Nature vs Real estate

Galveston TX is built on a shifting sandbar off the Texas coast, not far from Houston.

Galveston, it appears, is in big trouble even if sea level rise doesn't accelerate. The Texas Observer has an article called "That Sinking Feeling" detailing how the beach boom town is in denial about the fact that nature trumps real estate. The article only vaguely alludes to the likely outcome, which is that, at least for a while, until some day when the entire enterprise is abandoned, the less well-connected population of the Texas interior will be paying a lot of money to maintain what will essentially become (and is in parts already becoming) a vast and charmless concrete pier.

Texas geophysicists have stirred the pot with an alarming map showing high risk of near-term erosion of large parts of the island.

Geologist John Anderson says he’s tired of explaining the map, and the science behind it, to city officials. “If they do not understand it, they should not be in public office,” he says sternly.

Yet the map is based on an assumption of no acceleration in sea level rise at all.

Unsurprisingly and I think rather poignantly, Galveston real estate interests haven't really picked up on all the clues we've been shipping them. "Global warming, sea-level rise, whether it's man-made or it's the natural process we're going through, that's to be determined," one of their leaders, Jerry Mohn, says.

The same issue of the Observer has an unsurprising but remarkably well-stated editorial about climate change. It's probably worth quoting the juicy bits:

An unassailable majority of the world’s scientists believe that climate change is real, that human activities contribute to it, and that the consequences will be devastating. Yet our president and our governor—such learned men as they are—insist it’s not true. (White House Press Secretary Dana Perino noted last week that global warming has an upside: Fewer people will die from colds. We did not make that up.)

Their flight of fancy might be amusing if they weren’t taking all of us aboard with them. Like many conservatives, they have a curious relationship with science, seeming to believe that adamant ideology can somehow trump empirical data. Perhaps their free-market bent leads them to believe that an invisible hand will hold the polar ice caps together. Or maybe theirs is a faith-based approach: Global warming is a divine creation, or God will come down and make everything all right.

Faulty science is quaint when it’s just a few rubes publishing flat-earth pamphlets. But when their intellectual bedfellows are setting our public policy, things get a bit dicier. Under President Bush, eight years that should have been spent facing up to global warming will have been squandered. Gov. Perry seems to believe that ridiculing the notion of climate change will help win him the second spot on the next GOP ticket or a cabinet post in a future Republican administration.

We don’t have time for this nonsense anymore.