A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a wild 'n' wet ride. Also, a turbulent and dry one. That's the weather prediction--or, rather, the weather certainty--that today's global warming carries with it. Erratic and unpredictable weather is en route to the world, and climate change is destined to hit all our coasts, if we pay heed. Alas, and specifically, the city of Boston, which prides itself on the "if-you-don't-like-it-wait-a-minute" changeability of its weather, has yet to contemplate the messages.

As scientists and weather pundits survey the winds of climate change that will heighten and alter our famously capricious climate and raise water levels, it is high time (and high tide) to contemplate the fate of the half our population that lives on the nation's coasts. For the residents of Boston's soggy shores and filled-in mudflats, that alert and study came recently in a 160-page report on Climate's Long-term Impacts on Metro Boston (CLIMB).

The document not only underscored the threat but offered graphic images of "before" and "after" as the surging seas and rising waters rise from two to more than three feet across the city's coastline by the century's end. And, yet, here, as is all too often the case with other wary and myopic Americans (half of whom live on its coasts), the menace of these urban portraits has yet to have an impact--or follow up.

Indeed, the opposite attitude to the shores prevails. Boston and other local real estate pages offer developer portraits of forthcoming buildings jutting into the ocean, as if the higher sea levels and stronger storm surges were a mirage. More realistically, the developer-buyer's seaside constructions should evoke images of ground floor tenants peering through their underwater windows, eyeball-to-eyeball, with passing fish and flapping seaweed.

The marks from the before and after maps of the Boston study should galvanize its citizens. It should inspire a response or concern with, say, patching, the battered Charles River bridge, our barrier from the sea. It should cause a pause at the vision of an overflowing Charles River, and, indeed, stir some distress from the institutions facing a soggy tomorrow, as revealed in the report. So should the images of Mass General Hospital, the Public Garden, and the Esplanade--all slated for waterlogging. Not a nod to consider, or, protect, the already leaky Big Dig, not to mention a city's worth of historic structures built on mudflats with pilings on once and former bay and ocean, and a subway subject to flooding as New York's has been.

Despite its menace, apathy--or is it fear?-- remains the order of the day. Some do recognize that it is high tide and high time to act: to prepare for flooding from surging seas and ever-more extreme rain; more loss of wetlands and estuaries; and more demand for cooling overheated summers, and for warming frigid winters, thanks to climate shifts from our mounting greenhouse gases.

New Yorkers, for one, gathered last winter to discuss protecting New York City with barriers while reducing the greenhouse gases that cause the climate shift, talking about the danger to our "watery commons" and the (legitimate) impact of "human influences" in siting structures badly at their Academy of Science. Portland, Oregon, sets up lower levels of greenhouse gases and builds green roofs.

"We should take serious steps and a multi-faceted approach now if we're going to avoid a century from now," says Phillip Warburg of the Conservation Law Foundation which launched the report. "We need an industrial scale renewal," he continues, reducing our energy use by 70 percent through renewables," the figure adopted by other industrial nations.

We need to be creative about alternatives, endorsing, say the New England Governor's and Eastern Canadian Premier's work to comply with CO2 reductions at the local level. We need fossil fuel alternatives and conservation, not rich self-protectionists tiffing at wind turbines in Nantucket.

Here and there, we see it, from individuals curbing their output, to communities, like New Bedford, which constructed walls against storm surges, or Deer Isle, which planned early on for storm impacts, and to New York looking for the Corps of Engineers to build those barriers. Green buildings and other programs have evolved to cut emissions. They must multiply as we try to both mitigate and guard against the rising seas, from local actions to wider perusals of such climate calculators as the Dutch whose windmills, barriers, and outlets for water assaults protect the fragile island-nation.

Will our Wordsworthian "getting and spending" cloud such U.S. initiatives as they have clogged our planet? While Washington retreats, this nation, which contributes 25 percent of the world's climate-changing emissions, should, at the least, join the rest of the industrial world in following the Kyoto Protocol to protect our shores and reduce our greenhouse gases. About the only thing weirder than the recent weather is the myopia that stops us from doing so.

Jane Holtz Kay is author of Asphalt Nation, Preserving New England and Lost Boston. For more on the subject see www.janeholtzkay.com.

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