Flooding in Miami | Years of Living Dangerously

Jack's attitude was: "I'm on a journey." He wants to find out about Miami and wants to meet the people.

Nicole: "Hey, Jack. Hello! Hi, my name is Nicole Hernandez-Hammer. I just gave a tour of the town of Shorecrest to jet-black. This is high tide. This is just high tide, yeah. And it's not really a low tide; this is a foot less than last month. Crazy! So I came out here and I talked to folks, and I asked them what they thought was causing the problem. A lot of them thought it was water mains breaking, but it is indeed sea level rise. Just to be clear, we're pretty far away from the beach right now, and yet the tides bring in water out of the street like this. It comes all the way here through the floor; there's a limestone."

"Yeah, well this area is low-lying. It also has a segment that is low income, and that's kind of the area that I'm interested in working in: educating people in low-income communities about the impacts of sea level rise and climate change."

Jack: "So, you're a climate scientist? You grew up here. You can see the writing on the wall. What do you tell people in the community when you try to communicate what's coming?"

Nicole: "Perhaps they don't have a lot of money to lose. Mm-hmm. But in terms of how much they're gonna lose, they're gonna lose more than anybody else 'cause they could lose everything. With regard to climate change, there are scientific facts and then there's the heart and the emotion. If you only have one without the other, they're not really effective. You need a combination of the two to really spark the flames of positive social change."

Jason: "Hey! I was going... "

Nicole: "Jason! Yeah, I'm Jason. How you doing? To meet you!"

Nicole: "I was able to introduce him to some people in the neighborhood. I think a lot of times we think that climate change is something in the future, but when we talk to folks that are dealing with the problems now, it changes the context in which we're viewing climate change. It's gonna devalue the home eventually, yeah. People are gonna come by and see you, and there’s no interest in buying a property like that. You're surrounded by stinky water. Shells like years of living dangerously are incredibly important; it helps amplify what I do and helps folks across coastal areas learn about the issue of tidal flooding, sea level rise, and climate change."