Logan Ramsey
Editor-in-Chief
Humidity clung to my face as I got onto a tour boat docked on the Indian River, on the east coast of Florida just above Palm Bay.
I couldn’t help but admire the tropical landscape around me. If it weren’t for the cars bustling past on the state highway, you would be able to hear the sound of a thousand insects chirping together in a chaotic harmony. I was on the highly-rated Good Natured River Tour with Captain Bill Reynolds, and his narration of the river oozed with enthusiasm.
While the river was beautiful, it wasn’t enough to distract me from what I’ve read will happen to our coasts — the flooding that we’ll see in our lifetimes due to rising sea levels and climate change. This weighed on me with sadness while we floated up the serene river, and I couldn’t get my mind off of it.
Once my group had set out and started going north on the river, we sailed past homes surrounded by palm trees right on the coast with boats tied up and roofs over their docks. Some people sat out fishing on their boats, seemingly without a care in the world. On some of the roofs, birds had made their home and flew either high above the river or almost skimmed the current.
We saw a manatee with her newly born baby swimming under the surface of the water, too shy to peek their heads out. While the manatee wouldn’t come up, a pod of four dolphins leapt from the river as they swam in the wake of our tour boat.
The surroundings I saw were breathtaking. As we traveled down the river, I could only think of one way to describe them: a paradise.
It came up in the tour that the area was rocked by Hurricane Irma in 2017. On a small island in the middle of the river, there used to be a dragon statue, and we sailed past what remains of it. It’s been reduced to rubble, nothing but broken pieces that resemble anything but a dragon.
Captain Reynolds told us there are plans to rebuild it, but I know that it won’t stay up long if they do. As the climate changes over time, this exacerbates extreme weather.
After the president left the Paris Climate Accords, the United States took a major step in the wrong direction, further away from making any significant changes in our CO2 emissions. The U.S. is the second largest producer of emissions behind China, and if we continue at the rate we’re going, the ocean is going to continue to heat and sea levels will rise, along with more catastrophic and more frequent extreme weather events.
Places high above sea level aren’t even safe from climate change-caused weather catastrophes, as the flooding that’s consumed parts of the midwest is linked to a warming climate. An article from PBS said that this flooding foreshadows a national security threat posed by climate change. As our climate gets more extreme, our day-to-day weather is going to get more extreme as well.
Don’t take my word for it. Do any amount of reading, and you’ll find that the United Nations predicts there will be three feet of sea level rise by 2100. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts there will be six and a half feet of rise by then.
But these estimates could be low, because according to Harold Wanless, chair of the geology department at the University of Miami, the rate of sea level rise doubles every seven years, and if we continue at this rate, we’d have a 205-foot rise by 2095. While he doesn’t believe this will happen, he believes we should be prepared for at least 15 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century.
This is going to create a catastrophe in the United States, because once the ocean claims people’s homes, they’ll never get them back. At the rate we’re going, before the century ends we’ll see permanently displaced climate refugees without a place to go, and my guess is places like the coast of the Indian River will be the first to drown.
I don’t want to pretend to be an expert on this issue, because I’m far from that. My knowledge of science is very limited, and I don’t have the authority to make these estimates on my own, but they’re not my estimates. These are from the experts, and I would implore you to listen to their warnings. Maybe it’ll turn out all of these predictions were incorrect, but if that’s what you’re betting on, you’re a fool.
A thought that struck me as I watched dolphins bounce out of the wake from our boat was that they don’t care about rising sea levels. The dolphins in the Indian River will keep swimming along past submerged houses unaffected, and birds will always find a place to nest, even if they don’t have wealthy people’s dock roofs.
That’s not to say that climate change doesn’t affect them, because many species could go extinct due to the heating climate, but there’s nothing that we can do to the earth that natural life won’t bounce back from.
We have a tendency as a race to believe that we’re more powerful than we actually are. If we disappeared, the wildlife that we admire wouldn’t miss us, and they’d be better off.
That’s why we have to change our ways for ourselves. If we want our children and our grandchildren to be able to enjoy paradise, we have to save it.
