Receding coastlines

[Lone_Star_Dem]

SURFSIDE BEACH — Charles Watson stands by the side of the road smoking a cigarette and snapping photos with a digital camera. He seems transfixed as he watches his family's longtime beach home jacked off its pilings and rolled slowly down the street.

Several neighboring houses in this sleepy coastal town will meet the same fate this very day.

Forty years ago, 200 feet of sandy beach buffered Beach Drive from the sea. But today, the surf runs freely between the pilings and over the remains of concrete foundations.

The erosion has become so severe that Texas declared the property a public beach and gave the owners a choice: Take state money to cover the cost of moving the house or go to court.

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Beach Drive lost this war with nature, an early victim of rising seas and global warming and in many ways a harbinger of the effects of climate change on Texas.

Global warming often is associated with exotic places. The United Nations chose the Indonesian island of Bali as the setting of its international climate change summit that begins Monday. And to much of the world, melting polar ice caps, receding Alpine glaciers and the rapid decline of polar bear populations represent the most visible and immediate effects.

But climate change also has reached temperate Texas. Rising seas and sinking land have created some of the worst erosion rates in the world along the state's Gulf Coast. Extreme weather, which many scientists believe will become the norm because of global warming, has produced torrential storms and severe droughts in recent years.

In 2006, after two years of drought, South Texas water suppliers restricted use for irrigation and for lawn watering. Shortages are expected to worsen.

And birds indigenous to Mexico and the border have extended their range hundreds of miles north of the Gulf Coast.

Of all the looming effects of global warming, sea level rise and its potential to spur coastal erosion is the easiest for many to comprehend, particularly for those who live in or are familiar with coastal communities.

Read more at link: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/environment/stories/MYSA120107.global1.4572903e.html

[SheilaT]

1. Coastlines have always been fragile.

Global warming and rising sea levels simply make that more apparent over a shorter period of time than ever before.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

2. True

They also provide the visual that people sometimes need to kick start their ability to understand.

[MasonJar]

3. Too bad W's so-called ranch in Crawford is not on that coast; then he would

have a first hand look at what happened to the people of New Orleans. By the way, thank you Brad Pitt; you are my hero now. Brad has put in 5 million and now, DU, it is time for us to step up and help. If you go to the NPR website, it will direct you to the link to help Brad save the 9th ward.