Forecasters say Virginia coastline will retreat dramatically

Over the next century, most of the barrier islands on Virginia’s Eastern Shore would be lost, the ocean would breach into Back Bay in Virginia Beach and local rivers would swell and cover more than 10,000 acres of undeveloped land in Hampton Roads, a new study about global warming concludes.

The study released Thursday by the National Wildlife Federation provides one of the most detailed and localized forecasts of what might happen in the Chesapeake Bay region if climate change continues unabated.

Its conclusions are based on conservative assumptions about rising sea levels around the Bay – about 2 feet higher in coastal Virginia by 2100 – and uses computer modeling to create what-if maps of specific geographic areas, from Hampton Roads to Baltimore to Delaware Bay.

The results are not pretty: Ocean beaches decline by 58 percent along the mid-Atlantic coast; 161,000 acres of brackish marshes go underwater; 167,000 acres of dry lands are gone and replaced by open water or salt marshes.

“Even under the low-end scenarios, of sea levels rising 1 to 2 feet, there’ll be significant changes throughout the Bay,” said Patty Glick, a senior global-warming specialist with the National Wildlife Federation, based in Northern Virginia. “We absolutely have to deal with sea-level rise.”

Glick and others urged Congress to pass a bill, co-sponsored by Virginia Sen. John Warner, a Republican, that would set a national cap on greenhouse-gas emissions and let industries buy, sell and trade pollution credits in order to meet new limits.

This “cap-and-trade” proposal is scheduled for a Senate vote next month.

Group leaders also recommended that federal, state and local agencies start factoring in global warming with their coastal planning and construction of new utilities and roads, and to limit or prohibit new development in areas likely to be swamped by rising waters.

The governors of Virginia and Maryland have both convened climate change commissions to study and then recommend specific actions for reducing emissions linked to global warming in their states.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has called for a 30 percent cut in such emissions in Virginia by 2025, a mark that would be about what was pumped into the atmosphere in 2000.

Skip Stiles, a Norfolk resident and environmentalist who sits on Virginia’s climate commission, said the new study and its computer maps provide some of the best visual clarity, which brings home a key point that he and others have been making for years – sea levels are rising now, are rising faster than 100 years ago, and that people who live and work in coastal areas better wake up and take action.

“Norfolk’s very future is dependent on how we respond to sea-level rise,” Stiles said.

One of the biggest losers, according to the study, is the Eastern Shore in both Virginia and Maryland.

Flat, low-lying and sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, the Eastern Shore is expected to see its barrier islands and coastal marshes nearly vanish in the next 100 years. As much as 90 percent of all tidal marshes could be swamped by rising seas by then, the study says.

Popular Eastern Shore beaches in Chincoteague and Assateague are expected to be “overwashed” by the ocean and nibbled away by increased erosion, according to the study.

The study uses the same estimates as those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international coalition of scientists who won a Nobel Peace Prize for their work in unraveling the complexities of global warming.

Last year, the IPCC concluded with 90 percent certainty that human activity and the burning of fossil fuels have greatly contributed to warming conditions around the world.

Still, many skeptics remain, especially in the United States. They insist global warming is a hoax, a miscalculation of weather data and trends.

President Bush withdrew from Kyoto Treaty negotiations with other nations to cut emissions, though he believes global warming is real. All three presidential candidates from the Democratic and Republican parties are calling for a national program to tackle the phenomenon.

Emmett Duffy, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, said climate change is bringing spring about three weeks early to Virginia these days when compared to the 1960s.

Duffy said the Bay already has gotten a taste of global warming’s impacts. In 2005, unusually warm water conditions killed huge swaths of eel grass in the lower Bay, erasing a key habitat for crabs and fish and a source of oxygen in the water.

While some of the grass beds have started to grow back, Duffy said many have not – a harbinger of what might be coming with warmer summer and spring temperatures.

“Global warming is not a future threat to the Bay,” Duffy said. “It’s a threat now.”

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com