Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I thank Senator Flake for his comments, his willingness to speak out, and for the courage with which he has spoken. His beliefs, I think, are admirable, and this Senator wants to state that for the record. What he has spoken about does not look down the blind alley of partisanship. He is talking about looking at America, and this Senator appreciates his remarks. Climate Change

Mr. President, I want to talk today about what is happening to the coastal communities in Florida. The Presiding Officer represents Alaska, the State that has the most coastline. Next to Alaska, my State of Florida has more coastline than any other State, and I would venture to say that since Alaska has very few beaches, it ought to be very clear that the State of Florida has more beaches than any other State. That, of course, is an attraction that becomes an economic engine because people from all over the world want to come to enjoy the sands of Florida's beaches and enjoy the bounty of nature the Lord has provided, but we better watch out because we are starting to mess it up.

Yesterday, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, released data that the contiguous United States had the warmest May on record. The entire continent of the United States had the warmest May on record. The heat is having real-world impacts.

NOAA also released its ``2017 State of High Tide Flooding and 2018 Outlook.'' During 2017, the average high-tide flooding in the United States was the highest ever recorded. In 2018, NOAA predicts that high- tide flooding will be 60 percent more frequent across U.S. coastlines than it was 18 years ago in 2000, primarily because of the local sea level rise.

Doesn't this suggest something? In the lower latitudes, our seas are rising. It should not surprise us. It doesn't surprise this Senator. We got a glimpse of this when 4 years ago I took our Commerce Committee to Miami Beach and in fact had a hearing.

One of the witnesses was a NASA scientist, Dr. Piers Sellers, a prestigious scientist and former astronaut who, unfortunately, we lost to cancer just recently. At the hearing he said, ``By the end of the century, the intensity of hurricanes . . . will increase . . . but even if hurricane frequency and intensity do not change, rising sea levels and coastal development will likely increase the impact of hurricanes and other coastal storms on those coastal communities and infrastructure.''

I would like to show a picture. A picture tells the real story. This shows a sunny day in Miami Beach--a sunny day when the king tide is flooding Miami Beach. OK. That is obvious, looking at it. This happens frequently at high tide.

What has the city of Miami Beach had to do? Spend tens of millions of dollars on big pumps and raising the level of the road to try to alleviate this problem. This is happening with some frequency in South Florida. Dr. Sellers testified back in 2014 that not projections or forecasts but actual measurements showed the sea had risen over the last four decades 5 to 8 inches.

Let's take another look at other flooding. That photo was Miami Beach, which is down at the southeast part of the peninsula of Florida. This photo was taken in downtown Sarasota. Sarasota is on the Gulf Coast and is closer to the middle of the peninsula; in other words, about 150 miles north of the latitude of Miami Beach. The vice mayor brought me these pictures of Sarasota. Look at this car on the street. Pictures don't tell the full story.

We held another field hearing in West Palm Beach a year ago, and the Broward County resilience officer came to Palm Beach County for that hearing and showed a video of a man biking along the city of Fort Lauderdale, where the sidewalk is submerged in water. In other words, what has happened in Miami Beach is happening in the Las Olas section of Fort Lauderdale.

Then we took the committee to St. Petersburg, which is on the opposite coast, the gulf coast, where the city has designed its new pier out of floating docks to accommodate the rising sea as they rise up and down in Tampa Bay.

Or how about St. Augustine, where the public works department is seeing nuisance flooding from high tides that are overwhelming their storm water system.

All of these are examples of how sea level rise affects coastal Florida on sunny days, not rainstorm days. The NASA scientist at our hearing was talking about how climate could exacerbate damage from hurricanes. Why? Because if the water is warmer, that is the fuel for a hurricane, and that is what is sucked up into that vortex as the hurricane feeds itself. The hotter the water it is over, the more ferocious--and likely frequent--those storms will be. Warmer ocean water fuels hurricanes, making them more intense, and the sea level rise compounds the storm surge and the rain-induced flooding.

Let me show you another image. Here is an image that shows what Florida's coastal communities face when the Sun is not shining. This is during a rainstorm. Here is flooding in Jacksonville. Where is Jacksonville? It is at the north end of the peninsula. It is almost right next to the Georgia line. You can see a sign that says ``no skateboarding'' is almost completely engulfed by the rising water.

Then you think: What about a place further south on the latitudes, Puerto Rico? Hurricane Maria absolutely ravaged that island, and it is not an exaggeration to say that climate change and sea level rise are putting people's lives and their property at risk. It is the reality.

I am going to continue to extend an invitation to our colleagues. I want you to come with me to Florida, and I want to show you these impacts. I have had the privilege of taking several of our colleagues to the Florida Everglades, where alligators are plentiful, to see this unusual ecosystem as we travel about in an airboat. I want you to come and see what is happening as a result of the rising water, and the real question is, What are we going to do about it?

There are two pieces to the solution. One is that we are going to have to stop putting so many greenhouse gasses into the air. CO2, which is carbon dioxide, and methane are the two big culprits. Part of the solution is climate mitigation, which means we must invest in new technology, in the economy of the future--things like wind, solar, electric vehicles, and more efficient buildings. We are going to have to make our communities more resilient to the greenhouse gasses and the warming that they already have caused in the system. This is called climate change adaptation.

You don't have to agree with climate science to know that it makes sense; it makes dollars and cents to do this. We are talking about strengthening our building codes to withstand wind events. We are talking about restoring the function of the floodplains so that when 2 to 3 feet of rainwater suddenly gets dumped in one place, it can absorb and gradually recede. We are talking about rebuilding natural flood protection, like sand dunes and beaches. In the Commerce Committee we have heard countless stories from local government officials that if they could have invested before the natural catastrophe that hit them, they would have saved the Federal Government a lot of money by avoiding the enormous cost of the disaster response and relief itself, not to mention reducing the risk to human life.

The proof is in front of our very eyes. The photos we have shown-- let's show the rest of them here--don't lie. Yet here we are upon another hurricane season. Of course, we hope the big storms don't come, but the likelihood is that they will. Remember, they don't necessarily go just to Florida. Remember Hurricane Sandy? Look what it did to the Northeast.

We hope we don't see any more of these harrowing images. But, as we hope, we are going to have to act because what we have shown here in these photos today is not about projections; it is about real-time observation. Let's quit ignoring the obvious.

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