Through The Sandglass

The muddied waters of Sandy

In the aftermath of the real super-storm (or hurricane) Sandy, there has been, not surprisingly, a super-storm of reporting, opinionating, blogging, and twittering. This is good – there is, in certain quarters at least, some kind of debate going on. However, I have a problem, and so, to wrap up the current sequence of the ongoing theme, I will add my two cents to the maelstrom.

The cover, above, from a recent issue of Bloomberg Business Week illustrates my problem quite well. Putting aside my resentment at being addressed as stupid (I’m sure it wasn’t meant personally), I should say that the cover article is good in many respects. It begins, perhaps a little petulantly, “Yes, yes, it’s unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change” and goes on to declare that “Clarity, however, is not beyond reach. Hurricane Sandy demands it…” Then, in my opinion, it fails in its own quest for clarity by confounding two vital issues, two problems, both of which need to be urgently addressed – although these problems are related, the paths to successfully addressing them are distinct, and this distinction is lost in the furore. And Bloomberg are not alone.

The challenge of managing our coasts is not the same as the challenge of “managing” climate change. We urgently need a rigorous, evidence-based, approach to developing policy on both – but with the recognition that the solutions are distinct. Coastal management policy should be informed by analysis of the changing climate but should not be dependent on it. Successfully addressing global warming is neither a pre-requisite nor the solution for coastal management.

Here’s a simple summary of my argument (not that I claim any intellectual property rights whatsoever – I am simply following the logic of the experts):

1. The consequences of the damage caused by even a relatively modest storm such as Sandy are socially, financially, economically, and environmentally unsustainable.
2. More – and more violent – storms are inevitable, regardless of global warming, and their frequency and targets impossible to predict.
3. It is likely that warming oceans are exacerbating the strength and frequency of storms and hurricanes such as Sandy – but then the situation is arguably bad enough already.
4. Any hoped-for global action to address global warming will operate on a timeframe that is irrelevant to storm frequency in the foreseeable future and the consequent immediate coastal management issues.
5. Fundamental reform of the current free-for-all in coastal development needs to be an immediate and local issue, distinct from any longer-term actions to reduce emissions and ameliorate climate change.

So when a video report included in the Bloomberg piece tells me that “our cover story this week may generate controversy, but only among the stupid,” I have to take exception. It’s not that they don’t hit many of the components – insurance costs and so on - and their message that “We have to pay attention” is, of course, correct. Their concluding statement is absolutely correct: “The U.S. can’t afford regular Sandy-size disruptions in economic activity. To limit the costs of climate-related disasters, both politicians and the public need to accept how much they’re helping to cause them.” But, at the same time, there’s my problem – Sandy was a “climate-related disaster” independent of climate change; and yes, “politicians and the public need to accept how much they’re helping to cause them,” but the immediate cause of the scale of the disaster is not inactivity on climate change.

I really don’t mean for this to be tirade against the Bloomberg article – after all, it succeeded in its intention to be controversial, and that’s a good thing; it’s simply symptomatic of what I feel is a muddying of the waters. But let’s clarify what we should be arguing about. Bill Hooke at Living on the Real World hit the proverbial nail on the head in “Hurricane Sandy’s Real Lesson…will we learn it?”:

America needs a comparable national effort and accompanying long-term investment in reducing the need for emergency response on such a grand scale.

The need for emergency response will never go away. But we shouldn’t resign ourselves to the idea that emergencies will necessarily continue to grow in scope, number and impact, just because our society is growing in numbers, in property exposure, and in economic activity. We can grow our society’s resilience to such events. We can reduce the geographical extent and the population adversely affected by future events.

Exactly (except that it’s not just about America). The issue is resilience – and adaptation, and sustainability.

And some further words of wisdom from Rob Young, often quoted in this blog, from a New York Times piece, “As Coasts Rebuild and U.S. Pays, Repeatedly, the Critics Ask Why”:

“The best thing that could possibly come out of Sandy is if the political establishment was willing to say, ‘Let’s have a conversation about how we do this differently the next time,’ ” said Dr. Young, a coastal geologist who directs the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. “We need to identify those areas — in advance — that it no longer makes sense to rebuild.”

That’s one urgent issue. Climate change is another one.

From Judith Kildow (who directs the National Ocean Economics Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies), and Jason Scorse, an associate professor of economics at the institute, in a New York Times opinion piece a couple of days ago:

IT’S no surprise that it can be very expensive to live near the ocean. But it may come as a surprise to American taxpayers that they are on the hook for at least $527 billion of vulnerable assets in the nation’s coastal flood plains. Those homes and businesses are insured by the federal government’s National Flood Insurance Program.

You read that right: $527 billion, which is just a portion of the program’s overall liability of $1.25 trillion, second only to Social Security in the liabilities on the government’s ledgers last year, according to government data.

…The bottom line is that the flood insurance program is a fiscal time bomb for the government.

We should phase out the program, begin thinking strategically about how to shift populations away from the most risky coastal areas, and use the best available science to update the woefully out-of-date coastal-zone risk profiles that government agencies currently rely on to determine danger. We also need to encourage more stringent building codes that take into account the full range of climate risks.  

Which is also precisely what Michael Gerrard, director of the Columbia Center for Climate Change Law emphasised in his recent piece “What Hurricane Sandy was not.” Herewith, his conclusion – which, you will be relieved to know, I shall use as mine:

The prospect of future storms like Sandy is not something where our best future course of action at all plain and obvious. The magnitude of public investments that has been discussed is immense, and these projects must compete against a great many other compelling priorities.  The land use decisions we face are heartbreaking — we seem to be left with a choice between rebuilding communities in places that will continue to be vulnerable to storms like Sandy,  or not rebuilding them and requiring their residents and the rest of us to lose an immense amount of what we value. Perhaps a small fraction of the tens of billions of dollars we’re talking about for sea walls and flood gates should go to offering to buy out the homeowners in the extremely vulnerable areas — that should probably be on the table.  After the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Chile in 2010, serious land use restrictions were imposed on coastal areas that continue to be vulnerable to such events.  That, too, should be on the table.  Some really tough decisions lie ahead — and failure to make a decision is itself a decision, but often the worst one.

Sunday sand food

 

Living in sand is not easy, and life – animal and vegetable - comes up with all kinds of wonderful solutions for doing so. Perhaps qualifying for one of the more bizarre adaptations is Pholisma sonorae, a perennial herb also known as sand food. It can be found in the sands of the Sonoran Desert, particularly in the Algodones Dunes. Sand food is unusual and bizarre in a number of ways: for a start, is a heterotoroph, lacking chlorphyll and looks for all the world like a dull grey powder-puff lying half-buried in the dunes sand. However, from April to June, it is covered in incongruously colourful flowers.

If the wind blows the sand away from around Pholisma sonorae, it takes on the appearance of a mushroom, with a long scaly stalk revealed. But this is only the beginning of the revelation – the stalk continues down as far as a couple of meters below the surface, eventually linking up with the roots of one of a number of different desert shrubs. For Pholisma sonorae is a parasite, depending for nutrients on the roots of its host. It does not, however, depend on its host for water – that it seems to deal with itself, absorbing water through stomata in its scale-like leaves; this independent skill means that sand food is not a parasite in the strict sense – its host does no appear to suffer from the attention of its guest.

And why sand food? The answer is simple: because Pholisma sonorae is remarkably clever at absorbing whatever water is available, its root is fleshy and edible, and it has long been a food source for the indigenous inhabitants of the Sonoran Desert.   

 

[Header image, Photo credit: USFWS/Jim A. Bartel, Creative Commons License; other images http://www.calflora.net/recentfieldtrips/algodonesdunes08.html; for more details and images of sand food, see, for example, http://waynesword.palomar.edu/pholisma.htm, CalPhotos, Berkeley, and DCREP, California’s Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan.]

Weekend movies

 

If it’s cinematic entertainment you want, then I have a couple of recommendations: on the big screen, Skyfall (it delivers entertainment with style and gusto), in the privacy of your own home, Paint by Particle, a stunning epic directed and produced by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. This sweeping saga tells graphically the dramatic and compelling story of aerosols in our planet’s atmosphere – the image above is a detail, the one below a global extract.

 

The cast of characters is as follows: red dust, blue sea-salt, white sulphate, and green carbon. Prepare for the shocking moment when Karthala volcano on Grande Comore Island, off the southeast coast of Africa, erupts. Wonder at the onslaught of Saharan dust on the Atlantic. Cower in your seat as fires spew black and organic carbon across the globe.

Paint by Particle is a worthy sequel to Perpetual Ocean, NASA’s earlier production in which, with a stunning Van Gogh-like style (not an original observation), the “swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents were captured.”

Watch and wonder – and feel intense gratitude to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the people who are clever enough to do these things.

 

[Phil Plait, on Bad Astonomy, has posted a slowed and annotated version of the aerosol video, and thanks, Walter, for pointing me to all this.]

The ongoing theme, ongoing

“We cannot sustain the shoreline in the future as we have in the past”

   

Oblique aerial photographs of Mantoloking, NJ. View looking west along the New Jersey shore. Storm waves and surge cut across the barrier island at Mantoloking, NJ, eroding a wide beach, destroying houses and roads, and depositing sand onto the island and into the back-bay. Construction crews with heavy machinery are seen clearing sand from roads and pushing sand seaward to build a wider beach and protective berm just days after the storm.

As the assessment of the devastation and reflection on the consequences continue in the aftermath of “super-storm” Sandy, a couple of provocative updates. The quotation above comes from a piece in the New York Times titled “Costs of shoring up coastal communities,” and are the words of S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal scientist with the United States Geological Survey and the University of Hawaii. The entire article – well-worth reading – begins:

For more than a century, for good or ill, New Jersey has led the nation in coastal development. Many of the barrier islands along its coast have long been lined by rock jetties, concrete sea walls or other protective armor. Most of its coastal communities have beaches only because engineers periodically replenish them with sand pumped from offshore.

Oblique aerial photographs of Seaside Heights, NJ. View looking west along the New Jersey shore. Storm waves and surge destroyed the dunes and boardwalk, and deposited the sand on the island, covering roads. The red arrow points to a building that was washed off of its foundation and moved about a block away from its original location.

And now the USGS has published its initial post-Sandy report, accompanied by spectacular – and sobering – before-and-after photos of the coastline. As has been previously discussed on this blog, barrier islands are arguably the most dynamic and shape-shifting coastal landforms; they are simply piles of sand that are constantly on the move, dramatically so during storms. Their typical migration is landwards, storms breaching the islands and hurling gargantuan volumes of sand from the ocean beaches and dunes (where there are any left) across the islands and into the lagoons and waterways behind them. The USGS photos sampled here need no further explanation – these are simply the most stupid places to build (and re-build) anything.

Oblique aerial photographs of Bridgehampton, New York. The view is looking northwest across the south shore of Long Island towards Mecox Bay. This location is a very narrow and periodically opens during large storms. Large volumes of material were transported into Mecox Bay when it breached during the storm. One week after the storm, the breach was being closed by mechanical means.

 

[Thanks to Steve Bossert for the NYT link, and Jim Jackson for the USGS report.]

An ongoing - and ignored - theme

 

When I say “ignored,” it’s not that I pretend that this humble blog has any influence whatsoever on the policies of governments, it simply reflects the fact that the considered and rational voices of scientists who know what they are talking about continue to be not only ignored, but even defied, by the powers that be, national and local. I have often mounted my soapbox about coastal management issues in the past, generally amid the chaotic aftermath of the latest hurricane (or, as the case may be, “superstorm”). A good starting point in the archives, should you be interested, would be “Our own little bridge to nowhere,” from March of this year; in there are various links to the views and advice of experts such as Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey.

So, in the aftermath of the unfortunately named Sandy, I can only reproduce – somewhat forlornly - a piece by Young and his colleague from USA Today a couple of days ago:

Sandy reminds us of coastal hazards

Rob Young and Andrew Coburn

Our governments encourage rebuilding in vulnerable areas -- at a large cost to taxpayers.

Story Highlights

• Hurricane Sandy represent a chance to reassess and improve future coastline exposure.
• A new study showed that New York and New Jersey among states most vulnerable to sea level rise.
• Blame our federal and state governments for encouraging rebuilding.

5:14PM EDT October 31. 2012 - Superstorm Sandy will almost certainly join the pantheon of "costliest storms in history." The impact of the storm has been felt from South Carolina to southern Massachusetts. There has been massive damage to significant segments of the New Jersey and New York coastline.

As hard as it may be to think about while people are still being plucked from rooftops, storms such as Sandy represent an opportunity to reassess and improve future exposure of coastline communities to storms and ocean surges.

For example, let's take the hardest hit coastal area from Sandy -- New Jersey and New York. A study released in March 2012 by Ben Strauss and Climate Central, which does research on climate change, listed New York and New Jersey among those states most vulnerable to sea level rise. These shorelines will only become more vulnerable with time, and more costly to maintain.

Even New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie agrees. When NBC's Brian Williams on Tuesday night asked Christie about the power of Mother Nature, and rebuilding the Jersey Shore, he said: "There is a way to do it, but we're going to have to sit down and be smart about it. ... One of the things I'm going to be talking with President (Obama) about ... is bringing the Army Corps in immediately to talk to us about how's the best way to rebuild the Jersey Shore."

Of course, predicting the likelihood of wind damage 50 miles from the coast is impossible, but we have a far better grasp today of the impact of coastal flooding and erosion. Every coastal community has its hazard hotspots, and yet we still have failed miserably in keeping development out of these highly vulnerable areas.

How can we keep repeating the same mistake? The federal and state governments provide multiple incentives for homeowners and businesses to rebuild, rather than relocate.

The continuing saga of Dauphin Island, Ala., is a notable example. The west end of island is arguably the most vulnerable shoreline in the United States. It has been impacted by tropical storms 10 times since Hurricane Frederic in 1979. Though it was spared Sandy's wrath, it is still recovering from damage from Hurricane Isaac in late August. The cost from the previous 10 storms to the federal taxpayer was approximately $80 million for an area of about one square mile with only 400 homes.

The funds for this rebuilding come largely through the public assistance sections of the 1988Stafford Act. This law created the federal system of emergency response that we are all so familiar with. When the president makes a federal disaster declaration for a county, aid dollars flow in with few strings attached. And, as with Dauphin Island, those dollars are often used to replace the same infrastructure over, and over again.

The Federal Flood Insurance Program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), provides vulnerable properties access to flood insurance that would not be available in private markets. Many states have government-managed "wind pools" to keep the rates for non-flood property insurance artificially low. The largest insurer of coastal property in Florida is the State of Florida through its Citizen's Property Insurance Corporation. Private losses not covered by insurance are often written off at tax time, an indirect federal subsidy of risky development.

Finally, federal and state taxpayers have spent billions of dollars over the last four decades pumping up beaches in front of coastal properties (beach nourishment) and constructing coastal protection projects. In New Jersey alone, approximately $1 billion in public funds have been spent just to keep beaches in front of homes and oceanfront buildings.

Even more mind-boggling is the fact that FEMA treats beach nourishment projects as infrastructure. If a storm washes away your beach, taxpayers will put it back. One of the hidden costs of Hurricane Sandy up and down the East Coast will be the federal funds used to put the sand back in front of the houses.

It really shouldn't be like this. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the risk of irresponsible development, and we clearly shouldn't be rebuilding areas of known hazard multiple times. We need to allow market forces to set insurance rates and property values without the current government subsidy and risk underwriting.

Superstorm Sandy is a chance to change that calculus. Let's hope that federal, state, and local governments can come together to rebuild infrastructure in a way that will reduce future vulnerability, and limit taxpayer exposure.

Ultimately, let's hope that government at all levels can finally take the issue seriously. Every storm like Sandy is an opportunity to change the way we have been doing business. Let's take it.

Rob Young is director and Andrew Coburn is associate director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

So we’ll wait and see – perhaps after the next hurricane….

Meanwhile, there’s a good post at Geology in Motion on “Why did Sandy leave so much sand in Seaside Heights and even NYC?” and a useful explanation of what a storm surge is at Geology.com.

 

[Images courtesy of the BBC and AP]