Climate change: A slow-burn existential threat | Jon Gertner | Big Think

A few years ago, I went down on assignment for the New York Times Magazine to an island in the Chesapeake called Tangier Island, which is a real sort of sandbar. It's three sandbars connected sort of by some land. And it's an old fishing and crabbing community. And it's threatened by sea level rises as well as erosion in the middle of the Bay. It's about 12 or 14 miles from the Virginia coast.

And, in the course of doing that story, I found a couple of things. One is that Tangier Island, according—unless we build, or the Army Corps of Engineers or someone builds some kind of walls or protective structures, this place might not last more than 25 years. But in the course of my story, I also ended up coming across a paper by some academics who had studied the Chesapeake Bay.

And it turns out there were a lot of islands in the Chesapeake Bay. Well, there still are a lot of islands. But there are a lot of islands that had actually kind of succumbed to both sea level rise and erosion. And some of those islands were populated, and they've since disappeared. One of those islands was called Holland Island.

And these academics had studied what happens when an island is being overcome by rising seas. And I think in our minds we sort of think, OK, well, as the ice caps melt, as Greenland and Antarctica melt, places like Miami, which are very threatened, or Jakarta, that there will be this kind of massive flooding, permanent flooding. And that when the waters are up to our waist, people will flee. That may happen.

But it also may happen that what happened in Holland Island and Chesapeake Bay, which is that bit by bit the floods came, and the community actually began to break down, bit by bit. That not everyone left en masse at the same time. That eventually people stopped attending church, they left the schools, and left the island. And family by family they decided that there was no viable future in that place.

And I think it's an interesting lesson. It's certainly a worrisome lesson because we're facing this prospect of great floods, I think, in the future as the ice sheets increasingly melt. And even in a best-case scenario, the consensus is that we'll get at least two feet of sea level rise by the year 2100. Some of the worst-case scenarios are far, far higher than that—5 feet, 6 feet, I've even seen some that goes high, in some unusual circumstances, as 10 feet.

That's not going to happen all at once. It's not like Greenland's ice is going to just slide into the ocean. But our cities have been built—in fact, our civilization has been built on the idea that sea levels are relatively stable. And we know that they're not. We know that they're not by looking back in time. That ice sheets have melted before, that vast floods have covered our coasts.

But we also know now by just watching our tidal gauges, by using our satellites to measure how the tides are going up, that sea levels are rising. They're rising at an accelerating rate. And that the future bodes poorly for this idea that we can kind of keep colonizing the coast and stake out on these coastal cities.

And so I am not the best at predicting the future. I'm not sure anyone is. But I think we know that the way this goes is that the flooding gets worse and worse. What people will do, and when they will decide to leave, and when they decide that there's no hope for them in their town anymore, is a real big question. And it's a poignant question as well.

What it tells me, I think, is that not only will certain countries be more vulnerable, especially poor countries and low-lying countries, but it tells me that certain cities and towns will be as well. That richer towns have this option of building defenses. The idea of resilience and trying to kind of acclimate to a rising tide is going to be increasingly important this century.

But that takes money, that takes engineering, that takes investment. And I think it might separate places, winners from losers.