Your report on rising sea levels suggests Boston dodged a bullet with Hurricane Sandy. The report says if Sandy had come ashore five hours earlier, at high tide, 6.6 percent of the city would have been flooded, with water reaching all the way to City Hall. What did we learn from Sandy? Sandy did us a favor. It certainly didn’t do New York City a favor, but it did us a favor because it missed us. When you see a map like the one in our report you say, well, could that really happen? Then, when Sandy came in, you had to say, yeah, it can happen.
What’s with the stick? We have these maps that are color-coded to show the extent of flooding and also the depth. The stick is just a way of adding a third dimension. When I hold up that stick and say here’s zero to 2.5 feet of sea level rise or here’s 5 feet of sea level rise, suddenly people get it. I mean five feet is almost to the top of my head.
Your report urges Bostonians to prepare for sea level rising because of climate change. Does that mean it’s too late to prevent climate change? No, actually one of the things we hope people get is that it’s not too late. We need to continue mitigation, which is reducing our carbon emissions, because that makes a difference between 3 feet of sea level rise and 6 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century.
How worried are you about climate change? There’s still a lot of things we don’t know. Life and the earth are amazingly resilient. The planet’s going to be fine no matter what. Humans may or may not survive, but the planet will adjust and life will adapt and evolve in order to survive. If we want to live in a place in which we can survive, we need to do our best to reverse the impacts that we’ve created.
It seems like some people aren’t preparing for sea levels to rise. From a purely logical perspective, it doesn’t make sense to rebuild along the coast. It doesn’t make sense to rebuild a city that’s below sea level. Some of those things are stupid. On the other hand, we have to take into account people’s views and why they are doing this so maybe we can come up with better alternatives.
What drew you to hydrology, the science dealing with the distribution and circulation of water on and below the earth’s surface? Water is so ubiquitous. It’s everywhere and we use it for everything, but we kind of ignore it. It’s like one of those precious commodities that you take for granted, kind of like your spouse or your family. You don’t notice it until it’s gone.
You received your doctorate from Tufts. Where did you go to school before that? I didn’t start college at the University of New Hampshire until I was 30, so I was a mature, nontraditional student. I joined the earth science teaching program in the first semester, but then the next semester they started the BS in hydrology and I just thought that’s what I wanted to do. I was like the first person to enter the program.
What did you do before going to school? Oh, gosh. I was a receptionist, a bank teller, and I worked at a car dealership. I altered wedding dresses, which is the only job I ever got fired from. I worked at a valve manufacturing company and I was a bookkeeper.
Here is a link to the report, “ Preparing for the rising tide. ”
