When you received your electric bill for the month of July, you saw how hot that month was and it cost you big time.
Now scientists have confirmed that July was the hottest month the world has ever had, at least since we’ve been keeping record from the late 1800s. And the prediction is that 2015 will be the hottest 12-months in recorded history.
You paid the price in a higher electric bill.
California is paying the price of a drought made worse by global warming, up to 25% worse according to scientists.
Whales are dying in record numbers along the coast of Alaska and scientists speculate the cause might be toxic algae blooms resulting from warmer waters.
And scientists, 99.9% of them, agree that this undeniable global warming is largely the result of human-induced climate change.
This is only the beginning of our human and economic problems. Those fires out west, they’ll eventually burn out or the rains will come. But climate change will within the next 25-50 years give South Carolina a daily problem that won’t go away—coastal tidal inundation from rising seas.
Since 2013 the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce has been educating coastal small businesses about the threat to our vibrant tourism economy from sea level rise (www.SCBARS.org). We’ve been also asking our coastal cities to start planning for resilience against higher sea levels that threaten their local economies.
A community-based City of Beaufort/Port Royal Sea Level Rise Task Force has been making great progress in developing resiliency recommendations for scenarios up to a 3-foot rise in sea level.
However, Climate Central’s Surging Seas platform that this task force has been using clearly shows that if sea levels go above 3-feet, resiliency efforts will literally be swamped and economic disaster will ensue. This isn’t true just for the Beaufort/Port Royal area, it will be the same impact in communities up the South Carolina coast.
The answer is clearly this. Our coastal communities must plan for resilience to rising seas. But we also must attack climate change by cutting our carbon emissions to stop sea levels from rising above the point of resilience.
We can do both but we must start now.