Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News:
Dr. Andrea Dutton is an Oceanographer at the University of Wisconsin, and a winner of the MacArthur “Genius award. As I spoke to her about climate driven sea level rise, she illustrated her points with sweeping waves of her arms.
She traced a graceful upward swoop of an imaginary graph, to illustrate the steady rise of oceans in response to global heating – and made a hard point.
“When you look at those graphs, it shows this smooth line going up, which gives you the impression it won’t get to say, 2 feet higher than today, until 2060, for example.”
“But I think that’s a little bit misleading, because in fact, during extreme storms or extreme high tides, you’ll reach 2 feet, but you’ll reach it with increasing frequency, as you approach 2060, till you’re there on average.”
“And so when you look at the projection, it gives you almost this false sense of complacency, that, “we have time, we’re not going to get to 2 feet until 2060”, for example, but in fact, we will get there, much before then, with increasing frequency.
And so using that graph on its own is a little bit dangerous, without understanding what it means.”
At the moment, her words are coming vividly to life in news reports from California, as just such an extreme event is evolving in the Pacific Ocean.
El Niño is a regular cycle occurring every 3 to 7 years, in which the world’s warmest ocean water, that normally pools in the southwest Pacific, around the Philippines and Indonesia, sloshes eastward and piles up for a time against the coasts of the Americas.
This cycle, scientists tell us, is still developing, but may be the most intense El Niño ever in the modern record.
That water, slowly surging against the west coasts of the Americas, being warm, expands, and it’s level rises well above normal, even more so as it presses up against the coasts. The expanding thousand mile lens of water is called a “Kelvin Wave”.
It’s not a wave like we see in pictures of crashing surf, but rather a massive swell, thousands of miles across.
As it presses up against shorelines, it may cause sea level to rise temporarily by as much as a foot or two.
Of course, in a warmer world, we have already had most of a foot of sea level rise, so the Kelvin wave is riding on an already higher average sea level.
In addition, those warm waters have spawned a series of powerful cyclones, which are pushing strong waves of the ordinary kind toward the coasts as well.
Newscasts of late have vividly documented the results.
Along the California coasts, iconic beach towns like Newport Beach, Long Beach, and Huntington Beach are seeing stretches of sand disappear, streets dissolve in to sinkholes, and multi-million dollar homes fall to the waves.
Sections of the legendary Pacific Coast highway have closed due to dangerous erosion.
Local governments, acutely aware of the economic importance of their coastal real estate, are trying to push the sea back, dredging and bulldozing sand to replace that which is washing away.
The cost is many millions of dollars, money that increasingly, even wealthy communities struggle to come up with.
The El Niño won’t peak until sometime between late November and January, and the Kelvin Wave is still making its way further north, flooding high end real estate around San Francisco and Marin County, stunning local residents.
The effect is not limited to coastal areas. The release of heat and moisture is so massive that global effects are already obvious, including flooding rains in South America and Africa, choking heat, fires and smoke in Southeast Asia, and an anomalously warm Fall in the Central US, that has already triggered unseasonal wildfires and smoke alerts in Michigan’s UP, and a “Grid Emergency” in the eastern US, as electric producers struggle to keep up with demand for air conditioning at a time of year when power plants are normally shut for maintenance.
In all likelihood, the culmination may be that 2026 could become the warmest year in the modern record, only to be immediately eclipsed by 2027.
In the meantime, El Niño is giving us a glimpse of the future – in which governments, businesses, and property owners scramble to keep up with ever increasing extremes, for which none of our homes, roads, cities, water systems, sewers, grids, airports, or infrastructure were designed.
That trend will continue until humans understand the need to stop making the atmosphere a sewer, and devise systems to right the balance.