 Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Preservation crisis, flooding has been with us for a long time, back forever. There are different kinds of flooding, and what I'd like to share with you this morning is a short case that even amongst climate change as a preservation crisis, that sea level needs to be looked at a little bit differently. And there's kind of a new picture emerging that may help you see a future that goes far beyond our generation and will allow other people, many generations from now, to look back with a better sense of preservation. There's four points that I want to leave with you today, and I'll just tell you what they are up front, and then I'll kind of make my case. The first is that storms, extreme tides, and sea level rise do combine and can be looked at occasionally in combination, but need to be looked at separately as well. The second is that rising sea level will not affect every place the same. We tend to think the ocean would be the same everywhere, and it's not, for a reason I'll explain. The third is that the projections can be confusing, and I'm going to give you a way to kind of see through the various projections for sea level rise and what it means as a special crisis for preservation. And then the fourth point I'd like to really leave you with is that we need, we must not confuse preparing for inevitable sea level rise with the very important but very separate mitigation, as it's called, or reducing greenhouse gases or dealing with the warming. A lot of people tend to combine them, and I want you to help me explain the need to keep them separate. We know what storms are, they flood cities from New Jersey to Annapolis, but there's a new kind of flooding, and from Venice, Italy, many of you probably recognize the scene from St. Mark's Square. This square didn't used to flood, and now in Italy they call it Alta Aqui, the high water. It's about 100 days a year. It's a special case because the land there is subsiding, which is one reason that sea level affects different places differently, and they actually have not bleachers, but walkways to elevate people over the flooded St. Mark's Square. But to San Francisco and the Embarcadero, many of you recognize, seven and a half miles of waterfront that when it was established 140 years ago didn't flood, and now predictably, King Tides, they call them out there, but it's the Spring Tide, the extreme tides. The streets right there on the Embarcadero are a wash. And remember, that's not on the ocean, that's in the protected San Francisco Bay. In neighborhoods, in coastal neighborhoods all over the world, there are signs that something's different. There are storm drains that were put in place to take excess runoff from rainfall and take it to the nearest waterway or for water treatment. And now, predictably, every 28 days, those storm drains are backing up, in this case it's South Florida, but I could show you the scenes from all over the world. That's the extreme of the year. Certain months are even worse because of the alignment of the planets, the super pole of the planets on the oceans, compared to the daily polo pie and low tide. But something's different. When that community was built 50 years ago, streets didn't flood every 28 days. It was a year ago that National Geographic made Rising Seas the cover feature. And they showed what happens when all the ice on the planet melts, how high sea level would be against the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps you didn't realize what they were depicting, but that's it. Now, I actually think that that's a little bit distracting because that can't happen for many, many centuries. And it's true that 30 million years ago there was no ice on this planet. But those of you who are interested and concerned and professionals in the field of preservation, I think need to take a much more limited and pragmatic view. What can we do in the coming decades so that a century from now there are assets and cultural resources that people can not only enjoy and understand and study, but learn about our life and, of course, the life we now live back on 100 years before. So it requires a bit of a different view. Compared to flooding from rain or even these extreme tide events, let's look at sea level, which I want to pull out and make a distinction of. Sea level change is relatively new. Sea level has been pretty stable for about 5,000 years, which is pretty much the period of our civilization and probably explains why we have trouble believing it's going to change much. The last time sea level was higher than today was back in the last ice age cycle, which I'm going to show you in a minute, was 120,000 years ago. And none of you remember that. But it's the reason we have such trouble believing it's going to happen. A sea level is different than storm surge in one key way that we don't tend to think of. And that's that storm surge tends to hit at the coastline. And whether it be sand dunes or particular structures, we can build a defense against a storm surge or a wave. But sea level will find its way to the low ground behind the high point or up a tidal river. Most people wouldn't think of Sacramento, 80 miles inland from the Pacific as being vulnerable to sea level rise. But it certainly is. The Sacramento River is a tidal river. And not only that, the earth and levees that really created the city are very hard to shore up. It's very similar to New Orleans, but in fact with some disadvantages. So sea level rise has a vulnerability impact zone that's far beyond the normal coastal zone of a storm. And of course, as sea level rises, as the base level rises, it's the standard, if you will, all over the world. It's going to hit every place, whether you realize it or not. It's now unstoppable. We can slow it and we should try and do that. But this is a new reality and does present a new crisis for preservation. So let me give you a quick science tour of sea level. And I'll try and keep it pretty simple. But sea level in the last 150 years, since 1850 here, has risen about eight inches. And that eight inch rise, while it goes up and down, there's a pretty clear trend there. And that, as I said, the trend is your friend, whether you like where it's going or not. Because once you see a trend, you can actually plan to get ahead of it. And a couple of points you should perhaps discern from this, but close to examination. In the last 20 or 30 years, the rate of sea level rise increases getting steeper. And there is a trend there, a little hard to discern. The other thing you should know is that this eight inches of sea level rise is a global average, and it's varied a lot. But it has come about half from the warming ocean. The ocean's a degree and a half Fahrenheit, or 0.8 Celsius warmer than it was a century ago. So the ocean has actually expanded in height. And it's now about four inches higher from that. The other four inches come from melting ice. And we'll look at that in just a moment. I'll take you to Greenland in Antarctica virtually. But sea level doesn't hit every place the same. And that's really important for the cultural resources that many of you are looking at preserving. You need to look at the particular location, the geologic structure, and the issues of subsidence or uplift, which will vary from the global average that we all tend to talk about. This slide from the Union of Concerned Scientists, I'll be joined by one of them on the panel in a few minutes, shows the variation of that eight inches global average sea level rise to 13 US cities from outside of New Orleans on the left at 46 inches to New York in the middle at 14, Miami at 12, and down to Los Angeles on the far right at 4. So how could a global average sea level of eight inches translate into 46 inches to 4? The difference is land movement. The land uplifts or subsides. And the effect of sea level in relation to the nearest shoreline is a combination of global sea level change and then land change. So it's confusing. But it means that when you're looking at a particular resource to preserve, that it warrants particular study. Now, to really understand why sea level changes so much, and just as you study preservation and history and cultural resources to learn from it, those of us that study Earth science can see patterns from looking at geologic time scales. And I want to give you a very short course, and I'll keep it very simple. Since the last ice age, sea level rose 390 feet. A stunning amount. It's hard to believe. The reason we have trouble believing it as this graph shows is that it got to the present level about 6,000 or 8,000 years ago. Pretty much as far back as our human civilization and written records go. So no wonder we think it's not going to change. The other thing you should take away from this graph is that sea level can change dramatically even by nature. 14,000 years ago, sea level rose 65 feet, 20 meters in four centuries. Now, the reason that this happened, I don't know if you saw the four part mini series, but if you have kids or grandkids, my daughter was six at the time. I've watched this movie 30 or 40 times, not by choice. This was part two. Ice age, the meltdown. And behind Manny, Sid, Diego, and Scott, you don't know all their names? There's two miles of ice. And while it was a great cartoon series, it actually reasonably depicted the ice ages. And the reason I like to show it is not only to get you to laugh on a fairly dark subject, but more important that it helps to visualize that the reason sea level changes so much is if you believe the ice ages happened and nobody disputes that, that that two miles of ice, roughly 10,000 feet of ice, as it melted, it elevated the world's oceans 390 feet, 120 meters. Makes sense. Now, if we look back a little bit further, 400,000 years left to right, sea level has changed in a regular pattern. That's because the ice ages happen in a regular pattern. Most people know there was an ice age. They don't know that they've been going on for millions of years, for three or four million years. We've had an ice age about every 100,000 years. It's a natural cycle. There are two takeaways I'd like you to, actually three from this graph. One is that they happen on a fairly regular pattern. You can see that. Two is that we're at roughly the high spot of this geologic cycle. Without specific years or decades even, you can see that we're more or less at the turning point. And that's in fact why sea level hadn't changed much in 5,000 years. We were at the end of the 20,000 year rise, and should have been beginning the 80,000 year fall in sea level as the world cooled and the ice sheets expanded. But that's not going to happen now, for a reason I'll show you. Most of you probably know. But to visualize the impact of huge sea level change, I use Florida, not only the fact that I live there, but it's a very iconic shape, of course. We all know what Florida looks like today. 20,000 years ago, when sea level was down 390 feet, Florida was twice as big. And 120,000 years ago, at the warm spot of that last ice age cycle, Florida was half as big. The sea level got 25 feet higher than today. And we're surely going to go past that. There's enough heat in the ocean that that's unstoppable, as I'm going to make the case. But we don't know whether it's going to take 200 years or 2,000 years. And I know that's probably frustrating. But we'll talk about how to plan accordingly. There's a lot of misunderstanding about sea level rise. The first, I would say, and foremost, as I give talks, not only all over the United States, but all over the world, is that many people think the melting polar ice cap around the North Pole relates to sea level rise. It doesn't. Those are giant floating ice cubes. And just like ice cubes in a glass, you can run this experiment at home. If you don't drink out of the glass, the ice is 10% above the surface, just like an iceberg. And as it melts, as ice cubes in the glass melt, and as icebergs in the Arctic melt, they have no effect on the level. Maybe it seems surprising, but it goes back to Archimedes' principle. It does have impact for other reasons, that as the bright white ice turns into dark ocean, it accelerates the warming, just like turning a white roof into a dark roof would change the temperature in a house. And the disappearing polar ice cap, which is now unstoppable, is profound for the planet. But it also is visual proof of climate change in a way that is irrefutable. The Arctic Ocean has been frozen for about 3 million years. It's going to be ice-free starting in September, sometime in the next decade or two, and it's unstoppable. And each year or other after, it will be for an increasing period of time. Maybe variations from one year to the other, but it's a new world. And ice melts at 32 degrees Fahrenheit or zero Celsius, no matter what you believe politically. It's hard to argue that this is physics. And for those that say, oh, well, this is, you know, and want to dispute this or dismiss it, it is a nice reality check. And it's a sobering point. But as you now know, what's happened before? It just not happened on human time scale. The problem with sea level rise is that there's enough ice on the planet as that National Geographic cover showed to raise sea level globally, 212 feet. 24 feet would come from Greenland when it melts entirely sometime in the next millennia or two, hopefully, if we slow it down, Antarctic 186 feet, and then all the glaciers in the world, from Alaska to the Alps to Kilimanjaro, another two or three feet in aggregate. I know it's surprising, but those calculations are pretty simple to do, actually. So we have a stunning new reality to look forward to. It's not gonna happen in our lifetime. It won't happen this century. It can't. It's not possible to melt all the ice in the world this century. But we do need to understand what can happen. And I think it's fascinating that people like yourselves, professionals involved with preservation, or people who just do it out of passion, really may not look at this kind of future, but I think not only does it provide a particular crisis or threat, but there are lessons to be learned that can help you plan better. And that's what I wanna do in the next couple of minutes. But first I wanna just make sure we're clear on terminology. We just saw what an iceberg is. You all know that. It's a giant ice cube. They cab off of the face of glaciers. This is one I took in Greenland in 2007. If you go up the glacier, and I hope it cements in your mind, that a glacier is a bending river of ice, which is what that is. It emanates from the ice sheet, which covers 90% of Greenland. And as you can see, and there's behind us there, the two helicopters for scale, there are melt rivers of water on Greenland now. You've probably seen them again in National Geographic elsewhere that are really irrefutable. The ice is melting. The sea is rising. And the shoreline has just started to move inland. So we need to kinda look ahead. We need to peer ahead, look forward. And the past, in this case, the geologic past is kind of a tool to do that. So it's very appropriate to be here today at Pass Forward 2014 in Savannah with you. Greenland is a solid 90% covered by ice. Antarctica, of course, is similar. It's a little different. The ice is thicker, it's more mountainous. This is a photo I took in 2006. And as I already estimated for you, there's about seven times the amount of icing Antarctica. Antarctica holds the big unknown for sea level rise. The area is shown there at the eight o'clock position in this colorized photo to show where ice is moving, which is a reflection of where it's warming. It's the eight o'clock position and rather that's the problem. There are six glaciers there. And for those that have either read my book or you can see this on YouTubes and various places that have been TV shows about it, pay attention to it because in the future, what happens to these six glaciers in this view of Antarctica, the Pine Island glaciers, really will determine whether we get catastrophic sea level rise or not. We don't know. It, again, hasn't happened in hundreds of thousands of years. So we're doing the best estimates we can. And nobody wants to scare anybody and whether these six glaciers will release into the ocean this century or next or the one after is still a cause of scientific speculation or debate and study. But when those six glaciers alone slide into the sea and they will, we will get 10 feet of sea level rise and it'll happen in a decade or two or it could happen that quickly, I should say. We don't know. So this isn't to scare you and I know that's probably either done that or depressed you and I'm sorry. I really am, but it is what it is. Like I'm sure you face that in your work preserving buildings as things rot or as they subside or as they deteriorate for either lack of funding or some just physical materials. We have to deal with the world as it is and you deal with that all the time. The normal projections for sea level rise are 10 to 32 inches is probably the most common in the national climate assessment that was from the IPCC. The national climate assessment says one to six feet. They don't include some wild cards that we can't quantify yet namely the release of methane and also those West Antarctic glaciers. So here's how I think it's wise to think about sea level. We don't know exactly how quickly it's gonna happen. We do know it's now unstoppable because the heat's in the ocean. You can't cool the ocean. We're gonna get three feet of sea level rise for those of you who are from overseas. Let's call it a meter, close enough. And that's about as close as we can get at the one. And actually it's gonna go beyond that. It's not stop will even at three feet or a meter. But the sooner we begin to plan for the first three feet of sea level rise the better job we will do to plan for the future. If we keep looking at it an inch at a time we'll never get ahead of the curve. Three feet's a big step. And if you plan for three feet of sea level rise of course you're gonna be better prepared for storm surge or those extreme tides that happen regularly in between. And to prove to you that official projections tend to be low here is the official projections from 1990 for sea level. And I've cut it off at 2014, present year. They were shown in three different shades of blue to show the different probabilities and confidence intervals. And then this is from the IPCC, the big UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And then in 2002, 12 years later they did them again in green there. I don't know if you can see it but a little bit tighter, a little bit higher as tends to happen with these sea level projections. They keep getting raised and they will continue to keep getting raised. But even in those last 20 years if we look at actual sea level in gold or a smoothed out trend line in red it's at the top or even above the projections just for the last decade or two. So based upon public data I hereby make the case that we need to assume that the official projections are a little bit low. This slide, and I'm gonna tell you at the end by the way you don't have, I should have said don't take notes because at the end I'm gonna tell you away just to send an email and get my graphics and my notes from this talk to make it easy. We'll get to that in a minute. But this image you may wanna use and that email I'm gonna give you will get you this image. This is a graph I put together with the help of Dr. James Hansen who's probably the foremost climate scientist. Recently retired from NASA as chief scientist for earth science. And it shows 400,000 years, we saw the blue line already, sea level. Green at the top is a greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and in the middle is temperature, global average temperature. 400,000 years left to right. If you just look at the red first those are the ice ages. Up and down global average nine degrees Fahrenheit, five Celsius, regular pattern. As the planet warms the ice gets smaller and conversely the opposite happens. And temperature and carbon dioxide do go in loxing and one can leave the other there's an interesting technical reason why one can always precipitate the other but they always move together. And you see that these three lines do coincide basically a lineup I should say. But the problem is in the far upper right that little vertical tail where carbon dioxide has gone out of the normal range for the last millions of years of 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million I round things off to make it easy. And we're now past 400 parts per million, 40% higher. And while there's a lag time, indeed global temperatures chasing it were a degree and a half warmer Fahrenheit and sea level is eight inches higher. You can't melt ice quickly. We don't know how quickly we can melt the ice sheets and glaciers. We're running the experiment now. You're all part of it. It's not a really good experiment, but we're doing it. And unfortunately, the experiment's gone far enough that it's not stopped, but we can slow it and we should try and do that. And I hope you help all of us do that. But we need to see some of it that's inevitable. We get that data by ice cores. This isn't the time to get into this in detail for those that are interested on my website or in my book, we kind of talk about this more. But those air samples are locked in air bubbles that were the spaces between the snow crystals when snow fell and we can go back 800,000 years because that's how long the ice is accumulated in Antarctica and Greenland's about half that time. And so by drilling down in the ice, we can bring up an ice core and slice it and get the dates to it in three years. Very much like a tree ring would tell us what happened back in history in more recent time. So the problem is that this graph of 400,000 years, we can now extrapolate within reason those last 50 years or so and some of it's locked in. And we know that the greenhouse gas is now unstoppable. We should try and slow it. We know that it can have an effect to slow the warming and we should try and do that. But to the degree that the momentum is already there, that the heat is already in the system, it's not stoppable. So while that's sobering, depressing, it kind of is what it is. It's like getting older. You may not wish it was gonna happen but it's better than the alternative of not getting older. And so I'd like to leave you with that storms, extreme tides and sea level rise do combine for impact and it's convenient sometimes to think about the impact of flooding but we need to think of them differently because sea level rise is effectively a one way phenomenon for the next several centuries. It will not go down for a thousand years. That's different. Hasn't happened in the human experience. It'll have different effect in different places. So those of you involved with particular assets need to do an assessment appropriate to where you are, geology, et cetera. Sea level projections do vary greatly as you've seen now and they will vary greatly. They're just models and they get better and better but waiting for perfection is silly. We do know there's enough heat in the system to continue to melt the ice for generations and for centuries. So the sooner we begin planning for something and I suggest that three feet is a good target on top of storm surge. We don't have to do it today but it allows us to think bigger and better designs will come from seeing where things are headed. In other words, if you keep doing something a couple of inches at a time maybe you would have had a different structure and in the world of preservation I'm told that there's some axioms that you don't disturb historic buildings. You don't elevate them, you don't move them. Well, that's your choice if you don't wanna move them but if they're gonna flood then you're gonna have to issue snorkels and dive gear for people to see them and it'll become submerged resources at some point in the future and well that may be sort of funny but not. What it means is that those of you in the preservation community need to have a new dialogue and that dialogue about the precious emotional, priceless historic facilities, landmarks, locations that we have may help people to take this seriously. You can be part of the communication process and even within your own community this new reality that different than storms, different than extreme tides which are happening every 28 days from well all over the world. That sea level rise does worsen all those but is this kind of like the tortoise versus the hare as in the old fable. The tortoise moves slowly but steadily and sea level rises like that. It's gonna win the race. We tend to be on the lookout for the next big event or the next Sandy but there's that tortoise coming along and it's gonna win the race. It is unstoppable. And the last point is that even if we reduce greenhouse gases and we should, we should do everything possible. We can slow the warming and we can slow the melting but we can't stop it and therefore I'd like to leave you with the same place. I leave all of my talks and briefings. We need to think of two different things and it's counterintuitive. We need to begin adapting to rising sea level because it's now unstoppable. We also need to slow the warming sometimes called mitigation but we must not confuse them because even if we stop all greenhouse gases today, I mean all, not reduce targets but if we no longer emitted carbon dioxide and we could stop methane from bubbling out of the ground, sea level's still gonna rise for centuries because the ocean's warmer and the ice will adjust whether we like it or not. So the need to adapt to sea level and the economic impact and sea level change is not an environmental issue. It's an existential issue in some places and it's certainly an economic issue for the entire planet. And that phenomenon, if you wanna call it that, really needs to remind us that we need to do everything possible to slow the warming but not fool ourselves that the answer to sea level rise is to do other environmental, green and sustainable things. They will not stop sea level rise. And so while perhaps disappointing, sad, whatever, I hope that helps you see it more clearly. I like to leave people with the glass half empty, half full. The glass half full to me on this, very bad news and very bad insight is this. This happens slowly. This is not like a tornado, tsunami, earthquake that can happen without warning. We can see this coming. We can see this decades in advance. It's an opportunity to plan. That's a blessing. The second thing is that if we tackle a problem that we can do great things. But right now we're still playing games and politics and evasion and delusion and ignorance and we need to get around that because if we start planning for higher sea level we will do great things. And you can be part of that in your efforts at your facilities, your assets, your communities. Which brings me to the third positive is, well, people say, okay, so recycling and things like that won't stop sea level rise. They say, no, that's the truth. They will not stop sea level rise. But what you can do that's really important is to communicate, to share this information. I hope that now you have a different insight than when you walked in here this morning. And I'd like you to help share that. For those that would like copies of this, if you just send a, sorry, this is a Stranahan house in Florida showing what's regular flooding. And if you'd like copies of my notes and some of those graphics, just send an email to preservation at johnanglinder.net and you'll get some pre-downloads. Thank you very much. Please welcome to the stage our owner, Vince Mahler, and his followers, Rick Horsell, ending notice. Well, John, thank you very much for that presentation. I think you left us with a great place to start this conversation, which is how do we plan for this? I think historic preservation advocates have only begun to understand and appreciate the magnitude of the issue we're facing. And I think also that the focus of the whole climate discussion has been solely on the aspect you mentioned, mitigation. We look at how can we reduce greenhouse gases, historic buildings can be more efficient, things like that. But I think we really need to look, as you pointed to us, at the question of adaptation, how do we adapt our society and our systems for the inevitable rise in sea levels? We also have to look at the other word, resiliency, and dealing with the storm surges and the pairs that occasionally come running at us while the tortoise is creeping along. I think it's important that there has been some significant progress made in this area by the National Park Service and the Union of Concerned Scientists. And we're very lucky to have their representatives here to share findings from their work. So I'd like to start off by inviting Brenda to explain some of the genesis and findings of landscapes at risk. Thank you so much. And I really wanna thank the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Park Service for really calling attention to this aspect and creating this forum of the preservation crisis. Thank you so much. We at the Union of Concerned Scientists have looked at the scientific facts and we've looked at how are things changing on the ground. We've been doing climate assessments, especially in the United States. However, we came to the realization that if an extreme intense precipitation event takes out a bridge, we can rebuild that. And it's costly. When we were looking around at other types of impacts, we realized the preservation community has a really unique risk in that many people wanna visit our heritage, our shared stories. And lots of this is better experienced by going to a National Park Service location or historic site or an old home that is preserved by the local community. And that visual, visceral experience is priceless. So if that is under risk and that is not managed in such a way to be better resilient for the risks of climate change, then we might not have the same experience and we might not be able to share that with our children. And that is something that could be lost. So we decided to look at landmarks at risk. Those that there was lost, there was petroglyphs, extreme heat, if it falls off of the cliff face, then you do not see that ancient visual image that was put onto that face. If Jamestown, the bodies that are buried, if they're inundated by flood, it's a very high risk, that could be a loss, that creates challenges. And so we thought that really this needed to be a larger story told to the larger world because people come from all over the world to visit some of the sites of the United States and around the world. Thank you. Thank you, Brenda. I had the opportunity earlier this year to lead a discussion on this issue with the trustees and thanks to work of Anthony Virkamp at the San Francisco office, started to frame some of these questions of how do you not only mitigate, as we have to, as John pointed out, but how do you start to look at questions of adaptation and resiliency? And I think the Park Service has started to do some very important work to develop these strategies. So maybe, Dan, if you could describe what the Park Service has been doing to look at this. Thank you. We've been doing a number of things and like any large bureaucracy, we don't move very quickly, but we recognize that there's a real urgency here. We recognize that we're already losing resources, particularly archeological sites. So our director back in the spring signed a policy memo, which is kind of how we direct our staff to do things, which addressed cultural resources and climate change. And it set out some broad principles that will follow, set some priorities for doing things like looking at where we're spending our money. Should we be continuing to do our section 110 inventories in places that aren't necessarily threatened and vulnerable or should we focus on the coast or along the rivers where we're seeing flooded and the memo says very clearly, focus on where the risk is, focus on where the vulnerability is. It also says we need to start setting some priorities for where we spend our money on adaptation measures. If a resource is threatened, it's material is fragile and the only way to save it is to continue to invest more and more money. We need to think hard about that because as my grandmother pointed out, you can only spend a dollar once. And if you're spending it over here, you're not spending it over there. So we need to be thoughtful about where we're putting our limited funds. The other thing that the policy memo is three or four pages long, so it says quite a bit, but the other kind of important point it raises is that not only are cultural resources vulnerable to climate change, which is self evident and it's kind of the focus of what we're doing here today, but they also embody information that I would argue is potentially very useful in helping us to understand climate change, understand how people have adapted to climate change in the past, whether it's thinking about what a more resilient society looks like or how about this drought in California? How long? It's been going on for four or five years now. Well, the archeology says it could go on a lot longer because in the past it has. What would the effects be on societies? And we look at the archeology and we say, wow, there have been times when whole parts of the world have been abandoned because of environmental change. What would that look like? Or agricultural systems collapse? What would that look like? And it's easy to sort of distance ourselves from that and say, well, that was then and we're a modern society now, but at the end of the day, people need water, crops need water. So sea level rise is absolutely a major concern, but there's a lot more going on that we need to be thinking about. And one of the things, Dan, it might be useful to sort of give an example of this is we tend to look at the sort of most visible historic resources, but a lot of these issues of sea level rise and climate change are also gonna affect the systems that make it possible to see them or visit them or support them in the way we're used to. And maybe you could give an example or two of that. Yeah, you know, when I started at the Park Service, I, and this was back when officially climate change wasn't going on. And I really wrestled with, how do I get people's attention? And I was probably naive, I probably still am, but I started talking about, oh, these important archeological sites and one of the senior people in Alaska took me aside and he said, you know, nobody cares. And he's right. He said, if you wanna get people's attention, you need to talk about what happens when that sewer line gets disrupted and you've got sewage spewing all over your historic site because that is part of what we're facing, the compromise of the underlying infrastructure that makes it possible to have these historic homes visited. You know, we think a lot about historic landscapes and things like that and we talk about compatible and incompatible elements. But if you're looking at having a farm of porta-potties on the landscape, that's a design element that wasn't really envisioned. And that's a reality that you have to think about if your sewer system isn't functioning. And we saw with Hurricane Sandy that that does indeed happen in some places. One of the things that fascinated me, John, about your presentation is the huge range there was between specific locations. And I often, I'm fond of saying that historic preservation is a process of identifying, evaluating, treating resources rather than a single set of rules. But I think what it suggests to me, and I love everyone's reaction, is that we really have to look at each case individually because of the situation of what's the underlying ground like, what are the systems like? It's not gonna be the same everywhere. And as we have this opportunity to plan, different resources will be affected differently. It's not a simple filling a bucket of water. Not only is that absolutely true, Vince, but I think that when you face this daunting future and you need to do an assessment for different places, but looking ahead and looking bigger may help you get more resources. I mean, the emotional, I didn't get to say it, but I forgot, the emotional risk of losing these things, those of you that have trouble getting adequate resources, whether it from government or communities or donors, that this may create a new challenge, but you've gotta make that case locally because if in Virginia Beach and Norfolk we've had 30 inches of sea level rise, but in Alaska sea level's falling because Alaska's uplifting faster than sea level, there are very different situations. So you've gotta start with facts and it does come from a local assessment, but then building this big case hopefully will help you get more resources. Brenda, maybe you could respond a little bit about what are, how could some of those plans look? What would it look like to say we wanna adapt or we wanna make some choices? Sure, I think for example, sea level rise, you can look around the world and you see that for example, the Netherlands have decided to plan for the 10,000 level year sea level rise and they've invested in different solutions. Venice is letting the water come in and they're using boats and they're moving their infrastructure up to higher stories and let the water flow through the city and the Thames of London have temporary structures that are erected when a big storm surge wants to go up the river of Thames. And so different communities around the world are coming up with different solutions and it struck me yesterday I was thinking, looking at all of you in the audience as preservationists, in my mind you could be the heroes, unsung heroes of future climate induced disasters because if your cherished places are more resilient and our role model in the community that others say you decide to elevate or you try another solution and others start emulating what the National Park Service is doing or a historic building within a local community is protecting, that is an unsung first responder of an avoided disaster in the future and that to me is more heroic. Do we think that the issue of moving buildings, for example, just to focus on that because that's sort of been a thing we don't wanna do in preservation but I can even think of examples, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, Lucy the Margate Elephant of structures that were moved and are still national historic landmarks. What are the discussions at the Park Service regarding the moving of structures? Has that changed with this policy memo then? It's something that's very much under discussion. I think we recognize on the one hand that the context and setting in which a structure exists really is part of integrity. It's critical to understanding it and interpreting it. So that's kind of the purest view, if you will. And then there's the pragmatic view which says, well, it may lose some of that integrity if you relocate it but it's gonna lose a lot more if it's gone. And so there has to be some sort of middle ground but then you get into the more complicated and politically weighty things about well. So what if we elevate it? What does that do to integrity? And are there implications for eligibility for tax credits and things like that? So very much under discussion but no clear decision yet. Yeah, I think this is an interesting challenge because I suppose it means what is the significance of the resource? Defining that significance, how much of it comes from the context, how much of it comes from the artistry, for example. So again, I mean, I guess it takes me back to the place where you need to judge each resource individually given its circumstances and what's gonna happen. Somebody last night at one of the past forward events was made a quick conclusion that this fact of sea level rise and climate change and how it's gonna change things really almost beyond our imagination is gonna invite us to do triage which is done in the medical profession which is to say which things aren't at risk and are healthy, which things actually, some can't be saved, which is gonna be a tough decision. And then the work with the resources for the third category, the critical one of what can we put our resource into to save? And I think we're gonna really have to start doing that. Do you envision that communities will start to make plans that will prioritize what the triage will be in the future? I mean, you said, John, that one of the advantages that we have, that glass half full at the end of your presentation was that we know this is gonna happen so we can plan for it and there's a benefit into having that knowledge and being able to plan ahead. I guess the other question is, as a species, are we good at planning ahead? No, but I think again, by looking at the geologic past we see a clearer picture and by looking at history and preservation and the emotional pull of what you do there are not only lessons to be learned but lessons to be taught and I think it's that combination to not do it myopically but to look at that bigger picture because it's our obligation, our opportunity long beyond our lifetimes so that there are things preserved. Well, and also, in sort of a horrible way, if we decide that a certain place is going to be destroyed by rising seas and so forth, it becomes sort of a beautiful ruin and becomes, in a sense, the significance of the lesson to the future generations about what happened. I think the Park Service already has submerged resources, right? So this is, we're gonna add to them. Yeah, the head of our submerged resources unit a guy I went to graduate school with and he's fond of reminding me that someday it'll all be his. And I'm fond of responding by saying that doesn't mean you're getting a bigger budget. That question, though, of triage and what we decide to save is really an important one and there are processes under statute for going through the process of deciding and consulting and all of that but one of the things we've come to realize is as we're faced with these decisions and there are really decisions on an order of magnitude that we really haven't had to wrestle with before. It's incumbent upon all of us to do a better job with consultation, to take a more expansive view of consultation so that we really understand how the American public or the public in other countries value and appreciate the resources we're talking about because you go through the national register nominations and they may focus on one aspect of significance but those resources may have a completely different significance to different sets of the population and because as the National Park Service we're making decisions on behalf of all of the people it's really incumbent upon us to incorporate all of their values. Well I think that's a wonderful comment Dan because we talk a lot about values, orient and preservation and again getting the community involved is really important in making all these decisions. I guess the other question I have more for the science side of it is do we have the ability do different communities with different types of resources have the ability to get a decent model based on their geology and their position in terms of what's gonna happen in the future? There's abundant resources and we're blessed to live in a country that has invested in the science infrastructure of the federal agencies from NOAA to NASA, USGS, the National Park Service and our academic institutions. Most communities have experts that can make that local as John mentioned sea level rise locally is very different you have to plan differently and the value is having those discussions sometimes a community might decide wow I'm in Annapolis and the cost to protect all these structures is so important and so costly that if we found that we put the brakes on carbon emissions and slowed the pace of rise so that this century we had three feet of sea level rise or if we had one and a half feet of sea level rise this century it really changes the cost. I mean there's 24 hours in a day and I've often wondered can I extend that personally for myself and I can't but this is one way you can buy pop time for preservation decisions if you slow the brakes on climate change and heat trapping emissions that buys you a little more time to have better planning and to try more creative solutions that you as a community could come up with to for the structures of Charleston or Annapolis or the structures that may have fire risk and there is National Park Service and they have wooden roofs as Anthony Viracom mentioned to me and maybe do we have a fire perimeter and protection but the landscape the tree is important but that tree could catch on fire. These are tough decisions and we might need some time to wrestle with them as a larger community and so that's how what you could buy time is by lowering carbon emissions because that buys time for all of our sites. There's like three variations here that we need to think of and Brenda's exactly right but let's say that it's two feet, four feet or six feet depending on what we do which is and that's a reasonable range based upon the current science for what could happen to sea level rise. So we should try and keep it to the two foot level I don't think we can stay at one and a half feet anymore by my insights to it but if we keep it at two versus six that's a huge difference. Then we have the subsidence or uplift in different places the place by place evaluation and then it's preparing for sea level rise as the base, those extreme tides and then the possibility of a storm surge on top of that and so that makes the planning and again where we do it because the storm surge hits the coast and the sea level can go up the rivers and into the lowland like in Florida sea level rise won't hit the beach first it's gonna hit the lowland near the Everglades 10 miles inland we don't think of that. So the challenge to plan is more nuanced takes a little more study but we do have the science there's some great visuals by government agencies by private organizations now nonprofits that give us the tools to look at sea level variability storm surge and even extreme tides and see what floods and it's a challenge but so is preservation and I think it provides an opportunity. I have an interesting question which is I remember after Katrina that someone showed a map of the areas of New Orleans that flooded in the areas that didn't flood and of course the areas that didn't flood were the ones that had been built before say 1860 and so I wonder if there isn't some wisdom we can find out of historic buildings or landscapes or I think when Hurricane Andrew hit Miami and all the imported ficus trees were up and because they weren't in that climate looking at that sort of resiliency storm surge question are there lessons we can get from actually from our historic fabric about places that were designed before we got into the 20th century engineering where we could solve everything? Well you know I think the you can look if you take the example of New Orleans you can look at that two ways you can say well the places that were built before 1860 really weren't impacted that doesn't mean there weren't places that were built after 1860 that got washed away in a previous hurricane and there's a lesson in that too. We tend to think of these disasters as one-off things oh you know the 100 year storm we just passed it we don't have to worry about it again and yet as a species we have this remarkable inability to recognize how often we repeat bad decisions and we build in harm's way over and over and over again and it's almost like we look at this newly cleared ground because a storm surge has taken things out and we eye it as oh it's prime for development. Yeah we don't learn the lessons of the past I think it's a good point and again most of us didn't even know about the geologic past because it's way beyond our human perception but it does bring a new clarity to it and in a way we should get a pass because sea level has not been higher in 120,000 years no wonder we got fooled okay so we were sucker punched here because we just fell into the trap of thinking sea levels and the shoreline are permanent we now go different but we started building on the coastline centuries millennia ago I guess but now we build these permanent structures that we can't move the shack up the beach anymore it's now a billion dollar construct and we built cities in the Bay Area where they built Redwood City and Foster City on fill land two feet above sea level not think they would ever rise even the Dutch to Brenda's example when they built the big gates of Rotterdam Harbor planning for 10,000 year storm you're quite right when it was designed after the storm in 1953 to say never again they'd lost 1,835 people one night when a levee broke but they only designed for 30 centimeters or a foot of sea level rise because back then that's all they thought that could happen now they're having to redesign so the history does allow us to plan better or we just have to look at the right historic. Well I want to thank everyone for really helping illuminate this discussion I think we're approaching a more nuanced manner and we can continue the conversation and you can continue the conversation by taking part in the learning labs which are coming up I'd especially like to draw attention to Dan's session which will allow a fuller exploration of the park service work around climate change John will be signing books and speaking about his research between noon and one o'clock at the forum booth in the preservation studio so thanks Brenda, Dan, John and thank all of you for participating in Trust Live and pass forward 2014. Oh shutters. And the shuttles are waiting outside to convey you to the Savannah Trade Center for another full morning of learning labs power sessions and closing luncheon.