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PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFREY GREENBERG, EDUCATION IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY
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By Craig Welch, ENVIRONMENT writer
Humans take comfort in the idea of past as prologue. Our own lives move fast enough; the possibility of rapid changes in the world around can be unnerving. So, we lean on the things we find consistent. Baseball season starting in spring. Canada staying colder than the Mojave Desert. Cities growing and evolving—but not sinking into the sea.
Two recent tragedies focused new attention on just how quickly the world we know is changing, prompting conversations about how we must prepare.
In Surfside, Florida, as emergency crews continue sifting through the rubble of a condominium tower that fell to the ground with as many as 160 people inside, building experts and public officials are already talking about sea level rise. As my colleague Laura Parker notes, that’s not because any clear evidence has surfaced connecting climate change to the collapse of Champlain Towers on June 24—it has not. But when a 40-year-old building crumbles to dust in the middle of the night, it raises troubling questions about what else is coming and whether or not we’re ready.
Investigators scouring the rubble are exploring many factors, from cracks in support columns, to delays by a homeowners’ group in carrying out repairs, to an environmental risk that’s been known for a century: the effects of saltwater on buildings. As Parker writes, if mountains of building codes and armies of inspectors can’t keep a condominium safe today, what will protect oceanfront residents in coming years as “sea-level rise could dramatically eat away the beaches where towers now stand, and spread saltwater intrusion further inland, worsening its corrosive effects?” (Pictured above, oceanfront residences in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.)
And yet, Miami’s coastal construction boom rages on, even as experts like Hal Wanless, at the University of Miami, suggest accelerated melt of polar ice sheets could increase sea level rise beyond government projections. “We could well be two or three feet by mid-century,” Wanless says, noting those rises will occur within a 30-year mortgage cycle.
The disconnect, one former South Miami mayor says, is that it still seems incomprehensible that vast tracts of solid ground will give way to flooding. It’s hard for people to get their heads around the idea that land simply won’t be there. “They can hear you say it,” he says, “but they don’t have a mental construct for this kind of thing happening.”
A similar disconnect happened in Lytton, British Columbia. Temperatures, boosted by climate change, soared to never-before-seen heights across the Pacific Northwest and Canada for three consecutive days, leading to hundreds of deaths. But when tiny Lytton, B.C., broke its country’s all-time heat record, ticking up to 121 degrees on June 29, the phenomenon was so surreal tourists flocked to the tiny village.
But the following day, hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes ignited fires in Canada in one of the most extreme events meteorologists had ever seen. By week’s end, 90 percent of Lytton was gone, destroyed by a raging wildfire that killed two people. (The cause is still under investigation.) Some residents are still missing.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tacitly acknowledged the past can no longer be our barometer. “Realistically we know that this heatwave won’t be the last,” he said. B.C. Prime Minister John Horgan got right to the point. The Lytton tragedy, he said, is something “we’re not accustomed to in a temperate rainforest.”
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