Slate (yeah, not the first place I look for science news, but hey) unearths the sad truth about beaches that aren’t going to be beaches much longer:
[Jim] Titus, the Environmental Protection Agency’s resident expert on sea-level rise, first happened on Maryland’s disappearing beaches 15 years ago while looking for a place to windsurf. “Having the name ‘beach,’ ” he discovered, “is not a very good predictor of having a beach.” Since then, he’s kept an eye out for other beach towns that have lost their namesakes—Maryland’s Masons Beach and Tolchester Beach, North Carolina’s Pamlico Beach, and many more. (See a map of Maryland’s phantom beach towns here.)
…For nearly 30 years, Titus has been sounding the alarm about our rising oceans. Global warming is melting polar ice, adding to the volume of the oceans, as well as warming up seawater, causing it to expand. Most climatologists expect oceans around the world to rise between 1.5 feet and 5 feet this century.
…
Neither, it seems, does the federal government. Over the past decade, Titus and a team of contractors combined reams of data to construct a remarkably detailed model of how sea-level rise will impact the eastern seaboard. It was the largest such study ever undertaken, and its findings were alarming: Over the next 90 years, 1,000 square miles of inhabited land on the East Coast could be flooded, and most of the wetlands between Massachusetts and Florida could be lost. The favorably peer-reviewed study was scheduled for publication in early 2008 as part of a Bush administration report on sea-level rise, but it never saw the light of day—an omission criticized by the EPA’s own scientific advisory committee. Titus has urged the more science-friendly Obama administration to publish his work, but, so far, it hasn’t—and won’t say why.
So Titus recently launched a personal Web site, Risingsea.net, to publish his work. “I decided to do my best to prevent the taxpayer investment from being wasted,” he says. The site includes “When the North Pole Melts,” a prescient holiday ditty recorded by his musical alter ego, Captain Sea Level, in the late ’80s.
Yeah, OK, so I’m a sucker for a scientist songwriter.
Still, I’ve watched the beaches shrink around me all my life. In Palm Beach, they actually import sand. I’m not making that up. Truckloads of it, every year. And still it goes away.