The climate is changing, the ocean is rising, more storms are coming, and millions of Americans are in harm’s way. The costs of making people whole after these storms are soaring. Without ideas that stand some chance of breaking the political gridlock in Washington, the situation will eventually become a national crisis.

The law that Reagan signed in 1982 might just offer a model of how to move forward.

First, the background:

Scientists are still figuring out how storms will be altered as global warming proceeds, but they are pretty certain about some things. Land ice the world over is melting in the changing climate, and the ocean is heating up, too, which makes the water expand. Those factors are causing the ocean to rise.

It rose about eight inches in the past century, requiring billions of dollars to fight erosion. Recently the rate of increase seems to have jumped, to about a foot per century — and climate scientists think it will go up quite a bit more. The cautious prediction at this point is that we could see two or three feet of sea-level rise by 2100, and possibly even six feet.

What will that mean for people living near the shore?

You might think things would be fine for them until the day the ocean finally covers their land. But it does not work that way.

Long before inundation occurs, people will be hit more and more often by coastal flooding. In places where it took a huge storm to send seawater into living rooms, a routine storm will do the trick once the ocean has risen several feet.