"There was previously nothing in the comprehensive plan about climate change or greenhouse gases," she said.
Similarly, officials here are under a state mandate to upgrade the Keys' entire wastewater system to advanced treatment plants by 2015. It's a $150 million expenditure eating up much of the county budget.
As the wastewater network heads into its final design this fall, there are discussions about raising wastewater pumps higher in the lower Keys, to make sure salt water doesn't seep into the sewage system in the future. The plan in its current form says "all new and significantly renovated roads, parks, pump stations, filled lots, towers, etc., shall have the grade elevated above the lands' projected sea level for the expected life of the infrastructure."
Kevin Wilson, an engineer in the Monroe County Public Works & Engineering Division, said consideration of the height of wastewater pumps is important because salt water flooding into them could wreak havoc with bacteria designed to break down sewage sludge.
"Wastewater has to come first," County Commissioner Sylvia Murphy said at the recent meeting. The wastewater upgrade is such a huge expenditure that it is the obvious first choice to direct efforts about climate change, she added.
Low-level burning
In Big Pine Key, there is no viable way to prevent seawater from seeping through the porous geology and contaminating the underground freshwater pool that feeds pine forests and deer. The action plan aims to address part of the problem with a "natural systems" section that calls for "low intensity fire regime in fire-dependent uplands and wetlands of the lower Keys."
That essentially is a push for more low-level burning of vulnerable trees, a process that makes them naturally more resilient against storm surges. Controlled burning every decade or so helps clear out leaf litter that gathers on the ground, Bergh explained.
That clearing of litter through fire in turn prevents pine tree roots from migrating upward toward the nutrient-rich litter piles. With their roots tapping into the underground freshwater lens, they are less likely to die from salt water flowing in from heavy rains, he said.
In Bergh's neighborhood, the Fish and Wildlife Service would have to oversee any such burning, as it controls most of the area as part of the National Key Deer Refuge. Many of the pine tree forests in the Keys have not experienced any natural burning for decades, creating a huge amount of buildup on the ground, he said.
"The plan is one way to say, 'Hey, Fish and Wildlife Service, the county thinks this is something you should consider,'" Bergh said. About 60 percent of the Keys is public land, so part of the focus of the climate change advisory committee is to educate and reach out to federal and state agencies.
Federal officials say increased low-level burning is being looked at as part of the service's overall modeling of future climate change impacts. However, there are multiple jurisdictional and social "constraints" to burning more, said Phillip Hughes, an ecologist at the Florida Keys National Wildlife Refuges Complex. Those include the concerns of homeowners leery of increased fire in their neighborhoods.
David Bender, a botanist in the South Florida Ecological Services Office, said the county could play a huge role by buying and conserving land adjacent to public areas. The Keys contain so many species that are found only in this part of Florida that the county will be needed to help create land corridors for plants and animals to move to higher elevations, he explained.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, is helping fund the replanting of Key tree-cactus in the islands that are threatened with extinction because of saltwater intrusion increasingly tainting the soil. This summer, 72 cactuses were planted in the Keys at high ground to try to boost their long-term survival, Bender said.
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19 Comments
Add CommentI don't see the problem. Just get Republican Governor Rick Scott to say global warming is a lie.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen the sea hears that, it'll just go away.
What a ridiculous article. This wasn't about mitigating the effects of global warming, it was all about ridiculous politicians and how they are in their own way in the politicians never ending quest for power and money. Controlled burning to make trees more resilient to salt water? Yeah that makes sense, lets try to reduce global warming by burning trees and releasing not only all kinds of pollution into the air but heat as well. And we have all seen what can happen with "controlled" burning if the Los Alamos area is any kind of example. Yet another example as to why politicians and the scientists they pay should not be making any sort of recommendations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll this article proves is the reason politicians and some scientists want to claim humans are the one and only cause of global warming is because they want yet another excuse to pillage money from everyone else.
The planet appears to be warming and it is natural. The fact that it is natural is still no excuse for humans to just pollute. However, the mistake that will be made is attempting to save everything, even when it cant be. If the islands do go underwater, that is about it and attempting to save freshwater forests will be a total waste of money and time better spent on mitigation efforts that will have an effect. That said, spending massive amounts of money and time based on warmist rigged computer models spelling out certain doom for all when in fact all of the so called calamities prophesied by these models may not occur or be as drastic as they have rigged the models to predict. That is the problem with theories proven entirely by statistical models where nearly every bit of data is an average of an average of an average. They really have no idea what will happen and the same exact data could statistically prove nothing at all will happen in the keys or anywhere else.
People, billions of us, help speed change. Unfortunately, the end result is often lethal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince you are accusing climate scientists of "rigging" computer models (a very serious accusation), do you have any evidence of said rigging?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thispriddseren,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt was a herculean task, but I think you were able to introduce a factual error in every single sentence of your rant (a 2 in some!). Quite entertaining.
This would be a great topic for discussion by the Presidential candidates when they visit "swing-state" Florida. Let's hope that the Florida media and the residents are concerned enough to ask about the potential disaster.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell said lampora.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIsn't he the one recently saying how Fla wasn't losing land to GW? Even if not when towns have to deal with the effects that have already happened and from that knowledge plan for the future, he just rants lies because his cult of deniers is being proved wrong every day.
Can Priddseren spell Troll? Can't handle the facts so just insults.
Stepping outside and arguing with a fencepost is a more productive use of time than arguing with a global warming denier. While the foremost liar, Richard Muller, has finally admitted the primary facts of global warming and its human cause, the strategy has shifted to stalling action.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you want to stall necessary action on any problem in the world there is no more effective strategy than normalizing stupidity.
All global warming deniers are shills that spew illogical nonsense. The purpose of a shill is make a crackpot idea seem plausible by agreeing with it. You see this in television ads where some worthless piece of garbage or complete waste of time is sold by a huckster with a shill acting as a happy customer that is jumping with joy.
It's no different in the case of global warming denial to protect the profits of old energy systems at the expense of new energy systems and those who live on coastal plains and islands that will be inundated when the glaciers melt.
From the beginning, more thoughtful persons have seen themselves as too dignified to be involved with politics or to actively oppose the destruction of their world. Our punishment for our failure to step up and fight is to be ruled by the stupid and to witness the consequences of our dereliction of duty.
Look we need to face reality. IT IS TOO LATE. Nothing we can do will slow or reverse the warming that will happen over the next 100 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven if we adopted every single measure designed to mitigate what we've done, and did so perfectly, we would NOT see any impact until next century.
If you don't believe that, then google it. I know I did many times, and the story is always the same from climatologists.
What we should do is try to prepare as best as we can for the changes we have caused.
<b>To that end, the state of Florida is going to make a fine and dandy Atlantic Ocean version of the Great Barrier Reef, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
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Instead of trying to protect the Keys, we should be trying to find ways to make them disappear sooner!
[b]the state of Florida is going to make a fine and dandy Atlantic Ocean version of the Great Barrier Reef, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat's stupid. It's a prime example of what I'm talking about. Being a defeatist because you're too lazy to get up, go out, meet with people, and do something is stupid.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this20 million people live where a few thousand used to and folks claim to care about the environment?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFlorida from north to south is an environmnental disaster zone
Jonathanseer says that since we can't immediately undo what we have done, we should just continue to do it. We should in fact make it worse, almost inconceivably worse, while devoting all our time to fighting the mess we have made. Until the mess is so big it destroys our civilization. Good plan.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisan aside:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The county is the southernmost in the United States'
I'm not an American but wasn't that U.S. Customs I went through when I went to Maui in March?
The county is the southernmost in the United States, with acreage that is 73 percent water over its 3,737 square miles.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisZZZZZZT...Guess again. Try about 7,000 miles away in the middle of the Pacific. Southpoint USA is on the Big Island of Hawaii. In fact it's the only county in the country that is below the 20th parallel and actually in the tropics.
At any rate, if the rich snobs down in the Keys want to spend their money on greening up the place I'm all for it, but why stop there? They need to clean up the rest of that dump they call a paradise state.
Thanks singing flea...i had to get a permit for one of the campgrounds in Maui and I was pretty sure it was at the 'county' building. Not quite as far south as the Big Island but right next door.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's what they did in North Carolina...passed a law making it illegal to talk about climate change along the coast.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMartin
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo exactly what is a denier? Do you prejudicially group people by race when you are not doing so on climate change?
Most who have studied the issue agree that more CO2 will lead to some warming in all other things remain the same. In the actual earth system things do not remain the same and are considered additional forcings. Some are positive and some are negative.
The bottom line is that there continues to be a large uncertainty regarding the rate of warming associated with more CO2. It could be anywhere from 1C to over 3C for a doubling of CO2. No scientist will tell you today that they know what the number is plus or minus .5C.
There is the 2nd huge issue of what will happen to the lives of people around the world if it does get warmer. Will it rain more or less where people live? Again, nobody can answer this question reliably today. There are simply no reliable models that can predict future conditions with sufficient accuracy to be relied upon for making policy decisions.
Please try to keep learning and try to stop being prejudiced with those who may disagree with your preconceived ideas.
This is just the latest flavor of denialism. Aka lying about science due to commercial interests.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClimate sensitivity has been calculated as about 3.5C for a doubling of CO2 in the 70s and that number has not changed since.