Gather Retreat From A Rising Sea: Hard Choices In An Age Of Climate Change Narrated By Orrin H. Pilkey Shown As Textbook

is clearly written and informative if somewhat repetitious, It also argues clearly for the concept of human contribute to climate change, i, e. , global warming.

Divided into eleven chapters in a briefpages, the narrative eats at the reader like the tides, returning again and again to the one possible ecological and economical response to the rising seas, retreat.
For someone living on a small island on which high tides are encroaching on one major road and storms are likely to cut us into three, the book is not encouraging.


Nature is the fundamental and indomitable antagonist, but it is supported by the work of developers, real estate agents, fossil fuel purveyors, and their minions in the state legislatures and Congress, like the moronic senator from Oklahoma, Inhofe Rep.
, and his snowball.

What is at stake is the expectation of largescale movements of refugees from lowlying land and eroding bluffs.
The authors see these as unavoidable as the land cannot withstand the effects of the oceans, In the US, we can look to Miami and the rest of southern Florida low, New Orleans delta,
and all of the McMansions built along the coastlines.
Irma gave us a recent taste as did Harvey, which did a bit of damage to the petroleum works lying along the Gulf Coast it isn't only private individuals who shall have to move.


The Yahoos in charge in the Trump Administration are either monumentally stupid or bought and paid for by those who still insist on profiting from their industries, i.
e. , the Koch boys, Rex Tillertson's old employer, etc, etc,

So, yes, the book is infuriating, especially after reading Ch,, "Deny, Debate, and Delay" pp, in which deniers' names are named, strategies for sowing doubt are detailed, all this on top of earlier information on the complicity of the US government in supporting shoreline rebuilding of houses that will never survive Ch.
.

Anyone who pays the taxes which allow government folly or worse in this matter should read this book, provide copies for political representatives, and vote for sanity.
Perhaps, checking out DoD and CIA analyses as well as those once available from the EPA and NOAA might add some ammunition to sustain and even win this battle.
The sea will not be defeated, but yahoo politicians can be, A clinical look at a worrying future

InHurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, It suffered from an immense category five hurricane withmph winds combined with afoot storm surge.
Safety measures put in place failed, either because of poor design or substandard materials, Two thousand deaths andb of damages later it was one of the worst storms ever to hit America.


So far

In this comprehensive book, the authors outline the sort and long term future with regards to the effects of climate change and expanding and rising seas, particularly concentrating on the effect that it will have coastal communities, businesses and infrastructure.
Being an American centric book they concentrate on Miami, New Orleans, California and New York, They do venture off to other places, reporting briefly on the UK and other islands round the world, but spend a fair amount of the book looking at what the Dutch have done and how they have dealt with a significant portion of the country being lower than sea level.


They consider the political aspects and the certain fact that the world will have to cope with millions of displaced environmental refugees.
They make suggestions on how we will be able to mitigate this and consider the problems that the climate change denial is causing.
The authors predict a frightening future for a sizable number of the population near the coast and argue powerfully for substantial and immediate changes to be made.
Even though the subject makes for grim reading, they seem to know their facts and their suggestions are based on real evidence.
Well worth reading even though it was quite American centric, Sadly, the book was littered with formatting errors, with random paragraphs and odd capitalisation, It was a review copy, and I hope they address it for final publication, because this is a book people need to read

Halfmanhalfbook

Breakaway ers received a copy of the book to review.

“For the past two centuries, two trends have been steady and clear around the United States.
Sea level has been rising, and more people have been moving closer to the coast,” stated NASA scientists.
The steadiness and ineluctability of these two trends have been observed and documented worldwide as well by scientists and international organizations.


We're fucked but won't admit it, America in particular, because they don't want to use the word 'retreat', Goes into details about how Miami, New Orleans and to a lesser extent Boston and small Alaskan villages are fucked, and overseas looks at Jakarta, Bangladesh, Pacific Islands.
There's a great bit in the Florida chapter devoted to just slagging Marco Rubia and republicans, On the other hand, New York and the Netherlands are planning ahead I liked the thing about using underground parking and parks as a place to hold storm water and just realized we have parks used for the purpose in my town, and the Dutch sandbar that erodes inland.


The penultimate chapter on climate change deniers was infuriating,

Highlighted:

Dutch adaptation: For example, the Dutch have built an underground parking garage in Rotterdam that doubles as a water storage area to hold water during flood events.
In addition, more and more parks in the Netherlands are being designated as storage areas for floodwaters that will be released once the flood conditions have passed.




The Dutch hope to take advantage of massive offshore sand deposits to help maintain their shorelines in their current location for as long as possible despite sealevel rise.
Indeed, sand replenishment as flood control is a major theme emerging from the Dutch plans, The Dutch are blessed with both massive supplies of sand and a massive supply of money, They are testing a new approach called the Sand Engine, which does not use the traditional methods of depositing sand directly on the beach or directly offshore.
Instead, the Sand Engine entails building, using offshore sand, a halfmile seaward hookshaped peninsula in front of the beach.
The idea is that the body of sand protruding seaward will erode and provide a continuous supply of sand to the adjacent beaches.
The back side of the hook will create a small lagoon sheltered from the waves to serve as a habitat for fish and a recreational spot for beach visitors.
Regardless of whether this engineering innovation is effective, the Dutch will be increasing their replenishment of beach sand as a cornerstone of their floodprotection plans.



Architecture and rising sea levels: There are many creative ideas about how to accommodate the anticipated increased flooding associated with sealevel rise.
The Dutch architect Koen Olthuis appears to be leading the way in the use of floating structures.
Olthuis calls for letting “water in and even making friends with it, ” His amphibious architecture allows buildings to detach from the ground during flood events, Olthuiss company and the Dutch Docklands firm have built Greenstar, a floating hotel and conference center in the Maldives, and are constructing a similar floating hotel in Norway called the Krystall.
HampP Architects, a Vietnamese firm, have designed a prototype of a lowcost floating house made from bamboo that is secured to pilings and sits atop recycled oil drums to allow the house to float during flood events.
Similarly, Ann Englishs Buoyant Foundation hopes to retrofit Louisiana homes in floodprone areas atop Styrofoam blocks to turn them into amphibious houses that can rise with floodwaters.



Our options: Like it or not, we will retreat from most of the worlds nonurban shorelines in the not very distant future.
Our retreat options can be characterized as either difficult or catastrophic, We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms.
In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic, These are the choices we have,


Raising awareness: King tide is a colloquial term for the very highest of tides.
In New South Wales, Australia, the Department of the Environment came up with the brilliant idea to use king tides to educate the public about sealevel rise.
This led to the Witness King Tides community photography project, which has spread, as the King Tide Photo Initiative KTPI, to a number of U.
S. states, British Columbia, and even Tuvalu, an island nation in the Pacific, Each of these organizations announces to the public the dates of the next king tide and urges citizens to document the nowroutine flooding with photos to display online.
These photographs of king tides offer a glimpse into our futurea preview of where the increasing levels

of the sea are headed and an engaging way to alert and educate the concerned, the skeptical, and the unaware.



Hope for three feet, but James Hansen expects more: The consensus among climatologists, glaciologists, and oceanographers is that our society should be prepared for afoot rise by.
For Norfolk, Virginia, where sealevel rise is unusually rapid, the expected rise could be,feet. Norfolk has such a high rate of sealevel rise because it is simultaneously affected by four of the main causes of sealevel change: the increased volume of seawater from melting ice the increased volume of seawater from warming oceans the subsiding land and the changes in ocean circulation causing the central Atlantic Ocean bulge to flatten and contribute water to the midAtlantic coast.
We discuss these causes later,

Currently, a widely accepted sealevel rise scenario is a minimum of,feet, a maximum offeet, and a likely rise offeet by the year, In thes, James Hansen, former director of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was the first to bring global climate change and sealevel rise to the attention of the U.
S. Congress. Then in, Hansen andcolleagues dropped a bombshell prediction of a possible maximumfoot sealevel rise in this century.
This number was based on the assumption that once the ice sheets begin to break up, melting will proceed at an accelerating, rather than a steady, pace.



Worst cases: The potential for sealevel rise from the worlds ice bodies goes something like this: If all of Greenlands ice melted, the sea level would risefeet.
If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted completely, the seas would risefeet, The much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise the seas byfeet, and all the worlds mountain glaciers would contribute betweenandfeet.



Didn't realize scientists measured sea level rise in this amount of detail: n, University of Arizona and NOAA scientists reported in an article in Nature Communications that the sudden surge of almostinches in sealevel rise in/between New York and Canada was probably due to a slowdown in a major ocean current system known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation AMOC, of which the Gulf Stream is a component.




The graphs of sealevel rise over time are what scientists call noisy because of the yeartoyear and decadeslong variations in some of the factors just cited.
Because of the many peaks and valleys on the line marking the sea level, at least a decade of data is required in order to sort out any trends.
One downward trend lasted formonths frominto earlywhen the global sea level dropped about,inch. According to a study published in Geophysical Research Letters in, the probable cause of this temporary drop was the number of torrential rainfall events in over ayear period/in Australia, coupled with the dry soils of the Australian desert and its poorly developed drainage system.
Much of the rain did not immediately reach the sea, Since then, however, the rate of sealevel rise has resumed its pre/pace,


On shorelines in northern latitudes, including Scandinavia, New England and eastern Canada, and on beaches from Puget Sound north, unconsolidated sands and gravels left behind by the glaciers provide much material for beach construction but are particularly vulnerable to erosion and failure by sliding.



Many of the subsidies are for second homes of wealthy homeowners.
We subsidize their flood insurance, and when their houses are destroyed, we provide emergency relief funding to rebuild their homes.
This welfare for the rich must stop, In an age of climate change with rising seas and the increased severity of storms, we can no longer afford to hide the true costs of building in hazardous coastal areas.
We must recognize that we do not owe anything to anyone foolish enough to build in such obviously dangerous places.
Rather, we should penalize such behavior, Our tax money could be better spent encouraging and facilitating a planned and managed retreat from the coastrelocating people to higher ground instead of repeatedly rebuilding in many areas that we never should have built in the first place.

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