The end of beaches? Why the worlds shorelines are in serious trouble

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We can have our beachfront properties our Miami high-rises, our Hamptons mansions, our Jersey boardwalks or we can have our beaches. But as geologist and Duke University emeritus professor Orrin Pilkey has been arguing for decades now, we cant have both.

As the oceans warm and sea levels rise, coastal living is becoming an increasingly risky proposition. Any climate scientist would tell you not to invest in a beach house, and yet large-scale migration inland is something weve yet to see. The beaches themselves can withstand extreme weather, of course. But its our attempts to hold them in place,through techno-fixes like seawalls and beach replenishment, that ironically enough will end up destroying them. Sooner or later, Pilkey argues, were going to be forced to retreat. The question is whether therell be any beach left by then.

The Last Beach, which Pilkey co-wrote with J. Andrew G. Cooper, a professor of coastal studies at the University of Ulster, is but his latest attempt to drive home just how wrong-headed our push to build on and preserve shorelines is. Its been an uphill battle; for Pilkey, what counts as progress was that people acknowledged his plea not to rebuild after Superstorm Sandy instead of just attacking him for suggesting it even if they didnt really end up following his advice.

Bring pollution, oil spills and the destructive business of sand mining into the picture, and its not so extreme, Pilkey told Salon, to imagine a future where beaches as we know them as places to live and even as places to visit will no longer exist.

We dont typically think of beaches as something that can go extinct, but it seems like thats basically what youre arguing here.

Thats exactly what we argue: that beaches in developed areas will not be there, that they will be replaced by seawalls large and small. There will be beaches left in remote places and on national seashores and things like that, perhaps although theyll be suffering too, because theyll be eroding and retreating back separately from the developed areas, which will be standing still for a while.

By the time we really begin to see whats happening, like we are right now in Florida, well be worrying about Manhattan and Queens and Boston and Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Miami, Charleston, all those cities. We fully expect that the great expense required to hold back the shoreline which is a losing proposition in any event will be overwhelming for them.

It seems to us to be pretty obvious and I think most geologists would agree with this that in a 50- to 100-year timeframe were in trouble. The best example of that, the proof in the pudding, is Florida, where they have hundreds of miles of highrise-lined shoreline. What can they do? You could move the buildings back, but thats very costly and theres no place to move them to. So what we see right now, especially with the current governor of Florida, is the building of seawalls right and left. All you have to do is declare an emergency and you can build a seawall.

In the book, you also discuss how beaches have become dangerous places. So would you say theres also a loss of beaches, not physically, but as we are able to enjoy them?

Yeah, that was the point of that. We, by the way, were really shocked the one chapter that was really out of our range was pollution, and we were rather shocked at the numbers. We saw repeated statements about how to use a beach, if youre going to go to a beach what should you do and how should you use it, in the technical literature, but it hasnt been getting out to the public. Maybe thats a little bit of irresponsibility on the part of some of the biochemists in not getting that out to the public. On the other hand, I know what would happen. They would get heavily criticized, probably, as being alarmists.

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The end of beaches? Why the worlds shorelines are in serious trouble

07 11 2014 RENZI A VILLANOVA D’ALBENGA PIAGGIO AEROSPACE INTERVENTO INTEGRALE – Video

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07 11 2014 RENZI A VILLANOVA D #39;ALBENGA PIAGGIO AEROSPACE INTERVENTO INTEGRALE
Il premier Matteo Renzi ha partecipato all #39;inaugurazione del nuovo stabilimento della Piaggio Aerospace a Villanova d #39;Albenga, in provincia di Savona."Guai a pensare che si possa fare del mondo...

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07 11 2014 RENZI A VILLANOVA D'ALBENGA PIAGGIO AEROSPACE INTERVENTO INTEGRALE - Video

NATO chief hails new chapter in Afghanistan

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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg meets Afghan President Ashraf Ghani during a visit to Afghanistan on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2014.

Stars and Stripes

Published: November 6, 2014

KABUL, Afghanistan NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, during an unannounced visit to Afghanistan Thursday, promised continued alliance support after foreign combat troops leave the country by years end.

NATO and our partners have stood with Afghanistan for more than a decade, Stoltenberg said during a joint news conference with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Next year, we will open a new chapter. The future of Afghanistan will be in Afghan hands. But our support will continue.

After the NATO-led combat mission ends this year, about 12,000 foreign troops 9,800 of them American will remain primarily to advise and assist Afghan security forces.

Ghani praised the alliances efforts, noting NATO troops have stood shoulder to shoulder with Afghan National Security Forces during the bloodiest days of the 13-year war. While he said he was confident Afghan forces will be able to secure the country after 2014, Ghani noted that effort would depend on continued financial backing from Washington and NATO.

NATO has committed to fund Afghanistans 350,000 security forces at $4.1 billion annually. At a NATO summit in Wales in September, alliance leaders committed to continue funding through 2017.

Afghanistans new president was supposed to attend that summit, but because election results were still in dispute, the country was represented by the defense minister. Stoltenberg invited Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah chief executive in the new unity government and Ghanis rival in the protracted election to attend a NATO ministerial meeting on Dec. 2.

Stoltenberg said NATO wanted to develop its long-term partnership with Afghanistan.

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NATO chief hails new chapter in Afghanistan

Former NSA Head Michael Hayden: The Agency "Cannot Survive Without Being More Transparent"

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Do Americans have a right to privacy? At what point does national security take precedence over that right? Intelligence expert Amy Zegart discussed those issues and more with Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency. Hayden served as NSA director from 1999 to 2005, and was also CIA director for three years. Zegart is codirector of Stanfords Center for International Security and Cooperation, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business (by courtesy), where she coteaches a course on political risk management with former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The following are edited excerpts from their conversation:

The 215 program has to do with telephone metadata. So its not email traffic; its voice. And its not content, its fact of. What the agency gathers is who called whom, when, for how long. Its also within the technical definition of metadata to include locational data. But this program doesnt. Its consciously excluded. What youve got is a record of all phone calls made within the United States or between the United States and overseas thats given to the National Security Agency on a daily basis by the telecom providers.

Its not technically electronic surveillance. These are actually business records kept by the phone company in order to charge you for your phone usage. That data is then bent toward the National Security Agency, where its stored.

A key point about this is that it is unarguably domestic. Its your stuff. Its my stuff. And its put into this large database. Now, that in itself causes a lot of people concern because even with good intent, theres some nervousness about the government having that kind of information.

The NSA view is that, although that is kind of theoretically frightening, as a practical matter, one has to look at what happens to that data in order to make a coherent judgment about it.

That data is locked and inaccessible at NSA except under a very narrow set of circumstances. Number one, the number of people who are allowed to access that data is about two dozen. Actually, the right number is 22. And the way you access the data is through a number, almost always foreign, about which you have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the foreign number is affiliated with terrorist groups.

A specific example so you raid a safe house in Yemen. And you go in with your Yemeni allies and you grab some people. And you grab whats called pocket litter, which is identifiable stuff inside their pockets.

It confirms that, yeah, these guys are who we thought they were. Theyre affiliated with AQAP Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or some other group. And you discover a cellphone that youve never seen before. Now you have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that that cellphone is, in fact, affiliated with a terrorist.

What you then get to do and Im going to be a little cartoonish, here, but its kind of how it works. What you then get to do is walk up to that database, kind of yell through the transom, and say, Hey, anybody in here talk to this phone? And then if a number in the Bronx raises its hand and says, Yeah, I do every Thursday, NSA gets to say to the number in the Bronx, Well, then who do you talk to?

Thats the program. Theres no mining of the data, and theres no pattern development, no pattern recognition. It is: Did any of those phone events that were captured there relate to a phone that we have reason to believe is affiliated with al-Qaida?

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Former NSA Head Michael Hayden: The Agency "Cannot Survive Without Being More Transparent"

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