Reframing Sea Level Rise | Andrea Dutton | TEDxUF

I'm introduced as a scientist, but I actually like to think of myself as a detective because, as a geologist, I'm like an Earth detective. I can discover all the riddles and stories of the past by looking at what is preserved in the rock record and it turns out that the history of the earth is fascinating, it is full of stories of dinosaurs, asteroids and ice ages, sometimes it feels a bit like another world. I study sea

level

change by looking at fossil coral reefs that grew near the sea surface and you may have heard a lot about sea

level

rise

, but today I would like to share with you my perspective as a geologist on what is happening today and how it will develop in the future, but before we get there, I have a confession to make first there is something even more important than science that I want to talk to you about today because I am also a person I am a resident of the state of Florida I am mother a sister a daughter and I care about the people in my life just as I'm sure you care about the people in yours and that's why we're not as divided on this issue of sea level

rise

as our politics might suggest that it is time to reframe this conversation and stop repeating the fundamental science of sea level rise and move towards a debate about what we are going to do about it, because really now it is more of a social problem than a scientific one and we need to reach a social acceptance of the idea that our coasts are going to be on the move not just for decades to come but for centuries and even thousands of years into the future simply based on the amount of warming that we have already seen and that is happening to be our new normality, so the reason I came here today and I stand before you at this red dot is not to save the planet and that may be surprising coming from a geologist, but geologist, I can tell you that the planet Earth has been here. an awfully long time and he's going to survive this.

I am here today to save human lives and that is something we can do together, so what you need to know to save lives is that the seas are rising and that is not an alternative fact. and when you see this figure of three millimeters a year it may not seem very impressive and you know I would have to agree with you because three millimeters is the thickness of two pennies stacked on top of each other, so if you're probably People smell me in the back of the audience thinking that three millimeters this woman is really crazy.

I mean, my beach house is good right, we have this well, unfortunately for all of us, three millimeters a year is higher than anything the earth has ever seen. for at least the last few thousand years while we've been busy building on our shores and this pales in comparison to what's to come, but unlike those past worlds of Earth's history I talked about earlier, we don't We have to imagine what three millimeters per year because we are already seeing the effects around us as you can see in the headline of this newspaper because the flooding of our coasts has already started and I have been on the front line and I have seen what is is happening and salt water is filling the streets even on a sunny day during a normal high tide and when I go to these coastal communities to talk to them about sea level rise I don't have to try to convince them that sea level is rising by a problem because they are already dealing with the consequences of it, in some cases they are dealing with reduced supplies of fresh water as salt water is forced into underground aquifers on the surface, they may not be able to drive to work regularly or they are forced to do so. wading through water that is full of sewage and pollution just to cross the road, I'm completely on the wrong slide, okay, sorry, here we go crossing the road, sewage and pollution and as the sea gradually rises, this kind of Coastal flooding will occur more and more. more often because it won't be like a storm surge that goes away after a few days, sea level rise is here to stay and given what I've learned through my research on ice sheets in the past, we're sure that sea levels are going to rise in the future, in fact, you may not want to know this, but my work shows that we may already be committed to a minimum rise of six meters in sea level, that is, almost 20 feet, and this is what that will do to my home.

State of Florida, that's not going to happen overnight, but what that means is that this sea level rise is just the first step in what will be a long journey into the future, so we've established that The seas are rising. and you can look at graphs like this or you can look at all the visual and anecdotal evidence around us, but the surprising part of the story is that sea level rise probably won't play out the way you think, because your imagination has changed. It has been pre-programmed by the things that are seen and heard about sea level rise and there are several problems with the way this has typically been done.

The first of these and probably the most common is that sea level rise is routinely overdramatized as I can see here with this photo of the Statue of Liberty up to her armpits in water now I once saw this photo accompanied by the headline New York to see six feet of sea level rise clearly this is more than six feet high this is more than two hundred feet, so what's happening here is people are completely disconnected and they think that o We have no idea what we are talking about or that this is such a big problem that there is nothing we can do about it, the other problem with the way the future Sea level rise is often described as something too romantic and now I hate to break it to you, but sea level rise won't be like a romantic trip to Venice, and in fact, sea level rise will probably be more like this. or not, and when the storm surge is added to the cumulative rise in sea levels over the last century, the effects will be devastating, so the problem with having this kind of overly romantic alternative narrative of what is going to happen is that it distracts us from the potentially uglier reality of the fact that rising sea levels will potentially affect our ports and also our coastal airports that are largely built on landfills and also our energy facilities that line the coasts, so, In essence, the supply of water for food and energy, the fundamental things we depend on as a society to survive will be threatened for all of us.

The third problem with the way sea level rise is often described is that we have this unrealistic belief that we can simply engineer our way out of the problem. Correct situation, we can build walls, we can put up roads, we can install pumps, don't get me wrong, there is no doubt that there really is an important place for engineering solutions that can buy us some time, but large scale projects are very simple. They will not be a realistic solution for most communities and in the short term we will be able to keep the seas at bay in some places, but when those big storms come that infrastructure will fail catastrophically, so in the long term there will really be only two options that take: we can build walls and live in bowls or we can retreat and the problem is that for many people the word retreat sounds a lot like the word defeat, so now let's get to the heart of the matter because the sea level is rising and now we have I have to make some difficult decisions.

On the one hand, we can choose to manage that retreat to some extent or we can bury our heads in the sand and then respond to the crisis as the storms hit the insurance companies. and then prevent us from rebuilding in those vulnerable areas and unfortunately if we ignore that problem it won't go away because the certainty we have or because I'm sorry, the ice sheets don't really care what you think about sea level rise, they just care. about the temperatures that are causing them to melt and this certainty that we have about the fact that sea levels are going to rise in the future often gets lost in what we hear in the news, which tends to focus on the uncertainty of what That's going to go up so fast. and by focusing only on the short term of what will happen in the coming decades, we tend to lean towards infrastructure development solutions to preserve existing coastlines.

My point is that we also need to take a long-term perspective because at some point withdrawal will be inevitable and really defining our relationship with the coast will take time, so why don't we have more conversations about withdrawal? There is simply a decisive lack of social and political will to do so, even in communities where they have organized and are addressing the issue of sea level rise, people are still afraid to even mention the word retreat let alone have a discussion about it, why does my intuition tell me that it is based on fear, the fear of losing? what we are afraid of losing our homes the places where we grew up afraid of what will happen next where will I go how will I allow myself to go?

But if we continue to insist on building on these vulnerable coasts then we are missing an opportunity to relocate people, move to higher ground and develop along retreat corridors with that opportunity would come jobs, economic growth and, most importantly for me, saving lives so actually withdrawing is not a defeat, withdrawing is winning because the alternative would be a much more costly outcome so my message to you today is the time for us to face our fears about sea level rise because the fact that we can't even have a debate about this topic is a real problem because no action can be taken unless we talk about it first, so if you want to know what you can do as a single person is go out and talk to people about the problems we face, having difficult conversations about imagining what the future will bring, but I would like to remind you today that there has never been anything false about hope and as you now have this perspective on sea level rise, I have hope in you and what we can do together, so I challenge you today to get up and go out, put down your smartphones and talk to each other because we have a challenge before us and if we can have a more realistic dialogue on this issue , not the drama and romance you saw before, we can actually save lives, possibly even your own, because yes, the seas are rising, but we can also thank them.