I'm originally from Miami born and raised (Live in SF Now) and I have skin in the game, I own a house in Miami. However this piece is largely fluff and fear mongering, Miami has always flooded, The city of Sweet Water would be completely flooded every few months until they finally put in proper drainage after 20+ years of the same thing. The problem is poorly thought out city planning over the last 40 or so years, not a recent sea level rise.
It's plenty of time if you can admit you have a problem and get started on the planning and adaptation. The trouble is that half of the political spectrum in this country has as one of its dearest beliefs the denial that this problem is occurring. This really interferes with long-term mitigation efforts.
> half of the political spectrum in this country has as one of its dearest beliefs the denial that this problem is occurring
The Guardian article isn't actually talking about the general "problem" of climate change, even though it titled it that way for ideological reasons. Water backing up through storm sewers during high tides is an obvious issue regardless of the underlying long-term cause; it's bad design, and it shouldn't require a belief that climate change is a worldwide problem to understand that your own city's storm water system needs to be redesigned. I'm sure there are plenty of irrational political reasons why Miami hasn't fixed its storm water system, but I doubt that climate change "denial" is significant among them; I expect it's just, well, politics--elected officials don't get votes by forcing the city to make the hard choices that would have to be made to fix the problem.
Pointing out that the current problem exists regardless of the long-term cause is completely rational, but US politics (and no doubt politics in general) is far from rational. The denial half is so deeply invested in its beliefs that it's incapable of doing anything to address any current consequences that might be due to the change they don't believe is happening.
You don't have to believe in climate change to fix Miami's storm water system. But you can't be stuck with a belief system that holds that sea levels aren't rising and that nothing needs to be done to adapt to the sea level rise that has already taken place, because doing something would be an implicit admission that something has happened which you believe hasn't.
I come from "the low lands" in Europe, and trust me when I say this : it took two major disasters to make people redesign the water infrastructure. This occurred in the Netherlands in 1954, and was what created "Rijkswaterstaat" [2] (this is a Dutch ministry, and they're serious assholes to be frank, but without them ...), and the development of the "Delta works" [3].
Incidentally, apparently they won't even be maintained without a major disaster. It's now 2014 and a project to raise the Delta works was scrapped for the funds, which will go to some bank related measure instead (the dykes that form the Delta works are sinking into the ground due to their weight and should be raised to avoid the risk of water spilling over them : if the conditions of 1954 repeat, currently a disaster of about 1/3 the proportion of the 1954 floods would occur. It gets worse every year, and apparently by 2065 the Delta works will no longer provide any defense at all, meaning yearly flooding disasters will start occurring at that point).
Just providing a data point. Sea level rise is not a significant factor for the delta works (rather the standard deviation in average sea level is. In and around the channel there is an average sea level, and you see sea levels up to 6 meters higher than the average in most locations once per decade. A few centimeters don't really change the calculation. Hell, even a meter wouldn't significantly alter the situation. But the dykes are just barely 5.5 meters high anymore, and will fail entirely if water starts spilling over. Meaning once the water level goes more than 10 centimers or so above the top of the dykes, they will most likely fall over. Average sea level rise creates a problem for ground water, but that won't really affect anyone for quite some time. Btw: go to the page of the delta works linked below. Look at those towers. Just think of how much tonnes of water these guys are keeping out, yet those towers, impressive as they are, will fall over (more likely torn to shreds, but ...) in the next decade or two if nothing is done)
In general, I'd look at the Delta works though as an example of how everything can be fixed, but it comes down to this simple fact, and environmentalists won't like it. Humans need to take direct control of the ground water table, by erecting concrete barriers that make it look like the sea level drops several meters from the perspective of inland water tables. Those barriers can also prevent flooding by providing a large coastal basin of water where levels are maintained much lower than sea level (by opening the dykes at ebb and closing them at flood times), where storm floods can drain into. This will destroy fauna that depends on being exposed to waves (I'm sure they can be maintained in a few locations, like "Het Zwin" [1], but they'll no longer dominate the coastline), and will be replaced by inland river-fauna (frankly, I like that much better, but again, environmentalists will object to what amounts to artificial habitats).
A good part of Netherlands is below sea level. Just build dikes like the Dutch, and the problem is solved. But I guess the people in Miami would protest against those dikes, when their houses are no longer water front, but behind a dike.
Dikes won't stop water seeping up through the porous limestone which Miami is built on, nor are they practical for protecting the everglades or any of the existing fresh water and sewerage systems
I think the bigger problem is that the resources for dealing with this sort of catastrophe will be stretched very thin when every coastal city the world over is trying to deal with rising water levels.
There was one in October that made a lot of damage here [1], but also two days ago (albeit not hurricane) there was a storm that flooded large parts of Amsterdam [2] and killed on person. [3]
