The study, Climate change and the world economy: short-run determinants of atmospheric CO2, is published in the on-line journal Environmental Science & Policy. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall. The conclusion, excepted below, describes the study’s major finding:

The major conclusion of our study is that the annual growth of atmospheric CO2 levels is strongly dependent on the absolute growth of the world economy, so that the annual absolute increase of WGDP is a key variable to capture the annual increase in atmospheric CO2. * * * Our study provides substantive evidence that in the short run, world economic activity is a major determinant of rising CO₂ concentrations (we also show that estimated CO₂ emissions closely follow the oscillations of the world economy). For each trillion that WGDP deviates from trend, CO₂ atmospheric levels deviate from trend, in the same direction, about half a part per million. These findings are important because they reduce the uncertainty in the links of the causal chain implied in climate changing, and allow for quantitative estimates of the required levels of “human activity” that would reduce CO₂ concentrations if business-as-usual conditions are maintained.

Co-author Tapia Granados, researcher at the University of Michigan, says (with a scientist’s usual hedging) what nobody is willing to hear : economic contraction will be needed to reduce atmospheric levels of CO₂. If we want to save Earth’s climate, we’ll have to disavow economic growth and instead embrace la décroissance économique.

Environmentalists made a fatal miscalculation from the get-go in failing to challenge the ideology of growth. Rachel Carson kicked off the environmental movement 50 years ago in 1962, with the publishing of Silent Spring. Carson intimated that the project of progress and growth was fatally infected with hubris. Carson showed that the consequences might be unknowable and awful – awful not only in the sense of “filling with terror and dread” but also of “inspiring awe, filling with profound reverence” as Nature took her revenge. Silent Spring touched deep emotional chords, evoking an archaic world where transgressing inviolable boundaries evoked implacable retribution from forces beyond the control of humans.

But in their minds, environmentalists as well as politicians and economists had left the ancient world and old gods behind. Environmentalists joined in believing that Nature could be negotiated with and appeased if not conquered and subjugated. Scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki points to the movement’s fundamental miscalculation:

Environmentalism has failed. Over the past 50 years, environmentalists have succeeded in raising awareness, changing logging practices, stopping mega-dams and offshore drilling, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But we were so focused on battling opponents and seeking public support that we failed to realize these battles reflect fundamentally different ways of seeing our place in the world. And it is our deep underlying worldview that determines the way we treat our surroundings.

The big mistake was in seeing the environment as separate from and even subordinate to the economy.

[E]nvironmental protection came to be seen as an impediment to economic growth. * * *

Now the human economy has become a force that is altering the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the planet on a geological scale, destroying the very ground of our being.

In creating dedicated departments, we made the environment another special interest, like education, health, and agriculture. The environment subsumes every aspect of our activities, but we failed to make the point that our lives, health, and livelihoods absolutely depend on the biosphere—air, water, soil, sunlight, and biodiversity. Without them, we sicken and die. This perspective is reflected in spiritual practices that understand that everything is interconnected, as well as traditional societies that revere “Mother Earth” as the source of all that matters in life.

It was a mistake from the beginning in failing to advocate for and defend the land and the environment as a spiritual practice. It was a mistake to buy into the growth paradigm, thinking environmentalism would be easier to sell if it could be portrayed as accommodating and even enhancing economic growth. By failing to stand up for the fundamental reality that we are part of and dependent on the web of life that keeps the planet habitable, the battle was lost without ever being engaged.

Similarly in Oregon, land use advocates committed a fatal error at the very beginning. Upon taking office in 1967, Republican Governor Tom McCall had the state’s quarterly economic development publication renamed from “Growth” to “Quality” (and later, to “Progress). In 1971, in an interview by Terry Drinkwater before a national audience on the CBS Evening News, McCall pleaded for people not to move to Oregon:

Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But, for Heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.

In selling and defending new land use regulations,  McCall railed against “grasping wastrels of the land” and and “local officials who cater to developers and exploiters”. But even McCall could not bring himself to reject the economic growth paradigm, attacking only “unlimited and unregulated” growth and calling for “healthy, imaginative, nonpolluting industry”. When Senate Bill 100 emerged from the sausage factory of the legislature, the most visionary piece – “areas of critical state concern” – had been dropped from the bill; environmentalists and a vision as the land as a value in itself just weren’t that important. The bill passed only because powerful economic interests – the agriculture industry and the timber industry – were bought off with a huge property tax break, farm and forest special assessment. Deals were made with other economic interests as well, including homebuilders and industry.

In the early 2000s, Oregon’s planning program faced a moral challenge as being unfair to property owners, depriving them of their economic rights. The program’s supporters early reliance on economics as its justification left them disarmed in the face of a moral challenge. Their response to the proponents’ “fairness” argument was a feeble, “it’s too expensive”. Their response, when Measure 37 passed, was to save the program by destroying it. Land use “advocates” promulgated and spend millions to pass Measure 49, which enshrined “property rights” as the heart and soul of land use in Oregon. “Fairness” supplanted the admittedly limited goal of “preservation of a maximum amount of the limited supply of agricultural land . . . necessary to the conservation of the state’s economic resources” – a goal that itself embodied the fatal flaw that would eventually lead to the planning program’s demise. Any regulation that hits a property owner in the pocketbook is now and forever anathema.

In saving its land use planning program, Oregon land use proponents betrayed and sacrificed the very land the program was supposed to nurture and protect, too timid to even engage in its defense. As with environmentalism generally, the battle was surrendered without being fought.

Lane Code 14.600(4) sets forth who may participate in an appeal:

Participation Criteria. Persons who may participate in a Board on-the-record hearing for an appeal are:
(a) The applicant and the applicant’s representative.
(b) The Director.
(c) The appellant and the appellant’s representative.”

LUBA held that even if Lane Code can be interpreted to prohibit participation by other parties, such a result would contravene state law:

[I]t is not consistent with ORS 197.763 to authorize an applicant that does not prevail in that final legal argument at the conclusion of the quasi-judicial evidentiary hearing a second chance to present legal argument to another local decision maker in an on-the-record appeal, with all other parties forced to the sidelines and denied any right to present written or oral legal argument to the second decision maker. * * * ORS 215.422, unlike LC 14.400 and 14.600, does not include any language that even arguably authorizes a procedure that would (1) permit an applicant to appeal a land use decision that is the product of a quasi-judicial evidentiary hearing and (2) prohibit any other party to the quasi-judicial evidentiary hearing from presenting any legal argument in the applicant’s on-the-record appeal.

* * *

Given the above code and statutory context, although it is a reasonably close question, we conclude that LC 14.400 and 14.600 are not correctly interpreted to bar non-applicant parties in the evidentiary phase of a proceeding from participating in an on-the-record appeal filed by the applicant. However, even if we are wrong and the text of LC 14.400(9)(b) and 14.600(4) is not overcome by the above-noted context, we do not believe ORS 197.763 and 215.422 can be interpreted to permit such a procedure, and the county cannot do away with rights that are protected by those statutes. As we explained in a case with some similarities to this one, a county commits a procedural error that prejudices a party’s substantial rights where it denies them a right to participate in land use proceedings that is guaranteed by statute. (Citati0n omitted).)

While LUBA’s holding in this case is limited to the circumstance where the local appeal is filed by the applicant, LUBA’s reasoning would apply equally to a circumstance where an appeal is filed by a party other than an applicant. In both situations, the reasoning that other parties must have a right to rebut the substance of any ex parte contact or respond to new evidence that might be introduced would still apply. Similarly, LUBA’s reasoning that ORS 197.763 does not authorize an applicant a second chance to present legal argument while denying all other parties the same opportunity would apply as well to other parties.

LUBA also held that a person could not be forced to appeal an initial decision in order to preserve his or her right to appeal to LUBA, explaining a person could be satisfied with an initial decision and thus have no reason to appeal but then not be satisfied with a subsequent decision should another party appeal. LUBA’s reasoning here would support the more expansive reading of its holding on standing: people have a right to participate in local appeal hearings regardless of who files the appeal, at a minimum to have the opportunity to protect their positions taken in prior hearings.

LUBA held that LC 14.600(4) could be interpreted to allow parties other than an applicant/appellant to appear in an on-the-record appeal hearing. However, LUBA in relying on statutes seems to concede that this holding is a stretch; besides, LUBA’s limited holding fails to directly address the situation where an appellant is not the applicant. The results of this case demand that LC 14.600(4) be amended to provide that all parties may participate and provide legal argument in an on-the-record appeal.

The Census Bureau started tracking new home sales in 1963. Since then, the record low was 412,000 in 1982 – until that record was broken in 2009, and again in 2010. Calculated Risk posts this chart.

 It’s  looking like 2011 will see yet another record low for new home sales: at the pace so far this year, 2011 sales would total just 302,000.

As far as can be discerned from available data, Oregon tracks the national trend pretty closely. New Home Trends Inc. produces a Monthly Monitor Report for the Portland market (which includes Washington as well as Oregon: Clark, Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington).

Fewer new homes means less land is being gobbled up by development. The number of new subdivision lots being created has plummeted, and in June of 2011, no new lots were either applied for or recorded in the four-county Portland area.

Back during the Measure 49 debates, I argued that sacrificing the principle that the common good trumped property rights – rights which themselves were created by government in the belief that such rights, as carefully circumscribed, furthered the common good – was much too high a price to pay for the repeal of Measure 37. The philosophical argument was bolstered by a practical, economic argument: Oregon and the U.S. were on the precipice of an unprecedented collapse of the housing market that would render the so-called “right” to develop one’s property moot.

Property development as our future is dead. The data is beginning to confirm we sacrificed our principles for nothing. Now we find ourselves faced with the greatest challenge industrial civilization has ever faced – peak oil; and with the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced – climate change. But we’ve tied our hands, unable to shape our urban and rural communities to meet the challenges. In Oregon, virtually no law can be even considered that might lower the market value of someone’s property. Property rights trump everything, come hell or high water. And be assured, both hell and high water are coming.

But a new study from Finland – Implications of urban structure on carbon consumption in metropolitan areas – finds that, when it comes to carbon emissions, urban structure doesn’t make much of a difference.  The study looked at dense center cities, where apartment buildings dominated housing and diverse public transport was available; and “rural” cities with a lower density, a high share of detached houses, and weaker public transport. The study considered the effects of density, dominant building type, private driving and income on the carbon consumption.

Surprisingly, the study found the carbon consequences of urban density and dominant building type to be insignificant, based on a life cycle assessment: there proved to be no clear correlation between urban density and carbon consumption. Despite the identified connections between carbon consumption and urban density, it seems that the effect of density on carbon emissions is rather low, and that other factors override the effect.

The researchers seemed to have stumbled upon something they hadn’t anticipated or designed the study to analyze: what really seems to matter is income. As incomes rise, people engage in more carbon-spewing activities:

The rest of the carbon categories, the consumption of goods and services, reflect clearly the effect of income on the emissions. However, this part of the carbon consumption was not the focus of this study, and also cannot be analyzed in depth with the presented hybrid model. The model shows that traveling abroad and the use of services grow as earnings grow * * * but regarding daily consumption, it is not possible to differentiate amount and quality.

One interesting notion about the relation of income and carbon consumption is that emissions seem to grow as income grows, but with decelerating speed. * * * It seems that the share of savings increases rather rapidly as earnings grow.

The slight growth in energy-related carbon consumption found in less dense areas compared to the denser metropolitan core is overwhelmed by the high correlation of income and carbon consumption.

The results of the study may not be directly applicable in the U.S. Consider that in the E.U., the transportation sector generates 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, while in the U.S., transportation accounts for 33% of total greenhouse gas emissions [in Oregon, 34% of emissions are from the transportation sector; in California, 36%]. In Finland and the rest of Europe, the effect of private transport on overall carbon consumption per capita is quite weak when all emissions related to driving are calculated, including car manufacture, deliveries and maintenance of vehicles (the share of fuel combustion of all all emissions related to private transport is 50–70%, the rest being dominated by emissions related to car manufacture and maintenance). Thus, growth in trip generation due to a decline in the density of the city structure has a relatively minor effect on the overall carbon consumption. Here in the U.S., the contribution of fuel combustion to total emissions may be much higher.

The studies’ authors offer a modest suggestion.

When solutions for low-carbon living * * * are searched for, consumption-based assessments of emissions are essential.

Now here’s a truly revolutionary idea: if we are to emit less, we’ll have to consume less. No more growing the economy; rather, we’ll have to shrink the economy. It’s that simple. It’s the economy, stupid.

The latest EIA data show new global production records for both crude and all liquids. Sam Foucher asks at The Oil Drum, how much faith can we put in EIA data? Foucher points to another data source – the public database JODI – which shows production significantly lower than the EIA, and notes the way the production data are collected vastly differ between the EIA and JODI.

Jodi is a voluntary activity. Participating countries complete a standard data table (see table on page 2) every month for the two most recent months (M-1 and M-2) and submit it to the Jodi partner organisation(s) of which it is a member. The respective organisation compiles the data and forwards it to the IEF Secretariat which is responsible for the JodiOil World Database.

Foucher shows that, using JODI data where available and EIA data where JODI data are not available, the earlier record highs in both crude and all liquids production still stand.

Foucher asserts the EIA does not itself collect international production data, but rather pays a private company (IHS) for the data. I could not find a discussion of data sources on the EIA website, and am awaiting a response to an inquiry about their sources.

Global oil production data are less than perfect or certain. Jodi data are incomplete and, where available, self-reported. EIA data appear to be from a black box. Both should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s a shame that Peakoil Nederland is no longer publishing Oilwatch Monthly – July 2010 seems to have been the last issue. A valuable service Oilwatch Monthly provided was to track the enegy content of liquid fuels produced, as volume of liquids is not the same as useful energy. For example, conversion to BTUs shows that actual available energy worldwide in January 2010 was 3.3% lower than liquids statistics counted in barrels would suggest. And nobody is tracking liquid fuels production in terms of net energy, accounting for the decrease in EROEI over time as the easy oil is depleted.

Regardless of whether the world is seeing new record highs of oil production, high oil prices are already prompting people to make big changes in their lives. More than half of Americans say they have made changes to their lifestyle, according to a new Gallup poll. The most common adjustment: driving less.

The Federal Highway Administration reports that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in March were down 1.4% compared to March 2010 – and VMT for the year are now down 0.1% from last year. VMT in Oregon were down 4.1% from a year ago. So far, the decline is not as severe as in 2008. But as seen in this chart posted at Calculated Risk, the decline began at a lower level.

Calculated Risk also reports truck tonnage fell 0.7 Percent in April – and has not shown any overall growth in over seven years.

A new survey of real-estate professionals suggests driving less is causing Americans to rethink where they’re living, about shorter driving distances and being closer to shops and services.

The migration to the suburbs has stumbled as fuel prices soar and as levels of unemployment in suburbs remain about twice the level of unemployed in cities. New home sales overall have collapsed and remain at record lows. The Census Bureau reports 32 thousand new homes were sold (not seasonally adjusted) in April 2011, tying the record low for the month of April.

The Census Bureau breaks out sales data by region (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West), not by state – so from the data, we can’t tell what’s going on in Oregon. But in the West as a whole, April new home sales have fallen from an average of over 20,000 units a year in the 20-year period 1991-2010 to 8,000 units a year. New home sales are only 40% that of the 20-year average, and only 24% of the 33,000 units in the peak years 2004 and 2005.

In Oregon, expansions of urban growth boundaries are based on historical trends. Currently around the state, a flurry of requests for expansions are being considered. There’s just about zero current need for additional new homes, and future housing needs will not reflect past needs in number of units,or in size, type, or location. Expanding urban growth boundaries to accommodate desired growth will prove pushing on a string. It’s a good bet that most of the land to be newly slated for future growth will forever remain undeveloped.

The ecosystems and biodiversity which underpin all economic activity depend largely on ‘wild land’ – very much a poor relation in the competition with agriculture and urbanisation, both of which have massive economic forces in their favour.

Agriculture is driven by the demand for food. This demand is growing because of the rising population and more demand for meat, which requires more land than crops. Urbanisation is backed by the economic power of manufacturing, and the influx of economic migrants from countryside to towns and cities.

Wild land has no such strong purchasing power to defend its position and, therefore, is set to decline, affecting biodiversity and ecosystems with disastrous consequences leading to reduction of tropical forest area, loss of species, and reduced capacity for absorbing carbon.

It is not essential for land to be left wild to be productive ecologically: agriculture and urban areas can be designed in ways which maintain ecosystems. But whether land is left wild or combined with other uses, the survival of the services ecosystems provide – such as genetic resources, good quality soil, available water, pollination - is an essential underpinning of the world economy and people’s livelihoods.

Anderson’s article is a good reminder that land use as we practice it in Oregon is – or should be – about preserving land solely for economic exploitation. It’s about more than saving farm land for agriculture, saving forest land for timber production, and making the best use of urban land. It’s about saving the world that sustains us all.

We forget at our peril: God is great; humans, insignificant.

But the war is never won. There’s always another UGB expansion, another application to destroy farm or forest land. The best that can be said is that in Oregon the flood of “development” has been slowed, compared to what would otherwise be, as seen in other states – California, Washington, Texas, Georgia – where growth has gone completely unchecked and its devastation has spread, a cancer metastasized across the landscape.

Land use activists have never dared, still do not dare, to admit that we’re against growth. Lacking the courage to take on the zeitgeist and admit what we really think and believe, we instead dissemble that we’re for smart growth – an oxymoron if there ever was one, as the phenomenon of global warming is making clear.

Land use activists are not alone in their error. Tim Murray observes that the environmental movement as a whole has failed to identify and grapple with the real enemy, and asks: What if we stopped fighting for preservation and fought economic growth instead?

Each time environmentalists rally to defend an endangered habitat, and finally win the battle to designate it as a park “forever,” as Nature Conservancy puts it, the economic growth machine turns to surrounding lands and exploits them ever more intensively, causing more species loss than ever before, putting even more lands under threat. For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks. Nature Conservancy Canada may indeed have “saved” – at least for now – two million acres, but many more millions have been ruined. And the ruin continues, until, once more, on a dozen other fronts, development comes knocking at the door of a forest, or a marsh or a valley that many hold sacred. Once again, environmentalists, fresh from an earlier conflict, drop everything to rally its defense, and once again, if they are lucky, yet another section of land is declared off-limits to logging, mining and exploration. They are like a fire brigade that never rests, running about, exhausted, trying to extinguish one brush fire after another, year after year, decade after decade, winning battles but losing the war.

Despite occasional setbacks, the growth machine continues more furiously, and finally, even lands which had been set aside “forever” come under pressure. As development gets closer, the protected land becomes more valuable, and more costly to protect. Then government, under the duress of energy and resource shortages and the dire need for royalties and revenue, caves in to allow industry a foothold, then a chunk, then another. Yosemite Park, Hamber Provincial Park, Steve Irwin Park… the list goes on. There is no durable sanctuary from economic growth. Any park that is made by legislation can be unmade by legislation. Governments change and so do circumstances. But growth continues and natural capital shrinks. And things are not even desperate yet. . . .

Environmental watchdogs bark, but the growth caravan moves on.

Murray argues the practice of designating hallowed places as nature reserves must no longer be seen as “victories,” but rather as concessions. The same holds true in the land use arena: there’s no victory in limiting the amount of land lost to UGB expansions, to urban reserves, or to real estate development.

Aldo Leopold ‘s vision of the land was ecological, encompassing the entirety of the community which the land embraces:

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Saving what’s left of the land requires an explicit recognition of the ethical premises to which we hold, that humans are members of the land community.

It’s time to make our ethics explicit: the land is sacred, and is the ground of our being. It’s time to direct our energies into stopping the economic growth that is destroying the land – and inexorably, ourselves.

The study, titled Relationship between Growth and Prosperity in 100 Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas, examines the relationship between growth and economic prosperity in the nation’s largest cities. It finds that faster growth rates are associated with lower incomes, greater income declines, and higher poverty rates. Unemployment rates tend to be higher in faster growing areas. The 25 slowest-growing metro areas outperformed the 25 fastest growing in every category and averaged $8,455 more in per capita personal income in 2009.

Conventional urban planning and economic development strategies, which pursue growth of metro areas to supposedly advance the economic welfare of the general public, may be misguided. Our “growth is good” ideology presumes the negative impacts of growth to quality of life – such as increased traffic congestion, environmental destruction, loss of farm and forest lands, and loss of amenity values (such as tranquility, sense of community, or open space), and higher taxes to fund the cost of the new public infrastructure (roads, schools, sewer and water systems, etc.) – are outweighed by the new jobs and economic prosperity that are assumed to come with growth.

But this study suggests the presumed link between growth and prosperity is nothing more than a myth. The real consequence of growth is degradation of the quality of life.

Now a new report titled Driven Apart: How sprawl is lengthening our commutes and why misleading mobility measures are making things worse, finds the solution to the problem of commute time has much more to do with how we build our cities than how we build our roads.

Driven Apart ranks how long residents in the nation’s largest 51 metropolitan areas spend in peak hour traffic, and in some cases the rankings are almost the opposite of those listed in the 2009 Urban Mobility Report. While peak hour travel times average 200 hours a year in large metropolitan areas, Driven Apart proves that some cities have managed to achieve shorter travel times and actually reduce the peak hour travel times.

Here is the report’s finding, in a nutshell:

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Some metropolitan areas such as Chicago and Portland have land use patterns and transportation systems that enable their residents to take shorter trips and minimize the burden of peak hour travel.  Such cities have actually seen reductions in average peak hour travel times. Driven Apart concludes that if every one of the top 50 metros followed suit with Chicago and other higher performing cities, their residents would drive about 40 billion fewer miles per year and use two billion fewer gallons of fuel, for a cost savings of $31 billion annually.

The UMR depicts Chicago as having some of the worst travel delays, when it actually has the shortest time spent in peak hour traffic of any major US metro area. In contrast, Nashville jumped from 31st to first on the list of those with the longest peak travel times.

The UMR has a number of major flaws that misstate and exaggerate the effects of congestion, particularly the Travel Time Index (TTI).  TTI is the ratio of average peak hour travel times to average free flow travel times. Furthermore, for the 51 metropolitan areas analyzed in Driven Apart, the UMR overstates the cost of congestion by about $49 billion. Because UMR methodology does not take into account travel distances, it universally rewards cities that are spread out as opposed to compact urban areas.

Driven Apart suggests new metrics that focus on trip distances and total travel times – two statistics not reported in the UMR – because they point to a broader and more powerful set of public policy options for dealing with urban transportation problems.  The report recommends a new system for measuring urban transportation performance that includes emphasizing accessibility and focusing on measures of land uses, trip lengths and mode choices as well as travel speeds. The Texas Transportation Institute is listening, and is considering introducing a Total Travel Time performance measure and sustainability factors in future mobility reports.

Transportation costs are often the second highest expense for working Americans, behind housing costs – so it’s critical that transportation investments are guided by accurate and meaningful data.

Two meters far exceeds the projections of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 4th Assessment Report, which range from a low of .18 meters to a high of  .59 meters. However, the IPCC report contains this disclaimer:

This report does not assess the likelihood, nor provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.

The IPCC projections explicitly exclude future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The IPCC range assumes a near-zero net contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to future sea level rise, on the theory that Antarctica’s ice sheets will gain mass from an increase in snowfall.

The two-meter rise that Pilkey warns is possible is consistent with recent research based on semi-empirical models.

Estimates for twenty-first century sea level rise from semi-empirical models as compared to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report

Semi-empirical models have the merit that they reproduce past sea level rise very well, unlike the physical models used thus far. But they too have a serious limitation: there is no way to ensure that the historic relationship between sea level rise and temperature will continue to hold in future.  The semi-empirical approach does not account for non-linear changes. When it comes to ice sheets, the relationship between temperature and sea level rise may not be linear, and the ranges shown in the chart above could underestimate future sea level rise.

Pilkey says more needs to be done to prepare coastal communities from climate change threats – including planning for an orderly retreat.

If you’re going to have development and its close to the beach, make sure the buildings movable. It means you recognise there’s rising sea levels and you move things back as required, or you demolish the buildings.

As sea levels rise over the next 50 to 100 years,  we can try to fortify and protect existing development, and repair it when damaged. But in many cases, retreat will eventually be the only option. Whole communities may have to be relocated. Where will the money come from, and who will pick up the tab?  These questions are certain to be at the center of future political and legal battles.

Johnny Cash said his song Five Feet High and Rising wasn’t just a lamentation about destruction. The flood waters left a blessing in their wake.

My mama always taught me that good things come
from adversity if we put our faith in the Lord.
We couldn’t see much good in the flood waters
when they were causing us to have to leave home,
but when the water went down, we found
that it had washed a load of rich black bottom dirt across our land.
The following year we had the best cotton crop we’d ever had.

But this time, the water’s not coming down – at least not anytime soon. Or maybe we just need to take a longer view of things.

Orrin Pilkey is Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, and Founder and Director Emeritus of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines (PSDS) within the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.