OPB News: It’s not unusual for Keith London to run into people who doubt that global warming is really such a big deal. “I tell them, ‘the ocean is rising,’ ” he said. “They say, ‘so?’ It drives you crazy.” London is no scientist; he’s a city commissioner in Hallandale Beach, Fla., a municipality of about 37,000 that sits on the Atlantic coast between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. But he talks to scientists and engineers all the time as part of his job, and the story they tell him isn’t pretty. “The average elevation in Florida is 6 feet,” London said. “Some places are as little as 3 feet above sea level. And sea level is going to rise as all that ice in the Arctic melts.”For places like Hallandale Beach, along with much of South Florida, that’s a big problem — not just off in the future, the way climate change feels to some people, but right now. The sea has already risen more than a foot in this area over the past century, and new research by Climate Central shows that some 2.4 million Floridians are at risk of flooding from even a moderate hurricane-driven storm surge. The odds of a catastrophic 100-year flood by 2030 are now 2.6 times higher than they would have been without global warming.
Mindful of the danger, public officials in Monroe, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties — Democrats and Republicans alike — have organized the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact to coordinate their responses. But local governments have already been dealing with the effects of the rising sea, and Hallandale Beach is a perfect example.
“The two biggest issues,” London said, “are potable water and sewage treatment.” Hallandale Beach, like much of the region, draws water from the Biscayne Aquifer, an immense natural subsurface reservoir that supplies 1.3 billion gallons of fresh water every day for drinking, cooking, bathing and more....
Locator map of Hallandale Beach, created by Bastique, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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