Guest Essay by Kip Hansen – 22 March 2021
Dr. Judith Curry has been writing about Sea Levels and New Jersey [and here], spurred on by a request for an evaluation of the topic from the New Jersey Business & Industry Association (NJBIA). The NJBIA is concerned because a study by a team of sea level researchers at Rutgers University has called for “draconian policies unsupported by science” that would “harm our economy today” by overreacting to “legitimate concerns about climate change, sea level rise, and flooding”. Dr. Curry’s full report is titled: “Assessment of projected sea level rise scenarios for the New Jersey Coast”.
Dr. Curry’s CFAN report contains this summary:
The summary conclusions of the CFAN Review are:
— The sea level projections provided by the Rutgers Report are substantially higher than those provided by the IPCC, which is generally regarded as the authoritative source for policy making. The sea level rise projections provided in the Rutgers Report, if taken at face value, could lead to premature decisions related to coastal adaptation that are unnecessarily expensive and disruptive.
— Scenarios out to 2050 for sea level rise and hurricane activity should account for scenarios of variability in multi-decadal ocean circulation patterns.
— Best practices in adapting to sea level rise use a framework suitable for decision making under deep uncertainty. The general approach of Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways is recommended for sea level rise adaptation on the New Jersey coast.
I wrote a piece here at WUWT a year ago, titled “Atlantic City: I’ll meet you tonite…..”, prompted by the Governor of New Jersey’s executive order stating that “New Jersey has set a goal of producing 100 percent clean energy by 2050.” and “New Jersey will become the first state to require that builders take into account the impact of climate change, including rising sea levels, in order to win government approval for projects.” The sea level rise part of this executive order was based on an earlier draft of the same study by researchers at Rutgers University.
My Bottom Line in regards to sea level rise and building codes and restrictions for New Jersey was this:
“New Jersey, like many of the Atlantic states, has allowed unchecked development of its barrier islands, mostly over the last 70 years — placing billions of dollars of infrastructure at risk along with a million lives. If the “threat” of climate change is a necessary goad to change this foolish behavior, then at least something good has come of the climate change scare. It is long past time to rein in this self-destructive over-development of such fragile and by-nature-ephemeral environments.”
Currently about 500,000 people live year-round in single-family homes and one- and two-story apartments houses (along with some high-rise condominiums) on the “barrier islands” of New Jersey, such as the Barnegat Peninsula. These barriers islands are sand-bars (or barrier-bars) thrown up over the years by Atlantic storms and are occasionally torn down and cut into smaller pieces by those same Atlantic storms, including hurricanes.
Barrier bars or beaches are exposed sandbars that may have formed during the period of high-water level of a storm or during the high-tide season. During a period of lower mean sea level they become emergent and are built up by swash and wind-carried sand; this causes them to remain exposed. Barrier bars are separated from beaches by shallow lagoons and cut the beach off from the open sea. They occur offshore from coastal plains except where the coasts are rocky; where the tidal fluctuation is great (more than 2 1/2 metres [8 feet]); or where there is little wave activity or sand. Barrier bars are common along low coasts, as off the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, where they parallel straight beaches. They often are cut by tidal inlets and are connected by underwater tidal deltas; they convert irregular shorelines to nearly straight ones. [ source ]
For an example, we can look at Mantoloking, which was impacted by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Note that Mantoloking is “the second-wealthiest community in the state [New Jersey], is known for its Shingle-style houses overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay. The Mantoloking Yacht Club has produced Olympic-champions.” Let me translate that for readers: Mantoloking is a little town exclusively for millionaires. The median value for homes there is $1,305,600.00 (don’t mistake that median as a mean (average) value, the mean value is much much higher).
Hurricane Sandy, October 2012, neatly cut NJ’s barrier island at Mantoloking. It is interesting to note that the more common complaint about Atlantic storms is beach erosion, that they remove sand from the beaches, thus narrowing them. In this case, Sandy added to the beach at Mantoloking.
A couple of things to note from the slide show: Back in 1985, they were using bulldozers to build a protective dune between the sea and the main highway. By 2012, the entire strip between the highway and the dune had been filled with houses. Hurricane Sandy cut a new inlet from the Atlantic Ocean into the enclosed sound, but in the rebuilding it was filled back in with sand. In the present, there are four or five beach-front lots remaining empty. This view is current as seen from the north. Just north a bit more up the highway, less than a mile, the comparatively small house at 1007 Main Ave, right on the beach, was recently sold for $4,500,000.
Shortly after the disaster, in which these poor unfortunate millionaires were inconvenienced by Hurricane Sandy, CNN ran a seven-minute video segment on “this little town fighting back”. No mention is made of the fact these are the exclusive mostly-summer homes of millionaires.
One salient fact is that the main intersection in Mantoloking, the corner of Highway 37 (which comes over the bridge and causeway from the mainland) and Ocean Ave (the main drag running north and south) is shown on Google Earth to have an altitude of minus 4 feet. Now, that may be off by a few feet, but we can certainly know from that fact that the whole town is approximately at today’s relative sea level and its Mean High High Water, within a foot or two. Yet, with the exception of those few still-empty beach-front lots, Mantoloking has been totally built back, with larger more expensive homes.
Bottom Line:
The Jersey Shore does not need to look to the future to see pending disaster – these communities are already at existential risk from the sea levels of today. They were at existential risk from the sea levels of the past 50 years. They will be become only minimally more at risk in the future.
When there is enough money involved, all the rule books are thrown out the window. I don’t think that New Jersey will ever really pass — or if passed, enforce — building restrictions on the rich and super-rich. It is only the middle-classes that will bear the brunt of new restrictive building codes that will, in the end, mean that only the rich and super-rich can afford to ignore the obvious, present-day threats of building homes on ephemeral sandbars – if their beach house gets swept away, insurance will build it back and in the meantime, they can live in their third home in the woods of Vermont or New Hampshire or move temporarily to their condo in the islands.
In the long-run, there is no preserving the barrier islands of New Jersey or truly protecting the human developments there. They are naturally temporary and changeable. Nature will do with them as it sees fit in the natural order of things.
Enforcing building codes to “hurricane proof” homes or to raise highways will only bring temporary respite from the reality that barrier islands come and go over time and nothing we humans can do will change that natural order.
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Author’s Comment:
In our sailboat boat, on our trips to and from the islands, we sailed past the back-yards of many of these millionaire enclaves that crowd the Atlantic barrier islands of the United States. These trips are done in the early Spring (headed north) and the not-too-late Fall (headed south). Most of the mansions were empty, it being off-season for the rich.
In the Carolinas, we had friends that were marooned for weeks on barrier islands that had been cut off from the mainland by Hurricane Irene. These hard-working folks had lived and worked the sounds, fishing and building work boats, for generations. Their lives were mostly enhanced by the idiocy of the rich buying here-today-gone-tomorrow bits of sand and building homes that these regular folks could never even imagine being able to afford.
There seems no end to human stupidity. (and I don’t exclude myself . . . you ought to read my as-yet-unwritten autobiography.)
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Apparently, today is World Water Day.Got this in my email. Why are these people so obsessed with Donald Trump? It’s psychiatric.
Hi Phil,
World Water Day is a time for reflection. And ACTION.
By now, it’s clear to almost anyone paying attention just how important clean water is for all kinds of things, starting with our own health, even here in the U.S. Even before Trump’s Dirty Water Rule and the pandemic, access to clean drinking has not been universal.
Don’t Take Clean Water for Granted. Donate now to reverse the Dirty Water Rule and other dangerous rollbacks. Our water needs us now.
Donate now. Indeed I shall make sure I take a p!ss in the Bay today. Is it tax deductible?
spend many a fun summer weekend in Bayhead and Mantoloking and its always been one big storm away from destruction … many of the homes there are built on stilts in recognition of the possible storm surge … they are testaments to “anything is possible for the right price” …
These people didn’t read the book “Chesapeake” by James Michener published in 1978. He wrote about how the native americans recognized how those beaches and islands were alway in a state of flux. Some growing and some disappearing., always changing.
Natalie ==> Michner’s “Chesapeake” is required reading on the boat as we have traveled up and down the Intracoastal Waterway.
People just love beaches, especially sandy ones, where a person can walk barefoot into the water without worrying about rocks (although shells and certain sea creatures can be nasty on bare feet).
The New Jersey shore normally doesn’t get high storm surges, because most of the strongest storms are centered off the coast, with wind out of the northeast (nearly parallel to the shore) as the storm approaches, and out of the northwest (offshore) as the storm’s center passes farther north, usually east of Cape Cod. .
Hurricane Sandy was a rare exception, since its eye came ashore near Atlantic City, and shore towns to the north had strong winds out of the east and southeast, with a long stretch of open water (fetch) to build a high storm surge aimed directly at the barrier islands. But Sandy should not be blamed on “global warming”, since its center was forced westward by an unusually cold anticyclone (high pressure) over the North Atlantic, and Sandy also caused heavy snow in West Virginia in late October.
In Europe, where the strongest winds are out of the southwest, people don’t build houses close to the shore, but usually on rocky bluffs some 20 or 30 feet above sea level. Some sandy beaches get flooded at high tide, but people are careful to plan an escape route toward higher ground before high tide arrives.
Interestingly enough, when the duke of Orleans (France) sent a group of colonists to build a city in Louisiana during the 1700’s, the colonists wrote letters back that they wanted to buiild the city up and away from the river (Mississippi) due to frequent floods and tempests. Unfortunately, the great duke in his cozy French castle on a hill didn’t heed the advice, and La Nouvelle Orleans was built in its present location, and still suffers from frequent floods and tempests!
Hi Kip,
Good essay here, and I appreciate your taking the time to inform us about these issue.
There is a certain bit of it that seems hard to follow from the descriptions you referenced from the “Brittanica” source material.
I do not think that their description of what a barrier island is, is correct.
The quoted source is unclearly written, and there seems to be some conflation of what exactly a barrier island is, with the different thing called, by lay people in common usage, a sand bar, and then the other seperate thing called a “barrier bar”
What really helps to understand all of this is a very good description from a physical geography textbook.
Physical geographers have learned that a barrier island is a structure that occurs in what are called shorelines of submergence, as opposed to those that are called shorelines of emergence.
The distinction between these two types of coastlines is very clearly seen when the East and West coasts of the US are compared (including the Gulf of Mexico in the category of East coast of the US).
The East coast of the US and the coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico have been eroding away over eons of geological time, tens of millions of years, without any substantial tectonic uplift. All sorts of topography typifies such coastlines, and it can be seen from such studies that they are gradually becoming ever more submerged…again over geological time periods, not historical ones.
It needs to be kept in mind that fluctuations in sea level and due to glacial and interglacial periods, as well as isostatic crustal movements as a consequence of ice sheets forming and then melting away over and over again, are not what is described here. Those are all seperate, and tend to complicate the situation being discussed.
But one has to start at the beginning, and the East Coast of the US has had the basic characterisitics it has now for many tens of millions of years, long before the Quaternary Ice Age commenced.
“Barrier bars are separated from beaches by shallow lagoons and cut the beach off from the open sea. They occur offshore from coastal plains except where the coasts are rocky; where the tidal fluctuation is great (more than 2 1/2 metres [8 feet]); or where there is little wave activity or sand. Barrier bars are common along low coasts, as off the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, where they parallel straight beaches. They often are cut by tidal inlets and are connected by underwater tidal deltas; they convert irregular shorelines to nearly straight ones.”
From what anyone who has ever been or lived near one knows, this passage may be a good description of a barrier bar, but it is not what a barrier island is, or even exactly what people who live on the Beach in New Jersey call a sand bar.
Barrier islands are akin to sand bars, but at a larger fractal scale of time and size.
Some other relevant details re beachs, sand, storms, and the differences between gentle and rough surf, and how these types of beaches change every year between Fall and Winter and then Summer. and back to Fall and Winter, involved the movement of sand from the beach to the offshore litoral zone (note that the term “litoral zone” itself has several definintions, and those used by physical geographers is somewhat distinct and specific, and is also from other usages).
In general, the slow period and low amplitude waves that are typical of Summer on the East coast of the US will bring sand from the offshore litoral zone to the beach and deposit it in the intertidal zone, widening the beach and making it relatively flat to gently sloping.
This is in contrast to the large waves that occur when large storms are offshore, and when geostropic winds are far stronger, such as occurs regularly from Fall until Spring on the East Coast of the US.
These larger waves do the opposite of gentle waves. Large waves tend carry sand offshore, often very rapidly, and cause the beach and the intertidal zone to become very steep and narrow.
This situation was long misunderstood by various people and agencies, and it was assumed that storms eroded sand away and destroyed the beach. But all they did was move it offshore. It will eventually retrun.
However, locales that have lots of people that are used to having wide flat beaches all Summer typically do not want an education in landforms…what they want is the beach they are accustomed to, to be replaced.
So, anywho…East and Gulf Casts of the US…shoreline of submergence. Hurricanes cut inlets in barrier islands, but they can also fill them in, and add entirely new areas to barrier islands, as well as overwash them and move them by several feet towards or away from the mainland.
The West coast of the US is the other kind…it is a shoreline of emergence. Over geological spans of time it is being uplifted tectonically, as North America plows westwards a few inches a year into the Pacific plate (and previously the now all but vanished Farallon plate that was eastward of the spreading center that extends from the mouth of the Gulf of California and from there southwards is called the East Pacific Rise. Some fragments of this plate remain under different names here and there, Jaun de Fuca, Gorda, Cocos, etc).
There are no barrier islands offshore of this type of coast, and there is typically deep water relatively close to shore.
The coastlines tend to be rocky, there are few wide sandy beaches, caves are common, as are high bluffs and cliffs.
These are not places where the ocean has been working on the same rocks at the same elevations over millions of years, as is the case on the US East and Gulf Coasts…ice age fluctuations notwithstanding.
Note that the ice ages complicate the emergent/submergent shoreline paradigm immensely.
Sea level rose hundreds of feet in the past 12,000 years.
It is helpful to consider what the case was before the Quaternary Ice Age started, and this is what I am referring to here, mostly.
Nicholas ==> Maybe you could write an essay on this topic. I suspect that there are a lot of opinions as well as established facts. If I want to know what a barrier island is, I look at the marine charts for the US East Coast.
Even the Christian Bible cites the foolishness of building a house on sand. Here from the book of Matthew:
“shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: 27And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.”
This is 2,000+ year old knowledge. Simple people who thought the Sun orbits the Earth, knew don’t build your house on the sand.
Lil-Mike ==> Many astronomers in the time of Jesus were well aware the the Earth circled the Sun. But everyone knew better than to build homes on the sand!