Fleeing The Surging Sea

ALL HER LIFE she worked and planned for her dream home. Finally, she got it. High on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the beach and the Pacific ocean. A modest three bedroom home with a spectaculor view. Perfect for her and her daughter. One night in the middle of the night she thought she heard a faint rumbling, and felt a bit of shaking. When morning light arrived, her front yard was gone, and her house was closer to the edge of the cliff than ever before. Her patio and one of the bedrooms was completely separated from the rest of the house, and dangling by a thread. The rest of the hosue was precariously perched on teh extreme edge of the cliff, much of which had collapsed onto the beach during the night, leaving a huge pile of dirt and sand. The rising water table, caused by rising sea levels, had weakened the underlying ground, which could no longer support the weight of the land. The entire family got out without injury. Later on, the rest of the cliff and house crashed onto the beach. With a lot of help from friends, family, community, and insurance companies she was able to recover financially with a new home, one considerably farther from the beach. The same thing happens to many people every year, in increasing numbers every year. Climate change is causing the sea level world wide to rise fast; it has already risen about six inches during the last century, and is predicted to rise by as much as a foot more by the middle of this century. The world's oceans are rising rapidly and significantly. All over the world ocean front property is threatened, doomed by sea level rise. Land owners along Chesepeake Bay have noticed the water creeping ever higher onto their land, covering it. Pacific Islands are sinking beneath the waves. The number of people who live close to the ocean, and the number of busineses and amount of infrastructure close to the ocean is huge beyond measure; a large percentage of all human activity occurs within a few feet of the water; all becuase of humanity's love of and affinity for the ocean. Humanity will have to undergo a massive relocation project, which has already begun, but, like current efforts at fighting climate change, isn't nearly enough, is, in fact, much too little, much too late. Billions of people, businesses, and megatons of infrastructure, must soon be moved away from the rising oceans, costing the human race trillions of dollars. Already at every high tide in Miami, Florida, the sewer system floods, and the Atlantic Ocean rises up and covers coastal roads and property. Rain events along the U.S. East Coast are becoming more frequent and severe; they regularly turn coastal land into swamps and threaten low lying cities like Washington D.C., New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, among many others. Most of the world's biggest cities sit right on the ocean front, and will require huge dams, levies, and dykes, and will, ultimately, simply have to be relocated. Its unavoidable, becassue the sea level rise already guaranteed for the next several decades is being caused by carbon already in the Earth's atmosphere, carbon which has been in the atmosphere for decades, with no removal in sight. Not only is the world not reducing the amount of carbon already suspended in the atmosphere, it is adding ever more, as much as thirty billion tons per year, although some countries have begun to reduce and level off their carbon emissions. The world isn't even planning on reaching net zero carbon emissions until the year 2050, by whith time damage done by global warming caused by previous carbon emissions will have proved disastrous, including ocean level rise. We must change directions; the one we are going in is taking us nowhere except to extinction.