Melissa Ross
Whether he’s discussing the finer points of cold fusion or explaining incredibly complicated geo-engineering technologies, the lauded chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center is skilled at explaining cutting-edge solutions to the effects of climate change for a general audience.
Dennis Bushnell has been with NASA since 1963, working on the Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle programs.
But these days, his eyes are not on the skies but the seas; in particular, the ocean’s projected rising.
“This is going to be interesting for Florida,” Bushnell says, explaining that it’s realistic for Florida’s many coastal communities to expect at least 3 feet of sea level rise by the year 2050.
“The current actual changes are running toward the top of the projections,” Bushnell says. “The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) projections don’t include methane and CO2 uptake coming out of the ocean, the ocean becoming more acidic. The algae is going away. All of this produces higher temperatures, which means more water evaporation, and water vapor is the worst greenhouse gas.”
“It looks like we’re going to have greater than the top of the IPCC projections.”
What does that mean for Florida, South Florida especially? Miami is consistently cited as perhaps the world’s most vulnerable city in terms of the impact of sea level rise.
“There’s a huge cost associated with raising, armoring, and retreating,” Bushnell says.
“People have huge investments in the shoreline. There are massive numbers of people living in low-lying areas in the U.S. It starts in New England and goes all the way to Texas. And they want to hold onto this as long as they can. You can armor, put in sea walls, increase elevation — but one has to do a cost-benefit analysis. If you spend that kind of money and do this, what are the benefits, for how long? How do you amortize those investments?
“These are decisions people need to think about,” he says.
Bushnell recently had to cancel a talk he was scheduled to give on the University of North Florida campus on sea level/climate change models, along with the affects on coastal cities, including his thoughts on renewable energy, energy conservation, and geo-engineering.
He provided an update over the telephone, though, enthusiastically discussing revolutionary ideas aimed at mitigating the effect of warming on the planet.
One concept involves saltwater superplants called halophytes.
Bushnell says it might be possible to irrigate the Sahara desert with seawater and grow the plants there.
“You can grow biomass by growing halophytes using seawater on wasteland. The biomass can be used for food, petrochemical feed stock for plastics. It sequesters the CO2. We did some estimates of what would happen if you grew halophytes on a good chunk of the Sahara. You’re growing food with seawater.”
“You grow food, you grow energy that is green energy, and it favorably effects the climate,” he says.
Bushnell says those types of creative solutions will become an imperative in the coming decades. But despite the grim projections, he’s hopeful.
“The cost of renewables has been dropping year on year for decades and is still dropping. So I am very hopeful, because now there’s a financial incentive to change. The question is, can we do it rapidly enough to stop much of the water rise in the near future?”
