Norfolk, Virginia Tackles Rising Sea Levels While Cuccinelli Denies Climate Change

It's not exactly the type of media attention a semi-back water like Norfolk, Virginia desires, but an article on the front page of today's New York Times looks at the increasing problems facing Norfolk as global warming is rising sea levels. At the same time, Virginia's mentally untethered Attorney General, Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli, denies that global warming is a scientific reality and is using lawsuits to harass the scientific community. For Kookinelli (and the majority of his Christianist supporters), reality is what he wants it to be and he never lets objective facts get in the way of his insane, megalomaniac agenda. Of course, Norfolk is not the only Virginia coastal city facing the challenge of rising sea levels - Hampton is another as are virtually all seven of the cities of Hampton Roads. Meanwhile, as noted, Kookinelli wastes time and resources challenging science that collides with his religious based insanity. Here are some story highlights:
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But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean.
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Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.
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The state’s attorney general, Ken T. Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when he was a researcher at the University of Virginia. But the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level.
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“Last month,” she said recently, “there were eight or nine days the tide was so doggone high it was difficult to drive.” Larchmont residents have relentlessly lobbied the city to address the problem, and last summer it broke ground on a project to raise the street around the “u” by 18 inches and to readjust the angle of the storm drains so that when the river rises, the water does not back up into the street. The city will also turn a park at the edge of the river back into wetlands — it is now too saline for lawn grass to grow anyway. The cost for the work on this one short stretch is $1.25 million.
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Norfolk has hired the Dutch firm Fugro to evaluate options like inflatable dams and storm-surge floodgates at the entrances to waterways.
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Others like Mr. Schultz support the construction, even though they think the results will be very temporary indeed. “The fact is that there is not enough engineering to go around to mitigate the rising sea,” he said. “For us, it is the bitter reality of trying to live in a world that is getting warmer and wetter.”