Canaveral National Seashore, which stretches from south Volusia… (Orlando Sentinel file )
Headed for a Central Florida beach to enjoy an end-of-summer surf break over Labor Day weekend?
Be glad you can, but also worry about whether your children and grandchildren get to do the same in years to come, two environmental groups warned this week.
The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council chose the three-day holiday weekend to release a report that spells out how certain stretches of Atlantic Ocean shoreline will turn intolerably hot for people and wildlife before vanishing beneath rising seas.
Their scenario plays out over decades, though predicting exactly when it all happens is as iffy as the timing of expected worldwide climate changes caused by heat-trapping pollution from power plants and cars that burn coal, natural gas, gasoline and diesel.
Two things are certain: The process has already begun, and the nation has done too little in response to avoid calamity, said Stephen Saunders, president of the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization.
"We do not yet have a national decision that we are going to stop changing the climate," Saunders said. "I think that is more a result of divided government than it is of divided public opinion. I think there is majority support for protecting the climate."
The two groups have been writing a series of reports about the vulnerability of different U.S. landscapes. The latest study looks at seven national seashores, including Central Florida's Canaveral National Seashore, stretching along the Atlantic coast as far north as Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts.
"The biggest threat ultimately to these seashores is that they will be largely, or even entirely, covered by the ocean," Saunders said.
The latest report is based in part on a study released earlier this summer by the National Academy of Sciences that predicts a minimum sea rise of 20 inches by the end of the century — or as much as a 55-inch increase, depending on the success of efforts to stem heat-trapping pollution.
But before the well-known beaches are expected to disappear, they will become significantly hotter, "which could be enough to keep people from even wanting to go to these seashores," Saunders said.
Air temperatures at Canaveral National Seashore, which spans 24 miles and is the longest stretch of natural beach along Florida's Atlantic coast, now reach average summer highs of 90 degrees. But by 2060, according to the report released Wednesday, the beach park will measure highs of 94 degrees — which, for comparison purposes, have occurred recently in El Paso, Texas. And by the end of century, Canaveral will have highs of 97 — the recent norm for Desert Rock, Nev.
As those thermometer readings rise, the bridges and roads that link the seashores to the coastal mainland could become unusable because of rising seas, according to the report.
"We know that sea level has risen about a foot on average over the last 100 years, but in the last two decades from very precise satellite measurements we can see the actual rate of sea-level rise has increased 50 percent," said Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who has focused on coastlines for much of his 40-year career. "This is very likely the result of the melting of glaciers and ice sheets."
Williams, who was not one of the report's authors but provided editing comments, said the rise of sea levels along the U.S. East Coast is more complex than it might seem.
"It's due to not only a global rise in sea level, but also the land is sinking," he said, as a part of an ongoing flex in the Earth's crust. "What that means is that the rates along the East Coast of the United States are actually higher and have been higher than the average [worldwide] rate of sea-level rise."
The report makes clear that the national seashores are at particular risk because, in all cases but one, they are on barrier islands: thin, low-lying strips of coastal geology that are "especially vulnerable" to rising seas.
Steve Traxler, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Vero Beach, said the report does what his agency and others will be doing more often: focusing the global science of climate change on local geography.
"Most people want to know 'how it really affects me,' and I think this report does a good job in doing that," Traxler said.
Canaveral National Seashore, which stretches from south Volusia County into north Brevard, is graded in the report as facing the most risk from rising seas among the seven national seashores, a status the report's authors attribute to U.S. Geological Survey research.
The Florida park is no more than 100 yards wide in places and has only a single row of dunes to repel a storm's battering waves, while the other seashores have secondary dunes.
In addition to the natural wonders it contains, Canaveral National Seashore provides other benefits: 966,000 visitors in 2010 spent more than $65 million and supported 990 jobs, according to the report.
Not mentioned by the two groups is that the state, county and local beaches to the north and south of Canaveral are very similar in that they, too, cling to low-lying barrier islands.
A busy day at Canaveral would be a slow day at one of the more-popular beaches along the Atlantic in Volusia or Brevard. Those counties' beaches attract an estimated 12 million-plus visitors a year and are a critical part of the local economies.
Saunders, of the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, said the two groups focused on national seashores as "special places that we know and love."
"This is not just about polar ice caps and polar bears and things that are distant from people's lives," he said. "This is about places where people are going to the beach on this Labor Day weekend."
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