In Maryland Sea Level Rise Is Happening Now

you're Chester is also ground zero in the Maryland Chesapeake for the Grandin ominous changes that human fossil fuel burning has set in motion I guess you could say it's a whole new ballgame I'm standing where I used to bat a softball around with my friends when I was a kid in the front yard to my dad's hunting fishing cabin on the Hunger River in the lower Dorchester County [Music] if the consequences of global warming and rising sea levels and the worsening erosion and the high tides that bring seem a little hazy to you come take a tour Dorchester County where the future is now check out the dying forests sunken tombstones waterlogged home foundations of communities going into the bay plant a bicycle trip them some of the mid-atlantic most scenic country roads but check your tide chart before you go in another century maybe less this fourth largest county in Maryland by land area is going to be the 14th largest out of 23 counties it's absolutely true anywhere that you're going to be seeing these impacts of sea level rise it just happens to be that here within the Chesapeake Bay within Dorchester County specifically these are the places they're going to be impacted by this first we're expecting within the bay a little bit more than a two-foot rise by 2050 and then by 2100 our best estimates at the moment are about five and a half feet of additional sea level within the bay this is erosion over my lifetime that's been driven by a sea level rise of inches what you just heard from Mike Scott is that by around 2050 we could see another two and a half feet on top of what we've got now and by the end of the century five and a half the animation here shows how the low touches country become flooded as a sea level rises by the end of this century more than half of the torch's County will be underwater know this here's the the anchor of Hope Cemetery now I've got graves literally falling in the water I think I've probably lost about 10 people so far it used to be about a hundred and fifty feet of marsh of course the marsh was not there today because of the erosion over the years I see sometimes what I might call a kind of landscape mortality where features that I was accustomed to viewing don't exist where they might have existed 20 years ago you know 20 years ago this was a beautiful mix pine oak woods and now it's just it's just pie and not for long these ponds are dead and they just don't know it yet so it's one-two punch you know as that salt water comes in and poisons off the hardwoods and then eventually it kills off the pines that forest canopy is thinning out does that forest canopy thins out it's allowing more sunlight to hit the forest floor and ordinarily you would expect an explosion of understory specie but because it basically it's poison most of the species that are naturally adapted you know to respond that sunlight they can't handle that salt so they're not responding but we have this invasive plant Phragmites and it does very well in that environment and it's capitalizing on all the open space that frag will continue to flourish and then eventually what we're gonna have is a bunch of 30 foot tall stops what 15-foot tall Phragmites underneath and that's all we're gonna have well this is a first for me to come here in June that the peak of the breeding season and not find the salt marsh Sparrow we need to care about the salt marsh barren not just for the sake of a sparrow but because it's an indicator of the health of the entire ecosystem and salt marsh habitats as a buffer against storm surge and that can actually protect human communities and take the energy out of storm surges Salisbury today where I teach compared aerial footage of Blackwater in 1938 to aerial imagery from 2006 and discovered 5,000 acres of inner tidal marsh had converted to open water in 68 years and it's not just marched to water sea level rise and land some sites are also driving the wetlands upward drowning forests it's beautiful and it's a lovely landscape but there's a message behind that that everybody needs to understand the climate change is real sea level rise is happening and it's essential it's essential that we understand how to effectively respond to these challenges so we can ensure that our children have the same natural resource benefits that we have today we've got 1,700 miles of shoreline we've got 617 miles of roads I believe that we're responsible for alone not including the state the problems that we've been encountering with the roads have been the course of rising sea levels and and flooding and we're seeing it probably a little bit more frequently now with the tides the way they are and we've had to do some unique things we've had to look at ditching we've had to look at raising roads [Music] [Applause] we have an ambulance station at Madison volunteer fire company it's our primary response unit down to the lower parts of the county taylors island hoppers island they know that if flooding gets to a certain level because the firehouse sits right on the water that they will have to leave everything take the unit and move it north which means we're further away from the area that we're meant to cover next to the Madison Fire House is a little structure a few people ever notice as critical to County welfare as fire engines and ambulances thousands of acres of farms and timber lands stretching south for miles depend on this little slab of concrete to survive Harold Travers who farms 2,500 acres around here maintains the gate that keeps salt water off the land in my lifetime I think it's still gonna be alright but after that to see the Seas rising and all that so who knows what's gonna happen later on I don't know what else you could do but burn the farm up put a berm around your whole farm and put one of these devices in that's the only thing you'd be able to do worming their entire property is just what Danny Dawson and Kathy Harvey did every feature is a response to high tide even the henhouse is raised the septic tank is mounted up as our three parking spaces for cars before we did the raised berm we had to figure some way cheaper cars out of the tide they're just too expensive to get ruined maybe it's worth it to live here it's a land of pleasant living I didn't really think about the tides changing when I was younger and first selling real estate at all but over the past seven years six years it's become much more focused on the the issues of the tides they all seemed concerned some people's concern is another's challenge consider the Draper family to beat the tides Draper is building a berm around his property and raising his house 81 inches twice as much as required by Dorchester County's revised building codes we like a good adventure so if we lost time [Music] I'm 60 and my son is 30 he's gonna live here till he dies my son so you know it's invaluable to us to make it dry the Draper's maybe bucking the odds trying to make a go of it here in coming decades but they are tough adaptable resilient folks one shovel full all the time there's been a lot of shoveling [Music] all equalities that are going to be needed is Dorchester County and other low-lying parts of coastlines everywhere struggle with the challenges of the rising seas we've shown how a lot of people in Dorchester County are working hard to stay in place we why not they live in the beating heart of Chesapeake Bay most delight some patch of the planet but sea levels that rose a foot or less during the past hundred years could rise by six feet or more in this century two or three feet in just the next 3040 years we have to understand that and plan for it right now at the moment if we can get a hold of this in the next literally the next five to seven years we have time to fix it that way if we wait there won't be then we will be in crisis mode and once you're in crisis mode everything is going to get more expensive everything is going to have to happen in a very shocking and upsetting way to the people that live there and no one's going to be happy with that if you worry about your children grandchildren what kind of live they will leave you should take some actions global warming zero rise it's caused by human activities because it's a global problem it's easy to wave your hand say that we cannot do anything but I think that by working together we can tackle this big problem think globally act locally I've never been able to improve on that old environmental dictum and it's especially relevant with climate change we can still avoid some of that six feet of sea level rise are worse forecast by 2100 we do it by getting serious as a state and nation planet about reducing mitigating eliminating the fossil fuel-burning whose carbon dioxide emissions are at the root of the problem locally shorter-term in Dorchester in low-lying parts of virtually every County that borders Chesapeake Bay we have to deal with rising tides now if we don't Zillo the real estate company foresees that by 2100 more than 64,000 properties in Maryland alone with a value of almost 20 billion dollars will be underwater we have to plan now for an orderly retreat because what is politely called nuisance flooding begins to change people's daily lives devalues properties that doesn't mean we can't also pursue interim options where science tells us we can buy time one guiding concept is to leave room for nature to do what nature is going to do one way or the other as the tide bullies its way inland to make space for new wetlands to form on Timberland farms and yards so as we go forward in the future we're going to need to buy the development rights of those places from the people who own them now so you've got room for the marshes to migrate into as the Seas rise the seas are rising in Dorchester County the future is now I guess we're sitting just a little bit off where centerfield used to be now when you come back here and see these changes it's just amazing you

Channel: TeggTalk

Views: 92,573

Rating: 4.4263325 out of 5

Keywords: climate change, TeggTalk, storm surge, inundation, global warming, sea level rise, sea flooding, Thames, Coromandel

Id: paf2pJtaXYE

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/RoachKabob]

The companies that made billions causing this won’t be held accountable under our current system.

[u/knucklepoetry]

In the middle of the clip it just hit me. They won't be able to make it to the 2050s anyhow, what with the Sandies of the coming years that will flood those areas much much sooner than any real sea level rise will occur. How many times can you rebuild? Here's looking at you, #miami

[u/eoswald]

great video!

[u/missingstardust]

It’s hard to believe posts like these receive so little attention on reddit

[u/bligh8]

I'm seeing this up and down the east coast, it's accelerating and will, in human terms never stop.