[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 94 (Thursday, June 7, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3275-S3276]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Climate Change

  Mr. President, I want to talk today about what is happening to the 
coastal communities in Florida. The Presiding Officer represents 
Alaska, the State that has the most coastline. Next to Alaska, my State 
of Florida has more coastline than any other State, and I would venture 
to say that since Alaska has very few beaches, it ought to be very 
clear that the State of Florida has more beaches than any other State. 
That, of course, is an attraction that becomes an economic engine 
because people from all over the world want to come to enjoy the sands 
of Florida's beaches and enjoy the bounty of nature the Lord has 
provided, but we better watch out because we are starting to mess it 
up.
  Yesterday, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 
released data that the contiguous United States had the warmest May on 
record. The entire continent of the United States had the warmest May 
on record. The heat is having real-world impacts.
  NOAA also released its ``2017 State of High Tide Flooding and 2018 
Outlook.'' During 2017, the average high-tide flooding in the United 
States was the highest ever recorded. In 2018, NOAA predicts that high-
tide flooding will be 60 percent more frequent across U.S. coastlines 
than it was 18 years ago in 2000, primarily because of the local sea 
level rise.
  Doesn't this suggest something? In the lower latitudes, our seas are 
rising. It should not surprise us. It doesn't surprise this Senator. We 
got a glimpse of this when 4 years ago I took our Commerce Committee to 
Miami Beach and in fact had a hearing.
  One of the witnesses was a NASA scientist, Dr. Piers Sellers, a 
prestigious scientist and former astronaut who, unfortunately, we lost 
to cancer just recently. At the hearing he said, ``By the end of the 
century, the intensity of hurricanes . . . will increase . . . but even 
if hurricane frequency and intensity do not change, rising sea levels 
and coastal development will likely increase the impact of hurricanes 
and other coastal storms on those coastal communities and 
infrastructure.''
  I would like to show a picture. A picture tells the real story. This 
shows a sunny day in Miami Beach--a sunny day when the king tide is 
flooding Miami Beach. OK. That is obvious, looking at it. This happens 
frequently at high tide.
  What has the city of Miami Beach had to do? Spend tens of millions of

[[Page S3276]]

dollars on big pumps and raising the level of the road to try to 
alleviate this problem. This is happening with some frequency in South 
Florida. Dr. Sellers testified back in 2014 that not projections or 
forecasts but actual measurements showed the sea had risen over the 
last four decades 5 to 8 inches.
  Let's take another look at other flooding. That photo was Miami 
Beach, which is down at the southeast part of the peninsula of Florida. 
This photo was taken in downtown Sarasota. Sarasota is on the Gulf 
Coast and is closer to the middle of the peninsula; in other words, 
about 150 miles north of the latitude of Miami Beach. The vice mayor 
brought me these pictures of Sarasota. Look at this car on the street. 
Pictures don't tell the full story.
  We held another field hearing in West Palm Beach a year ago, and the 
Broward County resilience officer came to Palm Beach County for that 
hearing and showed a video of a man biking along the city of Fort 
Lauderdale, where the sidewalk is submerged in water. In other words, 
what has happened in Miami Beach is happening in the Las Olas section 
of Fort Lauderdale.
  Then we took the committee to St. Petersburg, which is on the 
opposite coast, the gulf coast, where the city has designed its new 
pier out of floating docks to accommodate the rising sea as they rise 
up and down in Tampa Bay.
  Or how about St. Augustine, where the public works department is 
seeing nuisance flooding from high tides that are overwhelming their 
storm water system.
  All of these are examples of how sea level rise affects coastal 
Florida on sunny days, not rainstorm days. The NASA scientist at our 
hearing was talking about how climate could exacerbate damage from 
hurricanes. Why? Because if the water is warmer, that is the fuel for a 
hurricane, and that is what is sucked up into that vortex as the 
hurricane feeds itself. The hotter the water it is over, the more 
ferocious--and likely frequent--those storms will be. Warmer ocean 
water fuels hurricanes, making them more intense, and the sea level 
rise compounds the storm surge and the rain-induced flooding.
  Let me show you another image. Here is an image that shows what 
Florida's coastal communities face when the Sun is not shining. This is 
during a rainstorm. Here is flooding in Jacksonville. Where is 
Jacksonville? It is at the north end of the peninsula. It is almost 
right next to the Georgia line. You can see a sign that says ``no 
skateboarding'' is almost completely engulfed by the rising water.
  Then you think: What about a place further south on the latitudes, 
Puerto Rico? Hurricane Maria absolutely ravaged that island, and it is 
not an exaggeration to say that climate change and sea level rise are 
putting people's lives and their property at risk. It is the reality.
  I am going to continue to extend an invitation to our colleagues. I 
want you to come with me to Florida, and I want to show you these 
impacts. I have had the privilege of taking several of our colleagues 
to the Florida Everglades, where alligators are plentiful, to see this 
unusual ecosystem as we travel about in an airboat. I want you to come 
and see what is happening as a result of the rising water, and the real 
question is, What are we going to do about it?
  There are two pieces to the solution. One is that we are going to 
have to stop putting so many greenhouse gasses into the air. 
CO2, which is carbon dioxide, and methane are the two big 
culprits. Part of the solution is climate mitigation, which means we 
must invest in new technology, in the economy of the future--things 
like wind, solar, electric vehicles, and more efficient buildings. We 
are going to have to make our communities more resilient to the 
greenhouse gasses and the warming that they already have caused in the 
system. This is called climate change adaptation.
  You don't have to agree with climate science to know that it makes 
sense; it makes dollars and cents to do this. We are talking about 
strengthening our building codes to withstand wind events. We are 
talking about restoring the function of the floodplains so that when 2 
to 3 feet of rainwater suddenly gets dumped in one place, it can absorb 
and gradually recede. We are talking about rebuilding natural flood 
protection, like sand dunes and beaches. In the Commerce Committee we 
have heard countless stories from local government officials that if 
they could have invested before the natural catastrophe that hit them, 
they would have saved the Federal Government a lot of money by avoiding 
the enormous cost of the disaster response and relief itself, not to 
mention reducing the risk to human life.
  The proof is in front of our very eyes. The photos we have shown--
let's show the rest of them here--don't lie. Yet here we are upon 
another hurricane season. Of course, we hope the big storms don't come, 
but the likelihood is that they will. Remember, they don't necessarily 
go just to Florida. Remember Hurricane Sandy? Look what it did to the 
Northeast.
  We hope we don't see any more of these harrowing images. But, as we 
hope, we are going to have to act because what we have shown here in 
these photos today is not about projections; it is about real-time 
observation. Let's quit ignoring the obvious.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.