Group quietly guides state policy on sea level rise

When a group of scholars and scientists studying climate change in Rhode Island sits down later this year to discuss potential sea level rise, they will be helping to shape official state policy, though they don’t even have a name yet.
The panel, organized by the Rhode Island Sea Grant program at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, is advising the R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council. The CRMC is updating its sea level policy, which it hopes will eventually serve as a guide for state and local building regulations in coastal areas. The advisory group doesn’t yet have any funding, Rhode Island Sea Grant’s Pamela Rubinoff said recently, but has started applying for grants to help it become a formal entity, she said.
“We feel that it’s really important to update the science on a quarterly basis and communicate that to policymakers, user groups and the public,” she said. If the advisory council were to be made official, it would be a go-to organization for anyone who wanted to do some fact checking about sea level rise, Rubinoff said. The panel informally met last year to advise CRMC policymakers.
University of Rhode Island oceanography professors Kate Moran and Isaac Ginis – both of whom are “one step away” from lead researchers in sea level rise, Rubinoff said – and officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution comprise the group. They’re people who “we trust are keeping their fingers on the pulse,” Rubinoff added.
With new studies coming out all the time, what is known about future sea level rise is constantly changing, so “it’s very confusing. We ask, ‘Is it right, is it wrong, is it uncertain?’ ” Rubinoff said.
When the group meets this fall, members will be talking in part about a study published in the May 15 issue of Science that says the impact of melting ice from the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has been overestimated and could be just half of what was thought. The finding will be reviewed by the Rhode Island group and it could impact their local estimates, Rubinoff said.
The study puts potential sea level rise at about 3.3 meters, or 11 feet, over the next about 1,000 years.
“There’s a vast body of research that’s looked at the likelihood of a WAIS collapse and what implications such a catastrophic event would have for the globe,” the study’s lead author, Jonathon Bamber, said in a statement. “But all of these studies have assumed a 5-meter-to-6-meter contribution to sea level rise [over the next 1,000 years.] Our calculations show those estimates are much too large, even on a thousand-year timescale.” So what does it mean? Well, for one thing, it ensures a difficult job for those attempting to help predict Rhode Island’s sea level rise in the near future.
“When we looked at policy [a few years ago,] we based it on a three-to-five-foot rise in sea level by the year 2100,” Rubinoff said. “We were going on the best available science and it was higher than what the International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, had recommended. They had not looked at the failure of the ice sheets to the extent that people are now.”
And Bamber’s study “does not include what’s going on at the ice sheets in Greenland,” CRMC Executive Director Grover Fugate said. “All the estimates for Greenland are that they are going [to melt] much faster than expected. So [sea level rise] is of definite concern to us because much of our coastline is exposed and we’re already seeing evidence of erosion and salt marsh transgression.”
Bamber’s study is just one of many that need to be surveyed to come up with a new comprehensive Rhode Island policy, Fugate said.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, for example, put out a report in April that said Arctic Sea ice levels in March were “substantially lower than normal” and dropping at a rate of 2.7 percent per decade. In late May, the National Center for Atmospheric Research predicted that the coast in the Northeast would by 2010 see more significant sea level rise – about one to two feet – than the rest of the continent.
The Coastal Resources Center at URI’s GSO last month published “Adapting to Coastal Climate Change: A Guidebook for Development Planners.” Penned in part by Rubinoff and posted for download from www.crc.uri.edu, that 164-page guide is intended to help municipal planners and others keep policy aligned with sea level and other coastal changes.
The as-yet unnamed advisory panel will try to sort through it all to help formulate some new estimates for seal level rise in Rhode Island, Rubinoff said. “We’ll bring our scientists together and say, ‘Given what we know now, [was our former estimate] an appropriate projection?’ ” •