Looking for motivation

Why would a politician want to work on planned relocation?

When I can, I try to read the front section of the NYT from beginning to end.

I notice each time that there are no ads. It's clear it makes little business sense for the paper to be physically printed, but I am grateful for the curated, final collection of stories that make up the front section. Someday they'll begin printing only on Sunday, and I will mourn.

This morning I was absorbed by stories about the Israel-Hamas war (including three op-eds and an editorial on the subject), the idea of asking for forgiveness in Minnesota, and the background of Judge Tanya Chutkan. I paged through every section of the physical paper, in fact.

Not a single story about climate.

Anyone alive and aware right now recognizes that we're in the midst of several overlapping crises. Yes, we're seeing a ferociously speedy departure from the stable climate on which our civilization has depended for the last several thousand years, but what's happening on the Lebanon border? 

What's the best way to live in this context? The only hint of an answer I have found for myself is to focus on whatever I can learn about the bundle of issues I'm working on now (today, climate adaptation in coastal cities) while contemplating and acknowledging the grief and horror of all the other situations. I don't always succeed. But I do know that rising sea levels remain important even when they drop out of the news.

So here I am, writing about climate again, forgive me. 

I'm interested in motivating public sector leaders to begin planning intentionally to work with Congress and communities on relocating populations to safer places over time. That's a lot of abstract processes in one sentence, and all of them will require large-scale institutional and legal reforms. But the first step is motivation. Where will that motivation come from? 

It may come from a series of coastal disasters happening within a short time, bringing home the visceral sense that extreme flooding events are right here, right now. It may come from a spray of coastal municipal defaults or bankruptcies, as cities are left with less revenue while still obligated to provide the same services. It may come from plain old moral horror, as existing leaders come to recognize that the safety of citizens is a basic requirement of governance. 

Motivation does not come from scientific facts these days. If it did, what we learned this past week about Western Antarctica would have done the job. 

Much of the uncertainty about when, exactly, the heat now baked into the climate system will cause debilitating sea level rise along the East Coast of the US stems from uncertainty about Western Antarctica. Scientists know that melting glaciers there might cause two or ten feet of sea level rise to show up on our shores very quickly, but they used to be pretty confident that this sort of event was unlikely to happen until toward the end of this century, or even beyond.

Now they're not so sure. Things may be moving much more quickly in Western Antarctica than scientists had thought.

Last week, a study in Science Advances ("Annual mass budget of Antarctic ice shelves from 1997 to 2021") found that key floating ice shelves effectively damming or blocking glaciers from flowing into the ocean had lost a tremendous amount of mass over the last couple of decades. In particular, scientists found the Thwaites ice sheet (protecting the Thwaites "Doomsday" Glacier) had lost 70 percent of its mass between 1997 and 2021. That's a lot; in fact, that adds up to 4.1 trillion tons of melt added to the Amundsen Sea. 

Because the ice sheet is already floating on the ocean, having it melt doesn't add to sea level rise. All that additional fresh water does, though, make the water around Antarctica lighter (less dense and salty), which in turn weakens the giant conveyor belts of ocean circulation that keep water off the East Coast and moderate temperatures. But if the glacier melts, that's big for sea level rise. And this thinning trend is part of an overall phase change for Western Antarctica: the warmer water underneath Thwaites is having a bigger effect than scientists might have expected. The National Snow and Ice Center had this to say last week about the continent: 

"There is growing evidence that the Antarctic sea ice system has entered a new regime, featuring a much stronger influence of warm ocean waters limiting ice growth.”

This is just another update, but what it demonstrates is that the changes are happening more quickly than scientists would have thought just a few years ago, and the outcomes for civilization are likely to hit more quickly (2050? 2070?) and be more severe. 

Leadership is the necessary element at this point. All the legal reform notions and institutional ideas in the world won't make a difference unless leaders take them on board, talk about them, push for them, and own their political consequences. 

It's a tall order. It requires looking beyond current news cycles. I'm sympathetic—that's not an easy task these days.