This week I saw 50 years into the future of Chesapeake Bay: Bring boots.
For days, offshore winds, with a little boost from the approaching full moon, pushed tides from Long Island to Baltimore about 1.5 feet higher than predicted.
Around the lower Eastern Shore, it meant wading to take a walk and avoiding low-lying roads.
It also meant parking lots flooded, docks underwater, marshes submerged.
Some schools let out early so buses could avoid rising waters, and there were concerns about response times for fire trucks and ambulances due to the flooding.
The high water was no disaster, but not something you'd want to live with, either. At some point it struck me:
In a few more decades, days like these will be the norm.
The increase we experienced, 1.5 feet above normal, is half the rise in sea levels projected for the bay in the next century.
By 2100, everyday water levels twice as high as those of the last week will transform the nature of the bay's edge, and where we live along it.
And imagine a future Hurricane Isabel blowing in atop a sea level swollen by an additional yard.
The high water set the stage for an eye-opening presentation Tuesday at Salisbury University. Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest hosted a screening of a film - We Are All Smith Islanders - at a forum on global warming.
A rapidly increasing sea level is the most apparent impact on the bay of our warming planet - a warming greatly exacerbated by human burning of fossil fuels.
The carbon dioxide released from coal, oil and natural gas remains in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a greenhouse.
As it warms, ocean water expands, driving up the sea level. Around the bay, the impact is even worse because the land is also sinking, still recovering from being bulged up by the pressure of glaciers to the north thousands of years ago.
Gilchrest, an Eastern Shore Republican, has become a leader in Congress on the need for the United States to join the rest of the world in reducing carbon dioxide.
"We're in a race against time," he said. "The planet is warming, and human energy needs are causing [climate] fluctuations in the last 150 years on a scale greater than anytime in the last 400,000 years."
He was joined by Mike Tidwell, a former journalist who founded the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (www. chesapeakeclimate.org).
It's a nonprofit organization dedicated to finding solutions to global warming at the state and bay-region level.
