PORTLAND, Maine — Portland Mayor Michael Brennan and City Councilor David Marshall on Wednesday called for the city to plan ahead for rising sea levels and worsening storms as research group Environment Maine released its latest report on climate change.
Marshall — chairman of the council’s Transportation, Sustainability and Energy Committee — said Portland can be proactive not only by preparing for storm surges and weather changes, but also by doing its part to cut down on greenhouse gases that most scientists believe are driving global warming.
Marshall, long a proponent of more efficient public transportation, renewed calls for progress in connecting Maine service centers by commuter rail in an effort to reduce the numbers of cars on the roads. He also reiterated a goal of real-time tracking of city buses, so potential riders can check on their arrival times through smartphones or laptops and be more confident in the public transportation scheduling.
“City Council has worked to reduce the carbon emissions by the city government by making our buildings more energy-efficient,” he continued. “ The energy services contract we’ve entered into has reduced our carbon emissions by 32 percent, which is the equivalent of pulling 900 cars off of the streets.”
The councilor went on to say that city officials should ensure building codes and zoning ordinances account for sea level rise and more dramatic storm surges — which Environment Maine’s report indicated will be likely — by raising structures above higher flood plain estimates. Marshall also suggested the city could develop zoning to encourage more development in areas less susceptible to rising water.
“I look forward to working with Councilor Marshall and the other city councilors to focus much more on how we can develop the city of Portland in a way that takes into account the potential effects of extreme weather,” Brennan said. “So when we’re talking about waterfront development — when we’re talking about developing East Bayside, when we’re talking about developing the Back Cove — we’re taking into account the potential effect of extreme weather, and we’re planning for that 20, 30, 40 and 50 years into the future, and not just focusing our efforts on remedial intervention or responding to a disaster.”
Joining Brennan and Marshall during the news conference Wednesday morning were Red Cross Emergency Services Director Michael Mason and Anika James, a field associate with Environment Maine, the local arm of Environment America. The organization’s latest report, “In the Path of the Storm: Global Warming, Extreme Weather, and the Impacts of Weather-Related Disasters in the United States,” tracks an uptick in federally declared weather-related disasters over the past five years.
The group attributes the increase in large part to climate change, and uses the statistics to reinforce its support for the Obama administration’s forthcoming carbon pollution and fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, as well as strong carbon pollution standards for coal-fired power plants.
In 2011, James said Wednesday, the number of weather-related disasters causing more than $1 billion in damage reached 14, a record for the country and one that added up to a cost of $55 billion.
In Maine, she said, federally declared weather-related disasters affected all 16 counties between 2006 and 2011, with York and Lincoln counties declared disaster areas seven times during that span.
James said Mainers can expect more frequent heavy downfalls of precipitation, increasing likelihoods of unseasonably warm weather and more intense hurricanes as the years press on.
“Rather than tying global warming to any particular storms,” she said, “we like to say that global warming loads the dice. … Each weather event has a higher likelihood of becoming a severe weather event because of global warming.”
On Friday, Brennan will return to the podium to take part in a presentation and community discussion of sea level rise and storm surges at the University of Southern Maine, where the New England Environmental Finance Center plans to unveil its study on dangers facing low-lying Portland neighborhoods such as the Back Cove area.
Are they bracing wicked hah’d? Something tells me this is going to cost us money.
What a great city – and what a gaggle of morons running it.
Chicken Little’s all! I find it incredible that so many people in very high places buy into this garbage. BRACE YOURSELVES, QUICKLY!!!
Wow, I was hoping that Portland would do something about its dirty streets and homeless people. But now I see that liberals are running the place, so quality of life comes second to the “global warming” hoax.
Portland is rampant with beggars. I can’t get out of Portland with out some one asking for a cigarette or change It’s the worst city I’ve been in for beggars equal to west palm beach or any Florida city’s … And I always cave in …..
Let’s pass some laws outlawing storms.
Maybe these bad storms caused by global laming will wash away all the liberals… :-P
Like most libs, they don’t/can’t even hold thier leaders accountable. Wasn’t it PBO that promised to LOWER THE SEA levels?
The debate is over, global warming is a hoax. You didn’t get the memo, were going with climate change and it’s man made. Oh yea, that mini ice age that’s coming is definately climate change.
The debate was over a long time ago. It is the money of the polluting industries buying psuedo-scientists to add confusioin to the discussion.
Two seconds on this groups website will tell you all you need to know. They are radicals who want to bring this state down.
They want to bring America down. GW is nothing but a plan to line the elite’s pockets at the expense of the gullible masses and transfer huge amounts of wealth from countries that earned it to backward nations.
What a crock..I hope they all move south to Mass. and not north, to the real Maine!
Was it Al Gore who came up with the idea of New York being under water at some point? His statements about so many other things have been proven wrong, yet he received accolades for the myths he perpetuated. Now, we have more liberals climbing on board his sinking ship–but have to give them credit for persisting in the myth–state a lie often enough and people will think it is the truth.
Al Gore said the middle of the earth was 1,000,000 degrees and his climate pals claimed that the glaciers in the Himalayas would all melt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMrxC-qEHb8
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9071908/Melting-glaciers-on-the-Himalayas-not-contributing-to-sea-level-rise.html
Climate Science Politics=NOT SCIENCE!
Looks like you can read the headline from The Telegraph, but not the article. Or, maybe you did read it, but you didn’t understand a word of what it meant.
And yes, the ice in the Himalayas is melting.
Why yes it was Mr. Gore. I believe it was shortly after he invented the internet and built his mansion on the edge of the coast that will be sure to erode away… at ANY moment.
Is PORTLAND DROWNS….PERFECT STORM II being sponsored by the LePage administration as payback for all the crap they have had to endure from Portland’s hipster elite?
While the dimwits complain, who else believes global warming is real and needs to be paid attention to?
Well, the insurance companies are betting on it.
The CIA tracks it.
The Department of Defense is preparing for the conflicts that will result from it.
Farmers around the world are adjusting their work in order to adapt to it.
In short, anybody who matters more than the nay-sayers gathered here to grumble believes that global warming, and global weirding of weather patterns, is real.
I’m glad Portland is paying attention.
Hey scomber, look out for global warming maaaannnn its as bad as the y2k. The CIA is all over it though just like the WMDs in Iraq. Portland wishes they were in Oregon maaaannnnn just like Portlandia.
You should get treatment for that limp.
AGW = HOAX.
Well if the science is so settled, why do they have (AGW groups) to resort to lies to stifle scientific skepticism?
“Fakegate: The Increasing Desperation of the Alarmists
By James Delingpole
…..”Among the first to smell a rat was the climate skeptical website Watts Up With That?, which noted that it was poorly punctuated, got simple factual details wrong and was the only “leaked” document which had been “scanned rather than produced
by a PDF document publisher”.
The Heartland Institute issued a statement confirming that the document was a fake. But it wasn’t just climate skeptics who were crying foul.
In theAtlantic, senior editor Megan McArdle – despite disagreeing “pretty strenuously with Heartland’s position on global warming” – noted that whoever wrote the document had got the tone all wrong.
….”It’s like the opposition political manifestos found in novels written by stolid ideologues; they can never quite bear (or lack the imagination) to let the villains have a good argument. Switch the names, and the memo could have been a page ripped out of
State of Fear or Atlas Shrugged.
Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.”
McArdle’s point was well-made.
But perhaps the most obvious giveaway was this: climate skeptics like those associated with the Heartland Institute do not see themselves as anti-science but as pro-science. “
You can make Maine and the entire US as green as a leprechaun, but all our efforts will be in vain unless something is done about of the big pig polluters (China, Mexico, etc ). They spew out dangerous chemicals and other poisons from factory smokestacks, autos emissions, etc. They couldn’t care less about the atmosphere or that the world suffers due to their ignorance.
It would be nice if the UN would actually order these countries to use emission controls, and threaten them with severe consequences if they didn’t comply.
It’s like the cartoon says: “What if it’s all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing.”
China’s inaction is no reason for us not to act. There are many good outcomes to climate stabilization policies beyond climate stabilization.
Oh yes, I agree with you, and I didn’t mean to imply that we should not do anything, but I still think that the polluters of other countries will hinder the results of the efforts we make. It’s time for the the polluters of the world to be put on notice that they need to get their nasty toxic fumes under control. It would make our efforts so much more successful (atmospheric wise) if every country in the world was on board and not just a few.
So you’re backing population control for Asia…a billion here, a billion there and you have an out of control impact on the globe.
So are you backing LePage’s plans to reforest Maine this ARBOR DAY, or just make more snarky comments?
The global warming BS is really getting old. “Ignorant bait” is what they call it. If you run your mouth and your print enough times quoting the same BS….the ignorant will swallow it like a trout sucks up a fly! The Earth may be getting warmer but CO2 hasn’t a thing to do with it. That’s just the cash extraction talking point that makes “ALGORES” rich at the ignorants loss.
I have to laugh at all the NRCM-produced maps they are using. I’m a history buff. The Fore River waterfront, Back Cove, and East Bayside that they are kvetching about being flooded by the rising ocean are all landfills. Take the old maps of “Falmouth Neck”, the present day Portland peninsula and superimpose over the NRCM Global Warming-monger’s flood maps and it fits perfectly. Moral of the story: the ocean is only taking away what was rightly its own.
But elitists instinctively are right, because, well because they are elite. So they don’t like to do the research on any of this as they might have an inconvenient encounter with some facts.
Maybe Portland is sinking under the weight of its own inflated ego?…How much does Portland now weigh?
Yup, there is a 1690 map revealing Portland as an island..heck the channel into back bay was 80′ deep!
When I lived in Portland on the corner of Cottage & Ashmont, the city dug up the street for a sewer separation project. We discovered at that corner, marine clay met the ledge. That means the house I owned would have been waterfront property a few climate cycles ago. Now that house is 1,000 feet from Back Cove. But the liberals who run Portland and the Enviro-Nazis need something to whine about.
I have a splendid idea, taken right from their own playbook. Let’s make Back Cove and East Bayside an industrial wind project, with 459 foot tall turbines (taller than Franklin Towers in Poertland, Maine’s tallest building at 202 feet). After all, these are the people who believe that blasting away and leveling Maine’s iconic mountains for industrial wind turbines will save the planet from global warming and keep the sea from rising and swallowing up parts of Portland. I say put your philospohy to work in Portland, which has more wind that places like the ridges of Lincoln Lakes. Walk the walk, not just talk the talk, Portland liberals!
The liberals and enviro-nazi’s take their lead from the people who somehow will make money by advancing the global warming hoax, such as NRCM.
Don’t forget that for the last several years Angus “Chicken Little” King was going around telling everybody that Maine was going to become “uninhabitable” and that “Augusta would become waterfront property” due to global warming and sea level rise. It was, of course, all part of his zealous campaign to push his useless industrial wind power projects. He has dialed back the rhetoric due to withering criticism.
The alarmist forecasts clash wildly with the extensive research done for Nova Scotia and Halifax, devastated in 2003 by a combination of hurricane, high tide and storm surge.
If you want common sense and a lot of real scientce from a variety of climate researchers; I’d suggest you research out Halifax and the various studies.
Then compare them with what the ‘we’re all going to drown’ crowd is using to get media headlines and contributions.
….just remember in 1690, Portland was an ISLAND!……so how much money will be saved by cancelling all those wonderful schemes to develop the Portland waterfront; how much tax revenue will be lost as valuable buildings are abandoned……?