Apologies for the buzz kill but surfers are scheduled to wear the brunt of climate change like a cancerous nose wart. It is everyone’s problem but it is unmistakably ours. The waves we ride, the places we ride them and the full bright lifestyles we enjoy are all in the firing line on a hotter planet. “The future is coming and the future is bleak,” Lewis Samuels writes in a special edition of Surfer magazine devoted to climate change and a host of other environmental issues which threaten or are already degrading the surfing experience.
Ocean warming and acidification are on track to kill the planet’s coral reefs dead. This is not some distant maybe proposition. The process is well under way. The ocean is already 30% more acidic than it was four decades ago and trending upwards. A recent report by the World Resources Institute argues that 90% of coral reefs are expected to be endangered or dead by 2030. When corals die they break down and eventually disappear. Similarly, waves which spiral over coral reefs are at risk of deteriorating or ghosting away.
The ones that do hang in will have to contend with creeping sea level rise. Originally predicted to be bad sea level rise is now expected to be much worse. Scientists monitoring the West Antarctic ice sheet issued their most disturbing update in May this year. “We’ve collected enough observations to conclude that the retreat of ice in the Amundsen sea sector of West Antarctica is unstoppable, with major consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise one metre worldwide,” says NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot.
That one metre rise is expected to arrive by the end of this century and is considered inevitable regardless of what we do in the meantime. The findings have been described as climate change’s Holy Shit moment and have led to calls for more strident carbon mitigation strategies so that the worst outcomes may be avoided our at least delayed.
One metre of sea level rise may sink many great surf spots but surfing will be far down the list of concerns for most people. It will cause inundation and necessitate retreat from thousands of coastal cities and towns. Globally an estimated 600 million people from low-lying islands and countries will be looking for a new home. Exotic surf destinations like The Maldives, The Solomons, Kiribati, The Cook Islands, and parts of Micronesia will be underwater. Surfing would struggle on but the coastline we know and love would be gone. In its place would be an ever-worsening disaster zone of patch ups, clean ups and misery.
If that sounds a bit bleak and alarmist consider this. Sea level rise can’t be turned off like a tap. It is projected to keep rising and rising for centuries. So every heart-wrenching, livelihood-destroying coastal flood will be grafted to the knowledge that it will be followed in time by a bigger and more damaging event.
Recently I interviewed geoscientist Dr Mick O’Leary who’s been examining the fossilised remains of coral reefs in Australia’s North West (including at Red Bluff). O’Leary’s findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience, are full on. He argues there is now strong evidence that the last time the planet was two degrees warmer sea levels were up to nine metres higher. Two degrees, you’ll recall, is the level of climate change currently deemed acceptable and a level humanity is striving to reach but not exceed.
O’Leary told Tracks: “The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sea level rise numbers are by definition conservative because they fail to account for the long-term dynamical behaviour of ice sheets in a warmer climate.” That’s a sobering thought because the IPCC’s projections are already so serious many bloggers, taxi drivers, citizen scientists, shock jocks and News Limited columnists dismiss them as alarmist fear-mongering.
The United Nations is so concerned with the way the latest climate science is tracking they have called for an urgent global summit of world leaders to meet in New York later this month. “Without additional mitigation, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread and irreversible impacts globally,” the IPCC has warned in a leaked draft.
President Obama will attend the conference and is pushing for a new global agreement to further limit the planet’s carbon emissions. PM Tony Abbott has confirmed he won’t attend and won’t sign up to a tougher mitigation deal.
Pissed off? There is a time and a place for you to rage against the machine. On September 21, when the New York climate summit is on, mass rallies are being organised for around the globe. Organisers are hoping it’ll be the biggest climate change protest in history. There are scores of events being organized for Australia and if there’s not one in your town you can start one yourself. (https://secure.avaaz.org/en/event/climate/?source=blast&cl=5720155579&v=44432).
If you can’t make that one protestors will be blocking the world’s biggest coal port in Newcastle on October 17. Surfers haven’t exactly made much noise about climate change but it’s not an issue that’s going away. Be a great to see a flotilla of surfers bobbing in the harbour.
