How’s this for poetic justice? In future years, the White House and all those federal agencies which acted so slowly after Hurricane Katrina smashed New Orleans last August, leading to an unknown amount of unnecessary death and suffering, will probably find their own D.C. offices threatened by catastrophic flooding from monster storms. They may be hunkering behind massive levees and fantastic floodgates, harried by the annual threat of Katrina-scale hurricanes.

Because one year after the great catastrophe in Louisiana, this much is clear: it’s coming to many more U.S. cities.

Barring a rapid change in our nation’s relationship to fossil fuels, every person who lives within shouting distance of an ocean will become de facto New Orleanians. Due to global warming, this is our future.

Oceans worldwide are projected to rise as much as three feet this century, and by double digits if the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets melt away. And intense storms are already becoming much more common. These two factors together will in essence export the plight of New Orleans, bringing the Big Easy “bowl” effect to the Washington area, as well as to Charleston, Miami, New York and other coastal cities. Assuming we want to keep living in these cities, we’ll have to build dikes and learn to exist beneath the surface of surrounding tidal bays, rivers and open seas-just like New Orleans.

We’d better be ready, because the hurricanes are coming, and they are more ferocious than they were in the past. Multiple scientific studies over the past year, the latest just last week, have found that rising sea-surface temperatures linked to global warming are causing an increase in the number of stronger hurricanes. One study by Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that hurricane wind speeds have doubled in the past 30 years. This may account for the fact that among the six most powerful hurricanes recorded in the Atlantic Basin-going back 150 years-three occurred over 52 days in 2005: Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

The higher sea levels that are coming will create other conditions that will make things even worse. In 1985, Hurricane Gloria made landfall north of New York Harbor. As a Category 2 storm, it could have had a serious surge tide. But it was a relative dud, causing only minor flooding. New York got lucky because the storm struck at maximum low tide, when the ocean had conveniently lowered itself a full five feet in relation to the land. Had Gloria arrived just six hours earlier or later, experts say, it would have been a monster, at least as destructive as the Great Hurricane of 1938 that killed 50 Long Islanders and caused billions in damage.

But with three feet or more of sea-level rise, we will be creating what amount to permanent high-tide conditions everywhere, guaranteeing that even Category 2 storms like Gloria will become surge-tide heavyweights.

“You’ve got a crisis situation, certainly,” says J. Court Stevenson, a marsh ecologist at the University of Maryland. “The buffering land forms that are the enemy of hurricanes will be gone. And the high water that is the best friend of big storms will be here in abundance.”

Fortunately, more and more people are getting it, appreciating the dangers we face if we do not move quickly and urgently to slow, stop and reverse global warming.  Even more importantly, we are in the beginning stages of the absolutely essential next major step for this movement: large-scale action in the streets.

We saw this last year on December 3rd, the first International Day of Climate Action. Thousands took action around the U.S. during this time, over 30,000 demonstrated in Montreal outside a major U.N. conference on climate change, and 80,000 demonstrated worldwide in at least 20 countries.

This year there will be a second International Day on November 4th. It is already clear from the organizing that has been begun worldwide that there will be many more countries and many more people taking part. Here in the USA local actions will focus on making climate issues prominent in voters’ consciousness as they go to the polls a few days later.

And last Saturday August 26th, a powerful action was held outside the national headquarters of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Hundreds of people heard inspiring speakers and musicians as we remembered the over 1800 who died as a result of Katrina and government negligence, called for jobs, housing and justice for those who want to return to their hometowns, and demanded an end to the NOAA leadership’s cover-up of the link between global warming and stronger major storms.

Toward the end of the action we held a moving “die-in,” scores of people lying on the concrete sidewalk in front of NOAA as the names of hundreds of those who died a year ago were read aloud. We concluded by joining hands in a circle and singing We Shall Overcome.

“We shall overcome-we are not afraid-we’ll walk hand in hand-the truth shall set us free.” Free to act commensurate with the urgency. Let’s make it so.

Mike Tidwell and Ted Glick are, respectively, Director and Coordinator of the U.S. Climate Emergency Council, www.climateemergency.org.
 

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