Payton Guion and Michael Sol Warren | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
If this keeps up, New Jersey will soon feel like North Carolina. And that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg.
Ocean City, underwater. Frequent deadly heat waves in Newark. The Meadowlands swamped, putting some of New Jersey’s most critical infrastructure at risk. Storms like Sandy no longer being outliers.
Those scenarios are just a few that climate scientists have confidently projected for New Jersey as global warming rolls in and the climate changes. But those projections have been based on what would happen if the Earth’s average temperature rose by two degrees celcius over the course of the 21st century.
Scientists in the state say that without comprehensive changes, life in the Garden State will be about adapting to a reality where the Jersey Shore is continually a disaster zone, the Pine Barrens are threatened, and inland river flooding brings floodwaters to the Statehouse steps in Trenton.
A groundbreaking new report from international experts released last week cautions that major consequences are closer than previously thought. Many of those disasters will be in play as the Earth warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, the report warns, and that could happen by 2040.
Natalie Mahowald, a lead author of the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, said that global warming is going to be one of the main things that dictates how people will live in the near future.
“In the next 50 years, we’re going to have to reconsider” how we live, Mahowald said.
Health at risk
A hotter world places a bigger strain on our public health. Summer heat waves will become deadlier. Ozone pollution, which is created through a chemical reaction in hot air, will become more prevalent and hospitalize more at-risk people.
Climate change is going to force New Jerseyans to adjust for everyday life. Bob Kopp, the director of Rutgers’ Institute of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, said that if the the goals of the Paris Agreement — the landmark climate agreement reached by more than 100 nations in 2015 — are not met, New Jersey’s climate will become the same as North Carolina’s historically has been.
Temperature data shows that the average July high temperature in Charlotte, N.C. is 89 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to 86 degrees in Newark. But winter brings a starker difference, as Charlotte’s average January high is 51 degrees, while Newark’s is 39 degrees.
Those temperature changes will punch New Jerseyans in the wallet as well. The hotter summers are going to mean steeper electric bills for utility customers cranking up the A/C.
“You could spend as much on summer cooling as winter heating,” said Dave Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist.
Warmer, higher seas and fiercer storms
But the most urgent threat to New Jersey is sea level rise. Melting ice in the North and South Poles are swelling oceans around the world, and the low-lying Garden State is particularly vulnerable to that change.
It doesn’t help that as the water rises, New Jersey’s land is sinking. Ice sheets that covered New Jersey during that last Ice Age pushed the Earth’s crust down into the mantle below and that sinking continues today.
“It’s a double-whammy,” said Anthony Broccoli, the chair of the Rutgers Department of Environmental Sciences, referring to the rising sea and sinking land.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency reported in 2010 that nearly 500,000 people in New Jersey live in areas at risk of a 100-year flood, which means a flood that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in a given year. Only Florida and Louisiana have more people at risk of a 100-year flood than New Jersey, and those floods will become more common as sea levels rise.
A higher sea level gives future storms extra punch as their destructive waves surge ashore. But even without a storm present, higher seas will overflow into coastal communities at the whim of the tides. It’s already occurring in places like Atlantic City and Ocean City. Kopp said that tidal flooding in some places along the Jersey Shore has risen by a factor of 10 since the 1950s.
Courtesy of the Regional Plan Association
Greater flood potential
Changes in the oceans don’t just affect the coast; they play as key ingredients for potentially devastating inland flooding in the future. Warmer ocean temperatures give more fuel for future hurricanes. Combine that with warmer air, which can hold more water that could be unleashed as rainfall, and freshwater flooding events caused by Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Floyd become more and more likely.
“We know that Sandy was a stronger storm because the atmosphere was warmer and because sea level was already somewhat higher,” Robinson said.
A new review of sea level rise records and projections, partially authored by Rutgers scientists and released on the same day as the jarring IPCC report, finds that the world's seas could rise 8 feet by 2100, and 50 feet by 2300.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group, warns that by 2045, more than 62,000 New Jersey homes — valued at $26.8 billion — will be underwater, displacing nearly 80,000 people. That loss would happen with two feet of sea level rise by 2045.
The Meadowlands, low lying and filled with water already, are also vulnerable to sea level rise. The threat to the Meadowlands is so great that the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit planning organization for the New York metro area, has recommended that the region be turned into a national park. The transformation from a heavily industrial area to a national park would buffer the region, and its critical infrastructure, from sea level rise according to RPA spokeswoman Dani Simons.
Matthew Ayres via AP
'The Oak Barrens'
The future of the Pine Barrens, a unique ecosystem in the Northeast, is in question as the world warms. The South Jersey pine forests have already been hit by the invasive, tree-killing Southern Pine Beetle. Pine forests cover about 440,000 acres in South Jersey; the beetle now affects more than 25,000 acres of that. In 2010, the bugs were found north of the Egg Harbor River for the first time.
Typically cold winters kill off the beetles, keeping the bugs in check and letting the forests adjust. But as that cold goes away, the beetles pose a growing threat. Now, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is trying to combat the pests through a combination of forest management techniques.
“If this were to spread without any kind of checks, we could lose an important ecosystem," NJDEP Spokesman Larry Hajna told NJ Advance Media in June. "The pine barrens could become the oak barrens.”
Scientists are in agreement that humans are a driving factor of climate change. The new IPCC report attributes at least one degree celsius of the Earth’s warming directly to human actions, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide into the air. Carbon dioxide essentially acts like a blanket, trapping heat before it can escape Earth’s atmosphere.
“Some of the things we have seen transpiring in the last several decades seem to have a human fingerprint on them,” Robinson said.
So what can be done?
“The first thing we need to be doing is talking about it,” Kopp said. “This is a long term challenge that is going to be increasingly severe as the century carries on.”
Kopp and other experts agree: There is no magic temperature, no magic number for climate change. The effects of global warming are happening, it’s just a matter of how great those effects will be and how fast they come. The most important thing, according to Kopp, is to view cutting greenhouse gas emissions as a form of risk management.
“We ultimately need to bring net greenhouse gas emissions to zero,” Kopp said.
New Jersey has typically been aggressive in trying to cut greenhouse gas emissions, dating back to 2007 when Gov. Jon Corzine signed the Global Warming Response Act. The law aimed at reducing the state’s emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a goal in line with those recommended by the IPCC report.
The Garden State was a founding member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multi-state effort aimed at cutting emissions across the Northeast through a cap-and-trade agreement. But Gov. Chris Christie took the state out of RGGI in 2011, calling the organization a "gimmick."
Christie’s changes didn’t stop there. He cut off funding for the Global Warming Response Act and used the money to plug holes elsewhere in the state budget, drawing the ire of environmental groups.
Gov. Phil Murphy's administration has moved quickly to reverse the actions taken by Christie. Murphy has ordered the state to rejoin RGGI, a process that is ongoing, and the Governor has set aggressive targets for cutting the state's carbon emissions as part of the controversial green energy law signed earlier this year. The new goal for the Garden State is to cut carbon emissions by 50 percent in 2030 and 100 percent in 2050.
'Still possible to limit the warming'
Despite the dire projections for New Jersey — and the world — the level-headed Mahowald suggested that the book isn’t written on the devastating effects of global warming yet.
“It is still possible to limit to warming to 1.5 degrees [Celsius,] but there’s still a lot to do,” she said. “Past emissions alone won’t cause 1.5 degrees. It’s possible for us to limit it to less than 1.5 degrees, but we’d have to stop emissions now.”
But even from that optimistic perspective, Mahowald acknowledged that New Jersey residents face a future of adaptation to a changed, more dangerous climate.
Courtesy of the Brick Township Police Department
Looking for more about climate change in the Garden State?
Hot pace for higher temps: N.J. is one of the fastest warming states in the U.S. Here's what that means
Storm ready: Hurricane season is heating up. Nearly 6 years after Sandy, is N.J. ready for another major storm?
Bracing for impact: Thousands of baby oysters have been enlisted to protect this N.J. Navy base
Payton Guion may be reached at PGuion@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @PaytonGuion. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Ad Choices