Tsunami Warning, Education, and Research Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today for my 151st ``Time to Wake Up'' speech on climate change. I have covered many topics during these speeches--from pulling back the veil on the fossil fuel industry's web of denial to sharing my visits to States from New Hampshire to Florida to Utah to see the effects of climate change there firsthand. But one recurring theme of my speeches and in the scientific literature has been the warning that the effects of climate change will hit home first and hardest along our coasts.

The oceans have soaked up more than 90 percent of the excess heat that has been trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses. That is a lot of heat. The Associated Press has compared the ocean heat we have added since 1997 to a, ``Hiroshima-style bomb being exploded every second in the ocean for 75 straight years.''

That excess energy is warming our oceans at alarming rates, and by the principle of thermal expansion, we know that when water warms it expands. That, coupled with the melting ice sheets, is driving up sea levels worldwide. For my Ocean State that is a big deal. Warming and rising seas carry real consequences for coastal economies.

New England is being hit particularly hard on this front. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost any other part of the ocean in the world. Narragansett Bay, in my home state of Rhode Island, has already seen a nearly 4-degree Fahrenheit increase in winter water temperatures since the 1960s. Since measurements started in 1930, sea level is up nearly 10 inches at the tide gauge at Naval Station Newport.

Now, 10 inches may not sound like an enormous amount, but if you do a little mathematics and take that 10 inches and you multiply it by the 147 square miles that Narragansett Bay occupies, that adds nearly 100 million cubic meters of water offshore--throw weight for when the next storm comes.

Now, we don't model storm surge very well yet. But there is a lot of potential harm for Rhode Island. If you look not just at Narragansett Bay but at Rhode Island State waters, it is more than 500 million cubic meters, which is more than 500 million metric tons of potential storm surge.

Earlier this year, researchers published in Nature an updated estimate of global sea level rise. With new estimates of how melting Antarctic sea ice will contribute to sea level rise, the scientists were able to paint a more accurate picture of what lies ahead. It is not good news.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had previously estimated sea level rise to reach between 1.7 and 3.2 feet by 2100. The new study doubles that estimate, putting global sea level rise over 6 feet by the end of this century.

To complicate matters more, as Antarctica loses ice and consequently mass, it will actually also affect the gravitational pull of the Antarctic on the oceans. With Antarctica's gravitational pull reduced, other continents will proportionately carry more gravitational clout, drawing even more ocean water away from the South Pole to their coasts.

Ben Strauss, the director of Climate Central's sea level rise program, recently told the Washington Post:

[T]he 22nd century would be the century of hell. There would really be an unthinkable level of sea rise. It would erase many major cities and some nations from the map.

A study published in the ``Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'' last month looked at the effects of rising seas on more than 100 coastal cities around the world. The study predicts that we will hit 2 degrees Celsius of average global warming, which scientists say brings catastrophic and irreversible climate effects, sometime between 2040 and 2050.

When that happens, over 90 percent of the world's coastal areas will experience almost 8 inches of further sea level rise. On the Atlantic coast of the United States, it is estimated to be more than 15 inches.
If we continue emissions unabated and hit 5 degrees Celsius warming by 2100, New York City could see over 3\½\ feet of seawater swamping its streets.

The year 2040 is not that far away. If you buy a house on the coast today, 2040 would fall well within your typical 30-year mortgage. As you might imagine, the real estate business is starting to take notice.
Zillow, the online real estate marketplace, has looked at how 6 feet of sea level rise by 2100 would affect over 100 million U.S. homes in its database. Around 1 in 50 homes in the United States, or just under 2 million properties, would find their ground floors underwater by 2100.

Thirty-six U.S. cities would be considered completely lost, and another 300 cities would lose at least half of their homes. Florida fared the worst in the study, losing more than 12 percent of the State's housing to sea level rise. Hawaii is not far behind, with over 9 percent of its homes expected to go underwater. Though New Jersey's overall housing situation fares somewhat better, with a loss expected at just over 7 percent, the value of those homes well exceeds any other State. New Jersey alone accounts for over 10 percent of the $882,000,000,000 worth of potentially underwater properties.

Miami Beach would be the hardest hit city, losing over 37,000 homes, worth over $33 billion. Those numbers just count residential properties, not expected losses to commercial or public properties. The insurance industry uses the term ``100-year flood'' to describe a flood that has a 1-percent chance of occurring in a given year. According to a 2013 study commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the area in the United States susceptible to 100-year floods will grow by 45 percent by the end of the century. Our Government Accountability Office says Federal flood insurance premiums are not keeping pace with that growing risk.

From 2002 through 2013 already, taxpayers bailed out insured properties to the tune of $18 to $25 billion. Government-backed mortgage giant Freddie Mac is preparing itself for broad losses from climate-driven flooding. ``The economic losses and social disruption may happen gradually,'' says its Web site, ``but they are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and the Great Recession.''
Let me say that again: ``They are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession.'' Some of the effects of climate change, it says, may not even by insurable.

Unlike the 2008 housing crash, owners of homes that are subsumed by rising seas would have little expectation of their home's value ever recovering. Therefore, they would have little incentive to make their mortgage payments, which would add to steep losses for lenders and insurers.

We don't, of course, have to wait until 2100 to see the effects of sea level rise on coastal cities like Miami, Charleston, Norfolk, or Newport, RI. So-called sunny day flooding is increasing in coastal communities. As sea levels rise, regular high tides can be all that is needed to flood streets, sidewalks and basements. NOAA estimates that non-storm-related nuisance flooding, just from tides and sea level rise, has increased somewhere between 300 to 925 percent along the United States' three coastlines since the 1960s.
This past October's King Tides--the year's highest tides--brought around 2 feet of water to Boston's waterfront. Last month's Super Moon pulled water into the streets of Charleston and the parking lots of New Hampshire. This wayward octopus--I don't know if you can see it clearly, but there is a fairly good-sized octopus here--ended up swimming through a Miami parking garage.

These extreme high tides give a preview of what may be the new normal in this century. Higher seas plus stronger storms forebode real catastrophe for coastal communities. The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 is the worst in Rhode Island's history. A storm surge of 12 to 15 feet hit Narragansett Bay, engulfing downtown Providence. You can see old photographs of the streetcars with just their roofs showing over the water.

If that storm hit again today, it would have a big head start, riding to shore on 10 more inches of sea with that potentially 500 million metric tons of water available for storm surge. Again, we don't know how much of it becomes storm surge, but it certainly raises the potential.

This picture is from historic Newport after Superstorm Sandy gave us a glancing blow in Rhode Island in 2012. It brought a storm surge of over 9 feet to Providence, and over 4 feet to the south coast of the State. This is downtown Newport and Seamen's Church Institute right here, and somebody is kayaking through downtown.

According to the most recent report from the National Ocean Economics Program, more than 134 million people lived in U.S. coastal zone counties in 2014. Those counties accounted for nearly half of the total U.S. GDP and more than 40 percent of total U.S. employment. In my State of Rhode Island, the coastal economy accounts for $55 billion of the State's GDP and employed over 400,000 people in 2014.

This productivity is at risk if those communities and their businesses cannot protect themselves from the consequences of our changing environment. A lot of places are taking this threat seriously.
Although partisans in the State government make the phrase ``climate change'' a taboo in Florida, local policymakers, particularly in South Florida, are making climate change adaptation a priority, forming a regional bipartisan compact on climate resiliency, hiring resiliency and sustainability staff, building seawalls, installing pumps, updating building codes, and in Miami Beach's case--just in that one city-- making $400 million in storm water management upgrades.

In New Hampshire, the Coastal Risks and Hazards Commission has advised cities to prepare infrastructure and buildings for rising seas.

Louisiana rewrote its Coastal Master Plan to accept the dark predictions of land loss and sea level rise facing that lowland State and to include around 200 projects designed to protect Southern Louisiana's marshes and limit the effects of storm surge.

In Alaska, Native villages are seeking financial support to relocate their traditional coastal homesteads to higher ground. In Rhode Island, under the leadership of Grover Fugate at our Coastal Resources Management Council and in cooperation with the leading experts at the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island Sea Grant, and Rhode Island Geological Survey, we are well aware of what climate change, sea level rise, and storm surge mean for our coastal communities.

STORMTOOLS, a free public online tool developed through this collaboration, is providing our city planners and concerned citizens with a visualization of the effects of various levels of sea level rise and storm surge on their properties. The Coastal Risk Environmental Index, which is shown here, will add even more specificity to the models working in STORMTOOLS. Users can actually navigate Google Earth to see what flood damage from sea level rise and storm surge will look like on a building-by-building basis. The city of Warwick, RI, featured here, is already using its maps in its future planning and emergency planning.

The rising tide calls for increased investment in coastal resiliency around the country. Senators Merkley, Menendez, and I asked the Government Accountability Office to review the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's support for coastal States' resilience efforts. Among its findings, the GAO report said that the Regional Coastal Resilience Grants Program ``received 132 qualified applications requesting a total of $105 million during its first application period in fiscal year 2015.'' Well, guess how much money was available to meet that $105 million approved or qualified need. Only $4.5 million. NOAA was able to support less than 5 percent of the coastal States' demand.

Climate change doesn't care whether you believe the science or the propaganda and nonsense pumped out by the fossil fuel lobby--shoreside homes' basements will flood either way. It is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of physics.

For all the denial and diversion, you will notice that the fossil fuel industry's web of denial groups don't talk much about the effects we are seeing in our oceans and along our coasts. Their business is denial and, through calculated misinformation, creating phony doubt.

That is their mission. If that is your mission, it is hard to deny water levels that are measured essentially on a glorified yardstick at tide gauges. It is hard to deny measurements from a Ph test that high schoolers do in their science classes. It is hard to deny readings from thermometers.

Here in the Senate, our choice is clear: We can take action or continue to sleepwalk through history. But we should remember Pope Francis's warning. Pope Francis said: ``God always forgives, we men forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives. If you give her a slap, she will give you one.'' And we have a big slap coming.

If we do nothing, what will we tell the millions of Americans who live by the sea and rely on it for their livelihoods? What should we tell them when they can't get insured for the next hurricane or when their mortgages are underwater in a literal sense? If we refuse to help our own citizens, who then will help the millions of others in developing countries around the world suffering the same fate and looking to our country for leadership? We have a moral obligation to pluck our heads from the sand and get to work. The oceans warn; it is time we woke up and listened.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source