Justin Gillis

The article “Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries” written by Justin Gillis is a pretty frightening title that raises a lot of questions. One of those questions is, who is Justin Gillis. Well Justin is an award winning reporter that works for the New York Times and has an avid interest in climate change which stemmed from an interesting experience that was recounted in his interview in Columbia Journalism Review. The interviewer asks, “How did you become interested in climate change?” To which Justin responds, “It was a direct consequence of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship I did during 2004-2005 academic year, where you take classes at MIT and Harvard. I was covering genetics and biotechnology for The Washington Post
But when I got there, no one could talk about anything but climate and energy. So I started taking classes and the more I learned, the more I thought to myself, “This is the biggest problem we have—bigger than global poverty. Why am I not working on it?” From there, the question was, how do I get myself into a position to work on the problem?” (Brainard 2012) In the first line of “Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries” it describes how flooding is becoming worse and more frequent due to human produced greenhouse emissions. These emissions are so bad that if we stopped emitting them, scientists think that sea levels could even begin to fall. The article continues by describing tidal floods as “increasingly routine” (Gillis 2016) which is particularly frightening as natural disasters should be anything but routine. But the article then starts to lessen the fear tactic as it explains that these floods only produce about 2 feet of water which is not going to drown most adults. But unfortunately it does drown plants, trees and clogs street drains. In some extreme cases it blocks off some island communities by submerging the roads that
The quote states “I think we can definitely be confident that sea-level rise is going to continue to accelerate if there’s further warming, which inevitably there will be.” (Gillis 2016) Yet another scientist thinks that if we don’t reduce our greenhouse gas emissions there will be dire consequences (a seemingly running theme in this article). In an effort to back this up with some more evidence, the article discusses a group in Princeton, N.J., Climate Central that calculated “roughly three-quarters of the tidal flood days now occurring in towns along the East Coast would not be happening in the absence of the rise in the sea level caused by human emissions.” (Gillis 2016) Again raising the question as to why global warming hasn’t been addressed by the government now or in the past but I digress. The article continues by stating that the rise of the sea level doesn’t really contribute to the, “huge disastrous storm surges accompanying hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy.” (Gillis 2016) But that is more contributes to those annoying floods that were mentioned earlier. For some perspective on how much has changed in the last few decades, a tide gauge measured 32 days of flooding in Annapolis between 1955 and 1964 while in 2005 to 2014 that jumped to 394 days of flooding. The new research was led by Robert E. Kopp, an earth