A sea change on managed retreat? – CommonWealth Journal

Plum Island, Merrimack River entrance, 40 minutes after high tide, January 23, 2023 (courtesy of Massachusetts the Office of Coastal Management via mycoast.org/ma).

As waters rise, coastal residents are increasingly facing a difficult choice: try to relocate in a difficult housing market and take losses on their homes, or get comfortable with a future where there may be multiple feet of water in their living rooms…

Hurricane Idalia’s Explosive Power Comes from Abnormally Hot Oceans – the New Yorker

Sunset at South Jetty after Hurricane Idalia (by Rudy Wilms CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

Of all the astonishing facts about our blithe remaking of the world’s climate system, the most astonishing might be this: if oceans didn’t cover seventy per cent of our planet, we would have increased the average temperature to about a hundred and twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit. That’s because those oceans have absorbed something like ninety-three per cent of the extra heat trapped by the greenhouse effect and our burning of fossil fuels…

How sea level rise made Idalia’s storm surge worse – the Washington Post

Geo Color imagery of post-tropical Cyclone Idalia (courtesy of NOAA, public domain).

In mid-November 2021, a great storm begins brewing in the central Pacific Ocean north of Hawai‘i. Especially warm water, heated by the sun, steams off the sea surface and funnels into the sky.

A tendril of this floating moisture sweeps eastward across the ocean. It rides the winds for a day until it reaches the coasts of British Columbia and Washington State. There, the storm hits air turbulence, which pushes it into position—straight over British Columbia’s Fraser River valley….