TIDES OF CHANGE: The State of the Climate Address

“It is the contrast between the pace at which the physical world is changing and the pace at which the human society is reacting that constitutes the key environmental fact of our time.” 

– Bill McKibben, introduction to 'The End of Nature'

Welcome to the second installment of Tides of Change, encore’s longform series about local effects of climate change. This month we’re taking a frank look at what’s going on in Earth’s changing climate, starting globally and working our way back locally. A state of the climate address, if you will. So, let’s zoom out – all the way out – until our mind’s eye is floating like an astronaut, high above our blue planet. Beautiful, isn’t it? The clouds, the seas, the continents, the polar ice caps (well, what’s left of them, anyways). It’s February 2026. What’s happening right now?

Before we begin, a quick note on where I got this information from. I got it where the rest of the world looks for facts – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC), which is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. Their most recent Assessment Report, the sixth, came out in March of 2023; the seventh report is currently being researched and written. The report summarizes “… the state of knowledge of climate change, its widespread impacts and risks, and climate change mitigation and adaptation,” and is an excellent overview of what’s happening. I also used the latest report from Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme, which came out in late January and is the most up-to-date publication I could find.

Why not use an American source, you may ask? Because these are dark times in America. There isn’t enough space in this article to list all the ways our government has self-sabotaged efforts to mitigate climate disaster, which is why our intern, Danny Crapanzano, is compiling a more comprehensive list (available soon). Scientists have been fired, research organizations have been shut down, information has been censored on government websites. In January, the US pulled out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, making us now the only nation on Earth to not sign the agreement (to be precise, three other nations – Iran, Libya, and Yemen – have signed the agreement, but not ratified it). Just before this story went to press, Lee Zeldin’s EPA announced they would rescind the 2009 endangerment finding, which regulated greenhouse gases as an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act, and underpinned every regulation trying to lower our emissions. So – to Europe we go for facts.

Those facts all point to one unfortunate conclusion: Life on Earth is in serious trouble, it’s our fault, and we’re running out of time to do something about it. I’ll briefly summarize the IPCC report, using their own words:

“Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming… Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase… Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people… Climate change has caused substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater, cryospheric, and coastal and open ocean ecosystems… Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all… The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”

A few statistics may help further elucidate the situation. The newest information available, from the Copernicus report, shows that 2025 was the third hottest year on record globally, and the last three years (2023-2025) were the hottest years measured since record keeping began in 1850. The average global temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period in the last 2000 years. In 2025, the surface air temperatures were above the 1991-2020 average across 91% of the globe. Last February saw the lowest amount of sea ice since satellite observations began in the late 1970s. Together, the last three years averaged 1.5°C hotter than pre-industrial temperatures, the first time that has happened.

This is significant – the 2015 Paris Agreement’s stated goal is to keep global temperatures below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with an understanding that we should really shoot for keeping it below 1.5°C. Right now we’re at 1.4°C, and Copernicus predicts we can expect 1.5°C by the end of this decade – four short years away. But 1.5°C (or a little under 3°F) isn’t that much hotter, is it? Turns out a small change can cause big problems, or as the IPCC puts it, “every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards.” The risks, which include species loss, heat risks to human health, food production impacts (including farm and fishery yields), and extreme weather events (like more intense hurricanes and wildfires) increase with every tick upward the thermometer makes.

It’s also clear what is causing all of this: us.

The report states that “observed increases are… unequivocally caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.” Average annual greenhouse gas emissions during 2010–2019 were higher than in any previous decade on record. 79% of those emissions came from energy, transportation, industry, and building, while the other 21% came from agriculture, forestry, and other land uses. There was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2024 than at any point in the last two million years. We put it there, with the way we generate electricity and get around and eat. The United States is the world’s number two emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China.

So that’s the big picture. But what does it mean for us, in our little community nestled between a mighty river and the rising sea? For answers to that, I turned to Roger Shew, a semi-retired senior lecturer of geology at UNCW and one of the most trusted voices in local environmental circles on this topic. Shew is tall, white bearded and soft-spoken with a native Brunswick County accent; over coffee in the university’s student union, we talk about how climate change-driven sea level rise is affecting our peninsula.

Wilmington, Shew tells me, is a compound flood zone, meaning we have multiple ways we can flood. “We’re blessed,” Shew says with an ironic chuckle, “we’ve got five ways to flood.” Those are local storm events, rainfall upstream, storm surge, sea level rise, and high tide flooding. Sea level rise and high tide flooding are the two tied most closely to climate change, but they’re also related to our deepening of the Cape Fear River – something Shew says we can look at now to visualize how rising sea levels will further affect our area.

In 1871, the natural shallow depth of the Cape Fear River was 12 feet. As ships – and our appetites for what they carry – have grown larger, we’ve deepened the natural channel.

Currently the Army Corps of Engineers maintains a depth of 42 ft from the river’s mouth to the port of Wilmington 28 miles upstream; attempts to dredge to 47 ft have recently been paused by the NC Division of Coastal Management thanks to strong opposition from local environmental groups. The last major dredging project was completed in 2005, and deepened the river from 38 ft to the current 42 ft. Shew pulls up aerial photographs taken in 2003 which show Town Creek (near Snow’s Cut and Orton plantation, on the western bank of the river). The creek’s banks are green with cypress trees. What deepening the river does, he tells me, is the same thing that occurs when sea level rises – salinity from the ocean moves further upriver and changes the vegetation types that can grow. He pulls up another slide of the same part of Town Creek, but from 2023. The difference is stark – where twenty years before there were verdant stands of living cypress, now are a few dead stumps and a field of dull brown marsh grass. This same process is now moving upriver, he tells me. “And of course they can only go so far. At some point in time many of the tidal freshwater wetlands and associated hardwood habitats will be lost. What you’ll end up with is marsh grass.” On the Cape Fear alone there are over 1000 acres that are expected to make this change.

He pulls up another slide, taken near the Battleship North Carolina, showing a car on a road, stranded bumper-deep in white-capped water. This was taken during a perigeal flooding event in January of 2022, he tells me, which is when the moon is closest to the Earth, causing a higher tide than usual. This event registered on the tide gauge at the Memorial Bridge as 2.35 feet above the mean highest high water. That aligns with what local sea level rise is predicted to be by 2060 or 2070, meaning this is what this road will look like every day at high tide in thirty-five short years.

We can pretty much expect to see 1 foot of sea level rise by 2050, Shew tells me, a prediction shared by NOAA and the Science Panel of the Coastal Resources Commission. “We can expect 2 feet by 2070, and 3 feet or more by 2100.” It’s important to point out that this is the intermediate scenario predicted by the models – the high-end predictions of sea level rise, assuming we continue emitting greenhouse gasses as we are today with no change, could be as much as 7 feet by 2100. Even in the intermediate scenario of 3 feet, Eastern North Carolina can expect to lose around 1500 square miles of land – just under a million acres, an area the size of Mecklenburg, Wake, and New Hanover counties combined – in the coastal plain, much of it in the northeastern part of the state. “Our red wolves will be in trouble when that occurs,” says Shew. He’s also quick to point out that a foot of vertical sea level rise equates to hundreds of feet lost laterally.

“We’re already seeing things we can’t ignore,” Shew tells me. “We should be planning now.” Our infrastructure, for instance, will have to be retrofitted or moved to keep it out of reach of corrosive salt water. How many pipes does our public utility have running under streets that will soon be inundated, and what will happen when the sea pours into those manholes? Cape Fear Public Utility Authority is building their new Southside water treatment plant so that it’s above the 500 year flood plain. “That’s good,” Shew says, “but we’ve had three 1000 year flood events in the last few years.” Speaking of drinking water, I learn that as of last September, Wrightsville Beach is now getting their water from CFPUA. Why? Because the aquifer they previously pulled from is becoming more saline. Salt water is creeping in as the sea rises.

Shew tells me that humanity has averaged adding around 2.6 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere every year for the last decade. Bill McKibben, a writer who helped bring the public eye to this issue in the late eighties with his book End of Nature, has been campaigning for years to keep the level of CO2 in the atmosphere below 350 parts per million. But that ship has sailed.

“I tell people we need to shoot for 450,” Shew says. “If we can keep it at 450 or less, we’ll stop short of the 2°C warning from the Paris Accord. Right now we’re going to fly past that. We’re at 427 right now [our interview took place in mid- January 2026]. This year, by the time you’re doing the mid-part of your story, we’ll be at 429. Though CO2 is a global issue, if we go backwards with our energy use to more coal and with increasing demands for electricity from data centers, while also doing away with the endangerment finding, we will contribute to even higher values and more rapid increases than now. The world is becoming more middle class and demanding more resources. We need to be good citizens and demand less pollution that leads to climate change and poor health, not more.”

Stay tuned.