Florida: Still Here, For Now

Don’t tell former GM vice president Bob Lutz, but his Key West property really is at risk. The legendary climate-change denier was a panelist on Bill Maher’s Real Time earlier this month, and with lying-eyes authority declared “The Florida Keys are supposed to have disappeared by now. I have a house there!”

Lutz was referring to a statement by that other former vice president, Al Gore, in his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, in which Gore shows a computer-animated map of an inundated South Florida and states: “If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida,” Gore said. 

Five years later Florida is still with us, but a recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change says that the “complete melt of the Greenland ice sheet could occur at lower global temperatures than previously thought.” And the nonprofit organization Climate Central recently unveiled a searchable, interactive online map underscoring its conclusion that “sea level rise due to global warming has already doubled the annual risk of coastal flooding of historic proportions across widespread areas of the United States.” 

--Reed McManus / Photo by iStock/marcellus2070