ABSTRACT
Climate change emerged as the great environmental crisis of the late 20th and early 21st century. While the science of climate change is improving quickly, there is some risk to predicting global temperature increases and corresponding changes in climate patterns and environment. However, many of these changes are already clearly underway and support many of the predictions of the last two decades. Global temperatures are predicted to increase by 2 to 4 degrees Celsius or 3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Even with immediate, drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions (which isn’t happening), it is almost certain that the world’s oceans will rise by at least 3 feet within the next century with some predictions of sea rise of 6 or 7 feet. Downtown Miami floods on a regular basis now, and globally other coastal areas are already under water. What does this sea rise mean for society and nature? Besides the potential loss of coastal areas and the prohibitive costs involved in trying to preserve cities in the face of invading waters is the loss of key coastal habitat. Coastal estuaries are critical nurseries for any number of species on every coastline of the country and world. They are vulnerable to even small rises in ocean levels. The other consequences of climate change are manifold: the expansion of the range of tropical diseases such as malaria and dengue fever; radical changes to the hydrological cycles of rivers globally, affecting fisheries and water supplies; and transformations to growing seasons and weather, influencing crop production around the world, are merely a few of the problems. Also, there is the possibility of shifts in ocean currents as well as atmospheric changes in the jet stream. Worsening droughts and large episodic rain events with extensive flooding followed by long periods with no rain, winter freezes in subtropical regions, and superstorms are just a few of the problems that are already occurring and will surely worsen.
