Guest Column: History shows that climate change should be considered with plans for downtown

Back in the early 70s, a TV ad ran for Chiffon margarine. Mother Nature, a pleasant woman dressed in a long flowing white gown and a tiara of fresh white flowers in her hair, is fooled by the company into thinking it was butter. This made her angry, so she turned the lush green forest into an arid desert snarling "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature". Turns out the Chiffon folks were onto something. Mother Nature is absolutely able to change the climate. Ads about Hydrogenated Cottonseed oil notwithstanding, nature reacts to many inputs, one of which is us.

In the 4th century BCE Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle noticed that when a marsh in a particular area was drained it became more susceptible to freezes. This may have been the first mention of the effects of human activity on the climate. He also speculated that the clearing of forests could cause increased temperatures as well. In the mid-1800's Sir Henry Bessemer received a patent for a process, named after him, which revolutionized the production of steel. This process reduced the cost of producing high-grade steel and was the lynchpin that moved the planet from the Iron Age to the Steel Age. It brought the world into the Second Industrial Revolution. By the end of the century though, this gave some pause.

In 1896 Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist, first warned that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could alter surface temperatures. Then later, in 1938, English engineer Guy Callendar linked rising levels of carbon dioxide concentrations to global temperature fluctuations. In the last 800,000 years these carbon dioxide levels, for the most part, had bounced around 200-300 ppm (parts per million) except for the latest 150 years (the advent of the Second Industrial Revolution 1870). Currently, it stands at 420 ppm. That rise corresponds one to one with the growth of human-created emissions and it’s not slowing down.

The one thing you get from the margarine ad beside a chuckle is that Mother Nature is reactive. When Edwin L. Drake bored the first U. S. oil well in 1857 no woman in a long white dress slapped his hands with a ruler and sent him to time out with a dunce cap on his head. That was just the first "pinprick" in her skin. There are literally millions of those holes today and Mamma's not happy.

Nature is a study in balance and the maintenance thereof, and I'm sorry to say, we are just wispy branches of the smallest willow in the grand plan that is this planet. The problem is that we think we aren't that insignificant. There are a considerable number of us who think we are above or even separate from nature. There are those who don't want to be bothered. Those who want to take the money and run. Those (yours truly) who are tapping us on the shoulder, trying to tell us the clock is ticking. Those who fear the ticking is slowing down. And regrettably, those who make every effort to tell us "There's nothing to see here folks".

The earth is controlled by the laws of Physics. It's a title someone far more knowledgeable than me gave the laws that govern the universe. Physics has been around since the Big Bang, maybe even before. It lies at the core of the earth sciences (another name for nature). Men have been studying it for a few thousand years. I think it's safe to say we don't know all there is to know about it. Among those who are studying climate change, a process inextricably linked to physics, 97% agree that unless we make immediate and dramatic changes to the way we conduct our lives we all will suffer significant hardships by the end of the century.

Here in Jacksonville, this means thinking beyond resiliency. We must think about sustainability and mitigation. We must plan for the worst-case scenario. When we plan all the wonderful riverfront development everyone's been talking about there should be a discussion as to what is the worst thing that could happen relative to climate change and plan with that in mind.

In 1964 Jacksonville, pretty much, took a direct hit from Hurricane Dora. It was a category 3 storm. Irma, in 2017, was a weak category 1 storm. We all have our memories of both incidents. There are reasonable individuals discussing the idea of creating a new category 6 storm similar to the storm that ravaged Hawaii in 2019 in which wind gusts of 191mph were recorded.

Could that happen here?

In 2012 Hurricane Sandy came ashore in the Mid-Atlantic states. It was 1,000 miles in diameter, the largest ever in the Atlantic at the time. 32-foot waves were recorded in New York Harbor. The storm surge was about 14 feet

Could that happen here?

Climate scientists project rising sea levels up to 8ft globally by the end of the century.

What does that mean for us?

It would be folly to assume something that has happened somewhere else can't possibly happen here. The Atlantic Ocean runs alongside over 300 miles of the Florida coastline. Those with the requisite knowledge say to expect more storms and that of those, more will be severe.

There is now a Northwest Passage. All of us of a certain age will remember in our collective History and Geography classes this discussion. Of course, the chief reason it has appeared is that the ice has melted away. It is still melting in the Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctica. Projections wrestle with the speed of the melt, not of its existence.

Mitigation and sustainability measures are going to be prohibitively expensive. Better to plan over six decades rather than one. Doing what we are doing now only increases the expense and the severity of the outcome.

Hopefully, just hopefully, I will, along with the efforts of many, many others, make it possible for my grandchildren and yours as well, to live on a planet that is as beautiful as it is today.

But... Tick-Tock people, Tick-Tock.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Climate change should be considered with plans for downtown development