The erosive effect of sea surges is visible on Eastern Cape beaches, starting with Nahoon.
Two cut-off mid-latitude storms — a feature of high-pressure cells moving south from the overheated oceans at the equator — and a raft of typical winter’s storms have grated the coast, moving tonnes upon tonnes of sand.
Another cut-off low system for the Eastern Cape is showing on Windy.com and is being mentioned by independent sites such as the Severe Weather and Information Centre for Wednesday to Friday.
The SA Weather Service confirmed the reports and was busy putting a release together.
While disconcerting, our ocean damage is small beer compared to more low-lying areas on the planet.
A recent scientific paper suggests that climate chaos — in this case melting ice and rising seas — has doomed New Orleans.
The paper in Nature Sustainability argues that the US authorities should immediately begin planning to relocate the city.
The research, which hit global headlines, found that rising global temperatures were melting vast amounts of the planet’s ice, and the run-off particularly threatened islands and delta regions such as New Orleans, which sits at the mouth of North America’s biggest river, the Mississippi.
New Orleans has now passed a “point of no return”.
Covering Climate Now reports that New Orleans residents complained their city was being unfairly singled out.
“Miami sits on porous limestone that cannot be walled off from rising seas,” Greater New Orleans, Inc president and chief executive Michael Hecht noted in a letter to The Guardian.
“New York’s financial district faces catastrophic flood exposure. But nobody suggests that these cities should be deserted.”
Hecht has a point, though it does not absolve New Orleans.
The fact is, many of the world’s biggest cities — from Shanghai, Tokyo and Bangkok in Asia to Amsterdam, London and Hamburg in Europe and to New York, Washington and San Francisco in North America — are also at severe risk from climate-change–driven sea-level rise.
Globally, more than a billion people live within 10km of the coast.
Issues of timing and scale are fundamental: How soon will the oceans rise, and by how much?
Also key: When preparing for sea-level rise, social context can matter as much as raw numbers.
Do communities living in a given location take science seriously, govern responsibly and possess the resources to act accordingly?
Sea-level rise differs from other climate impacts triggered by rising temperatures.
The harsher heat, deeper droughts and stronger storms of recent years could still be contained if humanity rapidly phased out fossil fuels, as most of the world’s biggest economies pledged to do last month at the landmark Santa Marta climate conference.
If humanity cut emissions to zero, temperatures would stop rising in three to five years.
Not only could this keep extreme heat and other impacts from getting more extreme, but it would also boost the chances of not pushing key planetary systems past tipping points, such as slowing down the Atlantic ocean current whose warm waters keep northern Europe habitable.
Alas, sea-level rise doesn’t work like that. The current 1.4°C of global temperature rise is already melting huge amounts of polar and glacial ice, and melting it faster all the time, especially in the Arctic and the Antarctic.
Even if temperature rise were miraculously halted at today’s level of 1.4°C, this melting would continue.
In other words, the tipping point for much of Earth’s ice has already been crossed; seas will continue rising for a long time to come.
Which is one reason why the recent brouhaha over whether to disregard worst case, “high emissions” scenarios of future warming is so misplaced: even under a low emissions future, climate change will pose enormous challenges.
Again, the crucial question is, how much and how soon will oceans rise?
The US scientific agency NOAA has projected that seas could rise by 2.19m by 2100, while eminent scientists such as James Hansen and Harold Wanless have calculated the rise at 3.05m to 6.1m.
The most conservative estimates envision 0.9m of sea-level rise by 2100, but even this will pose enormous challenges.
For example, it would put the runways of airports serving New York, Washington, San Francisco, Shanghai and other cities underwater.
“In south Florida, where I live,” Wanless wrote, “residents will lose access to fresh water.
“In China, India, Egypt and other countries with major river deltas, 30cm to 90cm of sea level rise will force the evacuation of tens of millions of people and the loss of vast agricultural lands.”
Our best hope, experts say, is to limit the speed and amount of sea-level rise to buy time to implement adaptation measures.
As The Netherlands and Bangladesh in particular have demonstrated, those measures include strengthening sea barriers, developing salt-tolerant strains of rice, and, yes, abandoning areas that cannot feasibly be defended.
None of this will matter, however, if global temperature rise is not halted.
Preparing for 90cm of sea-level rise by 2100 will be hard enough; doing so by 2050, the timeline implied by humanity’s current emissions trajectory, or trying to manage 2.1m of sea level rise by 2100, is hard to even fathom.
So, New Orleans is absolutely in trouble. As are many other places.
Many of the solutions are well understood and, in some places, already being implemented.
But there is precious little time to save ourselves from a dangerously watery future.
Daily Dispatch
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.