Coastal cities fate rests with Antarctica ice melt

Council members of an island town in Georgia met in a police station near sandy beaches last week to mull a plan for coping with worsening floods. The meeting followed unprecedented king tide floods in the fall that inundated the island and nearby Savannah, and shut down the highway that connects them.

“We’ve had more frequent flooding in areas that haven’t flooded before,” said Jason Buelterman, mayor of the beach town on the eastern shore of Tybee Island, where the population of a few thousand residents swells each summer with vacationers. “In November, water was coming into people’s garages and stuff. It had never happened before.”

The meeting was held eight days before world leaders were due to converge in New York this Friday to ratify a United Nations treaty, aiming to avert the worst impacts of climate change. If the treaty succeeds, Tybee Island and other coastal communities may flood terribly in the coming decades, but will most likely remain mostly above sea level, recent Antarctic modeling suggests. Vast scientific uncertainties, however, mean even that cannot be assured.

Mayors from small towns, planners from the world’s largest cities and U.N. diplomats are being guided on the details of a looming coastal crisis by sea level projections compiled by a U.N. science panel. The panel’s work includes warnings about the amount of flooding that could be caused by melting in Antarctica, and those warnings have been growing bleaker.

Read the Climate Central story - “Fate of World’s Coastlines Rests on Melting Antarctic Ice.”