The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and other news sources have been publishing the latest research and observations on climate change. The extreme weather is creating real problems everywhere.
Global warming is here and will only get worse until nations and citizens take the necessary steps, and even then the reversal will not be quick and painless.
New Jersey has not been immune to recent environmental changes. Its shoreline from New York Bay to Delaware Bay has been experiencing some of the world’s most rapid sea level rise. This is not opinion; it is measurable fact, investigated and recorded by scientists from Rutgers University.
As most local readers know now, this sea level rise is due to the warming from greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and even farms. The predictions are for several feet of additional sea level rise as the rate of climate change only increases. In New Jersey the rise will encroach on beaches, homes, towns, aquifer, and forests. Hurricane Sandy provided a preview of that future. A rapid switch away from fossil fuels could slow and possibly reverse this trend, but much of the potential, destructive change is, as they say, already baked into the system.
Other factors are also at play. Our section of our continent is apparently sinking, due both to natural change and to the pumping of ground water. At the same time, the Gulf Stream is shifting north, bringing warmer seawater to our coast.
The result has been a recent increase of several inches in the high tides. This is three times the average, global rate of increase.
If one explores the small coastal rivers and creeks along our Jersey shore, one will encounter, as the Rutgers’ scientists have, cedar forests jutting above the water, now dead from salt water. And this die-off, and the resulting “ghost forests” is being discovered up and down the mid-Atlantic coast – the result of rising seas.
Adding to the warming problem is the fact that these forests have long supported our climates by absorbing CO2 and by providing habitats for the creatures that in turn support the forests. But not only in New Jersey, in fact world wide, these forests are declining because of land clearing, fires, disease, invasive species, warming, and sea level rise. Sadly, clearing for farms, here, in the Amazon, and elsewhere contribute to this global problem. Similar forest declines or die backs are evident in Canada, Louisiana, and Maryland. The dead trees often remain standing until blown over by storms, leaving tidal marshlands that are slowly migrating inland. Since the 1850s, analysis by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science suggests that 100,000 acres of coastal forest around the Chesapeake Bay have died off, leading to marshland and then open water. The reduction in tree populations and their absorbing of CO2 is occurring just as mankind is increasing CO2 levels in our atmosphere.
These forest die-offs from rising seas also occurred in centuries and millennia past, but evidence reveals that the changes were not as rapid as they are today. And of course, there weren’t millions of humans vying for the acreage. Now New Jersey’s forests are boxed between shifting shores, farmland, growing communities, and vacationers.
As seas continue to rise, as they seem certain to do, the complex barriers to ocean encroachment of dunes, marshes, and woodlands seems certain to be further inundated and reduced.
In addition to the Rutgers School of Biological and Marine Sciences, and Princeton’s Climate Central, there are a number of local groups studying the situation and seeking solutions. Among them, the D&R Greenway Land Trust, the Princeton Photography Club, and The Pineland Preservation Alliance which are together working to introduce people to New Jersey’s changing shoreline, to the vast Pinelands, its aquifer, and to the environmental challenges ahead.