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Each month, The Conservation Group will reach out to experts in the environmental field to share what they know about our topic of the month. This month, The Conservation Group was honored to speak with Dr. Leonard Berry, FAU&rsquo;s Florida Center for Environment Studies&rsquo; Director, distinguished professor of geosciences and the co-director of the climate change initiative at Florida Atlantic University. To listen to our interview with Dr. Berry, follow the link below, or to read a transcript, scroll down.
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To listen, click here: Dr. Leonard Berry Interview, July 24, 2012
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Dr. Leonard Berry Interview Transcript:

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The Conservation Group:
Thanks for joining us, we are now recording. I&#39;m Hannah from theconservationgroup.com. Our theme this month is centered around recent studies about climate change showing that ocean levels are rising on both coasts of the United States. It is Tuesday, July 24, 2012 and today I am speaking with FAU&rsquo;s Florida Center for Environment Studies&rsquo; Director, distinguished professor of geosciences and the co-director of the climate change initiative at Florida Atlantic University, Dr. Leonard Berry, to learn how climate change effects rising sea levels and what that means for coastal cities, especially in Florida. So, welcome, Dr. Berry, and thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
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Dr. Berry:
Oh, it&#39;s a pleasure.
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The Conservation Group:
Dr. Berry, I know that in April you testified before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources at the Full Committee on Impacts of Rising Sea Levels in Florida. Can you please talk a little bit about what you presented there?
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Dr. Berry:
Yeah, it was an unusual meting on the impacts of sea level rise, generally, and there were five of us there. The key scientist from NOAA presented the scientific basis for climate change and there were presentations in a general sense and two of us were asked to highlight problems from our particular regions, somebody from New York and somebody from Florida. And we were using New York and Florida because these are areas where there is the greatest dollar risk, if you will, to sea level rise. So the issues that I focused on were the ones that are generally of the greatest importance for Florida. Florida &ndash; Southeast Florida &ndash; has a large number of people, millions of people, living within four feet of high tide, and a good deal of our roads and other infrastructure is in low-lying areas, so the whole issue presented was to point out the vulnerability of Florida but most importantly to point out that this is not a future problem. I think that so very often we are thinking, &ldquo;Oh climate change is something that&#39;s going to happen way off in the future and therefore we don&#39;t really need to address it very seriously right now.&rdquo; I think some of the extreme weather events that have occurred recently have changed that attitude, but it&#39;s an underlying attitude, and in South Florida I can&#39;t count on my fingers and toes the number of headlines there have been in the last two years in the news and media about particular problems that are not just separate problems, but they&#39;re all really related to one major problem &ndash; the change in climate, and particularly sea level rise. The problems manifest in the high tides; the flooding of areas --- which were not flooded before. The problems, as in Hallandale City, of saltwater intruding into the freshwater aquifers, and therefore having to move their drinking water supplies to wells further inland. And because so much of South Florida is in areas of intense water management we have lots of canals, and those canals &ndash; most of them &ndash; were built fifty or more years ago and the sea level rise of five to eight inches since that time has meant that those canals, again at high tides, are not functioning because they don&#39;t have the gradients to allow the water to flow out to the sea, and if the canals aren&#39;t functioning they, again, back up and cause inland flooding. Those were the issues that I was really focusing on &ndash; to point out that this was something that local people in southeast and southwest Florida are taking seriously and are beginning to look at ways in which they can ameliorate or adapt to these new situations. If you want to look at their website, the Senate website you can find a much longer account and responses to the various questions that were asked.
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The Conservation Group:
Okay, great. Thank you. You mentioned saltwater intrusion, high tide flooding, and the canals not functioning properly are some evidence of sea level rise occurring, but how else to we know that sea level rise is occurring? Can you explain how sea level rise is measured and does it impact all coastal areas equally?
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Dr. Berry:
Well, there are two different techniques for measuring sea level. The traditional one is by a tide gauge, which we --- put a stick in the ocean and measure the height of the sea against that at different tidal circumstances and one of the longest records in the U.S. is Key West, where we have over a hundred and twenty years of tidal records from the same spot, carefully taken, and analyzed, and that tidal record shows a rise over that whole period of about eight inches. More recently since the nineteen nineties, we have a satellite called GRACE, G-R-A-C-E, which measures water volume very accurately and we are now able to get a global picture of the height of the sea level and therefore changes in the height of the sea level from the GRACE satellite, and the GRACE satellite measurements have been coordinated and compared with the ones on the ground where they both relate to the same spot, and they match very well, so one of the presentations at our meeting in June was to show that the long-term measurements and the satellite measurements are compatible, and more concerning, is that in the last twenty years &ndash; a little bit less &ndash; we&#39;ve seen an increase in the rate of sea level change from about 1.8 millimeters per year to about 3 millimeters per year. It doesn&#39;t sound very much, but it adds up very quickly in low-lying areas like South Florida.
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The Conservation Group:
That&#39;s incredible the technology we&#39;re able to use now with the satellites and how accurate that can actually be...
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Dr. Berry:
Of course, whereas the tide gauges give us a spot reading the satellites give us a big area reading so that we can get a sense of not only the changes but variations and changes from one place to another.
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The Conservation Group:
I read &ndash; and I believe this was part of your senate testimony, actually &ndash; that by 2060 sea level rise in southeast Florida is expected to be between nine and twenty four inches, and in a state that lies mostly at or below sea level, this would impact the infrastructure hugely, transportation, insurance rates &ndash; overall the impacts would be huge, and with so many potential impacts, can you talk about what people should be most concerned about right now?
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Dr. Berry:
Oh. (Laughing) Insurance rates is the trite answer, but I think that what people should be most concerned about is that any infrastructure, any planning, that is more than a few years, should take sea level rise into account. We... if by 2060, the projections at the higher end of that range are realized, and most of the recent data that we get, really is pointing that it&#39;s really rising more quickly than we anticipated &ndash; so if we do have a two feet rise in sea level than that will impact not only a lot of structures, but it will impact the functioning of canals, quite dramatically. It will result in continuous flooding in some areas which are inland rather than just near the coast, and so I think people should be concerned about thinking that they can postpone action to this event. I think that the Florida Department of Transportation through some work that we have done, has begun to look at the most vulnerable roadways. Fortunately, many of the roads... the through roads are on the coral ridge, [railways] on the coral ridge , but many many many community roads are vulnerable and we&#39;ve got some detailed studies that show that communities will have to slowly adapt, and some areas will have to be either greatly redesigned or even abandoned. I think the problem that most people are not addressing right now is the whole question of how we manage our water supplies under these changing circumstances, and I think that water management, in terms o f drinking water management and flood management is going to be a much more expensive and important issue and that we need to begin thinking now about how we&#39;re going to deal with water: both obtaining it, and also making sure it&#39;s not in our backyards.
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The Conservation Group:
Absolutely. What are some of the most effective strategies that you&#39;re seeing now as far as adaptation to sea level rise in South Florida?
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Dr. Berry:
The most effective strategies are in the future. I think what we&#39;re seeing now is encouraging because people are beginning to understand the problem; they&#39;re beginning to look at ways in which they can ameliorate the problem, but in fact, we haven&#39;t had a lot of on the ground redesigning. I know of one hospital in south Florida which has totally redesigned it&#39;s lower floors with an understanding of both storm surge and sea level rise so that none of the records, none of the heavy equipment is on the ground floor. And I think the most effective short term strategy for many public buildings will be to rethink the use of the building. I think many of these tall skyscrapers are very firm buildings; they&#39;re not going to be washed away, but as sea level rises and the ground floors are going to be vulnerable &ndash; particularly during extreme events like hurricanes or major rain events &ndash; they&#39;re going to be vulnerable to flooding and we just have to adapt our use to new circumstances. It&#39;s mostly future. We haven&#39;t yet seen a lot of adaptive action except for planning. Planning is good, but operations are important.
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The Conservation Group:
Right. And we&#39;ve seen that even with certain storm events where simple things like making sure the generators are not on the ground floor and things like that could have really prevented a lot of trouble.
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Dr. Berry:
That&#39;s right and for institutions like hospitals that still have a lot of paper records and a lot of hardware, putting them on the ground floor is not smart. But it&#39;s what we&#39;ve tended to do because they tend to be heavy, they tend to be easily moved if they&#39;re on the ground floor, but for a lot of Florida that shouldn&#39;t be in the future.
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The Conservation Group:
Right. So climate change is often regarded as one of the leading causes of sea level rise. Is climate change, in fact, the primary cause of sea level rise, and if it is, are there steps people can take to prevent or slow down either climate change or sea level rise significantly, like reducing carbon emissions or things like that? Will that make a significant different at this point?
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Dr. Berry:
Yes. If you look back at the geological record there have been fluctuations in climate and fluctuations in sea level much greater than the ones that we&#39;re contemplating now, but on the other hand, those were slow moving. They were mostly when the human population was tiny, if at all, and now we&#39;re dealing with a phenomena that is operating more quickly and in the face of a world that is seven billion people and increasing. The cause of this sea level rise could be part of some long term fluctuation, but in the judgment of nearly all scientists, this is driven both in intensity and in pace by the increasing carbon in the atmosphere which we&#39;ve measured very consistently for over fifty years, and that increase of carbon in the atmosphere can be attributed directly to the amount of fossil fuels and wood burning, agricultural clearing that we humans have perpetrated over the last century or so. And there&#39;s a very direct correlation between the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and the change in temperature, particularly important in the arctic and, to a lesser degree, in the antarctic. Whatever we do now, a lot of that carbon is going to be there for a long period of time and warming is likely to go on, but if we significantly reduce the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere that weight of warming will slow down and the impact will not be for such a long period. People worry about what happens in 2100, but if you look beyond that is where some of these scenarios get really scary with projections of sea level rise more than six feet, which would be disastrous for low lying places in Louisiana and Florida, for example, and a major impact on New York. So, yeah, I think if one accepts, and as I said nearly all scientists do, that this is a cause effect relationship than we ought to be working even harder than some areas are doing now to significantly reduce that. There is a feeling of judgment that if we can reduce and can keep the temperature rise to a global average of less than two degrees centigrade than the consequences of that rise can be managed and dealt with. To do that means a serious global effort at reducing emissions, and that&#39;s not happening right now. Though, understanding that relationship and responding to it and dealing with it is globally very important.
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The Conservation Group:
Well that speaks a bit to my next question which was going to be, if you could recommend one thing for every person at home to do today to help ameliorate the negative impacts of sea level rise, what would that be, whether it&#39;s calling or emailing a state politician or reducing emissions in some way, like buying an electric car, what would be your one action step?
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Dr. Berry:
I think the one action step &ndash; of course I have two &ndash; but the one action step would be to really bring home the importance of this issue to your politicians at state and federal level because I think policy changes are going to be necessary. I think individually, we ought to be doing stuff but that the major player is going to be government. Businesses are already responding to a degree, but I think that the federal and state governments are where the action needs to take place and the more citizens can make that point, the better.
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The Conservation Group:
And then what was your second one?
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Dr. Berry:
Well, the second one is really individual responsibility for your carbon footprint and looking at your own individual carbon footprint and finding ways in which that can be reduced. I think we can do an awful lot individually in terms of the way we move, whether we drive our car or walk or cycle, what kinds of public transport we use &ndash; all of those seemingly small things that add up to major things.
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The Conservation Group:
Right. I agree. Well, thank you very much for speaking with me today, Dr. Berry, I really appreciate your time.
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Dr. Berry:
That&#39;s just fine, and thank you for your initiative.
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The Conservation Group:
Thank you.
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