Turtles on a beach

Contributor

other

HANDOUT on 8/17/23

The Washington Post

handout

September global average temperature compared to normal

Color1008

HANDOUT on 5/20/14

U.S. President Joe Biden travels to Arizona

For The Washington Post

An illustration shows a military jet emitting an orange hued substance into the atmosphere.

Main image for climate geoengineering comic

1.5 promo image

Floating Solar Aims to Gain Ground in China's Coal Country

Stringer

Days with dangerous heat by mid-century

How climate change is impacting the world

Coronavirus Pandemic 2021 - Death Valley National Park

staff

FILES-BRAZIL-AMAZON-DEFORESTATION

Getty

TOPSHOT-GREENLAND-ENVIRONMENT-CLIMATE CHANGE-ICEBERGS

Wildfires Break Out Across Boulder County In Colorado

Map showing summer temperature change in the U.S. comparing 2017-2021 vs. 1971-2000

EXTREMESUMMER PROMO

World Heat thumbnail

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Bryce Harper, Joey Gallo and a bond forged by baseball since they were kids

Rating every game on the Commanders’ 2024 schedule

The 34 best things to do in D.C. this weekend and next week

Tariffs against China hamstring the transition to a clean energy future

The Post’s choices in Northern Virginia’s U.S. House primaries

States see legalized sports betting as a tax windfall — but at what cost?

6 Airbnb red flags to spot before you make a booking mistake

Some cruise prices are about to get a little more clear

Cruise ships to return to Baltimore two months after bridge collapse 

CNN gets a presidential debate — and a much-needed win

Netflix will air NFL’s Christmas games, a major step for streaming service

Sam Feist, longtime CNN executive, will become CEO of C-SPAN

Rep. AOC's 'people-first' approach

Rep. Cori Bush: Activism is 'part of who I am'

Roy Lichtenstein’s pop-art take on Eve hides some deep theology

Look to the cloud to protect the life documents saved on your computer

Can you spot bad financial advice on TikTok? Take our quiz.

5 myths about Social Security as the program faces a funding crisis

Only in the surreal Fox universe can James Comer be treated as credible

Trump’s ‘they’re out to get me’ campaign and its enablers

Voters key to past Democratic wins are skeptical and undermotivated

Puppy abandoned with heart-rending note is adopted, named Minerva

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

Senators studied AI for a year. Critics call the result ‘pathetic.’

Google’s AI answers could come back to bite it

Cruise settles with person dragged under one of its robotaxis

Second Russian invasion of Kharkiv caught Ukraine unprepared

Russia seizes more land than Ukraine liberated in 2023 counteroffensive

Kenyan president aims to attract green investment during U.S. visit

Ask Amy: Retired couple misses social activities since the pandemic

Miss Manners: Longtime friends lose minds over canceled dinner plans

Carolyn Hax: After holiday meals, guests rush the kitchen to claim the leftovers

Trump

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

Salwan Georges

The shorelines of the United States are projected to face an additional foot of rising seas over the next three decades, intensifying the threat of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/01/05/climate-disasters-2021-fires/" target=_blank>flooding</a> and erosion to coastal communities across the country, according to a <a href="https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelrise-tech-report.html" target=_blank>report released Tuesday</a> by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Human-caused climate change, driven mostly by the burning of fossil fuels, has accelerated global sea level rise to the fastest rate in more than 3,000 years. The report by NOAA, NASA and five other federal agencies — updating a study from 2017 — predicts that ocean levels along U.S. coasts will increase as much by 2050 as they did over the past century.

Casey Silvestri

This amount of water battering the coasts “will create a profound increase in the frequency of coastal flooding, even in the absence of storms or heavy rainfall,” NOAA said.

“We’re unfortunately headed for a flood regime shift,” said William Sweet, an oceanographer at the NOAA National Ocean Service and the nation’s top scientist on sea level rise. “There will be water in the streets unless action is taken in more and more communities.”

Drawing on data from tidal gauges and satellite imagery as well as cutting-edge models from the most recent United Nations report on climate change, the NOAA analysis gives decade-by-decade projections for sea-level rise for all U.S. states and territories over the next 100 years. Advances in ice sheet modeling and better observational data allowed the authors to give more definitive near-term projections than ever before, Sweet said.

Even if the world takes swift action to curb carbon emissions, he said, the trajectory for sea level rise “is more or less set over the next 30 years.”

Kristina Dahl, a principal climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said research she and colleagues have done suggest that 10 to 12 inches of sea level rise by 2050 would put roughly 140,000 homes at risk of “chronic inundation,” or flooding every other week on average.

Already, she said, high-tide flooding in places such as Charleston, S.C., has quadrupled in frequency since the 1970s. Other regions, from Louisiana to New Jersey to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, have wrestled with flooding that has become more common and costly.

“They’re already having to make difficult decisions or major investments to cope with the flooding they are seeing,” said Dahl, who was not involved in Tuesday’s report. While other coastal communities have avoided major impacts, “they will have to start grappling with these same kind of issues.”

Federal report: High-tide flooding could happen ‘every other day’ by late this century

Looking ahead to the end of the century, the amount of planet-warming pollution people release into the atmosphere could mean the difference between sea levels stabilizing at about two feet above the historical average or surging by almost eight feet, NOAA reports.

“This report is a wake-up call for the U.S., but it’s a wake-up call with a silver lining,” NOAA Administrator <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/22/biden-noaa-administrator-rick-spinrad/" target=_blank>Rick Spinrad</a> told journalists in a teleconference Tuesday. “It provides us with information needed to act now to best position ourselves for the future.”

Marvin Joseph

In years past, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/08/23/tennessee-floods-show-pressing-climate-danger-across-america-wall-water/" target="_blank">powerful storms pushing water up shorelines</a> were the primary drivers of flooding along coasts. But as surging seas raise the level of high tides, communities from the Gulf Coast and the Pacific Northwest to the beaches of Hawaii and the barrier islands of North Carolina increasingly suffer from “sunny day” floods, when saltwater bubbles up from storm drains and spills into streets without a drop of rain.

A <a href="https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/2021_State_of_High_Tide_Flooding_and_Annual_Outlook_Final.pdf" target=_blank>report </a>released last year by Sweet and his Ocean Service colleagues found that U.S. coastlines experience twice as much high-tide flooding as they did just 20 years ago.

By the middle of the century, the new NOAA analysis finds, minor high-tide flooding events could happen more than 10 times a year. More significant and destructive events, which currently have about a 4 percent chance of happening in a given year, could occur twice a decade.

“What we are trying to communicate to folks is these are real-life impacts that will influence their day-to-day decision-making,” Sweet said.

Coastal communities must start planning for regular inundation, scientists warned, especially in places where coastal development and sinking land compound the risks of sea level rise.

Storm and wastewater systems may need to be upgraded to cope with the influx of seawater. Homes and important infrastructure located within the new upper bounds of high tides might have to relocate.

The consequences could go beyond floods. Saltwater threatens to infiltrate coastal aquifers, affecting water quality and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ruined-crops-salty-soil-how-rising-seas-are-poisoning-north-carolinas-farmland/2019/03/01/2e26b83e-28ce-11e9-8eef-0d74f4bf0295_story.html" target="_blank">sterilizing farm fields</a>. The septic systems used in many coastal communities <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/12/17/climate-solutions-sewage/" target="_blank">won’t be able to safely handle waste</a> as water tables rise.

Ports could see severe damage, said NOAA National Ocean Service Director Nicole LeBoeuf — disrupting supply chains and raising costs even for people who live hundreds of miles from coastlines.

While Tuesday’s report makes clear that a certain amount of sea level rise is essentially guaranteed based on the world’s past emissions, Dahl said that reality only underscores the importance of reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

“The fact that there’s this locked-in sea level rise is not a reason to throw up our hands and say there’s nothing we can do about this, because there absolutely is,” she said. “This decade we’re in right now is one of the most consequential decades for our climate future.”

That is because only by acting rapidly to reduce global emissions can the world limit Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels — the most ambitious goal of the Paris climate agreement.

If nations fail to hit that target, she said, it risks destabilizing the Antarctic ice sheet and creating conditions for catastrophic amounts of sea level rise in the future.

“It’s really critical that we start bringing our emissions down quickly and steeply,” Dahl said, “so that we don’t get anywhere near those tipping points.”

The reports finds that if warming exceeds 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, there’s at least a 50 percent chance of sea level rise exceeding 1.6 feet on average globally by 2100. With 3 to 5 degrees Celsius of warming, that likelihood balloons to 80 to 99 percent. The sea level rise in the United States would be near or higher than the global average.

Compared with NOAA’s sea level rise projections made in 2017, the new estimates are largely unchanged through 2100. However, the expected rate of sea level rise is slightly slower through 2050, before accelerating toward the end of the century. The agency also eliminated an “extreme” scenario of over eight feet of sea level rise by 2100 that it now considers implausible.

Sign up for the latest news about climate change, energy and the environment, delivered every Thursday

Reide Corbett, dean of Integrated Coastal Programs at East Carolina University and executive director at Coastal Studies Institute, said the NOAA report is important because it so clearly and definitively details a real-world threat posed by climate change.

“We need to make people understand this isn’t just a bunch of scientists talking and arm-waving. This is really happening, and it’s happening on time scales that matter to the individual,” said Corbett, who was not involved in the study.

“If we’re talking about 2050 — for someone buying a house today, that’s within the range of their mortgage.”

For Corbett, who lives on the flood-prone Outer Banks of North Carolina, the prospect of sea level rise is deeply personal. Just last week, he said, beach erosion caused a house in nearby Rodanthe to <a href="https://www.wcnc.com/article/weather/beach-erosion-cause-home-collapse-outer-banks/275-3ef646f9-95d4-4f64-903b-3f9513bc36c3" target=_blank>collapse into the sea</a>.

He hoped the NOAA findings will spur vulnerable communities to invest in adaptation measures — restoring ecosystems that help hold back floodwaters, rerouting roads and bridges to steer away from the most vulnerable spots. In some cases, he said, communities will have to make hard decisions about what places are worth protecting and when it’s time to retreat.

“We need to really start working through these challenging conversations now,” he said. “Not right after the next storm, but before.”

2019 Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism–Features; 2020 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award - Silver; 2023 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for a young science journalist

Georgetown University, B.S. in International Culture and Politics

Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter covering humanity's response to a warming world. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe.  

Sarah Kaplan

Pulitzer Prize, explanatory reporting, 2020

Pulitzer Prize finalist, explanatory reporting, 2009

Pulitzer Prize finalist, national reporting, 2021

Society of Environmental Journalists, Outstanding Explanatory Reporting, first place, 2020

Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for human interest storytelling, 2006

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Brady Dennis is a Pulitzer Prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on environmental and climate stories, primarily around the Southeast. He previously has covered the Environmental Protection Agency, international climate policy, the Food and Drug Administration and  the nation’s economy. 

Average Year-To-Date	1
Yearly Average	40
Record Most	67 (1980,2010)
Record Fewest	7 (1886,1905)
Last Year	38