[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 7821-7823]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          SAFE CLIMATE CAUCUS

  (Mr. WAXMAN asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. WAXMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today as a member of the Safe Climate 
Caucus to urge the House to act on climate change.
  Last month, scientists recorded atmospheric concentrations of carbon 
dioxide at more than 400 parts per million. The long-term consequences 
of this development are going to get worse in the future, but we're 
already seeing the immediate impacts today.
  The Philadelphia Inquirer has recently reported on the sea level 
rising along the Delaware Bay and the spring season coming earlier to 
the Philadelphia region. I will insert these two articles into the 
Congressional Record.
  And just last month, the Natural Resources Defense Council released a 
report on the cost of climate change, showing that the Federal 
Government spent $100 billion on disaster relief last year. That's more 
than we spent on education, transportation, or even nondiscretionary 
spending on health.
  And, yet, not only does the Republican majority in the House refuse 
to address climate change; they're actively pursuing legislation that 
is sure to make things worse. We must address this problem now.

              Along N.J. Bay, Rising Sea Draws Ever Closer

                     [The Inquirer, Apr. 29, 2013]

                           (By Sandy Bauers)

       The night Meghan Wren got stranded by floodwaters and had 
     to sleep in her car, she knew it was time for a reckoning.
       She had been driving to her waterfront home along the 
     Delaware Bay in South Jersey. As she crossed the wide marsh 
     in the dark, the water rose quickly. It became too deep--
     ahead and behind. She had to stop and wait.
       To her, no longer were climate-change predictions an 
     abstract idea. Sea level has been rising, taking her 
     waterfront with it.
       ``This isn't something that's coming,'' she later told a 
     group of bay shore residents and officials. ``It's here. We 
     just happen to live in a place that will affect us sooner.''
       Wren lives on tiny Money Island--more a peninsula of 
     bayfront land with about 40 small homes and trailers in 
     Cumberland County.
       Just visible across the grassy marsh is Gandys Beach with 
     80 homes. Farther south, Fortescue with 250 homes. All three 
     are steadily disappearing.
       On the Atlantic coast, beach replenishment masks the 
     effects of sea-level rise. But along the low-lying bay shore, 
     veined with creeks, the problems are striking.
       With each nor'easter, more of the beachfronts erode. More 
     of the streets and driveways flood. Septic systems, inundated 
     with salt water, are failing.
       ``We're seeing beyond the normal damage,'' said Steve 
     Eisenhauer, a regional director with the Natural Lands Trust, 
     which has a 7,000-acre preserve in the area ``We see the 
     problems getting worse.''
       In the last century, sea level in the bay has risen a foot, 
     gauges show, partly because the warming ocean is expanding 
     and polar ice is melting. Also, New Jersey is sinking.
       All the while, humans have been pumping more and more 
     greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The planet's average 
     temperature has increased.

[[Page 7822]]

       ``All those links are very strong,'' said Pennsylvania 
     State University's Raymond Najjar Jr., an expert on climate 
     change in Mid-Atlantic estuaries.
       ``The reason the sea is rising as fast as it is in the 
     Delaware Bay is human-induced climate change,'' he said, 
     echoing many experts.
       Sea level is rising faster now than in the early 20th 
     century, and scientists expect it to rise even faster in the 
     future.
       The three towns' beachfronts and marshes have always been 
     nibbled away by ship wakes, storms, and more typical 
     erosion--but sea-level rise, combined with more frequent and 
     intense storms, makes them all worse.
       Can these three communities, all within Downe Township, 
     adapt to climate change?
       Or is there a point beyond which no amount of money can 
     stop the sea? Should everyone relocate?
       It's been done. After a $1.8 million seawall in nearby Sea 
     Breeze failed a year after being built, the state bought out 
     the 23 remaining households three years ago for $3.3 million. 
     Tiny Thompson's Beach and Moore's Beach are gone, too.
       These are special places, where people look out their 
     windows and see eagles soaring. The bay turns red at sunset. 
     Salt marshes thick with aquatic life stretch for miles.
       With marinas in Fortescue and Money Island, they are among 
     the last places in South Jersey where people can access 
     Delaware Bay--vital for generating support to preserve the 
     rich habitat.
       But, like Wren, residents sometimes see white caps in their 
     driveways.
       Downe officials have come up with a $50 million plan to not 
     only shore up the shore, but also add amenities across the 
     township to draw tourists who could revive the economy.
       The plan, which would cost the equivalent of $31,500 per 
     resident, calls for bulkheads and truckloads of sand, 
     restrooms, picnic benches, nature-viewing areas, and a 
     township visitor center.
       Officials identified nearly 30 ``potential'' funders--from 
     agencies to nonprofits. But many feel the project is a long 
     shot.
       Meanwhile, bumper stickers are plastered on homes: ``No 
     retreat. Save the Bayshore communities.''
       ``I refuse to give up one house, one lot, one piece of 
     land,'' said Robert Campbell, Downe's mayor. ``These towns 
     are 200 years old . . . It's a special place. We've got to 
     preserve it.''
       Their survival is also fiscally crucial; they represent 
     half of Downe's tax base.
       He and others blame flooding not on sea-level rise but on 
     the decline of dikes once used for salt hay farming, 
     (Scientists say the dikes blocked the tides from naturally 
     bolstering mashes with sediment.)
       Campbell also blames the state for being too tough in 
     issuing permits for bulkheads and jetties,
       After Hurricane Irene struck in 2011, the town put up 
     temporary bulkheads. The state issued violation notices.
       Now, those structures need restoration, too.


                            `We can survive'

       Before modern travel made all the Atlantic beaches so 
     easily accessible, Delaware Bay was the shore that many 
     Philadelphians went to.
       In the late 1800s, Fortescue was the Cape May of the bay 
     shore, with hotels and a boardwalk.
       ``We are so rich in our history,'' said Dennis Cook of 
     Money Island, who specified in his will that his ashes be 
     thrown off his pier. ``We can survive.''
       Or at least they feel compelled to try. Many residents are 
     retirees who have sunk their savings into their homes. Now 
     that prices have fallen, they can't get out unless the state 
     buys them out.
       Nine Money Island property owners have already requested 
     that.
       One is Tony Novak, owner of the local marina. He wants to 
     stay, and thinks he can for the near future, but ``there is 
     no doubt that the only reasonable, logical, long-term 
     approach is strategic retreat.''
       ``I have neighbors,'' he said, ``and all they have left in 
     the world is being washed away.''
       In October, Wren held a forum on what many consider the hot 
     issue for the bay shore: ``Rising Tides.''
       About 100 people went to the nearby hamlet of Bivalve on 
     the Maurice River, and filled a chilly room in a historic 
     shipyard shed owned by the nonprofit Bayshore Discovery 
     Project, which Wren founded.
       It owns New Jersey's tall ship, a historic oyster schooner 
     called the A.J. Meerwald, and the walls of the room were 
     lined with vintage oyster cans.
       Outside, docks built in the early 1900s still exist, and 
     old-timers notice that the tide comes up higher than it used 
     to.
       On the serpentine Maurice River, erosion--a natural process 
     worsened by sea-level rise--has almost cut through the bend 
     at Bivalve. If it occurs, the docks might end up high and 
     dry, and land to the east will flood.
       Toward the bay are ``ghost forests''--skeletons of trees 
     killed by saltwater intrusion.
       Upstream, a quarter century of bird counts shows that black 
     vultures, a Southern species, are becoming more numerous.
       In decline are American black ducks, which depend on a 
     freshwater wild rice that is being depleted as saltier water 
     moves up the Maurice River.
       ``The coast is changing,'' Jennifer Adkins told the group 
     in Bivalve that night.
       The executive director of the Partnership for the Delaware 
     Estuary, she cited research showing the dramatic loss of the 
     bay's wetlands. Nearly 5,000 football fields' worth vanished 
     from 1996 to 2006 alone, mostly from sea-level rise and 
     erosion.
       Wetlands protect coastal areas by absorbing water from 
     storm surges, so losing these natural buffers makes the bay 
     shore communities more vulnerable.
       And then Matt Blake, then with the American Littoral 
     Society, raised the topic few wanted to hear.
       ``Strategic retreat,'' he said ``The questions of whether 
     to pull back or reinforce are going to come up again and 
     again.''
       He didn't claim to have an answer. But he said solutions 
     should be based on research, not emotion ``We'll never have 
     enough resources to defend every community. Before we start 
     spending on new roads and bridges and pipes, we have to run a 
     cost-benefit analysis.''
       But Campbell wouldn't hear of it. ``There seems to be a 
     double standard between the Atlantic coast communities and 
     the Delaware Bay,'' the mayor said when he got to the 
     lectern. A murmur of assent rose from the audience.
       ``I don't hear anybody talking about retreat in Atlantic 
     City,'' he said. Or ``moving the casinos back to Absecon.''
       Still, he handed out a summary of township problems: 
     collapsed pavement, eroded road shoulders, failing seawalls.
       ``Downe Township is just one hurricane away from becoming a 
     bayfront statistic'' like the three other abandoned towns.
       Eleven days later. Hurricane Sandy hit.
       Bayfront houses were undermined, the sand washing out from 
     under them. Front steps hung in the air. Decks and front 
     rooms were gone.
       Campbell said damage along the bay front totaled $20 
     million; about 30 homes were destroyed.
       ``Sandy focused everybody's attention,'' Wren said. You 
     can't just quietly ignore [the rising ocean] anymore.''


                        remote and little clout

       The bay shore, unlike the Atlantic coast, is ill equipped 
     to respond.
       Cumberland County is remote, rural, and economically 
     depressed, the poorest county in the state.
       ``They don't have the population. They don't have the tax 
     base. They don't have the votes,'' said the trust's 
     Eisenhauer. ``They don't have the clout to get the funding 
     they get on the Atlantic coast.''
       Yet the area is hugely vulnerable. About 12 percent of the 
     county's population lives in a floodplain, according to a 
     federal analysis. Ditto 6 percent of the schools, police 
     stations, and other ``critical facilities.'' Plus 10 percent 
     of the road miles.
       Local leaders feel they aren't getting much help.
       Across the bay, Delaware has a climate-change action plan 
     and a sea-level rise advisory group. It has listed strategies 
     for its bay shore and analyzed the costs and benefits.
       ``The first step is to have rock-solid science and good 
     economics,'' said the state's environmental head, Collin 
     O'Mara.
       In New Jersey, Gov. Christie closed the Office of Climate 
     Change, although a spokesman said several agencies deal with 
     the issue, and many efforts have been launched since Sandy.
       Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Larry 
     Hajna said officials visited Downe ``to see what we can do.''
       ``Sea-level rise is clearly one of the biggest concerns 
     along the bay,'' he said, ``But at this point there aren't 
     any long-term answers.'' Federal, state, and local entities 
     would have to get involved, he said.
       Ultimately, the question may not be how to keep the 
     waterfront intact but how to get to the towns in the first 
     place.
       A new sea-level rise mapping tool from Rutgers University 
     shows that with one more foot of rise--easily possible before 
     century's end--the roads through the marshes would be 
     underwater at high tide.


                             Rude awakening

       Wren thought she would have more time.
       She imagined that the changes ``would be far enough in the 
     future that I could figure out how to manage it''--maybe by 
     working from home during floods. Not anymore.
       She and her husband, Jesse Briggs, subscribe to an alert 
     system for when higher-than-usual tides are predicted.
       But in December, an alert went out at 3 a.m. When Wren woke 
     up, it was already too late. Her Prius was swamped. Now, she 
     drives a hybrid SUV that is six inches higher.
       She thinks it was hubris for humans to build on the shore. 
     And ``it seems like folly to be trying to control nature'' 
     now.
       But she's lived on the water her whole life. Briggs is 
     captain of the A.J. Meerwald. They named their son Delbay--
     for Delaware Bay.
       ``I can kind of see it from all sides,'' Wren said of the 
     debate over Money Island and its neighbors. So far, it comes 
     down to this: ``If the township decides to keep the 
     infrastructure, I'm committed to keeping my house.''

[[Page 7823]]

     
                                  ____
                   [From the Inquirer, May 22, 2013]

           Spring Comes Sooner to Phila.--and That's Not Good

                (By Sandy Sabers, Inquirer Staff Writer)

       One in an occasional series about the regional effects of 
     climate change and how we're coping.
       On May 2, 1908, as he strolled along the Perkiomen Creek in 
     Montgomery County, Bayard Long collected a flowering sprig of 
     redbud.
       He mounted it, labeled it, and added it to the herbarium at 
     the Academy of Natural Sciences, where he was the curator.
       A century later, but just miles away in Chester County, 
     botany graduate student Zoe Panchen also found a redbud in 
     flower. But this time, the short-lived blooms had appeared 
     much earlier. It was April 13, 2010.
       Those two data points--and 2.537 others that Panchen 
     analyzed--show a dramatic change in this region's flowering 
     plants.
       On average, about 20 species of common spring plants are 
     flowering a day earlier every decade, Panchen concluded.
       That scenario is happening across the biological spectrum 
     in ways that could put nature out of sync, worsening pest 
     problems and helping invasive species to flourish.
       Migrating birds are arriving earlier, frogs are calling 
     earlier, and insects are emerging earlier than they were 
     decades ago, according to an analysis of the Northeastern 
     United States by a national group focused on phenology--the 
     study of all the things that animals and plants do that are 
     related to the seasons.
       Researchers link the numerous shifts they're seeing to 
     climate change--mostly, the warmer springs associated with 
     it.
       Individual years are highly variable, of course. Last year 
     was the earliest spring in the North American record, based 
     on ``indicators'' such as plant leaf-out and flowering. This 
     year in the Philadelphia region, temperatures were slightly 
     cooler than normal. But many creatures shift their cycles to 
     go with the overall trend.
       ``Climate change is here, it's now, it's in your backyard: 
     that's the way we put it,'' said ecologist Jake Weltzin, who 
     directs the National Phenology Network, a federal program 
     that is enlisting citizen scientists to gather data on the 
     plants and animals in their own backyards.
       Weltzin and others acknowledge that many factors affect 
     living things--habitat loss, pollution, urban heat islands.
       But as they try to understand the changes in timing and 
     shifts in abundance, again and again, climate change appears 
     dominant.
       ``If you have multiple species that aren't even related, 
     and they're all doing something similar, it's likely that 
     there's a shared cause,'' said Keith Russell, science 
     coordinator with Audubon Pennsylvania. ``Climate change is 
     the one thing that makes the most sense.''
       An international coalition of scientists that produced the 
     seminal analyses of climate change noted in their latest 
     report, in 2007. that phenology ``is perhaps that simplest 
     process in which to track . . . responses to climate 
     change.''
       Even then, they were seeing it. Numerous studies had 
     documented a progressively earlier spring--by two to five 
     days a decade, the group said.
       The evidence continues to mount.
       A longtime study of lilacs and honeysuckles across North 
     America shows the plants are leafing out several days earlier 
     than in the early 1900s.
       Ten bee species have accelerated their emergence date by 
     roughly 10 days over the last 130 years, a Rutgers University 
     entomologist and others reported in a 2011 paper.
       Several studies have pointed to earlier bird migrations. 
     One analysis found that 17 forest species were arriving in 
     Pennsylvania earlier over the last 40 or so years--three days 
     for the cerulean warbler to 25 days for the purple finch.
       In addition, a National Audubon Society study looking at 
     305 species found that birds' wintering grounds had shifted 
     northward an average of 35 miles in four decades.
       In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, black vultures moving up 
     from the south are becoming more numerous.
       ``We're seeing this in real time,'' said Eric Stiles, 
     president of New Jersey Audubon, whose data collectors are 
     part of a national breeding bird survey that is seeing 
     species show up two and three weeks early. ``It's all 
     happening in our lifetime.''
       Some of these changes in patterns may not be bad. They're 
     just changes.
       But some changes have been linked to pest outbreaks. A 
     longer growing season for some plants means a lengthening of 
     the allergy season.
       Scientists don't know how the changes will reverberate, 
     ``If you tug at anything in nature, it's a web,'' said Gary 
     Stolz, manager of the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at 
     Tinicum. ``You pull one little string, and it's tied to 
     everything else on Earth.''
       Researchers have found some cases where early bird arrivals 
     put them out of sync with the sweet spot of insect 
     emergence--their dinner.
       Plants that shift their bloom times earlier could be 
     damaged by even a normally timed frost--a potential disaster 
     if the flower happens to be a crop species. Last year in 
     Michigan, frost damage to fruit trees totaled half a billion 
     dollars.
       Organizers may need to rethink the timing of a few 
     festivals to boot.
       Last year, the parade for cherry blossoms in Washington 
     happened just as the flowers were beginning to fade. The 
     town's cherry tree cultivars now bloom an average of seven 
     days earlier than in the 1970s.
       Scientists say much more research is needed.
       Some important data are coming from citizen scientists--
     people who go out in their backyards and simply notice what's 
     going on. Even with inevitable mistakes, the bigger picture 
     emerges.
       Observers are reporting leaf-outs and flowering times to 
     Project BudBurst, nighttime trills and croaks to FrogWatch 
     USA, and backyard bird sightings to Cornell University's 
     FeederWatch project.
       Diane House, a physician who lives in Newtown Square, 
     tracks beeches and red maples for the Phenology Network's 
     ``Nature's Notebook.''
       The granddaddy of citizen-science efforts, it has nearly 
     2,000 data gatherers. Its more than 1.8 million records on 
     plants, trees, animals, and birds are already informing 
     research, including a paper showing how ruby-throated 
     hummingbirds are arriving in North America 12 to 18 days 
     earlier than in the 1960s.
       In 2010, with a grant from Toyota, Moravian College 
     biologist Diane Husic began a local version, the Eastern 
     Pennsylvania Phenology Project.
       She now has 50 regular contributors--master gardeners, 
     nature center staffers, even grade-school teachers who take 
     students on a recess walks past the same trees every day.
       Scientists also have a mother lode of data from more than a 
     century ago--before the Industrial Revolution, when 
     temperatures and CO2 levels began to rise.
       In the mid-1800s in Concord, Mass., Henry David Thoreau 
     noted enough about the flowering plants of the region that a 
     modern Boston University professor was able to determine 
     that, on average, spring flowers in Concord are blooming 20 
     days earlier. The work is being featured in a special exhibit 
     at the Concord Museum through Sept. 15.
       Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel 
     University is known for its wealth of early data.
       Its herbarium--with 400,000 specimens from Pennsylvania, 
     New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland--was crucial to Panchen, 
     who at the time was in the Longwood graduate program at the 
     University of Delaware.
       In recent years, volunteers at the North American Bird 
     Phenology Program have begun to transcribe more than 1.2 
     million bird-migration records--most of them handwritten on 
     old cards--that were collected between 1881 and 1970.
       The idea is to digitize the records and make them more 
     researcher-friendly.
       None too soon. Within the last month, the level of heat-
     trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as measured at a 
     key station in Hawaii, has breached levels that haven't been 
     seen in millions of years.
       ``All the models say changes are going to accelerate,'' 
     Husic said, The more data, the better.

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