that for us. We do it because we know the realities of life. Well, the reality of sea level is that we can’t predict it exactly, we do need to get off fossil fuels and slow the warming or it’s going to get catastrophic.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:38:27] We need people to understand that sea level being stable for the last few centuries or a thousand years has been unusual and that sea level moves up and down greatly. The more that people understand and can separate sea level from what’s in the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River or the Thames River in London or Indonesia’s rivers, the more people get a little science education and realize that there was a natural climate change called the ice ages. It’s been a repeating cycle for 2.5 million years of Earth history. We know that, there’s no doubt or speculation about that. But we’re in a new era and we’ve got to get off fossil fuels as soon as possible, hopefully putting a price incentive in there. We’ve got to prepare to be more resilient for more wildfires, more high temperature days, heavier rainfall that all go with a warmer planet. That’s being resilient.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:39:25] Then this one feature, sea level, which determines the shoreline. As sea level goes up, the shoreline goes inland. Because we were fooled into thinking sea level is stable until 20 or 30 years ago and now it’s accelerating, we’ve all got to “talk this new reality.” As I say, you hate to think we’re going to die, but we’re all going to die, and so we enjoy life. We do good things during our lives. We take care of our family, but we do make preparations, knowing the uncertainty of life as our responsibility for our community and our family.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:40:04] Sea level is a little bit different than that. But the fact is, once we realize that sea level has moved up and down 400 feet, 120 meters, and now it’s rising faster and faster, now is the time to bring this into architecture and engineering and planning departments and law and finance. I mean, even a 30-year mortgage may have to be re-evaluated for rising sea level in some places, particularly in places where the land is going down, so sea levels are rising. I should explain this, as you know, in some places, the land subsides, it’s either compacting or the tectonic plates are tilting a little bit, or it’s because we’re drawing water and petroleum out of the ground, which further causes it to compact. In places like New Orleans or Venice, Italy, or Norfolk, Virginia, or Jakarta, Indonesia, the land is going down and so sea level appears to be going up faster there because the land is going down. There are a few places like the northern latitudes from Alaska to Scandinavia where the land is coming upward, or uplifting. So that affects the perception of sea level, but global sea level is rising right now, about a fifth of an inch a year. It’s the acceleration, as we discussed a minute ago, and we can see where this is headed. It’s just that the challenge is, it’s not in our lifetime or not in the human time frames of year to year that we can see easily.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:41:36] Here’s the exciting thing, because I know one of your questions was, what does this mean for young people and careers? In a way, it’s exciting. We get to reinvent architecture and engineering and what to put on floats and coastal infrastructure and ports and transportation systems with this new challenge. We’re going to have decades to do it, but we really need to get started. It means that lots of professions are going to need to reinvent themselves, purely as a result of unstoppable rising sea level.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:42:13] That makes sense John.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:42:15] There are reminders all around of how high sea level has been. This is not something that I need to show you a detailed chemical analysis of. You can go to the shores of islands in the Bahamas and you can look up at coral reefs that were once some amount of feet underwater.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:42:36] Sure. Now you can find sharks teeth that are now on cliffs a couple hundred feet above sea level too as a common example. There’s even marine sediments at the top of Mount Everest, by the way, which most people don’t know. The other thing you must consider is that mountains have been built up and land has uplifted to, so you’ve got to back that out, but you’re quite right. We can see even with adjustments for tectonics and uplift, we can back out of that what the depth was when the sediments were laid down, and yes, it’s quite clear that sea level has been up and down over history.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:43:15] That’s part of the rigor of the scientific process, is taking everything into account and in extracting the signal from it.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:43:24] Right.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:43:24] I like the kind of pragmatic approach as well, taking these risks into account and planning for variability. Now, if I am, say, a city planner, are we looking at planning for the absolute worst-case scenario? For example, say I’m going to plan to 2100 and I’ve got a range of variability that the science tells us that sea level rise is going to be superimposed. On top of that, I’ve got things like hurricane intensity and frequency. So, do I plan for that once in 100 years scenario, with the strongest hurricane we might expect in 100 years on top of the most sea level rise? Or is it some sort of risk assessment in the same way that you said we do with insurance and things like that? Is that all stuff that still must be learned and talked about and incorporated into how we do things? Has that all been decided?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:44:23] Good questions there. So, first, we should think of flooding as what I like to say is five kinds of flooding. I do them in order: Storms because we all visualize a hurricane or typhoon hitting the shore with the big waves. Rain, we’re getting more rain, which is more evaporation from the oceans, rain comes down and it could be five inches or five centimeters but then it goes downhill and it can multiply. So that’s downstream runoff or just down slope runoff or even to the lower street in Miami. So, there’s storms, rain runoff, then tides, which are not weather related. Tides are based upon the pull from the planets and they go through a daily, lunar monthly, and then 19-year cycle, the extreme tides. We’re seeing sea level rise manifest in high tides because of the fifth factor, which is sea level rise. So, we have storms, rain, runoff, tides and sea level rise. Then there’s erosion, which is a bit different. But we tend to confuse all those things. So, for planning purposes, back to your question, we’ve got to look at all of that because you don’t want your house to flood at the simplest level – nor your restaurant or your subway or anything else on the coast.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:45:38] We’ve always taken what we thought was the worst case, but sea level was stable. Now, if you’re planning for a hurricane or an earthquake, you don’t plan for a medium one, that would be dumb. If we had a category one to five hurricane and planned on a three, you’d get fired quickly. We tend to plan for a worst-case scenario with a margin of safety on top of that, typically. Now the idea that sea level is rising is a new parameter. We need to plan for the worst case, but we don’t know whether we’re going to get one to three meters of sea level rise this century, and that’s going to depend on how successful we are getting off fossil fuels. So back to your very good question, if you were a planning director, whether it be in Miami or New York City or San Francisco or Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon or Calcutta or anywhere else in the world, what should you plan for?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:46:38] I think you should do one of two things. You should either plan for the reasonable worst case, which to me is three meters, 10 feet, but that’s a daunting challenge in some cases. Or you plan what we call adaptive engineering. You say, I’ll plan for a meter, but design it so the foundation of the seawall or the building or whatever, allows me to modify it later if things continue to get worse. You can build a 10 story building a floor at a time if the foundation is right. If you knew up front that you might build a 10 storey building, you can build it as you need, adding layers. Seawall is the same thing, but you’ve got to know up front to design the right foundation, otherwise you’ve got to tear it all down every time. It’s better to raise something three feet one time than to raise it one foot three times. It’s a lot cheaper, but it’s also disruptive for a community. So you’ve got to look at everything from what kind of community we’re talking about. Is this a residential street, or a shopping street, or is it a port with big concrete wharves and it doesn’t really matter if we just get a little more aggressive about it.
We Should Plan for Relative Worst-Case Scenarios
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:47:50] So the situation will dictate our attitude. We should plan for relative worst-case scenarios, but where we can’t allow for future adaptability, allow adjustment of the engineering. Then there’s some things we can put on floats. There’s houses in the Netherlands in one place where they know they’re going to get flooding temporarily and so they’ve designed short term houseboats, where they float up – and the power and water and wastewater all comes through an umbilical. So, the houses may float for 20 days a year during extreme high tides and then they settle back down in the ground. So, there’s lots of creative things to come up with.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:48:38] Just like with life insurance or something else, to use the other metaphors or hurricane or earthquake planning, it’s better to plan conservatively and we’re not doing that.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:48:53] There is precedent in the US even dating before more recent planning and recent engineering things like we’ve seen up in the Netherlands or what they’re planning, say, off the coast of New York City. We’ve seen dating back to over 100 years ago large changes in coastal adaptability. I don’t know if it’s something you’d want to go into, but what happened down in Galveston Island, where in the early 1900s, it was the most destructive natural disaster in US history, and they literally picked up old churches and buildings and built the island up a certain amount of feet and placed a big seawall.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:49:36] I was living in Texas when Hurricane Ike hit and we had a lot of refugees, friends of ours, who had their homes flooded up to the second story and they lived closer to the bay, which hadn’t been built up in the same way. So, they flooded from the bay side, the seawall and the extra height they added to the island did its job and protected most of the economic center of that island. Bolivar Peninsula, the next barrier island to the east that had not been built up over 100 years ago was completely wiped clean.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:50:12] Great example. Galveston, as you say, 100 years ago, because of that terrible hurricane, they erected a 17-foot seawall and raised essentially every building in downtown Galveston 17 feet and it has given them a lot more resiliency. There are a few other examples we can cite. Seattle did the same thing in a part of downtown Seattle, also about 100 years ago, because the land was sinking and they realized that the flooding was just getting worse. So, they built everything up 22 feet higher. So, there are places like that, but that won’t work everywhere. Particularly where you have porous rock like in South Florida or the Bahamas or most coral based islands, the porous limestone allows water to infiltrate in through the rock. So, building a seawall won’t work, but we can build the land height up higher.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:51:04] If you look around the world with the almost 8 billion people we have, you can’t build all the land up higher to compensate for sea level being higher. We’ve got to start looking into the future. I mean, it’s one thing when the land is subsiding and getting a little more flooding or it’s inch by inch. But for the first time in human civilization, we need to look ahead to sea level being at least a meter, if not three to five meters higher. It’s daunting. It’s scary. But you know what? It’s a great challenge and the fact that it can’t happen tomorrow, that it’s gradual, is a blessing. We literally have time to engineer a new coastal environment, and it’s going to provide great opportunity for young people. Because whereas engineers and architects and all the other professions I’ve mentioned, they may have thought they knew how to do things right, this new truth, which is going to be more of an issue for young people who are going to live another 60 or 80 years, means they get to reinvent professions, and that’s exciting. We may have thought everything was invented for electronics and technology, the truth is basic coastal design, engineering, utilities, ports, airports, military bases, we must rethink it all in this new reality to recognize that sea level has moved up and down 400 feet. I don’t think I pointed it out with that prior graph, but the maximum natural rate was about 4.7 meters, that’s about 15 or 16 feet in a century.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:52:51] That happened without human intervention. Now that we have better geologic history. When we start thinking about that, you either say that’s the scariest news, or how fortunate that it can’t happen “tomorrow” like the tsunami that instantly killed 200,000 people, as happened about 20 years ago in Indonesia. Sea level rise can’t happen that quickly because it takes a while to melt the ice sheets, but the reverse is true; you can’t stop it quickly either. So, we have decades to adapt, but we can’t keep kicking the can down the road and delaying it. We must start adapting as soon as possible, because building codes and roadways and tunnels and train systems and electrical distribution systems are all oriented to a flooding height.
We’re Seeing a Little Bit of Sea Level Rise, but it’s Just the Beginning
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:53:47] We think of floods as being storms, rain, runoff, dams breaking or rivers overflowing. We’re seeing a little bit of sea level rise, but it’s just the beginning. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, as they say. By the way, I should point out, just as an example of how much we all must learn, we think of icebergs, they’re about 10 % out of the water. As icebergs melt, they don’t affect sea level, and that’s a surprising fact to people.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:54:18] An iceberg floats roughly 10 % out of the water, but as it melts, it compacts. Ice is less dense than water and that’s why ice floats on lakes and things like that. As a result, a floating iceberg or an ice shelf that’s floating on the water doesn’t affect sea level as it melts. It’s the ice from land that breaks off into a new iceberg. That’s like adding an ice cube to a glass. That does raise the water level, of course. Also, the meltwater from land and the thermal expansion of sea water. That’s why sea level rises, not because of icebergs or ice shelves melting.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:55:00] Thanks for clearing that up, John, I think that is an important clarification.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:55:05] I’ve seen the misconception of the ice cube melting in the glass, but what we’re talking about is adding a second ice cube, not allowing the one that’s already in there to melt. I would like to mention quickly, this concept of living shorelines. I’ve seen it up here in the Great Lakes. I’ve seen it on the Atlantic Coast. We have natural kind of flood control systems and these are things like marshes, wetlands and natural sand berms and things like that.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:55:46] I know that one thing that we’re really concerned about is will marshes keep up with sea level rise? Can they trap enough sediments that we will still have these coastal features? That’s important because then can we build constructed wetlands that will help to keep up with sea level rise? Can we do constructed berms and we can replant, say, native vegetation on them that will keep those berms together and instead of seeing a sea wall, you’re going to see a berm with natural vegetation. Is this a possibility or is the rate of sea level rise such that we really need to look towards hardened shorelines? Speaking specifically of, say, the US Atlantic coastline.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:56:29] So I think it’s all the above to some degree. What I mean by that is I certainly think the natural shorelines from marshlands to mangroves, what they call horizontal levees in some places, as opposed to a hard sea wall structure, they’re a good idea certainly. It gives us flexibility. The natural vegetation or even oyster shells or oyster beds are used in some places, can absorb energy and are not as sensitive to a little bit of flooding as a built structure, a building or a roadway.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:57:13] So the natural systems are great but to your second point, when you look at the ability of a natural system like the Everglades, for example, to grow, to keep up with the rate of sea level rise. It can happen at present when we’re in this couple of millimeters a year phase, but as sea level gets to meters a century, tens of centimeters, natural systems can’t keep up with it. So, we’ve got to do both. I think we need more and more natural ecosystems on the shore to be adaptive, but we can’t believe that that’s the solution to adapt to sea level rise. Because of this acceleration, as I showed in that chart, looking back over the last century, it was 1.7 millimeters a year. That’s a tenth of an inch roughly. The rate has doubled since the precise satellite sea level measurements began in 1993. The rates of change has almost has doubled again in the last decade. So, we’re on this accelerating growth. It’s like high interest rates, the compounding of interest, if you have ever looked at what happens with savings or financing and stuff, if you have high interest, it gets away from your easily.
The Ice is Going to Melt Faster and Faster
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:58:37] We’re in preparation mode. We need natural systems, the more the merrier. We need to slow the warming, to slow the change. But we’ve got to realize that just because of the heat that’s already stored in the ocean, which is an enormous amount of heat to warm the oceans almost two degrees Fahrenheit, one degree Celsius, that the ice is going to melt faster and faster. It’s kind of an escalating or accelerating curve. The natural systems won’t keep up with it some time by mid century. So now is the time to change the building codes as well as implementing the natural barriers.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [00:59:18] Is this increase in rate primarily due to feedback mechanisms that are inherent in how the earth switches climate?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [00:59:27] The feedback mechanisms are certainly part of it. But if you apply a lot of heat to ice, it doesn’t melt instantly and we’ve warmed the oceans again, roughly one degree Celsius, roughly two degrees Fahrenheit – and the ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland are collapsing year by year. Even with lots of heat in the Earth’s system, the ice doesn’t melt tomorrow. It’s like taking a big block of ice and putting it on your kitchen table. If it’s a big enough block, it’ll be there tomorrow. It’ll be a little bit smaller, but it takes a while to melt ice. Remember, the ice on Greenland and Antarctica is over a mile thick, in some places, two or three miles – several kilometers – thick. We’re finding caverns the size of Manhattan now underneath these ice sheets. These are hidden features that are rapidly deteriorating and there’s a delay time or lag time from applying the heat to seeing the effect.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:00:28] You can do that experiment at home. You can take a big pot of water, put a bunch of ice in it, let the water cool down and it’ll melt slowly once the water has gotten cool. But then turn the heat up for a second, turn the burner up on your stove. Just leave it till you see the ice start to melt quicker. Turn the heat off. The heat that we’ve put in the water from our stove is going to have an effect by accelerating the ice melt for a long time after you turn the heat off. There’s a thermal lag time. It makes sense when you think about it like that. We’ve got a block of ice, Antarctica, seven times Greenland in terms of ice mass. Antarctica by itself is far larger than the United States, covered by a mile of ice, and so we’ve applied heat and it’s melting faster. Even if we turned the heat off now, we haven’t seen the result because there’s a lag time to melt the ice. Just as if you put a giant block of ice on your kitchen table, it will take days for it to melt but here we’re talking decades or centuries.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [01:01:46] There’s so much to talk about here. Each one of these things we’ve talked about can then be taken in a bunch of different ways and we could probably talk all day about the science and adaptation strategies and those are conversations I would love to have.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [01:02:02] Let’s wrap this up for everybody. We know about this threat. We know that we need to plan, as we do for other things in the long term. We know, as you mentioned, that the key to all of this is kind of a bottom up, making sure that people know what’s going on, to make sure that we do the outreach with science and what it means for coastal communities. But even non-coastal communities because everybody is dependent on what happens along the coastline because of industries and how many people live there and things like that.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [01:02:37] So let’s wrap it up. If I am, say, a homeowner and say this is a family home that’s been on the coastline, it’s in a relatively low-lying area and I’m starting to be concerned about this. I’ve educated myself and I know that the ocean is going to continue to creep up on to my property. Erosion is a big issue; I’m just waiting for the next storm and I don’t know if that’s what’s going to do it or if I’m going to have another 10 or 20 years. Or if I’m a business owner in the same situation or a city council member trying to advise people. Now I’ve educated myself, what is the next step that I should be focused on? What’s kind of a take-home message for individuals who are trying to take this and work it into their lives?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:03:31] So the first thing is to do a vulnerability assessment and you can either hire a professional to do it or the truth is you can begin to do it yourself in most cases. How close is the water getting to your property or your threshold of your door or lowest window during the worst flooding events and knowing that sea level is going to rise and storms and rainfall are tending to get worse? You can take a precautionary view. You don’t want to wait till you have flooding to make plans to either improve things, elevate things or move.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:04:08] So let’s talk about that for a minute, because once your property is flooded, its value has gone down considerably. Surprisingly, it doesn’t take the property submerging for it to lose value, even if your property floods one day a year or three days a year, nobody wants to pay that much for it, if it’s in a flood zone. Even if your property hasn’t flooded, but the one a little bit lower than you is flooding and the water has been coming gradually uphill, your property is already being discounted in value because if you live in a neighborhood where there is increasing flooding, people are aware of that. So, property loses value certainly when it’s submerged, but even when it floods frequently, even one day a year. If it’s in a low-lying coastal area, just as the water gets closer to it. So those discounts are happening already in some cases. Some people are already either lifting their property level (with fill), moving, or elevating their houses.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:05:12] There’s a whole industry of lifting houses up and building a higher foundation. So, there’s a lot of different approaches that you’ve kind of got to look at on a case-by-case basis. The time to do it is sooner rather than later, for obvious reasons, because there is a discounting that’s already been documented of properties that are vulnerable to flooding. Now, the solution for you may be as simple as closing in a basement window opening, that may give you a much better situation. There may be some ways to reduce the flood potential of your property, but there may be a way to raise the house entirely. That’s becoming more and more common. At some point you may move to higher ground and there are people doing that already because they want to sell while the market values are high. Everybody’s going to decide for themselves, what their vulnerability to risk is, what their age is. If you’re 60 years old, you may want to do it now, not when you’re 80, even if it’s a ways off, because you’ve got to decide what point you are at in life – your family issues and all that and your health and just how vulnerable you are to a decrease in your property value.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [01:06:31] So this is great, John. I appreciate you talking about this stuff, because these are things where we’re not just a society waiting for, say, a seawall to be built.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [01:06:42] These are things that I can wake up and say, yeah, I’m concerned about this and these are the first few things that I might want to do. Maybe there’s a few small things I can do to give myself some breathing room in the short term. Then there are some planning strategies that I need to start to take and if that happens with larger, say, urban planning superimposed on top of that and just a changing mindset among society as we get educated, is that kind of how it will happen?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:07:12] Yeah, I think so. In my new book, Moving to Higher Ground, there’s a checklist for people to go through with their properties. I think it’s an 18-point checklist, so I should just put a plug in there for that. This is a personal issue, it’s a community issue, it’s for your family. And as you say, rising sea level is going to affect everything, even if you live in Denver or in Switzerland up in the mountains.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:07:38] The global supply chain is affected. So, your company, whether it be Wal-Mart or Costco or whatever, the goods may be interrupted during storm events more often. There are port cities today that are not going to be port cities 50 years from now and the people who can see the future can reduce their risk and perhaps even benefit.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:08:02] As I say, most fundamentally, we’ve got to get educated about this. It’s a very challenging and disturbing concept. We’ve never had significant sea level rise in human history. It’s been stable for 6,000 years, roughly. It’s risen a few feet. But before then, it was rising at 15 feet a century. I mean, that’s mind boggling. Now, someone like you, Rick, who lives on a great lake, you’re going to be in good shape. We have to educate people about their geography, if you will, at least a little bit. The Great Lakes may rise a little bit, but they’re not vulnerable to sea level rise. You’re hundreds of feet above sea level. In Florida here, people think that the whole state of Florida is going to go underwater. That’s not true at all. There are towns in Florida that are two hundred feet above sea level, such as Tallahassee, the state capital. In Orlando where everybody likes to go for the amusement parks and things like that…that’s 80 feet above sea level. It’s not in any danger of flooding. So, it’s partly getting aware and realizing that our preconceptions and misconceptions, that sea level is static, that climate change is a hoax, that we couldn’t possibly be changing the atmosphere’s heat retention and melting the icebergs or ice sheets. I say, we all have lots to learn. We should share it with friends and neighbors because it’s when there’s a growing awareness of good science, good earth science, that’s when there will be support for adaptation and more support to get us off fossil fuels.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [01:09:39] Thanks, John. I really appreciate you taking the time to educate us on these topics today.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [01:09:47] Your wealth of knowledge and the amount of outreach you’ve done is incredibly valuable. Take one minute and just tell us what’s in the future for you. What’s next?
New Book, Moving to Higher Ground
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:10:00] Well, my new book, Moving to Higher Ground will be out April 6th, 2021. It’s available for preorder at Amazon and Barnes and Noble already, I’m excited about that. I’ll be doing a speaking tour once the Covid-19 virus problem hopefully gets under control. My mission is really to share what I’ve learned in my decades of looking at sea level rise, which has changed in recent years, and really help us all plan differently for the future. It’s what I’ll do for the rest of my life, even if it’s something I stumbled on to.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:10:35] I really do think that for young people who ask what their career path might be, should be creative. I think that from architecture to engineering to oceanography to finance to law, all those things are going to be affected by sea level rise. What you and I learned when we were in school, is not the knowledge for the future. We have new information today and that makes it exciting to learn. People will find ways to marry different professions, to be an oceanographer who understands law or to be an architect who understands coastal or building regulations and that’s going to be an investment in the future.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:11:22] There’s going to be a lot of opportunity. Our accounting systems will have to change – perhaps a silly example, but we don’t depreciate land right now. We depreciate buildings and infrastructure. We write them off over 30 or 50 years. We leave land on our balance sheet because we thought land was permanent. Our accounting system is going to have to change. So, some people are going to get to dig in there and figure that out. This is a very profound change and it’s either scary or it’s exciting. I think we must look at the glass half full and say that, like all change in life, some of it’s not pretty or not what we want, but it’s what it is, and we should embrace it and we should see the opportunity ahead, which I think is going to be bigger than we can imagine.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [01:12:10] Thank you, John, I think that’s a very inspiring point to leave it on, and I hope that there are some young students out there who are seeing the opportunity in how a lot of these professions are going to change in ways that they can find their path by combining some of their interests. For example, say, oceanography, but you also major in urban planning or get into law or the other various subjects and think about these as real opportunities and look towards the future. Just like 100 years ago, they built the seawall in Galveston. What do we have to contribute now in our lifetimes where we’ll be saving people and property 100 or 200 years from now?
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:12:59] Thanks for your great questions and your insight as an oceanographer. For those that want to continue with this, if you send an email to [email protected], you can get a set of slides to use for free. There’s a weekly blog post and a newsletter that I do for people who want to get the latest information as I learn more.
Richard W. Smith, ideaXme world’s oceans ambassador: [01:13:20] Thank you, John. I hope to talk with you again sometime soon.
John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute: [01:13:23] Ok, thank you. I appreciate it.
To find out more:
John Englander’s slides.
Visit John Englander’s website here
Visit John Englander’s Blog and Newsletter See Level Rise Now
Credits: Richard W Smith, ideaXme world oceans ambassador.
If you enjoyed this interview check out ideaXme interview with Fionn Ferreira Google Science Fair Winner which is conducted by ideaXme world oceans ambassador Richard W Smith, oceanographer.
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