Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
Miami Beach has a vice – a bad one – a dangerous one.
Miami’s vice is water, as in waterfront. Everybody seems to want a house on the waterfront, a house on a canal, with a boat tied to the dock.
So what’s not to like about that? After all, my wife and I live on our boat.
The New York Times (and the LA Times) has been running story after story about Miami flooding, Miami King Tides, Miami sea level rise threating billions of dollars of infrastructure.
Like these:
Intensified by Climate Change, ‘King Tides’ Change Ways of Life in Florida
Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun
A Sharp Increase In ‘Sunny Day’ Flooding
Perils of Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate
These news pieces offer images such as:
This first image is hurricane storm surge impacting a millionaire’s beach house, built less than 10 feet above mean high tide.
High-stepping to avoid regular flooding from high tides…street built at mean high high water (MHHW). [Note: All of these named tidal datums are defined here.]
Typical canal scene in Miami (city, not beach). The mean high water line is clearly visible on the sea wall by the boat house on the right, with a safety margin of a foot or so, but no more than that. The sea wall on the left is not quite so high.
This image is actually Fort Lauderdale, but typical of Miami as well, with a flooded low lying street.
This corner, photographed hundreds of times, is Alton Road and 10th Street. Built below the level of mean higher high water (MHHW) in the canal a block and a half away, floods at every higher high tide, offering wonderful photo opportunities for every budding journalistic photographer wishing to illustrate how Miami is being overrun by rising seas.
Built below high tide? Yes, exactly. One would think that with the advent of modern surveying technology, adequate for the purpose as early as the 1950s, that roads in American coastal cities would be built at least above the predictable daily high tide marks. However, Miami is an exception [one of many, unfortunately].
Another famous Miami area intersection…let’s look a little closer:
Even though there is still about a foot clearance at the seawall, the intersection itself is below the level of the water in the canal……gotta love this kind of civil engineering.
Here is Miami Beach, showing the water levels at Mean Higher High Water:
MHHW [mean higher high water] is the level of the water at the higher of the two daily high tides. The mean of those “higher high water” levels is the MHHW – what we normally would consider the High Tide Mark. The bright green areas are “low lying areas”, known to be below this level. These SLR images are courtesy of NOAA at https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ .
While we’re here, let’s look at the data for sea water levels in Miami. This one image contains almost all you need to know about this problem:
I would have liked to re-do all the numbers to be relative to Mean Sea Level [MSL], but have settled on adding in the numbers in red giving the levels above MSL and on the right, the levels above Mean Higher High Water (the “high tide line”).
To summarize, for those who read words better than images: The highest astronomical tide (a tide cause by the moon, sun, etc, not storm surge) was one foot above the normal MHHW. The highest observed water level was 1.77 feet above MHHW. These levels occurred in the 1980s and 90s. They are historical, as opposed to speculative or modeled future levels. Note that on the left, at about Mean Sea Level, is a little red bracket ( [ ) that represents the calculated (but not measured) sea level rise in Miami over the last 30 years, just under three (3) inches, which is about one tenth (1/10th) of the range of the tide, from low to high, which averages about 32 inches.
Now, let’s look at Miami, with our NOAA sea level viewer, for a sea level one foot above MHHW [ remember, the first sea level image above was for Mean Higher High Water (or for landlubbers, the high tide mark) ]:
Circled in light blue are the areas that we see over and over in the MSM – those areas that are guaranteed to flood during the highest of predictable astronomical tides. One of these areas includes Alton and 10th (second up from the bottom) and almost the entire Miami Golf Club (green means low lying areas not actually connected physically to the sea by a water way). Not that bad, really, except that the areas that appear as light blue pixels will be filled with sea water at every above-average high tide.
But that data table from NOAA shows that sea water levels have been observed – historically known to have taken place and recorded – as much as 1.77 feet above MHHW. NOAA does not offer the ability to see what 1.77 feet (just over 21 inches) of additional sea water looks like, but we can look at 2 feet (which is just 3 inches more):
Light blue pixels represent flooding from sea water.
This problem has nothing whatever to do with sea level rise. It is a civil engineering problem of almost unimaginable magnitude. This city has been built – for all intents and purposes – almost precisely at predictable, recurring sea levels. It is already inescapably flooding from normal predicted tides and it will continue to flood unless sea level drops a foot or two, which is not going to happen during this millennium.
But wait, it gets worse. What was the highest ever observed sea water level? The Maximum? 35 inches above MHHW MSL. (correction h/t Brigantine and notwhatbutwho) What does that do to Miami Beach?
The sea water level was that high in 1984. City officials were all alive to witness the above flooding event. They are well aware that this level is possible without some great change to the natural system – it doesn’t take global warming sea level rise to flood Miami Beach to this extent.
How much has sea level risen (calculated as there are no existing tide gauges in Miami that have NOAA’s required thirty-year’s of data) in the last 30 years?
Just under three inches, at a calculated rate in the 2.0-2.5mm/year range (NOAA, personal communication). That’s about the thickness of two (2) US pennies. This sea level rise consists of actual rising sea levels and the geological subsidence of the land at a rate of 0.6 mm/year – about 18 mm or 0.7 inches over the same 30 years. Let me remind you that it doesn’t matter at all if the sea is rising or the land is sinking, or both – all sea level problems are entirely local consisting only of the physical relationship between sea water levels and the local land mass.
Take Home Messages:
Miami Beach is at such grave risk of sea water flooding today that it should preemptively be declared a disaster zone – not because of global-warming-driven sea level rise but due to a seeming total lack of sensible civil engineering standards and sensible building codes.
Much of the above-ground infrastructure of Miami Beach was originally built on land in areas known to be below historical highest water levels (Maximum), and some of it built below normal highest tide levels (HAT and MHHW) – to make matters much worse, much of it is intentionally connected to the sea by canals cut for this purpose.
Almost all of the underground infrastructure is below Mean Sea Level – this means utility cables, water lines, sewer lines, basements and storm drains. All subject to sea water intrusion and the resulting corrosion. Most of these features of a modern city have to be protected by pumps – which must have electrical power to continue to operate. Sewage must be pumped up into sewage treatment plants – storm drain water must be pumped up and back into the sea — it will not move when the power is out.
Hurricanes, the biggest natural disaster threat to the area, in addition to the terrific damage caused by the forces of high winds and surf, can dump inches-to-feet of rain causing fresh-water flooding, raise sea level with storm surge causing sea water flooding and knock out power transmission lines thus stopping or destroying most of the pumps that keep Miami Beach’s infrastructure going. Auxiliary generators can only keep going for so long before running out of fuel; fuel which cannot be delivered across flooded causeways and through flooded streets.
The slow inextricable rise of the sea – the majority of which is down to the geological recovery of the Earth from the last Ice Age – will continue at a rate somewhere between 2.0 to 2.5 mm/year — equivalent to 8 to 10 inches over the next century. The entirety of southern Florida will continue to subside (move towards the center of the Earth) at a rate near 0.6 mm/year equivalent to 2/10th foot or 2 1/3 inches over the next century. (The expected sea level rise includes the expected subsidence.) Nothing mankind can do will stop these processes – they must be reckoned with.
Some areas of Miami Beach (and other seaside cities built on barrier islands, sandbars and/or built on fill in tidal zones) will suffer higher rates of subsidence as soil is slowly washed out from under the buildings and roads by the coming and going of the tides in nearby waterways – a process that can be abated only at great expense.
Sea Level Rise, regardless of cause, is a peripheral, minor issue to the problems Miami Beach has with the sea – Miami Beach is already a century behind** in implementing mitigation efforts if it wishes to survive in the long run as a viable modern city.
# # # # #
** Miami Beach was once a pleasant seaside resort and agricultural community on the sandy barrier island off of Florida’s southern coast. It should have been left that way. If development was imperative it should have been subjected to long-term realistic planning that would have prevented the present-day disaster-in-waiting.
# # # # #
Author’s Comment Policy:
I’ll be happy to answer your questions and give more references if anyone wants them.
My biggest fear for Miami Beach and many other similar areas along America’s eastern seaboard is a repeat of the 1900 Galveston, Texas disaster.
I have never lived in Miami Beach, but have lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida, which suffers similar problems, which had a near miss with Hurricane Matthew. We have friends there (on the Banana River side) who lost their entire riverside front yard in Matthew. Their home is 2 feet above Mean High Tide.
There is a new-ish activist movement pushing King Tides which I will write about once I have a clear idea of who is paying for it.
You may contact me by email at my first name at the domain i4 decimal net if you wish.
This essay is not about climate change (under any name) – please restrict your comments to the issues discussed. If your comment is specifically addressed to me, please indicate so by using Kip as the first word — like “Kip, please explain why you say…”
# # # # #
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It is clear that “fake news” and mainstream media “climate change news” are synonymous. Thank you for shedding light – and truth – on yet another example of just how corrupt climate fear mongers really are. Miami is likely to suffer massively in the foreseeable future from the basic engineering failures you have outlined. Every dollar, every hour that the climate change movement wastes on their fake news and phony policies makes The problem facing Miami and other at risk cities worse, not better.
Excellent article and pictures.
I saw one reporter hyping climate change sea level rise in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew by pointing out the flooding that had been caused in Miami “by the hurricane”.
A large chunk of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is built on land reclaimed from the bottom of the North Sea. The altitude of Schiphol Airport, one of the busiest in the world is -3 meters. You can build anywhere, it is a matter of engineering, cost, risk, and value.
My mother, may she rest in peace, owned a house in South Florida, that was 12 feet above sea level and only about a hundred yards from the ocean. I had read that the maximum expected storm surge in that area was 25 ft. I was glad to be able to sell that place after she died.
Floridians have been living with these risks all along. They will continue to exist until such time as the next glaciation begins (which would be a climate change that would create real problems) or until Floridians develop the good sense of the Dutch, which is far more improbable than than the former.
In any event, low lying South Florida is not a problem for people outside of Florida to worry about.
We only worry about paying for Floridian folly.
Yes, I worry about South Florida if the general taxpayer is to be expected to fix it. I also worry about downtown NYC and Norfolk/Va. Beach for the same reason.
As discussed above, that has been the general pattern so far. The taxpayer bailed out hundreds of homeowners on Staten Island who had no flood insurance.
scraft1
You worry about an interesting variety of things. You must be exhausted.
And we haven’t even discussed getting hit in the head by a meteorite…
Javert Chip. Does it make any difference to you who pays to fix S.Florida? Or if you continue to bail out people who fail to buy flood insurance? There will be tons of money spent on these problems. You probably should think about where the money comes from.
Don’t criticize the civil engineers for this. They certainly know the risks of building in a flood zone. Blame the wealthy who will buy waterfront property without caring about the flooding until it’s too late and the zoning boards who approve the construction.
Gary ==> Point taken — a civil engineering failure, not necessarily committed by civil engineers!
Low lying Florida real estate has been something of a joke for a long time. Add in subsidence from overpumping aquifers, it gives advocates all the pictures of flooding they want. I think it is as silly to buy something that routinely floods as it is unethical to sell it.
Tom
Ethics has nothing to do with it.
Humans easily convince themselves to heavily discount the NPV of future catastrophic events (excluding CAGW evangelists). The new rich guy buying the Miami property from the old rich guy simply does not believe bad things will happen, or if they do, it won’t be so bad. Human nature.
Regarding the flooding in Miami and Miami Beach, it seems to me (and maybe I’m wrong here) that building codes should have been written to require residencial and other buildings be built up on pylons or stilts. I’ve seen photos of residences built up on stilts in hurricane prone areas to guard against the flooding of the storm surge. I believe that they do this in the Florida Keys and in areas of the tropics near the coast. Unfortunately, as the author of this post has said, this does nothing to prevent infrasturcture like water and sewer lines from becoming corroded by the saltwater.
This would probably be controversial and unpopular, but I think one solution in the VERY long term is to simply abandon the flood prone areas near the coast slowly over time. As buildings go up for sale, they would be bought out by the state or federal govt as part of the abandonment process. This obviously would be very costly, but it is the price we humans perhaps need to pay for our stupidity. Those areas would then be simply converted into public beaches and parks.
Just my 2 cents worth.
….sorry misspelled residential.
CD. Once again, I would object to making the taxpayer pay to buy bldgs. in the flood plain. Flood prone properties will eventually be abandoned, and then can be condemned at a fair price. Whoever owns the land obviously will take his/her lumps, and that’s the way it should be.
scraft1: I understand why you probably don’t want taxpayers buying out flood-prone coastal properties for condemnation. The taxpayer would be buying out stupidity. That is why I said it would be controversial and unpopular among many.
If the taxpayer is not going to buy them out, then something else needs to happen to induce abandonment of the properties. I fear that the fact that they are flood prone areas and in hurricane country may not be enough to induce abandonment. It has been and perhaps always be very popular to live in a tropical or sub-tropical climate on or near the waterfront.
I mean, it’s not like we are talking about Detroit here scraft1. Detroit has its share (maybe more than its share) of abandoned properties for economic reasons that Miami and Miami Beach may never experience. There may always be enough naive people (okay, stupid people) willing to buy these Florida properties when someone is selling despite the risks.
If the taxpayer is not going to buy them out, then a powerful and convincing inducement needs to be put in place to get the abandonment process to begin. I will suggest that this inducement would need to be in the form of no bail-out from the state or federal govt (FEMA) or anyone else when flooding occurs. The property owner is on his/her own.
The likely problem with that though is that a LOT of coastal property owners are going to scream bloody murder if such a thing is proposed—-which will make is difficult if not impossible for federal or state legislators to enact the proposal.
A more rational choice is simply to phase in the building code requiring buildings to be elevated off the ground with stilts or pylons of some sort—as is being done now from what I understand. The exception of course would be garages and storage areas. Unfortunately, that phase-in is going to take a very long time…..
CD ==> Many areas in the eastern US lowlands now have building codes that required the main living areas of homes to be XX feet above historical highest water, resulting in all new construction being on stilts, as you say. We see this traveling up and down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.
Kip – building codes are strict in eastern NC and require 12 feet above high water. Of course, many older properties are not so built. If they are rebuilt after a storm (not easy to do because of coastal management rules) then they must have 12 feet.
We visited Newport, KY in the mid-1960s; across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. I have no knowledge of the laws but I do know many of the places were raised — with many normal yard things under them. Such structures can be found in many places.
@Kip Hansen and mib8 (below): Glad to see those laws in place requiring homes be up on stilts in the flood prone areas. They also need to be hurricane resistant and withstand hurricane force winds. There is one company in North Carolina that I know of (I won’t give them a free plug here — don’t want to be snipped by Anthony) that specializes in building just such homes. I imagine that they are considerably more expensive to build that ground level homes without the hurricane resistance. I also imagine moving furniture and major appliances in and out of them is more a pain in the you-know-what since they are xx feet off the ground. Forklift maybe.
The bottom line here is that SOMETHING MAJOR needs to be done in Miami Beach and the flood prone areas of Miami where homes are still at ground level.
On one of the episodes of “Tiny House Nation”, a house on stilts was built upon the site where a house was swept away by a hurricane. The mayor of the community stopped by during construction to say nice things about how they were building the replacement and how it might be a model for others to rebuild the devastated community.
If not literally “stilts”, the rule ought to be that all walls below that minimum level be concrete/masonry that can survive being wet, with the expectation that any spaces enclosed by those walls be reserved for purposes such as garaging vehicles that can be driven to higher ground as a TS/hurricane approaches (and perhaps things like laundry equipment the homeowners understand will need to be replaced after a storm surge floods that space and ruins them, or storage of items that could be readily moved upstairs prior to the storm).
I would imagine most people who buy beachfront property have plenty of cars they’d like to garage, and would be OK with using the rest of their Below-The-Line space for patios shielded from the hot sun by dint of being underneath the house proper.
Monster ==> The modern stilt houses (technically, built on pylons “Pylons are often made of steel or concrete, because they are strong substances that can hold a large amount of weight. A pylon needs to be sturdy, since it is supporting a bridge, road, or power lines.” — in our case, a home) — and the lower level, ground level, looks like the rest of the house but is used as non-living space — usually garages, storage, etc. New homes being built 1/2 mile north of us on the ICW are this type of construction. The front entry to the living area is reached by a long stairway from ground level to what appears to be the second floor.
what’s not to like? Hideous humidity (everything corrodes; for quite a while I chided people about not taking proper care of their tools until I realized that local conditions made that impossible), disease-carrying mosquitoes…
In other parts of Florida they have, for at least several decades, required that new construction be up on stilts at least 14 or so feet up (depends on local high tide and storm surge estimates). The stilts also help with the mosquitoes, I am told by some swamp-dwellers; they generally do not swarm so high. But then the vehicles and tools and such are typically stored below flooding levels beneath the buildings, so that value must be written off from day 1. (And all that time I’d thought it was non-industrious mañana/hillbilly culture.)
Excellent presentation by Kip Hansen. Well done. Clear and concise.
They’ve done the same thing in New Jersey. Built on sandy barrier islands that are no more than 2 or 3 feet above sea level, some even less. Those islands were known to recede and grow. Multi Million dollar houses now sprout along the waterfront like weeds.
Miami was like most Florida, swampy. There were and sometimes still are real estate scams selling property that is underwater. That dates back at least to the 1920’s. Biscayne Blvd. was built through a swamp. There was a human cost cost to building it, a man a mile.
“The slow inextricable rise of the sea…” I think you mean “inexorable”.
Monna ==> Thank you. When I used “inextricable”, I knew someone would want me to have used some other “in…” word. My editor and I considered several alternatives (wasting way too much time). However, I settled on “inextricable” with the intentional dictionary meaning of:
impossible to escape from. — “an inextricable situation”
Thank you for paying attention to language, too few do. I like words!
After watching the Californication of Colorado, one would be thrilled if this article could convince New Yorkers not to move to Florida. BTW, Miami Beach is not Florida, it is in Florida. And while there are other legacy areas that flood regularly….St Petersburg & downtown Tampa have their own “Bright Greens” most of contemporary coastal Florida is being built with living floors @ur momisugly 13′ above MSL–code when we built on the water in 1983. Over time, areas underwater will protect themselves a la the Netherlands, a cost; or pay for periodic flooding– a cost; or be gradually abandoned or rebuilt safely — a cost. Decisions are made by individuals who are spending their own money. Decisions may be different if we no longer subsidize flood insurance for coastal areas — that’s fine. The market will appropriately price such insurance, and folks will or won’t buy it as they choose. Decisions are better when full information is available, thus kudos to WUWT.
If I wish to live on the coast, and presume that once over 50 years I’m likely to have to pack my valuables and leave, only to come back to a massive rebuilding project, and consider this a reasonable tradeoff for the joy of living on the water, The New York media can kiss off. Or consider how their infrastructure handled not-quite-a-hurricane ‘Superstorm’ Sandy. Their concerns over Miami are the moat in Gods eye, compared to the sty in their own lowlying areas.
.
Good Morning Kip,
Great post. I loved it. Miami is a wacky situation.
I recall a discussion in the comments a while back maybe 12 months where we were discussing the sea level, the shore line levels, and GPS measurement of them.
Some pretty sharp people here showed me evidence that there is no known sea level on a planetary scale. Earth is lifting and sinking. It may not even be related to sea level changes where the shoreline is swallowed.
I would like to see a planetary map of the elevations of all of the shorelines (terrestrial) and have a time lapse of them lifting and sinking,
.. Willis E project for sure.
Paul Westhaver ==> Global sea level may well be what I coined to be “an imaginary number”…imaginary in that it does not describe a real physical thing…it can only be imagined. NOAA has a global sea level image showing which areas of the Earth’s ocean are rising and which are falling, and at what rates.
The ocean, however, is not a bathtub, which maintains a constant surface level over it’s entire area. Adding water in India does not necessarily raise sea levels in Miami. The oceans surfaces are “lumpy”.
While it is mathematically possible (however improbable) to create a number that one calls Average Global Sea Level and then derive a figure for how much that number is increasing each year, it may not actually mean anything particular in the real world.
NOAA’s CORS project has a lot of interesting data about the movements of the land masses in America over time.
I see much work for Dutch engineers in the future.
Kim.
Recently, the moon was positioned closer to the earth than it had been in the last 40 or so years. It seems to me, that such closeness would increase high tide levels. Has any research been done on this issue?
David J. Bufalo ==> Yes, David, this situation is called, amongst other things, a King Tide. In the Author’s Comment Policy section (at the end of the essay) I give a link.
Very eye catching, interesting post. Thanks.
People born 100 or 200 years from now may not be able to live there. But, they won’t care at all — they’ll just live somewhere else. People adapt to the physical world into which they were born without having to think about it. Only us old folks worry about change — as if it were going to “happen overnight”.
Humans seem to choose short-term convenience over long-term dependability far more often than not.
In the long term, we are all dead, tadchem.
Same comment to all who are decrying future costs of fixing past mistakes.
Top notch reporting Kip!
Everyone has a plan until the get punched in the face.— Mike Tyson
This amounts to the New Orleans Levee Boards for rich people, all working with the underlying assumption that the Feds will come to rescue with other people’s money or debt in an emergency. It’s the free rider problem for rich people and their local governments.
Exactly, … in New Jersey, it’s replenish the beach with other people’s money.
Beach replenishment is a different issue. Beaches are public resources, and in NC are enjoyed by the public below mean high water. It’s fair to expect the public to pay at least part of it.
Beach renourishment is expensive, but is considered a fair cost of maintaining property values and local tax rolls, in addition to providing the public with a useable beach.
On the barrier island where I live, local taxpayers pay about half and the state pays about half. Atlantic Beach gets dredge spoils from Beaufort Channel at no cost – i.e. feds pay cost of least expensive disposal of dredge spoils, in this case on the beach itself.
In New Jersey, the situation is different. Some beaches aren’t public. The only beaches that did not have a fee was in Cape May. That might have changed. But the primary issue in New Jersey is beach replenishment with OPM.
Great post. Should be spread far and wide.
Interestingly the real state market knows that Miami does and will flood regardless of a sea level rise that may or may not happen in a hundred years, and ultimately it doesn’t give any importance to that. Sales prices are on the rise after the 2008 slump, despite all the scaremongering in liberal media.
Good summary post showing the folly of building “perm” structures on a barrier island. Barrier islands exist as energy adsorption features (especially large storms/hurricanes) in some coastal areas as the result of natural seashore processes. Typically their highest points are only a few 10’s of feet above high tides and may be submerged under significant storm surges. They are (by natures’ construct) fleeting in both location and permanence on even very short geological time scales. Age dating studies conducted on Atlantic barrier islands show their formation as post Pleistocene (around 10,000 to 11,000 years before present) and may be considered as continuing to form due to sediment influx via rivers draining the mainland (at least where river control has not dramatically affected sediment transport into the bay behind [landward] of he BI). Construction and river channelization can “starve” the BI system of replenishing sediment causing the BI reducing the BI landmass and exacerbating natural erosion. The folly of placing expensive structures on BI is well known. One day Miami beach will be no more due to nature, and that is without any additional sea-level rise other than the natural rise (still continuing) from the end of the Pleistocene Ice Ages.
I offer an antipodean example:
http://floodinformation.brisbane.qld.gov.au/fio/
The link shows the Brisbane (Australia) river flood levels of 1974 and 2011 with 1974 being the higher of the two. Even with the knowledge of the earlier flood, 40 years later we have the same areas underwater and thousands pleading for assistance from the Federal/State governments and insurance companies.
While this was a storm event and (apparently) mis-management of flood controls at the dams rather than sea level rise, the same development mistakes were made – building on a known flood plain.
Kip: re “There is a new-ish activist movement pushing King Tides which I will write about once I have a clear idea of who is paying for it.”
Here is the link to the California king tide coven:
http://california.kingtides.net/
At the Los Angeles Harbor principal tide gauge, the highest perigean spring tide (I refuse to use the activist term) will be at 0753 Tuesday, December 13, 2016. The water surface elevation will be 7.14 ft MLLW, 6.76 ft MSL NAVD 88, and 4.32 ft MSL NGVD 29.
I table and sort the tides a water year (July to June) in advance. As you state, the astronomic tides are as predictable as the sun and moon that cause them. The web site itself provides a schedule for future events.
Conversion between the various vertical datums is here:
https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/Vertcon/vertcon.html
Note that county surveying authorities might have adopted an administrative conversion.
Neil ==> Thank you, very interesting. when I was a teen, surfing the beaches of LA (more days than not) tides changed the beach offshore topology and affected the wave shape, so we kept track of them.
Let me know if you can find out who is actually paying for the King Tides Pjt International. A PR firm is co-ordinating it.
Kip – here’s a start. I just asked the all-knowing Internet. I understand there is a 3-link limit for posting, so I just put in what appears to be the top three.
http://seagrant.noaa.gov/Websimple/TESTResilienceToolkit/TabId/609/ArtMID/5413/ArticleID/366/Beware-the-Rising-Tide.aspx
http://california.kingtides.net/who-we-are/
And “king tide” plus Peter Gleick:
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/searise/2015-07/major-sf-bayfront-developments-advance-despite-sea-rise-warnings
Neil ==> Thank you. “Project co-founder Marina Psaros…” runs a PR firm and lists the King Tides Pjt as a client.
There are agency donors, but someone, somewhere, has financed the PR firm Maria Psaros runs to create the whole movement. That’s who I’m looking for…guess we’ll keep digging.
I have often wondered about SLR and the impact of general land erosion into the bodies of water and ground water/aquifer extraction and runoff. Sea floor rise also. Just sayin, don’t hear much on those as just a few examples.
ossqss ==> Those are all valid questions — related in different ways to SLR. Land erosion into bays creates sand bars and can affect the tides, restricting inflow and outflow, but generally doesn’t affect local MSL. Groundwater extraction can cause land subsidence, lower the land near a body of water, raising local relative sea level. Sea floor rise changes the topology of the bottom, but generally doesn’t have that much effect on surface sea levels, to my knowledge.
Why?
So they get their feet wet. That is fine with me. It is their choice.
Just do not tax me for the “damage” of wet feet.
You say they do not build high enough above sea level? I do not care if they put up coffer dams and pave *below* sea level. Their money, local control, they can do what they want.
Just do not ask me to pay for it.
Back where I come from, fine definitions between MHW and MHHW would be silly, tides cause water level to go up and down 20 feet or more *twice a day*.
We all knew enough to give the ocean the space it wants.
So what is the problem?
Aha! You do grasp the concept! Unless your boat has a serious problem, you are immune from daily sea level changes. You should also be quite protected from all long-term sea level rise, so long as you keep all your through-hull fittings in good shape.
All those houses right on the water, and just a foot above MHW?
No problem.
People payed good money to build them, and people payed good money to buy them. If somebody wants to live on the water and does not want to get flooded, they can use your solution.
Just do not ask me to pay for it.
If somebody makes choices, and gets their feet wet, they can get dry socks.
Just do not ask me to pay for it.