Climate Change - Chestertown Spy

Trends in U.N. Climate Report Point to an Altered Chesapeake Bay

August 30, 2021 by Bay Journal

Climate change is clearly observable in every region of the planet, and the window is closing for nations to take actions that would stem the most severe future impacts, a global climate assessment concluded in August.

The report, compiled by more than 230 scientists who assessed more than 14,000 studies, cautioned that world leaders are rapidly running out of time to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels.

Many of the changes now observed are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years of climate records, said the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was created by the United Nations in 1988 and is considered an authority on global climate issues.

Even with quick action, the panel warned, that changes already set in motion — such as sea level rise — are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years because it takes so long to counter alterations already taking place in the oceans that cover three-quarters of the planet.

Still, the report said that strong and sustained actions to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would limit impacts of climate change, but it could take 20–30 years to see global temperatures stabilize.

“This report is a reality check,” said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, co-chair of the IPCC Working Group that released the report. “We now have a much clearer picture of the past, present and future climate, which is essential for understanding where we are headed, what can be done and how we can prepare.”

The Chesapeake Bay has seen rising water levels and temperatures for decades, and the report says continued rises in sea levels and temperatures are virtually certain for most of North America, including the East Coast.

This means, in all likelihood, that the Bay in coming decades will be unlike the Bay of the past. It will be both higher and warmer than it has been since it was created after the last ice age 10,000 years ago.

Water levels around the Bay have already risen by about a foot during the last century. That’s one of the fastest paces in the nation because the Bay is experiencing the dual effects of rising water and subsiding land.

NASA, using modeling data produced for the report, launched a website predicting future sea level change in different places around the globe. It shows that sea levels near Norfolk could rise between 2 and 5 feet by the end of the century and between a foot and a foot-and-a-half by 2050.

Temperature rises will cause their own problems. Bay water temperatures have risen about 1 degree Celsius in the last 25 years. That has contributed to the loss of eelgrass in the Lower Bay — a critically important underwater habitat that scientists expect to largely disappear from the Bay in coming decades. Scientists also say the rising water temperatures have increased the prevalence of harmful algae blooms.

The Bay’s watershed has about 10% more precipitation on average than it did a century ago, and a 2017 federal climate report said more of that rain was coming during intense storms. The IPCC expects those trends to continue and will lead to an increased frequency of river flooding.

It also expects hurricanes along the East Coast to become more severe. The Chesapeake Executive Council, which includes the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, governors of watershed states, the mayor of the District of Columbia and the chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, which represents state legislatures, is expected to adopt a directive later this year affirming that climate change is affecting the Bay and its watershed and that urgent action is warranted.

By Karl Blankenship

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Climate Study Predicts Heavier Rains, Deeper Floodwaters on Eastern Shore

March 14, 2020 by Bay Journal

Climate change will fuel heavier downpours and deeper floodwaters on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, according to one of the first detailed looks at changing rainfall patterns at the local level in the mid-Atlantic.

The new report, a collaboration between the University of Maryland and Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, estimates rainfall totals and intensity for five towns on the Mid and Upper shores. It predicts that by the 2040s, a 100-year storm will dump an additional 0.5-inch to 1.5-inches of rainfall over 24 hours, depending on the location.

That might not sound like much of a difference. But when it comes to planning for new roads, drainage ditches and other types of infrastructure, it is, said Jim Bass, manager of the conservancy’s coastal resilience program.

Jim Bass, of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy’s coastal resilience program, stands in the rain at the conservancy’s office in Easton, MD. He said that the rural towns represented in a new Eastern Shore study face a bigger challenge, than most because their public works staffs and budgets are smaller than most of their counterparts. Photo by Dave Harp/Bay Journal News Service

“This was a great opportunity to bring some specificity to this phenomenon that everyone agrees is going on,” he said. “You can’t plan for what you don’t know.”

Many coastal communities across the country are struggling to get ready for rising seas, greater storm frequency and other climate-related impacts. The rural towns represented in the Eastern Shore study face a bigger challenge, Bass said, because their public works staffs and budgets are smaller than most of their counterparts.

In anticipation, his organization formed the Eastern Shore Climate Adaptation Partnership in 2016. The network’s six participating counties and three municipalities work to share costs and resources as they plan for climate change. Their goal, according to the partnership’s website, is to create “America’s Most Resilient Region.”

The rainfall study, funded by a $60,000 grant from the New York-based Rauch Foundation, brings a level of scientific understanding to those communities that many larger cities still don’t have, its backers say.

Climate scientists typically use broad brush strokes when predicting rainfall patterns decades into the future, said Kaye Brubaker, a University of Maryland researcher who co-authored the report. Even with the aid of supercomputers, they can only pin down results to square-shaped blobs with boundary lines stretching more than 30 miles apart.

Brubaker and her team took just such information from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program and used a statistical process called “downscaling” to make forecasts at a more-precise scale.

“It’s almost like zooming in onto an image,” she said. “As you zoom out, you see very coarse pixels, and when you zoom in the pixels get finer and finer.”

The study forecasts rainfall for the period between 2041 and 2070, assuming a scenario in which relatively little is done to combat global greenhouse gas emissions. For a 100-year storm — the sort with a 1% chance of occurring during any given year — the study foresees the following rainfall totals over a 24-hour period:

• Elkton: 9.3 inches (1.6 inches greater than the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration currently charts for such storms in that community)
• Denton: 9.9 inches (1.2 inches greater)
• Cambridge: 10.1 inches (1 inch greater)
• Easton: 10 inches (1 inch greater)
• Centreville: 9.2 inches (0.5-inch greater)

Brubaker said the labels used to describe storms can be misleading. A 100-year storm can strike more than once every 100 years; to say it only has a 1% chance of arising per year is better, but it’s still possible for such ferocious storms to pop up once every few years or even within days of each other.

“It’s like you’re rolling a 100-sided die. Your probability of coming up with a 1 is one in 100. But there is a possibility that you could roll it two times in a row and a 1 would come up,” Brubaker said.

Those labels, though, are critical for engineers trying to decide how high to build bridges and how wide to dig stormwater ponds. If the calculations for a newly constructed highway don’t account for the shifting definition of a 100-year storm, it may be in danger of flooding more often in the future, Brubaker said.

“If the rain falls slowly, it can trickle off somewhere,” she said. But “if the rain falls intensely very fast, where’s it going to go? It’s going to pile up in your pipes and on your street.”

Another symptom of climate change — rising seas — could complicate things for local planners, Brubaker said. If coastal areas become inundated by higher tides, it will be more difficult for rainfall-driven flooding to drain away.

Brian Lightner, the zoning administrator for Cecil County in the state’s northeast corner, said the new rainfall totals will help his department develop even more localized computer models, which he hopes to use to plan stormwater projects.

“Local governments are always thinking about where we can do stormwater retrofits,” he said. “With our flood vulnerabilities being predicted, [we’ll be] looking where we can try to do some restoration to reduce some of that impact.”

Climate scientists generally agree that rainfall will continue increasing in the Chesapeake Bay region, but projections at the local level have only begun to trickle in. The Maryland Commission on Climate Change said in a 2008 report, for example, that winter rainfall amounts could increase up to 12% by 2090, but that information applied statewide.

A 2015 analysis compiled for the District of Columbia’s Department of Energy and Environment looked at a variety of storm scenarios, finding greater intensity and frequency with each. For instance, it showed that the number of days per year with 1 inch of rainfall would increase from an average of 10 to 13 by the 2080s.

In Virginia Beach, a 2018 study suggested that 100-year storms would typically produce 13.3 inches of rainfall over the span of 24 hours by 2075, up from the historical average of 9.4 inches. Such results prompted the report’s author, the Dewberry consulting firm, to recommend that the city increase rainfall intensities by 20% in its design calculations.

In its report, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy lays out several policy recommendations of its own, emphasizing the use of “green infrastructure,” such as rain gardens and wetlands, to absorb additional water.

It is the second climate change report produced by the organization in as many years. Its sea-level rise study last year estimated a 6-foot increase on the Shore, a swell that would put nearly 6,000 buildings at risk of becoming flooded.

Brubaker said that her use of a higher-emissions scenario was a feature of the study, not a fault. It is better to plan for a worse scenario and wind up with dry roads than to hope for the best and end up under water, she said.

“I think we all need to pay attention to what we’re doing to the planet,” she added. “This [analysis] is a hint of what global-scale change might be bringing to our neighborhood.”

By Jeremy Cox

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Snapshots Of Daily Life: Change by George Merrill

February 9, 2020 by George R. Merrill

Life’s the passage we make through one change after another. Impermanence is the name of the game.

On Halloween 2012, shortly after hurricane Sandy had ravaged the East Coast, Carol Pruitt Moore, a life-long resident of Tangier Island motored by boat to see what was left of the island’s tiny village of Canaan. Earl Swift, in his engaging book, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, writes an elegy for the disappearing island and its way of life.

Tangier Island will soon be claimed by the Bay.

Swift writes how Moore made a melancholy discovery that day as she went ashore near Canaan; the family gravesites that once occupied the ground beyond Canaan had been inundated by the Bay. She discovered a grave and, “. . . a few feet away the second grave and in it a complete skeleton . . . partially exposed with hair combs held fast by clay on either side of its skull . . . a third grave containing a tiny casket inside a bigger coffin and in the middle, the skeleton of a small child perhaps no more than the toddler, its shroud had long since succumbed to rot but two white buttons that held the garment closed were aligned on the child’s breastbone.”

In only 40 years, one quarter mile of the island became inundated by the Bay, including the many who had been interred on their beloved island.

I am not writing this with the matter of global warming necessarily in mind. Indeed, it may be exacerbating the inundation of the island, but I believe in this case the process had been underway long before climate change had accelerated in the way it has recently.

I write with the reality of impermanence very much on my mind. Perhaps more than any other certainty dictating the nature of my life and yours, none is more compelling or is more actively denied than the fact that everything – and I mean everything – is changing. Being an octogenarian helps bring the matter home in even more immediate ways. I learn daily of contemporaries that have died. “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away,” the scriptures tell us.

Forever and ever is, in fact, mutable.

But why does any discussion of impermanence matter at all, that is, having a conscious awareness of inevitable changes? I believe that awareness is highly influential in how we live. The knowledge shifts values. What really matters becomes a lot clearer.

Now, with today’s increased longevity being the norm, issues of aging and death are more frequently discussed. A familiar story goes something like this: we learn from a physician that a loved one has a limited time to live. Our initial reaction is shock even though the person is well up in years and it’s obvious they have a limited time to live. I think the shock is because we live with the subliminal conviction that things are, after all, forever. We don’t do endings well, especially as endings inevitably force us to change the way we live.

In managing losses, we go through a period of anticipatory grieving and then feel sorrow and sadness. However, I have heard more and more such stories and how there is also a kind of psycho-spiritual shift that takes place when people are confronted with the highly personal realization of impermanence, of loss.

The value of the person we are soon to lose increases. They become even more precious. We become exquisitely conscious of this perhaps in ways we never have been and the time we have left assumes a character different from before. The loved one emerges in our hearts with greater clarity and with more profound appreciation than ever before and the quality of the remaining time spent together often becomes the most rewarding in the history of the relationship.

In the peculiar way life works, it’s only as we confront losses that we can appreciate the full measure of what we have and have had all the while.

The naïveté in the assumption that everything will remain the same has ramifications well outside of human interactions. It affects how we relate to our environment and to the natural world in general. The assumption that the environment is a static agent, something that is ‘just there’ and will always be there regardless of how we may regard and deal with it, has led to much of the chilling abuses and their resulting consequences, which the world is reaping today.

The environment is not permanent at all, and constantly changes as other forces interact with it. Nor, for that matter, are we permanent. How we accommodate to that change is our challenge.

The cornerstone of Buddhist spirituality is its insistence that to fully come to terms with the reality of life’s impermanence – like we’re going to die – is the requisite for living our lives abundantly. If it’s not forever, then each moment is something to be savored. It’s in those transient moments of life that we see glimpses of heaven in the wildflower and find eternity in the grain of sand. These moments are transient.

Impermanence is vigorously denied in daily life. Understandably so. Confronting its realities is painful. They create grief and mourning. I think of Carol Pruitt Moore and her kin on the tiny island that’s inching away day by day, and so she is losing not only the remains of her kin, but an entire way of life. For over two hundred and forty years this island was home to a way of life shaped by the rhythms of the Chesapeake’s winds, waves and the sea creatures that have lived in it.
It will soon be over. There’s nothing anyone could have done differently. There’s no one to blame. It’s the way it is.

What’s left is sadness and the memories that will eventually find their way into the lore of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States I call home.

It’s all about change.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

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