SAN FRANCISCO — Major U.S. coastal cities, including Washington, D.C. and Wilmington, North Carolina, have already slipped past a sea level rise-related “tipping point,” and into a new era of increasingly common and damaging coastal flooding events, a new study found.
Other cities along the East and Gulf Coasts are following close behind, with the majority of coastal areas in the U.S. expected to see 30 or more days of “nuisance-level flooding” each year by 2050, regardless of how significantly countries cut emissions of the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming, according to the study.