Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate professor Orrin Pilkey thinks it is wrong to rebuild after major storms – though so far coastal communities whom he has advised have not been receptive to his wisdom.
Beyond Evacuations: Climate Change May Mean Abandoning Our Coasts Forever
By Casey Williams
Sep 14 2018, 8:10amA climate scientist thinks that we aren’t taking major storms like Florence seriously enough.
Get out, and stay out. Or at least, don’t come back and build a high-rise. That’s the message Orrin Pilkey, a climate scientist and emeritus professor at Duke University, hopes Hurricane Florence will send lawmakers and coastal residents when it smashes the southeastern US this week. As climate change warms the oceans, swells the seas, and makes deadly hurricanes a fixture of American life, a massive and permanent retreat from the coasts may be the only way to protect lives and livelihoods in the long run, Pilkey says.
In his 2016 book Retreat from a Rising Sea, Pilkey, whose family’s Mississippi home was destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 1969, argues that unchecked climate change could make coastal regions uninhabitable sooner than we think. He thinks coastal communities should respond to this threat by moving away from the ocean now, before it’s too late. Pilkey takes particular aim at post-storm “urban renewal” projects—replacing modest homes with high-rises and mansions, for instance—that swell coastal populations. But even ordinary residents might have to give up the comforting dream of rebuilding after the storm.
Sooner or later, he says, coastal communities will have to choose from two bad options: hunker down beyond proliferating seawalls, or pick up stakes and move inland, forever. As Florence approached, I talked with Pilkey about his thoughts on the storm, climate change and “managed retreat.”
…
For a lot of people living on the coast, the idea of retreating—giving up their homes, their way of life—is going to be a tough pill to swallow. They’re going to swallow it sooner or later. The sooner they swallow it, the better off they’re going to be. I understand completely. When I’ve talked to people on the coast, I’ve been told to go jump in a lake, and a lot worse than that. In many of the communities on the coast, their beaches will become unstable. And if they don’t want to lose their buildings, they’re going to have to rely on a seawall. So, you’ll have a tourist community without a beach. That’s already happening. For instance, Miami Beach is considerably narrower than it was.
…
In the midst of a major flooding event like Hurricane Florence its easy to forget that living on the coast often provides protection against severe flood damage. The reason is flood water drains back into the sea far more easily if you live on the coast, than if you live inland. Coastal floods are usually very short lived, often lasting minutes rather than days, peaking at high tide.
You can usually protect a home against a brief flood, the way I once did, by covering the doors in waterproof tape and using non-setting plumber’s putty to seal any leaks we missed. Coastal houses can also be built to resist short floods, the house I protected had telescopic air vents, vents which had been deliberately set a lot higher than normal so they were less likely to become inundated by floodwater. Other houses on the same street were elevated on stilts, or set back a little from the water, to provide a buffer.
Houses further inland during that particular event were in a heap of trouble – their flood lasted days rather than minutes. Instead of their floodwater draining away back into the sea as rapidly as it had arrived, the inland floodwater was trapped in slow moving river systems. It is far more difficult to protect a house against prolonged flooding than against a brief coastal inundation.
Obviously a very large large storm surge can overturn the flood advantages of low lying coastal properties. The protective measures I describe don’t work if your near sea level house is buried under 20ft of water. But such severe storm events also affect inland properties, sometimes even worse than properties in coastal communities.
In my experience as a former and current coast dweller, blanket advice to “abandon the coasts” is nonsense.
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New Bern, NC has been in the news about how bad the flooding is.
Much of my family lives there.
The town was founded in the early 1700’s and has flooded frequently.
That never slowed people down. New Bern has grown steadily for many years.
Worldwide people like living near water.
From the time of the Noah stories on people have been at risk for flood.
For the same period of time people like this Professor have deceitfully over hyped the risk by claiming universal messages from local weather events.
Houses on stilts?
I know you Americans are SO much more intelligent than the rest of the world put together, but observing how people live where surface water is an annual event might bring you out of the 19th century where construction is concerned…
Obviously you are totally unaware of the construction that has been going on for decades. Newer Homes along the shore are totally raise to an elevation to keep them from flooding when there is a significant Hurricane. In New Jersey, Sandy, not even a Hurricane as it made landfall, cleaned out many of the vulnerable homes that withstood earlier storms. If you look at the barrier Islands a large percent of the homes are significantly elevated as now required by code.
I live in the UK.
It’s possible to get 44 miles from the sea in the UK.
Where would he suggest we all go?
[Scotland highlands? /brexit of England .mod]
Do you get hurricanes with storm surges sometimes in excess of 15 feet? If you are right on the coast, even in the US, 30 feet above sea level should protect from the storm surge. Problem is that so much of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts are beaches and low dunes, barely above sea level.
I have to admit I saw the homes right ON the beachfront sand and queried their sanity
storm or not, thats just daft.
The empirical evidence (IPCC AR5 Report, Chapter 2) show for the past 100 years, there have been no increasing trends of neither frequency nor intensity of: hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, tropical storms subtropical storms, and thunderstorms…
Moreover, Sea Level Rise (SLR) has been stuck at around 7 inches per century since 1800, and this century will be about the same, so obviously CO2 forcing has had almost nothing to do with SLR.
Free markets (not government hacks) are excellent at determining where buildings/infrastructure should and shouldn’t be built based on property insurance rates..
Unfortunately, Leftist hacks think high insurance rates are mean and unfair…so they subsidize them, and/or use taxpayer money to rebuild after a catastrophic natural event, even for buildings that were uninsured…
If Leftists remove risk, crazy things will happen in any market and taxpayers get stuck with the bill.
Leftists are really stupid.
AI to take over renewable energy…
https://techcircle.vccircle.com/2018/09/11/ai-based-energy-firm-autogrid-bags-32-mn-in-series-d-round
NBC running clip now climate change fueling Florence. The stupid burns
Just another leftist trying to tell people how and where to live their lives. A major corner stone of the collectivists creed is the idea that they are superior and must guide or force the masses to do what they believe to be the right thing. I always get a chuckle when some Academic who’s life has been lived primarily in the Ivory Towers bestows their “wisdom” upon us unwashed masses who live and make our way in the rest of the world outside the halls of Academia. It is a characteristic found in a lot of “teachers”.
So true. Academics are among the most useless people on the planet. If someone tells me they are a professor I know immediately they are a pontificating fool – exceptions being engineers or specialists who are geniuses in their field but couldn’t buy a bus ticket or a quart of milk without help. They are completely unworldly their lives consisting of – middle class upbringing, university education and that’s it. I had a dozen jobs – paper boy, hand-cleaning wheels in a car wash, pump jockey, air force craftsman (got out early), smelter worker, vacuum cleaner salesman, insurance salesman, before I was 25. I was lucky enough then to land a job as a reporter at a daily newspaper.
There’s no fool like an old fool……
Academics and common sense rarely go hand in hand; as this shows!
I wouldn’t buy property on the GOM coast, or on the east coast south of MD. Not after seeing the destruction of the last several hurricanes. People in Houston are still not back in their homes, and they aren’t even strictly on the coast. FEMA isn’t able to cope with the scale of damage. If WUWT readers want to spend their hard earned csh that way, its their choice.
The majority of homes in Houston suffered no damage. There are certainly people in Houston still not back in their homes, but of the ~10,000 homes needing permitted repair after Harvey, over 6000 were complete after 6 months. For those who were displaced, a month ago 70% reported their lives were back to normal.
Would you want to be one of the 30%, a year after Harvey? I wouldn’t, which is why I wouldn’t put so much $ in harm’s way.
“I wouldn’t, which is why I wouldn’t put so much $ in harm’s way.”
Virtually all the damage in Harvey was from inland flooding (i.e., not storm surge). It’s ridiculous to decide where to put property based on avoiding damage from more than *2 feet* of rain happening in a couple of days.
It make much, *much* more sense to develop portable measures that can be brought in to protect homes and businesses on an as-needed basis.
No I wouldn’t. I lived in Houston for a time and chose to leave mostly due to the unpleasant weather that occurs there most of the time. Threat of hurricanes had nothing to do with my decision to leave.
That said, Houston is one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. and 4th most populous. Obviously, more and more people choose to live there for a variety of reasons. I would suspect that many do so for economic reasons but not to put $ in harm’s way.
Seas have been rising for 20,000 years and continue to rise at 8-12″/century… has nothing to do with AGW… but it is a fact and because of that it is foolhardy to build high rises and mansions in ocean sand dunes and in flood plains… no point in arguing… just abolish federally subsidized flood insurance and the problem solves itself. You want to build in hazardous areas. Fine. Try to purchase mortgage insurance and flood insurance without taxpayer help.
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Wow. And Gore paid all that money for that beach property, too.
What’s the chance of Gore taking this advice?
I saw the aftermath of Camille, wonder if his family home was near the one with the shrimp boat in the yard. Based on a failing memory there are 5 long established marine laboratories, no doubt lavishly government funded, that were struck in Harvey and Florence. This is along with an uncounted number of retired academics, some of whom know better, not necessarily best.
I am looking out my window at a flowing street in Rockport, Texas where upstream a post-Harvey house is being built blocking a pond drainage. The Live Oak Peninsula, where developers want to make it look like the Florida coast, and are well on the way, is a Pleistocene Barrier Island covered with Carolina Bay like ponds which come and go with the cycles. There are an uncounted number of flooded cars here today, some probably affected by the poorly planned four lane highway built right through the middle of the peninsula.
Unprecedented, every 18.6 years, more or less.
The old Rockport courthouse was torn down with great difficulty in the 1950s, maybe the only one in the state. Most of the government buildings put up since now have to be replaced, except for the old schoolhouse, well built and located. A three story damaged motel is adding a fourth story. Talk about loss of tribal memory! But they are having meetings. Us older folks won’t go for fear of having a stroke.
There is far too much focus on climate change as being the only and main source of risk to coastal areas. Treats from other natural causes like earth quakes and volcano eruptions which can generate immense damaging tsunamis are down played or ignored until it is far too late. Nowhere is this threat more real and possibly imminent as well, than in the Atlantic Ocean Coastal regions. There is a potential time bomb in the region of the Canary Islands namely the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma Island where the western flank of this volcano could slip into the sea due its porous nature. If this were to happen, it could create a tsunami in size and destructive power unlike any modern era tsunami. It would dwarf any flooding experienced recently due to Florence but all coastal areas of the Atlantic Ocean could be affected. Yet when did we last hear of any recent scientific papers , studies or international conferences by the scientific community to mitigate this potential disaster which could dwarf the damage due to global warming .
It’s the treacly condescension that gets me.
“I understand”
Ph.D. = Piled Higher and Deeper
Hmmmmm, Why do I immediately think of King Canute?
Wood is the bane of mankind, claim researchers.
Its ability to splinter, and the danger of splinters, no one can deny.
This puts people at a general disadvantage,
for the mere inability to deny or scoff at any danger at all means,
no one can tell the researchers to just shut the F up
and no one really knows exactly where their money is coming from
or why the tabloids are full of splinter scare-stories
but a growing number wish it would stop.
In past generations people actively pushed back
at those who wasted their resources and time.
Once aggravated they put extra effort into it.
As mankind was evolving the social structure of today
bullies of every kind were seldom tolerated and guaranteed swift action,
subject to sustained pursuit and swift payback.
The basic idea was, failing to encourage undesirable behavior is never enough
there must be a concerted and coordinated effort to single them out
and exact punishment that varied from place to place.
Then as people settled in metropolis and relied on central government for justice,
satisfied that it addressed the real crimes that afflicted them,
a strange thing began to happen. The public expression of discontent or anger,
including righteous anger by those aggrieved by policy or person,
began to be equated with actual violence. The bullies supported this,
because it allowed them to hide behind the skirt of the judiciary
that had been appointed to punish true violence. Senate and judiciary,
swayed by a growing opinion that talk of violence promotes violence,
passed laws that further clouded the distinction between words and actions.
So it was that society lost the use of its only tool for making bullies back down:
the threat of violence that does not actually contain violence.
And children grew with no clear distinction between words and actions in their minds.
As children this was regrettable and sad. As adults they have become dangerous.
We have crossed the Rubicon of redress, and our modern world is one
where bullies are rewarded for being aggressive and shrill. There is no limit
to their power, no credible threat to their behavior. Every incursion into your space
must be met with an indifferent shrug, as we see the quality of life diminishing.
We are (to quote the archaic) no longer secure in our persons and property.
And dare not speak up about it because to take offense is seen as an offense.
Confusion of “to take offense” and “malicious offense” is the bullies’ greatest triumph.
So you’ll be reprimanded if you consider splinters a small price to pay for the use of wood.
Incredible photographs of people impaled by splinters will flood the news.
The dodgiest ones will attract the most attention because there will be no one left
who dares to be the first to speak out about anything. Another generation of mothers,
unchallenged, will tell the young terrifying stories about wood.
And plastic will cover the land. Some day even the people will be made of it.
It did not take long for some computer based study “Climate Change to make Florence worse”…
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/you.stonybrook.edu/dist/4/945/files/2018/09/climate_change_Florence_0911201800Z_final-262u19i.pdf
It did not take long for the CBC, Canada’s foremost global warming propagandists to disseminate this rubbish.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/hurricane-florence-climate-change-1.4824624
Yet in the text nuances are abundant: “The researchers aren’t saying with certainty that there will be 50 per cent more rain from the hurricane as a result of climate change. “What we’re saying is that in our forecast of Hurricane Florence, that it was 50 per cent higher. This is a forecast multiple days before landfall.”
So the author Nicole Mortillaro uses the word “likely” to package her agitprop piece.
Amen! Hallelujah, brother! The first thing I say after EVERY hurricane is: What part of BELOW sea level do you NOT understand? (I’ll go back and read the article and comments, but I just had to enter my exclamation upon reading the headline.)
I’ve been studying climate science and global warming alarmism since 1985 and have written about it since 2002. I have two engineering degrees from top universities.
Early on, it was obvious, based on the fundamentals of science, that global warming and climate change hysteria were false alarms.
It is true that atmospheric CO2 has been increasing since controlled measurements started in 1958 at Mauna Loa. Some people argue about the cause of that increase, but that is a secondary issue – atmospheric CO2 IS increasing, by about 2 ppm per year.
The global warming alarmist hypothesis argues that this increase in atmospheric CO2 will cause runaway and catastrophic global warming. There is not, and there has never been , any credible evidence to support this hypothesis. In fact, there is ample credible evidence to the contrary, such that any resulting warming from increasing atmospheric CO2 will be mild and net-beneficial to humanity and the environment. The dangerous manmade global warming hypothesis has been falsified, based on full-Earth-scale evidence.
At least the global warming hypothesis is sufficiently scientific to be falsifiable – and it has been adequately falsified. The “climate change” aka “wilder weather” hypothesis is so vague and changes so often that it is not even falsifiable, and therefore it is not science, it is nonsense – the prattling of imbeciles.
“A theory that is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.” – Karl Popper.
“By having a vague theory, it’s possible to get either result.” – Richard Feynman
Examining the conduct of the chief proponents of global warming alarmism reveals another important observation – the alarmists’ use of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” tactics to harass and intimidate their scientific opponents, compromise politicians and university colleagues and administrators and propagandize the gullible public. This vile harassment was apparent starting in the 1990’s and became even more obvious with the release of the Climategate emails. The proponents of global warming hysteria were exposed as unprincipled scoundrels.
Global warming / climate change alarmism is the greatest scam, in dollars terms, in the history of humanity. Tens of trillions of dollars have been squandered, and millions of lives have been lost.
I suggest that the leading conspirators in this huge scam belong in jail, for crimes against humanity.
Properly deployed, the tens of trillions of dollars squandered on global warming alarmism could have:
– put clean water and sanitation systems into every village in the world, saving the lives of about 2 million under-five kids PER YEAR;
– reduced or even eradicated malaria – also a killer of many millions of infants and children;
– gone a long way to eliminating world hunger.
Regards, Allan
Notes and References:
Climate sensitivity to increasing atmospheric CO2 is low – probably less than 1C/(2xCO2).
Christy and McNider (2017) estimate climate sensitivity at 1.1C/doubling for UAH Lower Tropospheric (LT) temperatures.
Lewis and Curry (2018) estimate climate sensitivity at 1.6C/doubling for ECS and 1.3C/doubling for TCR, using Hatcrut4 surface temperatures (ST). These surface temperatures probably have a significant warming bias due to poor siting of measurements, UHI effects, other land use changes, etc.
Both analyses are “full-earth-scale”, which have the least room for errors.
Both are “UPPER BOUND” estimates of sensitivity, derived by assuming that ~ALL* warming is due to increasing atmospheric CO2. It is possible, in fact probable, that less of the warming is driven by CO2, and most of it is natural variation.
(*Note – Christy and McNider make allowance for major volcanoes El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991+)
The slightly higher sensitivity values in Curry and Lewis are due to the higher warming estimates of Hadcrut4 surface temperatures versus UAH LT temperatures.
Practically speaking, however, these maximum sensitivity estimates are similar, about 1C/doubling, and are far too low to support any runaway or catastrophic manmade global warming.
Higher estimates of climate sensitivity have no credibility. There is no real global warming crisis.
Increased atmospheric CO2, from whatever cause will at most drive minor, net-beneficial global warming, and significantly increased plant and crop yields.
Conclusion:
The total impact if increasing atmospheric CO2 is hugely beneficial to humanity and the environment. Any scientist or politician who contradicts this statement is destructive, acting against the well-being of humanity and the environment.
How does any of that amount to him demanding anything?
Eric Worrall said:
“Climate Scientist Demands Permanent Evacuation of Coasts Because Climate Change”
How does any of that amount to him demanding anything?
“Orrin Pilkey…hopes Hurricane Florence will send lawmakers and coastal residents when it smashes the southeastern US this week. As climate change warms the oceans, swells the seas, and makes deadly hurricanes a fixture of American life, a massive and permanent retreat from the coasts may be the only way to protect lives and livelihoods in the long run, Pilkey says.”
Notice the “lawmakers” part. Notice “the only way” part. Connect the dots. His language is that of an ideologue. He, like his Warmunist brethren believes that government is “the answer”.
Bruce Cobb said:
“Notice the “lawmakers” part.”
Yes, he hopes that decision makers will take notice of something he believes to be an issue.
” Notice “the only way” part.”
Yes, he believe that a retreat from the coast may be the only way to deal with it practically.
“Connect the dots.”
The only way to turn that into a demand is to do what you’ve done and add your own dots.
“For a lot of people living on the coast, the idea of retreating—giving up their homes, their way of life—is going to be a tough pill to swallow. They’re going to swallow it sooner or later. The sooner they swallow it, the better off they’re going to be.”
So, if it’s a personal decision about when to swallow “the pill”, what’s the problem, as long as they are footing the bill, not taxpayers. Oh, wait, the National Flood Insurance Program is subsidized partly by taxpayers. But he doesn’t say anything about that. Instead, what he wants is a national program of forcing people out, perhaps reimbursing them. Yeah, that’ll go over big.
Pilkey and his ilky want the government to run roughshod over people’s rights, in the name of “Climate Change”. Because, the ends justify the means in their sick, twisted minds.
We need to let people live and die by their choices. Mandatory Evacuation means ALL first responders too.
You want to “ride it out” you do it on your own. Tough love. Do that once and you won’t have to do it again.
Government should have no role either way. Do not subsidize and do not force out.
The type of man my grandad would describe as a mucking foron to spare the blushes of ladies and children.