Welcome to The Speaker for Blue Podcast, session 157. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another great episode. Today, we're going to be talking about climate change, and a new study reveals something that I find quite alarming. It's not a huge deal yet, but it's becoming a bigger and bigger deal, and I find this is a part of climate change that we don't talk about. I call it climate change's silent killer. It's not as devastating as it sounds, but it's still a big problem and it's a growing problem that I find. A lot of us, especially here in North America, ignore. We're going to talk about it today because it can't be ignored anymore. This is what we're going to be talking about, climate change's silent killer in sea level rise on today's episode of The Speaker for Blue Podcast. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of The Speaker for Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of speakupforblue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. Today, we're going to talk about something that has come out in the news in the last 24 hours, where five Pacific islands in the Solomon Islands, which is a series of basically the Solomon Islands are a series, I think it's like a few 500 islands or even maybe even more, that are quite important. It's an archipelago that is very diverse in sea life and marine life, and it's a very important part of the Pacific. There are some of the islands where they're inhabited and some of the islands that aren't inhabited, but they're very important anyways. The loss of these five islands that were smaller islands really begs us to address the question of sea level rise or address the problem and the issue of sea level rise. I don't find we talk about it enough because I think when we hear about sea level rise and we hear about the increases, say worldwide, there's going to be a two centimeter increase will be devastating. Here we think, well, that's not that bad, it's only two centimeters. What's that going to do? If you think about it, two centimeters increase on 71% of the earth's surface is quite a large volume of water. I think we need to realize how devastating that might be. We're going to talk about that today, but before we do, I just want to go over, a new thing that I'm trying out here on speaker for Blue podcast where I've been getting a lot of, I've been talking about it, I've been getting a lot of fan mail where people are like, hey, I really love your show and this is why I love I just discovered this net. I thought to help engage the audience and get to know the audience and have other people get to know the audience and really to show that people are saying this stuff, I'm not just just just making this stuff up. I thought I'd read out the people who have been sending me stuff and just kind of read out their names and stuff. So I thought today's comment or the recently, this month's comment came from Lindsey Cunningham on the Facebook, on her speaker for Blue Facebook page. And she, she said this, this is what she, this is what she wrote. She said, I've been receiving emails from your organization for quite a while, but never took the time to listen to the podcast until last weekend. I have to say I am completely hooked. My resultant thirst for knowledge has been increasing exponentially since I started. I now listen to your podcast every chance I get, most importantly, your work has inspired me to continue down the competitive postgraduate path of marine conservation. Thank you so much. I will promote you guys as much as possible in the future. And I just want to say to Lindsey, if you're listening right now, you know, trying to quench that thirst for knowledge, thank you very much for this, this note, it really helps me. It's, it's a very weird feeling when you podcast because you're speaking into a microphone. I'm in my office right now. It's 10 o'clock on a Tuesday night and this is going live tomorrow on a Wednesday or today, you know, Wednesday. So I'm doing it the night before and I'm in my office by myself with some lights on because I do a video podcast on our YouTube channel. And it's weird because I don't get any feedback, like direct feedback as I speak. So it gets, you know, sometimes I run off on tangents, which if I had an audience in front of me, maybe I wouldn't, but it's, it's kind of interesting, it's a weird feeling. So when I get responses like this saying, Hey, you know, your podcast is, you know, the content, your podcast is awesome. We really like it. I've been listening to it. I've been trying to catch up on stuff. I've been really listening to it. This makes me feel good. This makes me feel great. And it makes me want to do more episodes. So thank you very much for those, those notes. And if you guys want to send a note, you can email me through our Facebook page. You can go on or through our webpage on our contact me page. If you want to go on our speak up for blue Facebook page, if you want to do it through the Instagram page, if you, you know, our Instagram account, if you want to do it through Snapchat, we do have @speakupforblue. We do have a Snapchat account that we haven't used yet, but we do have one, you know, you can do it in multiple ways. So do that. And I want to hear, you know, all about what you think of the podcast, whether it's good or bad. I really don't care. I just want to hear your thoughts. And especially on the issues that we talk about, you know, you don't just have to say, Hey, I really love the podcast, you know, talk about the, you know, certain issues. If you have issues with those certain things I say, or you agree with them, or you're like, Hey, how can I do more and stuff? I, you know, I really like to hear that. So, so thank you very much, Lindsey Cunningham for sending me that that I really appreciate that. But anyway, let's get on with the rest of our show. So sea level rise is something that, you know, as a scientist, a marine scientist, a marine conservationist, I'm very aware of, I am, you know, I worry about it. It's always in the back of my head. It's one of those consequences of climate change that we don't normally think about, but it's because it's a very long term consequence. It happens over a long period of time. It happens in small increments, but it happens over a long period of time. And those small increments kind of grow and grow and grow until all of a sudden, you know, part of a coast somewhere is gone or an island or five disappears in the case now. And it's, it's very alarming because if you look at most of the island nations around the world, they are not that much higher than sea level. Their land is not that much higher than sea level. Now, I'm not talking about, you know, on the California coast where you have big rock faces and stuff like that and big cliffs and stuff. I'm talking about islands that are maybe 35 centimeters above sea level, you know, and that are inhabited, like fully inhabited by, you know, you know, generation and generations of people who want to live there and they want to stay there. And it happens, it can happen anywhere. Now when we always talk about sea level rise and the increases, it's not always even. It's not always like two centimeters or one centimeter or one millimeter or 10 millimeters evenly across the ocean, across the world. It happens in different places and it affects different islands or different places at different times, some more extreme than others. A lot of the small islands nations are really feeling the pressure, especially in the South Pacific right now. The article that I found in The Guardian, I do like The Guardian, guardian.com and we'll put the link in the show notes, which will be speakupforblue.com/session157. And you know, they talk about these islands, the Solomon Islands, and if you want to know where the Solomon Islands are, they're just east of Papua New Guinea, northeast of Australia. And like I said, it's a series of islands, multiple islands, so I'm going to just look for the figure here I saw it earlier. I'm not sure. I thought I saw it somewhere. It could be the Marshall Islands I was looking at. Anyway, there's a number of islands, you know, hundreds of islands. And some, like I said, some aren't have it, some are not. The ones that this article talks about is they were five islands. They ranged in size from one to five hectares. So that's 2.5 to 12.4 acres. And they weren't inhabited by humans. So there was no way it was displaced. What the thing is, is there are six other islands that had in the study that had large swaths of land washed into the sea, and of, and two of those islands, there are entire villages were destroyed because of these lands, because this land going off into the sea. And people were forced to relocate. And that's happening a lot. Last year, there was an article in the New York Times talking about how the Marshall Islands are disappearing. And this is, I believe it was in the summer of 2015. So they were talking, the article talks about the, the ambassador, I believe, was it the ambassador? Or is it here? The, I think it was the ambassador of Marshall Islands going to, oh sorry, the foreign minister, sorry, the foreign minister, Tony de Brum, going to, you know, New York, Paris, London, Washington, to talk about, at the United Nations climate change, to talk about, you know, sea level rise and how it's affecting their, their livelihoods. And it's the article, it's, it's a compelling article, it starts off talking about this person Lindber and Edge, who is waiting out at low tide, which means the water is usually away from their places or away from you, it's not, you know, just away from the high watermark. And he's hauling out concrete chunks and metal scraps to shore and rebuild the makeshift seawall in front of his home. He says, the temporary barrier is no match for the rising seas that regularly flood the shacks and muddy streets with saltwater and raw sewage. But every day except Sunday, Mr. and Edge joins a group of men and boys to haul out the flotslam back into place. So that stuff that they bring out, the concrete blocks, the metal scraps that they use as a makeshift seawall comes in once the tide comes in and once the sea level gets too high. So any kind of storm surge, so any kind of storm just on a regular basis as an increase, it comes right through their home. And of course, they're not obviously living in a, you know, a mansion that's protected or some wonderful home, they're, they're not, you know, the richest people in the world, but this is their livelihood. This is where they've lived for probably generations and generations and now it's being washed away. And if you look at the makeup of the Marshall Islands and the Solomon Islands and a lot of these smaller islands in the South Pacific, you see that a lot of them are, you know, narrow or there's short or there's, you know, they've got very small shapes to them. And then just, there's just not much to them already. And you have people living on these islands. And then all of a sudden sea level rise comes and it's destroys their entire infrastructure, their housing, their roads, sewage is on the roads, you know, they're waiting in sewage. It's just obviously, it's not healthy. They have to move islands. So that means you're getting cultures of people moving. And before I go on, I want you guys to understand what sea level rise really is. Sea level rise really starts when the temperatures of the earth increase globally. It increases to a level where the glaciers in the north and south poles begin to melt. I'm not talking just the glaciers that you see floating by in Newfoundland or in the Arctic or in the Antarctic. I'm talking about large sheets, like massive sheets, sizes of cities that are breaking off and melting into the sea. What that does is that puts a lot of fresh water, a lot of water, a lot of fresh water because this is what is frozen, it melts it and it puts it into the water. That volume of water expands once it becomes water, that ice expands once it becomes water, and it just, it has to go somewhere so it goes throughout the oceans and it increases the volume of the oceans. And that's what sea level rise really is. So the longer, and the longer the ice sheets melt, the worst sea level rise will get. And even though the models predict very small increases in sea level rise globally, it still means that we are affected by sea level rise. And it's not just the oceans, it's the lakes that are connected to the oceans, the river beds, the streams, they're all affected in some sort of way, some more than others. And we have to be careful with that. In Lake Erie, here in the Great Lakes, there are stories of people and documented stories of people who are losing their backyards that go into Lake Erie and one of the Great Lakes. And what's happening is that all that soil and all those banks, the shores are being eroded away to the point where people are losing like 50 feet of their backyard. And what they had is a 50 foot backyard is now right up to their homes and it's water. So this is what's happening in certain parts of the world more than others. If you think about it from a global standpoint and a human aspect standpoint in terms of reducing emissions, reducing climate change, most, if not all, 90% of the emissions that are going into the atmosphere that is causing climate change are coming from developed countries. Most of the affected areas where people are moving have to move their entire culture for survival to a different island or a different country or a different place are developing countries. There's a big difference. These are not the countries that have the huge smokestacks or the coal mining or the big fossil fuels burning. These are the countries who a lot of times we dream about going to because it's so picturesque and it's like looking into a beach and an ocean and an island living on an island somewhere. And these are the places that are being affected. And I think as I actually don't think, I know as a human population that we should all be participating especially for the countries that are causing the pollution. Canada is a huge natural resource country. Most of our natural resources are fossil fuels. It's unfortunate but right now that's what our market is based on. Our dollar is based on it well, sort of, but our dollar is based on it. So when oil is down, our dollar goes down, our economy goes down. When oil is up, our economy goes up. And so that means we're producing a lot of the fossil fuels that are going into the atmosphere. Maybe not the most, but we are producing a good amount. China, India, they are rapidly industrializing or they have industrialized and they're starting to slowly change into a more sustainable method getting away from coal mines and stuff. But they are producing a lot. They have a billion people each living in their country that need energy and they need to get it fast and the way you get it fast is through fossil fuels. So they are burning them out like that you can't believe we're in Beijing. People have to wear masks during most days just so that they can breathe properly. These are the things that we're doing, developed countries are doing to the atmosphere that is changing the oceans causing sea level rise and affecting places like Marshall Islands, who and the Solomon Islands. These are islands, a lot of these islands are where people are living off the land. They're not even using the electronics and stuff that we use that we require fossil fuels to burn to use these devices. You don't even use that and they're paying the price for our use of these fossil fuels. And I find as a country like Canada and the US and other countries like Britain and Australia and whatnot, we owe it to these other countries and islands to help protect them. And in November of this year or December, December of this year, the Paris Accord, the climate change agreement that was struck implemented this, which was great because it basically had money going to these island nations, these small island developing states that need the money to adapt to the problems that they're seeing, the climate change problems that they're seeing. And it's almost like, I guess, it's what, naturally, what cap and trade is all about, but it's necessary because the infrastructure in these small islands are getting destroyed by sea level rise, you know, right off the bat, and they're seeing it the most. Imagine your home one day being there and then your home being flooded with water, constantly to see water, and it's not going anywhere, right? A lot of times, you know, in North America, if we get flooded from a river or stream, it will eventually go down, or even from an ocean will eventually go down, this is not going anywhere. It's going to continually happen because of sea level rise. And I find it very frustrating when I see politicians in a lot of countries who are trying to, and I kind of understand what they're trying to do, but I just feel it's not very responsible, but they're trying to stop their country from giving money or giving dollars in some format, whether it be in-kind support or financial support to help these countries, because they're like, well, it's, you know, one of the New York Times article about the Marshall Islands talked about how the Republicans in the House of Commons were, or sorry, the Congress were actually trying to stop the US from giving over that money because they say on behalf of the American taxpayer, you know, we shouldn't have to pay for their problems, you know, on the backs of hardworking Americans. And I'm sure the same thing, you know, there's still some people who still who feel the same way in Canada. I don't want to just, you know, I don't want to single out Republicans of the US or somebody from the US, it's, it has happening all over the world, it's happening in Australia, Australia just, they just had an impeachment or some sort of change in government at the highest level, the prime minister level, but the, the environment minister is still investing into coal, because he says there's no real, uh, link it between climate change and coal, which is absolutely false. And but you're still having, you still have people like that in power who are preventing this stuff from happening, or who are trying to prevent this stuff from happening. And I think the agreement in Paris is refreshing to see because it's starting to show that the world is coming together to take care of each other, to take care of the planet instead of their own country. And yes, you have to take care of your own country first, but I think at this point we are in survival mode. I think we, we're at the beginning of a survival mode. And I think we need to help out everybody. Because if we don't, things are going to get nasty really quickly. And so I, that's one of the best things that came out of this was now this accord, this Paris accord, the climate change talks or whatever you want to call it, if, because if we didn't have that, things would be really messy. And I think there'd be a lot of people who have any problems in the audience. Now whether this is all going to be enforced as a court, this agreement, and, and all the stuff that comes out of it will be enforced, I don't know. I hope so, right? I hope it's more of one of shame if a country doesn't abide by those rules. But you know, let's be honest, it's up to that country to really follow through. So it's almost like a bit of an honor system. Because if one country doesn't follow through the rest, they're like, well, why should I follow through? So I kind of wanted to, you know, wanted to address this, the sea level rise because of the article that I saw today, because as I was reading it, I was just, people don't think about sea level rise that much. You know, we hear corals being bleached. And that's a problem. Great Barrier Reef, 93% bleached. It's a huge problem economically, ethically, from the environment perspective, huge problem, from a coastal protection perspective, huge problem, biodiversity perspective, huge problem. But sea level rise is actually taking out cultures. It's taking out inhabitants of islands that have been there for generations and generations hundreds of years, probably more. And I think it's sad to see. But it also begs the question to being like, would you live near a coast anymore? You know, we all want to live by the water. But is it really worth it? You know, I've always been a proponent now, like I've always wanted to live on the ocean. I've always wanted to buy a vacation home on some sort of Caribbean Island or South Pacific Island that I can get to, and I can go for a couple of weeks of the year. Of course I want one. But now what I get one, hell no. Because I know what's going to happen, right? So it really begs the question of, you know, I always find it interesting to help people always want to go by the ocean, by the sea. I understand why and buy a house there, but make sure it's protected. Make sure you're not in some sort of floodplain or future floodplain because your house will be gone, if not, because the sea level rise storm surges and everything like that erosion. If you're going to buy, make sure it's one insured and make sure to that you are protected, that your home is protecting physically because you're going to see problems. I mean, super storm sandy was a huge problem for a lot of homes along the Jersey shore, the New York shore. They were wiped out and, you know, that's devastating when your home is lost. And I think people need to think about that in the future is, should we live near coast, should we? And a lot of the times too, is that development along those coasts where you have houses and stuff really take out a lot of mud flats and especially in the northeast mud flats, saltwater marshes, wetlands, mangroves in the south, seagrass beds, sometimes coral reefs to get ruined. These are natural systems that help solidify the coast and help fight off any kind of storm surge or any kind of increase in sea level rise. And if we get rid of those, as coastal development happens, then we are making our coastline more vulnerable. And I think now even the Army Corps of Engineers in the US are now starting to talk more about naturalization of shores instead of putting like just big armored boulders and stuff like that to protect the shore, but also kind of keep it natural as well because it has a lot of biological benefits as well as physical benefits to the shore. So we are adapting to these areas, but I think there's still a lot of ignorance on the issue of sea level rise. And that's why I wanted to do this episode and I was inspired by this article, as sad as it is, we need to start thinking more about sea level rise and we need to start making sure that we hire and vote for politicians and leaders that are willing to face climate change. The fact that people still deny climate change and connections between fossil fuels and climate change is absolutely ridiculous. And we should be putting, there should be the leadership that we put in each and every government that you can vote in should be addressing climate change as one of their top priorities. It's going to be a campaign issue all the time, and it never is, but it's going to be one of our biggest problems. It is our biggest problem to date, but it's going to be, it's going to increase in problems in the future and we need to do something drastic. Hopefully the Paris Accord will do something to help that, but we still have problems. I'm a little bit pessimistic on it because of what's happening, like our old track record. So as a world, so this is, I guess it's not an enlightening episode, but it's something that I felt we had to talk about because I find sea level rise just kind of gets grazed over as a climate change consequence when I think right now we're using islands being swallowed up by the ocean and civilizations having to move. I find that a huge problem and we have to address it and we have to discuss it and we have to talk about it. So that's what I wanted to talk about today. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you, you know, we want to continue the discussion. You can do so either on our Facebook page, on our website, our show notes speakupforblue.com/session_157. And you can, I'm starting a group on Facebook. I haven't finished it all yet, but if you're on Facebook, look out for this group. You can just, you can Google the speakup for Blue and it's a, it's an old, it's own group. And it's more to facilitate discussion with the audience of the Speakup for Blue podcast just so I can interact with you guys even more. So look out for that sign, that, that group and if you see it, like it's up right now, but I haven't started advertising for it and inviting people to it, but please feel free to look it up and, and click join, it's, I'll accept you right away as long as you're respectful to other people and other issues that we have going on in there. So, but anyway, thank you very much for listening. The show notes speakupforblue.com/session_157. I really appreciate you listening. I'm hoping to have a guest on next week and, and we're going to talk about shark education, which I'm very excited about and get more guests on our interview Wednesdays. It's been difficult, me being a Cuba and other things have been coming up with scheduling with different schedules. I'm not the easiest one to schedule since I have a full-time job. But look out for some big changes coming with Speakup for Blue. We still have the Speakup for Blue Institute. We're going to be doing some science and conservation, help people get working experience in ocean conservation by working with our partners that are at, that are, that are non-profit charitable conservation organizations. They're doing some great work and we're going to help them out even further. So look out for those kind of information. We also have a Speakup for Blue magazine that is coming out that we're going to release hopefully. I'm hoping it'll be released on an ocean today. So look out for that. That's going to be hot off the press. It's going to be a digital online magazine. I'm very excited about that. And of course, I have a lot of work to do with Nathan and Kate, our team members here. But I'm looking forward to doing that. So anyway, thank you very much for listening. I really appreciate you guys listening. You've been listening to Speakup for Blue podcast. Stay tuned for Friday for Ocean Talk Friday with Nathan Johnson. I'm looking forward to doing another one of those. And have a great Wednesday and happy conservation. [MUSIC]
