Governor DeSantis ban on using the words 'climate change' in naming state programs didn't stop Florida from spending a hundred million dollars shoring up the servant's entrance to Mar A Lago.
CLIMATE ADAPTATION FLORIDA STYLE
While the Florida Department of Transportation can't call it a climate adaptation project, the improvements along Southern Boulevard are intended to keep traffic and pedestrian flow across the tidal Lake Worth Lagoon high and dry in the face of a very climatey problem: continuing sea level rise along both Mar-a-Lago's lagoon bulkhead & Atlantic sea wall.
LAST APRIL 13th, AS TWO FEET OF RAIN SWAMPED SOUTH FLORIDA, PRESIDENT TRUMP SAT IN MAR A LAGO DOING A FAIR IMITATION OF KING CANUTE, TELLING PAST FLOODING VICTIM TUCKER CARLSON NOT TO WORRY "ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING... THE OCEAN WILL RISE IN THE NEXT 300 YEARS BY 1/8TH OF AN INCH"
The reality is that sea level is rising a hundred times faster than Trump told Carlson. It has risen more than an eighth of an inch since this interview was taped. At this rate, the Venetian ballroom of Mrs. Post's Italianate palazzo will become gondola-accessible by this century's end .
The barrier island's coral rock spine may survive, but absent heroic engineering, low-lying Mar A Lago will not.
The Flagler Museum and the Breakers Hotel have better prospects for survival. Both rise from the Coquina bedrock of the Anastasia formation, created during the Pleistocene era when sea level was lower, and sand & shells were exposed to slightly acidic rainwater, that dissolved enough of their calcium carbonate to glue them together into rock.
Palm Beach has long presented a surfing challenge, for many iron bulkheads were emplaced in its fragile shore in the 1920's to curb sand migration and beach erosion. Jutting out tens of yards from the low water mark, they punctuate the coast with a fossil map of the beachfront property lines of the Roaring Twenties. Their rusting remains still pose a danger, and Palm Beach lifeguards, public and private, restrict swimming to roped-in beaches when the water turns rough.
Until Trump appeared on the scene, this made then-empty Mar A Lago's unguarded Atlantic beach a neighborhood short-board Mecca when surf was up.
