A climate change tipping point has passed, says NOAA

A climate change tipping point has passed, says NOAA

Some US coastal areas will now see flooding regardless of what is done about climate change and many others will follow soon according to a new report.

Climate change is frequently seen as something that will happen in the far off future. While that might have been the case once, many areas are starting to see the impact now and conditions are going to continue to get worse.

According to a new report from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) a majority of U.S. coastal areas will see flooding for 30 days or more each year by 2050. For Washington DC, Annapolis Maryland and Wilmington North Carolina this will happen even if efforts are taken to reduce greenhouse gasses. For a number of other areas including Baltimore, Atlantic City and Charleston, South Carolina the tipping point will come in 2020 unless atmospheric Co2 is somehow dramatically reduced in the next 5 years.

It is important to remember that as the sea level rises, it will not do so evenly. The geography of the ocean floor, the geography of the coastal land as well as weather and ocean currents will all play a role in how much sea levels rise and when. However, nearly every coastal area will see significant amounts of annual flooding by 2100 and the date beyond which that flooding cannot be avoided is beginning to arrive for many cities.

In preparing the paper, “Extreme to the Mean: Acceleration and Tipping Points for Coastal Inundation due to Sea Level Rise” NOAA scientists William Sweet and Joseph Park established tipping points for each region. These points represent a time when “nuisance flooding”, of 1 to 2 feet, occurs more than 30 times per year.

The NOAA team found that these points will be met by 2050 for most of the US east and west coast. For the study the researchers used sea level rises of 1.5 to 4 feet by 2100, which is the rise projected by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change. Local factors such as subsidence of land were also taken into account.

Historic measurements from NOAA tide gauges was used to predict annual daily floods which, the researchers report, are five to ten times more likely today than they were 50 years ago.

“As communities across the country become increasingly vulnerable to water inundation and flooding, effective risk management is going to become more heavily reliant on environmental data and analysis. Businesses, coastal managers, federal, state, and local governments, and non-governmental organizations can use research such as this as another tool as they develop plans to reduce vulnerabilities, adapt to change, and ensure they’re resilient against future events,” said Holly Bamford, Ph.D., NOAA acting assistant secretary for conservation and management in a statement.

This flooding will make, or is already making, coastal communities come up with contingency plans to mitigate the damage done by this flooding. These mitigating plans include building further inland, the use of natural barriers such as dunes and wetlands or other fortifications such as storm water systems and sea walls.

The importance of this research is that it draws attention to the largely neglected part of the frequency of these events. This frequency distribution includes a hazard level referred to as ‘nuisance’: occasionally costly to clean up, but never catastrophic or perhaps newsworthy,” said Michael Ellis, editor of Earth’s Future the journal that published the paper.

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