Earth Day sounds alarm on climate catastrophe

“It’s a global problem, not a local one, but it’s going to manifest itself locally,” he said.

Multimillion-dollar projects to stem beach erosion in the area are fighting a losing battle, said Heimlich, who is president of the Broward County Audubon Society. “I don’t have to tell you beaches are important to the economy here. In Broward County most of the beaches have been washed away, and the same is true in Palm Beach.”

Rising sea levels pose a longer-term catastrophic threat. South Florida, one of the nation’s fastest growing metropolitan areas, is particularly vulnerable. It is basically flat. Parts of Dade County are below sea level. A 3-foot sea level rise would wipe out beaches and inundate coastal wetlands, causing flooding throughout the area. Much of the Everglades would be engulfed. Sea levels are expected to rise by up to 3 feet or more within the next 90 years as a result of global warming, as land-based ice melts and ocean temperatures rise. Some scientists say melting of ice caps and glaciers could raise sea levels as much as 25 feet.

In addition there’s the threat to the complex fresh water systems that not only maintain the Everglades but provide the region’s drinking water. “We get all our water from the fresh water aquifer about 100 feet below us,” Heimlich said in a phone interview. Intrusion of salt water from ocean flooding would “jeopardize our water supply.”

A thousand miles north in the Midwest, global warming means greater weather extremes — harsher storms, more tornados, Emily Green, senior Midwest representative for the Sierra Club, told the World. The region can expect colder winters, hotter summers and declining lake levels, spelling trouble for farmers and for Great Lakes shipping.

“The bottom line is, we’re really at a tipping point, about to set our planet on a course of no return,” Green said.

A growing volume of scientific research has shown major global climate changes over the past century, driven by human activity that is heating up the earth’s atmosphere.

“Human activities, mainly the burning of coal and oil, but also agriculture and deforestation, have dramatically increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere,” Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said in a March 30 speech at Yale University. “The impacts we are seeing now — today — are happening much sooner than anyone might have anticipated even a decade ago. These changes were predicted, but even the scientists who made the predictions are surprised at the rate at which they are now occurring.”

Despite Bush administration efforts to squash the evidence, polls show increased public concern over the issue. In an ABC/Time/Stanford University poll last month more than two-thirds said the federal government “should do more than it’s doing now to try to deal with global warming.”

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