MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Boston Harbor (Photo: Bertrand Duperrin)

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Anyone who reads Truthout reporter Dahr Jamail's work on the deleterious impacts of climate change knows that it is not a theoretical threat. However, we live in a time when the administration of Donald Trump is silencing talk of climate change -- and research about it -- in the federal government. The gap between Jamail's on-site researched reporting and current national public policy is immensely troubling and ominous for the future of the planet and its people.

Although the Earth-altering impact of climate change could become catastrophic, it is not immediately visible to many people. Therefore, it remains an abstract threat to them -- not an immediate concern. However, that has not deterred many states and local communities from preparing for some of the destruction that will likely result from climate change.

That's the case with Boston, which according to The Boston Globe is considering a giant sea barrier to protect the heart of the city from rising water:

As rising sea levels pose a growing threat to Boston’s future, city officials are exploring the feasibility of building a vast sea barrier from Hull to Deer Island, forming a protective arc around Boston Harbor.

The idea, raised in a recent city report on the local risks of climate change, sounds like a pipe dream, a project that could rival the Big Dig in complexity and cost. It’s just one of several options, but the sea wall proposal is now under serious study by a team of some of the region’s top scientists and engineers, who recently received a major grant to pursue their research.

With forecasts indicating that Boston could experience routine flooding in the coming decades, threatening some 90,000 residents and $80 billion worth of real estate, city officials say it would be foolish not to consider aggressive action, no matter how daunting.

One of the most frequently reported effects of global warming is the melting of glaciers, as well as the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields. This melting causes the level of the world's oceans and seas to rise, posing a threat to sea-level nations and cities around the world -- including, of course, the large municipalities and towns on the east and west coasts of the United States and bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

This threat becomes more of a reality every year. As Dahr Jamail reported last year on Truthout:

Recently, a Norwegian Coast Guard icebreaker ship took an interesting trip into the Arctic. The ship found no ice to break, despite the fact that it was the dead of winter and barely 800 miles from the North Pole.

Indeed, record-low levels of Arctic sea ice are becoming normal. The ice is disappearing before our very eyes.

Satellite data now shows we are witnessing a very rapid acceleration in global sea level rise. In the last six years, oceans have risen by five millimeters per year, which is a rate not seen since the ending of the last Ice Age - and it is accelerating.

Miami is often cited as a city that is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, since it is basically flat with a long shore line. In 2015, Vanity Fair bluntly asked, "Can Miami Beach Survive Global Warming?" Forebodingly, Jamail has further covered this trend:

Another perfect example of this is a crucial recent study led by James Hansen, the former director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The study, authored by Hansen and more than a dozen other scientists and published online, warns that even staying within the internationally agreed goal of keeping the planet within the 2-degree Celsius temperature warming limit has already caused unstoppable melting in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. The study shows that this will raise global sea levels by as much as 10 feet by the year 2050, inundating numerous major coastal cities with seawater.

That is a warning that wasn't even aggressively acted upon during the Obama administration in terms of major policy, as The New York Times noted in a 2016 report :

The gridlock in Washington means the United States lacks not only a broad national policy on sea-level rise, it has something close to the opposite: The federal government spends billions of taxpayer dollars in ways that add to the risks, by subsidizing local governments and homeowners who build in imperiled locations along the coast.

Even more troubling, this observation was in an article written before the Trump administration -- which denies human-caused climate change -- came into power.

When a city as far north as Boston is beginning to plan for the sea level rise caused by climate change, it is likely a sign that other coastal municipalities along the East and Western seaboards will begin to take their own action to mitigate the destructive force of global warming. Unfortunately, all individual cities can do is "Band-Aid" prevention in the absence of vigorous national and worldwide efforts to halt the acceleration of climate disruption.