Coastal communities all across the U.S. will be at significantly greater risk of flooding as sea levels rise at a rapid pace over the next 30 years, according to a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The report indicates that sea levels will rise 10 to 12 inches by 2050, as much in the next 30 years as they did in the past 100. That increase will lead to more frequent high-tide flooding and extreme storm surge heights.
“This report is a wake-up call for the US, but it's a wake-up call with a silver lining,” NOAA chief Rick Spinrad said at a Tuesday news conference. “It provides us with information needed to act now to best position ourselves for the future.”
Large coastal cities like Miami, New York and Washington have already seen their frequency of flooding double since the turn of the century. Scientists say this has transformed a “rare event” into a “disruptive problem.”
“Decades ago, powerful storms were what typically caused coastal flooding,” the NOAA said. Now “even common wind events and seasonal high tides regularly cause [high-tide flooding] within coastal communities, affecting homes and businesses, overloading stormwater and wastewater systems, infiltrating coastal groundwater aquifers with saltwater, and stressing coastal wetlands and estuarine ecosystems.”
That change has been attributed by scientists to sea level rise.
While the report didn’t delve into the price tag of an increased frequency of some of the nation’s biggest cities flooding, the NOAA’s National Ocean Service director Nicole LeBeof addressed the big-budget elephant in the room at a news conference.
“What I will say is that the magnitude of these impacts, direct and cascading, will be high,” LeBeof said. “Forty percent of the US population lives within 60 miles of our coastlines. There will be highly variable impacts along those coastlines, but there's no denying that a large portion of our economy and revenue and tax base are right there, front and center.”
The sea change has also led to much more destructive major storms like hurricanes and tropical cyclones, due to the greater reach achieved by storm surge. And beyond 2050, it could get even worse.
Report co-author Robert Kopp, a Rutgers University climate scientist, said future changes are solely dependent on how the world responds now to climate change. Kopp said that if fossil fuel emissions are cut back on a global scale and the rise of the planet’s temperature is limited, the sea level rise could also be limited to about two feet by the year 2100.
If those emissions are not reined in and temperatures continue to jump, the forecast for the change in sea level increases to seven feet.
“We already are seeing once-rare tidal flooding events becoming increasingly frequent,” Kopp told CNN. “So today along the Jersey Shore, flooding events that used to happen in the 1950s every year or two are now happening for several days a year on average.”
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