The eastern United States must plan on the very real possibility that total sea level rise by 2100 will exceed 6 feet on our current emissions path. Sadly, the Washington Post got the story only half right.

This week I'll focus on our best understanding of the impacts that Americans face from human-caused climate change. On Tuesday, the US Global Change Research Program is releasing its long-awaited comprehensive analysis of Global Climate Change Impacts in United States. We'll see how it matches up against my not-so-well-funded analysis, "Yes, the science says on our current emissions path we are projected to warm most of U.S. 10 - 15°F by 2100, with sea level rise of 5 feet or more, and the SW will be a permanent Dust Bowl."

First, though, let's do a comprehensive review of projected sea level rise (SLR), starting with two recent studies on what accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet might mean for us. The University of Alaska Fairbanks reports on a brand new study in the journal Hydrological Processes (subs. req'd):

The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than expected according to a new study....

Study results indicate that the ice sheet may be responsible for nearly 25 percent of global sea rise in the past 13 years. The study also shows that seas now are rising by more than 3 millimeters a year-more than 50 percent faster than the average for the 20th century.

UAF researcher Sebastian H. Mernild and colleagues from the United States, United Kingdom and Denmark discovered that from 1995 to 2007, overall precipitation on the ice sheet decreased while surface ablation-the combination of evaporation, melting and calving of the ice sheet-increased. According to Mernild's new data, since 1995 the ice sheet lost an average of 265 cubic kilometers per year, which has contributed to about 0.7 millimeters per year in global sea level rise.

This research is consistent with data presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December (see "Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003, rate of Greenland summer ice loss triples 2007 record"). This staggering ice loss is all the more worrisome because it was not predicted by the IPCC's climate models. As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking "100 years ahead of schedule." In 2001, the IPCC thought that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.

And, of course, Greenland is facing an almost incomprehensible amount of warming if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path - see "M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F - with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F."

Especially worrisome for North America is that a new study in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req'd) finds that sustained high rates of Greenland ice loss could lead to staggering increases in coastal sea level rise. As reported:

If Greenland's ice melts at moderate to high rates, ocean circulation by 2100 may shift and cause sea levels off the northeast coast of North America to rise by about 12 to 20 inches (about 30 to 50 centimeters) more than in other coastal areas. The research builds on recent reports that have found that sea level rise associated with global warming could adversely affect North America, and its findings suggest that the situation is more threatening than previously believed.

"If the Greenland melt continues to accelerate, we could see significant impacts this century on the northeast U.S. coast from the resulting sea level rise," says NCAR scientist Aixue Hu, the lead author. "Major northeastern cities are directly in the path of the greatest rise."

All that is needed for the 20 inches of extra sea level rise is if Greenland's melt rate continues at its current rate through 2050.

And the key point of this study is that this 20 inches would be on top of what ever sea level rise is caused by the ice loss in Greenland, Antarctica, and the inland glaciers, plus thermal explanation of the ocean.

How much sea level rise is that? Well, if you read last week's WashPost story on the second study, "East Coast May Feel Rise in Sea Levels the Most," you'd get the bizarrely old SLR estimate from the 2007 IPCC report:

While the rest of the world might see seven to 23 inches of sea-level rise by 2100, the studies show this region might get that and more - 17 to 25 inches more - for a total increase that would submerge a beach chair.

[Note to WP: Sea level rise is one of the most potentially devastating impacts of global warming to human civilization -- so you need a more serious visual metaphor for it than submerging a "beach chair.]

The 7- to 23-inch estimate was out of date the minute it was published in 2007, since the IPCC froze virtually all new science inputs to its Fourth Assessment in 2005. Why would the WP write an article about the very latest study of possible extra SLR in 2100 and then add it to a very old SLR estimate that was based on an even older literature survey?

Last year, the Bush administration itself explained in great detail that the IPCC's projection, low-balled the sea level rise number - see US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely "substantially exceed" IPCC projections. Since big media still gets this wrong, let's take a quick look at that study, which concluded "based on an assessment of the published scientific literature":

Recent rapid changes at the edges of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show acceleration of flow and thinning, with the velocity of some glaciers increasing more than twofold. Glacier accelerations causing this imbalance have been related to enhanced surface meltwater production penetrating to the bed to lubricate glacier motion, and to ice-shelf removal, ice-front retreat, and glacier ungrounding that reduce resistance to flow. The present generation of models does not capture these processes. It is unclear whether this imbalance is a short-term natural adjustment or a response to recent climate change, but processes causing accelerations are enabled by warming, so these adjustments will very likely become more frequent in a warmer climate. The regions likely to experience future rapid changes in ice volume are those where ice is grounded well below sea level such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet or large glaciers in Greenland like the Jakobshavn Isbrae that flow into the sea through a deep channel reaching far inland. Inclusion of these processes in models will likely lead to sea-level projections for the end of the 21st century that substantially exceed the projections presented in the IPCC AR4 report (0.28 ± 0.10 m to 0.42 ± 0.16 m rise).

What does the recent published scientific literature now project?

And here's an extra update. The 2008 Science paper, "Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise" with its 0.8 and 2.0 m projection for 2100, is widely considered to be the most credible, comprehensive, and authoritative recent estimate. And yet consider just one piece of that analysis - the lower bound projection of the SLR contribution in 2100 from the ice caps and inland glaciers (other than Greenland and Antarctica), which the paper says is 0.17 meters (170 millimeters).

These inland glaciers are melting unexpectedly fast (see " Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers "decapitated" and "Another one bites the dust, literally: Bolivia's 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier is gone."

A 2009 Geophysical Research Letters paper, "Sea-level rise from glaciers and ice caps: A lower bound," (subs. req'd) concluded a detailed analysis of actual glacier data:

If the climate continues to warm along current trends, a minimum of 373 ± 21 mm of sea-level rise over the next 100 years is expected from glaciers and ice caps. When compared to recent estimates from all other sources, melt water from glaciers must be considered as a particularly important fraction of the total sea-level rise expected this century.

So you can add a minimum of 0.2 meters to the lower bound of the Science paper - taking that paper's lower bound to 1 meter. Given how fast the Arctic is projected to warm on the BAU path, I wouldn't be surprised if projections of the likely ice loss from Greenland will rise in the coming years. Same for Antarctica (see "Q: How much can West Antarctica plausibly contribute to sea level rise by 2100?").

Bottom line: The entire U.S. should be planning on SLR of 5 feet by 2100 on our current emissions path. And the eastern United States should plan on the very real possibility that total sea level rise will exceed 6 feet.

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Don't let Beantown become a has-been town.

Buckle your seatbelts: it's going to be a wet 'n' wild ride. That's the prediction -- or, rather, the certainty -- that today's global warming carries. Erratic and unpredictable weather is en route, and coastal areas are among the places destined to be hardest hit. So why are Americans paying so little heed?

As scientists and weather pundits survey the winds of change destined to bounce our thermostats and pivot our climate, the political will of the nation seems becalmed. With change now the constant, it is high time and high tide to contemplate the fate of the half of our population who live on the nation's coasts.

Recently, an EPA-funded study predicted that massive coastal flooding could radically alter the landscape of Boston, my home city, by the end of this century. The Hub, which prides itself on the "if-you-don't-like-it-wait-a-minute" changeability of its weather, is not alone: the East Coast's problem is America's predicament, and the world's. Alas, few U.S. residents have yet to seriously consider the message.

"We should take serious steps and a multifaceted approach now if we're going to avoid trouble a century from now," said Conservation Law Foundation head Philip Warburg in response to the 160-page report, which not only underscored the coming threat, but included graphics showing how surging seas would affect some of the city's streets and landmarks. "We need an industrial-scale renewal."

For all the efforts of Warburg and others, the study seemed to galvanize neither city officials nor citizens. I heard not a word on, say, patching the battered Charles River Dam Bridge, nor on combating an overflowing Charles River or Boston Harbor. Not a word about preventing distress to the institutions facing a soggy tomorrow, including Mass General Hospital, the Public Garden, and the Esplanade. Not a nod to a city's worth of historic structures built on mudflats, nor plans to protect the already-leaky Big Dig tunnel, which houses the city's major artery, or the vulnerable subway nearby.

Indeed, an opposing attitude toward the shores prevails. Real-estate pages throughout New England and elsewhere continue to feature developer portraits of forthcoming buildings jutting toward the ocean, as if the future were a mirage. To be realistic, these seaside images should portray ground-floor tenants peering through their underwater windows, eyeball to eyeball with passing fish and flapping seaweed.

Though developers are missing the boat, scientists are stepping in. In January, a gathering at the New York Academy of Sciences discussed the toll of climate change on their sea-wrapped metropolis, and the literal barriers that might ward it off. What's an island "nation" like Manhattan to do in the face of rising waters and storm surges? This was the question posed by Douglas Hill, an engineer who edited The Baked Apple: Metropolitan New York in the Greenhouse almost a decade ago, and is still (and maybe more) anxious today. Hill and Malcolm Bowman, an oceanography professor from the State University of New York-Stony Brook, shared the platform to discuss the chances of protecting the populated urban shore.

Their presentation offered a glimpse of tomorrow's weather events, when hurricanes, packing the extra wallop of the changed climate, would combine with rising waters. That mounting height and flooding would construct an inescapable situation, Hill observed. "When do you plan for a flood?" the scientist-scholar asked. The answer to this classic question: "Too late."

When in foam, do as the Venetians do.

Attempts to defend these fragile shores are getting off the ground in places -- from New Bedford, Mass., which has long relied upon a rocky hurricane barrier, to New Orleans, which struggles to find ways to protect its precarious perch below sea level. In Europe, Venice introduced adjustable barriers to prevent tidal flooding. The Netherlands, a parent of water protection, has constructed barricades, places for inland flow to run off safely, and even amphibious houses that bob up and down as the seas come and go, Hill pointed out.

But barriers are not enough. We need to be creative about alternatives, endorsing efforts like the New England governors' and eastern Canadian premiers' work to implement CO2 reductions, and Portland, Ore.'s success in shrinking emissions to levels of a decade and a half ago. We need fossil-fuel alternatives and conservation, not rich self-protectionists tiffing at offshore wind turbines. We should, as Warburg says, pursue an industrial-scale energy shift, and we must reduce consumption. We must mitigate and guard against rising seas. And though Washington retreats, this nation -- which contributes 25 percent of the world's carbon emissions -- should, at the very least, join the rest of the industrial world in following the Kyoto Protocol.

If we protect our shores, we protect ourselves. The need is great, and the only thing weirder than the weather is the fear or myopia that stops us from acting. If our Wordsworthian "getting and spending" chokes our initiative as it has cloaked our world, then we'll have sunk our planet -- and ourselves.

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With the Clear Skies bill dead in committee, the Bush administration is going ahead with its plan to implement provisions of the bill as regulation. Yesterday saw the first step, as the U.S. EPA issued the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), which will substantially curtail emissions of soot-causing and smog-forming emissions, primarily generated by power plants, in 28 Eastern states and Washington, D.C. By the time the regulations are fully implemented in 2015, the EPA expects them to reduce sulfur-dioxide emissions by over 70 percent and nitrogen oxides by over 60 percent, which would mean preventing 17,000 premature deaths a year, millions of lost work and school days, and loads of hospital visits. The rule met with approval from both industry groups and enviros, though the former would prefer federal legislation and the latter would prefer larger cuts and tighter deadlines. EPA officials have calculated that the benefits of the rule, primarily in health-care savings, will outweigh the costs by some 25 to 1. Next week the agency is expected to take on mercury emissions -- expect that fight to be considerably bloodier.

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The Mercury Mutiny is gaining force on the state level, galvanizing some unlikely rebels. Eastern states including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York were the first to jump into the fray, launching local efforts to reduce mercury pollution in response to the Bush administration's widely criticized plan for dealing with mercury. Then last week, a new regional effort was announced by a coalition of state legislators from six Midwestern states -- Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin -- many of which have economies reliant on King Coal, a major culprit in mercury emissions.

Coal it like you see it.

Photo: Los Alamos National Lab.

"You might expect this kind of action from Northeastern states, but now even Midwestern states are mobilizing," said Jane Krentz, a former state senator from Minnesota and the Midwest coordinator of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, the group that organized this regional initiative. "We can't ignore the science any longer. The federal government's rollback on mercury is very disturbing -- it will set us back decades -- so we've got no choice but to take things into our own hands." The state senators and representatives plan to introduce bills in their legislatures that would curb mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Adam Schafer, program director for NCEL, admitted that it will be difficult to get the legislation passed considering the power of the coal industry in the Midwest, "but we hope that working together as a coalition, we'll have more leverage to fight that battle," he said. "More importantly, we're sending a message to Washington, letting the EPA know that we can see the writing on the wall: Mercury threatens the brains of babies. If Washington isn't going to act to protect our constituencies, we won't sit back and let that risk escalate."

Indeed, the writing on the wall got even bolder a couple of weeks ago when the EPA's top mercury scientist, Kathryn Mahaffey, released new findings indicating that 630,000 babies born in the U.S. each year, one in six, are at risk of mercury-related developmental problems contracted in the womb -- a number nearly twice as high as the EPA's current official estimate. Mahaffey's new calculations are based on the finding that mercury concentrates at higher levels in the umbilical cords of pregnant women than in their bloodstreams, indicating that fetuses could be getting higher doses of mercury than previously thought.

Mahaffey's findings are unlikely to sway the administration from its current controversial cap-and-trade program for mercury pollution, which has been derided as too weak by environmentalists and public-health advocates. And hers is not the only mercury-related science that the Bush administration doesn't seem to want to consider.

In late January, Inside EPA reporter Liz Heron obtained EPA documents through the Freedom of Information Act revealing that the agency failed to comply with two executive orders requiring it to study how the administration's mercury plan would affect children, minorities, and low-income populations.

"What they said to me was that they were trying to protect the entire population, so it wasn't necessary to look at the effects on specific population subsets," said Heron. "Their logic is that if their end goal will benefit everybody, it will help susceptible populations as well."

But environmentalists argue that such studies of potential effects on vulnerable populations are particularly important in the case of mercury pollution, which, as Mahaffey made clear, has disproportionate impacts on children, and is widely thought to create toxic "hot spots" in the mostly low-income communities immediately surrounding power plants. Bush's cap-and-trade program -- which would let utilities buy and sell the right to emit mercury -- could exacerbate the hot-spot problem in particular. "The larger point here," said Heron, "is that the Bush administration is shifting away from the emphasis on environmental justice that was prevalent in the '90s."

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Engineers at Yale have developed robotic dogs that can sniff out environmental toxins at contaminated sites. The mechanical critters were originally designed and marketed as toys by Sony and other companies, but an intrepid crew at Yale modified the robo-puppies with sensors that detect environmentally damaging chemical compounds and improved their ability to maneuver across rough terrain. In addition to sniffing out trouble spots on the East Coast, the pups have been put on the trail of radioactive waste and fallout in Idaho, Australia, and Belarus. "These dogs are programmed into instruments for social activism," said Natalie Jeremijenko, a lecturer in engineering at Yale.

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Controversy is bubbling along the East Coast of the U.S. as a handful of companies press forward with plans to build offshore wind turbines -- 858 off the Maryland shore, 221 off Virginia, and 130 off Cape Cod, Mass. There are now some 15,000 wind turbines on U.S. land, providing clean, renewable power and decreasing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, but no turbine farms have yet been constructed in U.S. waters. Not-in-my-backyard complaints from wealthy communities in Cape Cod and other spots have thrown a wrench in some wind-energy plans. By contrast, officials in Northampton County, Va., the poorest county in the state, asked Winergy, one of the more aggressive wind-development companies, to move a proposed wind farm closer to shore, into local waters, so the community could better benefit from tax revenues and job opportunities. While the U.S. now gets less than 1 percent of its energy from wind, the Department of Energy has set a goal of increasing that figure to 5 percent by 2020.

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Water wars have long simmered in the arid Western U.S., but now they're bubbling up in Eastern states as well. Dry spells in 1999 and 2002 brought many of the East's rivers to worrisome lows; increased water demand spurred by new development is only adding to the problem. A contentious quarrel between Maryland and Virginia over the Potomac River has worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, while North Carolina, South Carolina, and other Southern states are fighting tooth and nail over rivers like the Pee Dee, Chattahoochee, and Savannah. "This past year, we came within feet of shutting down nuclear power plants because there wasn't sufficient water to cool them," said Freddy Vang, South Carolina's deputy director of natural resources. "At the same time, we came within feet of shutting down major municipal water supplies because they couldn't pump water anymore."

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Two new studies on global climate change, both appearing in the latest issue of Nature, predict that the Earth will get even hotter by the end of the century than previously estimated by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One study, from Switzerland, sees a 7.7 degree Fahrenheit increase by 2100; the other, from Great Britain, predicts as much as a 12.4 degree increase. (The IPCC expected a rise of anywhere from 3 to 10.5 degrees; for comparison's sake, the temperature difference between now and the last Ice Age is 9 degrees.) More important, say scientists, the studies show a temperature increase of 0.5 to 2.3 degrees (the British study) or 0.9 to 1.9 degrees (the Swiss study) for the years 2020-2030 -- just two decades from now. And you thought it was bad on the East Coast right now.

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Organic foods, long associated with the crunchy West Coast and the yuppie East, have made dramatic inroads into more conservative places -- so dramatic, in fact, that Idaho, home to many rabid anti-enviros, has become one of the top five states in the nation for total organic acreage. Part of the new popularity of organics may be a growing awareness of the health virtues of eating chemical-free food, but from the farmers' perspectives, much of it also has to do with the bottom line. In 2000, organic food was a $7.8 billion market, and in Idaho, organic farming has grown 10-fold since 1990. Across the country, mainstream grocery stores like Safeway and Albertson's are beginning to stock their shelves with organic items.

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