It’s personal, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said. The impact of climate change on homes in the Rhode Island Democrat’s state gives his fight increasing urgency.
“When I see little summer cottages washed into the sea when a winter storm comes, that makes it a bit personal,” Whitehouse said in a recent interview with The Hill. “And when we can’t take action on something of this magnitude, that is a disgraceful moment in our history.”
In the year 1900, most of the city of Galveston was washed out to sea along with 10,000 people. No one was stupid enough back then to think they could have stopped it.
Reblogged this on The Firewall.
“One of these days your sense of humor will get you in trouble. To show you that I mean business . . .” wrote the editor of a once prestigious journal to me in 1969.
He resigned his position within a few months, probably still unaware that we could not survive without a sense of humor.
stop building little cottages next to the sea…
You beat me to it, Lance. People in the northeast build homes 6 inches above high tide and then blame global warming when they occasionally get washed away. Then they look to the government for disaster aid to rebuild. Next, the government cites increased damage valuations to prove global warming is a serious and worsening problem. And millions of semi-literate uninformed people accept this hogwash as fact. Sigh.
I still hear those seawaves crashing…
My late father-in-law showed me million dollar houses – not cottages – being washed into the see on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach, LI, NY. He said the libtards wouldn’t let them build jetties or anything else to stop the erosion.
So when cottages in RI get washed into the sea, I suspect libtards are involved. Libtards like Sheldon Whitehouse.
In many cases, jetties are problematic. If there’s a prevailing current along the beach, A jetty will cause sand buildup on one side, and sand loss on the other. So a jetty may protect your house on the up-current side, but cause your neighbor’s house on the down-current side to wash away.
In some cases the sand loss on the down-current side may actually be desirable, such as when on the down-current side there is a channel or navigable inlet. In such cases, a jetty on the up-current side both protects the shore there from washing away, and protects the channel from filling in. Those jetties are called “terminal groins.”
There are other options, which are designed to address such issues. Holmberg undercurrent stabilizers are sort of like jetties, but shorter. They stay below the surface, and reduce but don’t completely eliminate sand migration.
Unfortunately, reactionary liberals often reflexively oppose any and all engineered solutions to beach erosion, including Holmberg devices, and even terminal groins. So, unfortunately, in many places regulatory constraints mean the only thing you can do about an eroding beach is retreat.
They did raise and build a seawall in Galveston. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galveston_Seawall
Someone should send the idiot to Providence, Rhode Island, so he could see first hand that Hurricanes use to hit his beautiful state in the 50s.
Sheldon Whitehouse is clueless. Anthropogenic climate change has absolutely nothing to do with sea level at the Rhode Island coast. There’s one good Long Term Tide Gauge in Rhode Island, at Newport. Here’s the graph of sea-level there:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8452660
As is obvious from the graph, there’s been no statistically significant acceleration in sea-level rise associated with anthropogenic CO2. At Newport it’s rising at about 2.7 mm/year, just as it was 80 years ago, and at least half of that apparent sea-level rise is actually due to land subsidence, rather than the ocean rising.
Proof, once again, that you don’t need a brain to be a politician.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
Another Whitehouse spreading BS, at least they are consistent.
LOL. Good one, Gator!