CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS, RETIRED
FISHERMAN: Got you this time.
REPORTER:
Did you get one?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Yeah. They are little though. Right
there, that’s the spot.
REPORTER:
Hey!
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: A little bigger.
REPORTER:
What have you got?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Another sea trout, look at that?
REPORTER:
Yeah.
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Now they get this big so he's a little
baby.
REPORTER:
Right, so that’s a little baby.
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Be free!
REPORTER:
How long have you been fishing on these waters?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Well I grew up here. I got my first
boat when I was 10 years old, so I'm 67 now, long time, long enough to see
changes.
REPORTER:
And when did you first notice that things were starting to change?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Really in the middle 1970s when
I saw barnacles going up seawalls and pilings, 'cause they don't grow where there's no water. And
then 15 years ago it started to flood and it wasn't
very often but then it was more and more and more, now it's flooding all the
time.
REPORTER:
Do you think you and the people in your community will be climate change
refugees?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Oh, absolutely. If the water comes up
where do you go? Unless we want to live on a raft or something, I don't think
so. Everybody's going to have to move.
REPORTER:
And by everybody?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Oh, it's not a small amount of people.
It could be millions.
Because
Captain Dan doesn’t exactly live in a small fishing village…. He lives in one
of the biggest cities in America: Miami.
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: That's an original sea wall it's 80
years old.
REPORTER:
And you're saying that the water would have been lower than that?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Lower than that at high tide.
REPORTER:
At high tide?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: At high tide.
REPORTER:
Why do you think people are still building here?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: They're in denial. All these people are in
denial. You would think people that have this much money, that are so rich,
would understand what's happening with climate change at Miami Beach. They
don't. They don't care, I guess. Nice houses, huh?
Dan
also has a nice house here, but he thinks the warning signs are overwhelming
and he’s doing something about it.
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: I never thought I'd have to leave
here. It's a great house.
REPORTER:
So what's happening with it?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Well, sea level rise is happening with
it and I don't want to have to go through the issues that we have on Miami
Beach, so it's for sale.
REPORTER:
You're selling this house that you built.
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: Right.
REPORTER:
To move out of here because you're worried about climate change?
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: I'm worried about climate change, I'm
worried about the sea level coming up and me having a life that I don't like,
so I'm going to sell the house. Let's go and you can see what I'm leaving.
REPORTER:
Thank you.
CAPTAIN DAN KIPNIS: I have people telling me it's a bit of
a drastic move. In my mind, it's not. I'm being timely about this where I have
time to actually get out and still be able to afford
to go somewhere else and do something else. And this was my office, it’s
all bare walls right now but it used to be covered with world records, mounted
fish, trophies from fishing tournaments, my whole life was in this room, it’s
all in boxes in storage now. It hurts me to leave here. I built everything
here, to stay here, to live out my life here the next 20 years until I die. And
I'm not going to be able to do it and it pisses me off. I'm not a happy camper.
For
Dan, climate change is a pressing issue, but right now, it is not for President
Trump and Trump’s not alone. The Governor of Florida, Rick Scott, refuses to
comment on the issue and has reportedly banned parts of his office from using
the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in official correspondence.
Governor Scott declined to speak to Dateline for this story.
A
study published last year found that Florida has more people vulnerable to
climate change than any other US state, but still some locals are sceptical.
MAN: I’m not sold on climate change. I think there’s
always going to be big storms, I’m not ready to say it’s because of climate
change or global warming or anything that we’re doing particularly.
WOMAN: I do believe that climate change is just a phase
that the earth goes through to cleanse itself.
MAN 2: Up until it’s proven I think it’s more of a natural
thing.
MAN 3: I don’t really care about climate change.
REPORTER:
Harold, good to meet you.
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS,UNIVERSITY OF
MIAMI: Jan, it’s a pleasure.
REPORTER:
Let’s take a tour of Miami.
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS: How about it.
University
of Miami professor Harold Wanless has been tracking
the tides here for decades.
REPORTER:
How long have you been trying to warn people about the rising sea levels here
in Miami?
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS, : My
first talk is, was, I know I gave one in 1981.
REPORTER:
In 1981!
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS: Yes.
In
the last decade alone flooding in Miami Beach has increased by 400 per cent.
The city has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to stem the problem.
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS: This road has been raised about
two feet. You can see. I can go down here and this is,
this is would be the sidewalk level of the old place, okay? And so they raised it up where you are.
REPORTER:
And is this enough of a raise do you think, to stem the water?
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS: Well we are going to have
another two feet of rise according to US government projections, probably by
2048 or maybe earlier.
REPORTER:
So they're going to have to raise this again?
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS: And again, and again and
it's going to get faster and faster.
These
predictions from Florida International University show what Miami will look
like over the next few decades, in 150 years only 3% of it’s
land – according to the study - will remain. Predicting sea level rise is still
an active area of research meaning some scientists would argue that it may not
rise this quickly or by this much. But Professor Harold Wanless
says even with conservative estimates the future for Miami does not good.
REPORTER:
Do you think this city as we know it, will be here in 100 years?
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS: It won't be here in 100 years.
It will either be a few stragglers trying to hang on to a city that has no, no
infrastructure, no fresh water, no sewerage facilities or it will abandoned completely. Well here we are, there’s one
more property we should probably look at here.
REPORTER:
Alright.
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS: It’s quite vulnerable. So this is Palm Beach and this is Mar-a-Lago, one of Trump's
residences.
It’s
President Trump’s pride and joy. The sprawling estate of Mar-a-Lago has become
a de facto White House.
REPORTER:
So will this place exist as we know it in 100 years?
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS: If I'm right, this will be
something you can go snorkel on. It will be quite famous - it will be a former
president's mansion.
REPORTER:
It will be a former president's mansion, in Atlantis.
PROFESSOR HAROLD WANLESS: In Atlantis, right. This will no
longer Palm Beach, this will be Atlantis 2. This will be a very popular dive
site.
Trump
has called climate change “bullshit”, “a myth”, “a very expensive hoax”. He’s
pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement and he’s cut funding to the Federal
Environmental Protection Agency. Trump’s Environment spokesperson did not
respond to requests by Dateline to take part in this story. Yet, it’s Trump’s presidency
that will oversee the relocation of America’s first ever climate change
refugees.
It’s an autumn
afternoon in Louisiana.
CHANTELL COMARDELLE, FORMER RESIDENT: Look, you’ve
got a friend, you didn't think you were gonna have a
friend. How are you?... We're at my grandma and grandpa's house on the
island. We are all down here celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary.
REPORTER:
Your grandparents have been here all their lives, right?
CHANTELL COMARDELLE: All their lives. They're 90 and
91.
REPORTER:
Hi, thanks for having me.
This
is one of the last family milestones the Billiots
will celebrate here.
FAMILY: Happy anniversary!
The Billiots have a house in Louisiana's Isle de Jean Charles
that for seven decades has been a home for their sprawling family.
WOMAN: I am not touching the fish.
BOYO BILLIOT, FORMER RESIDENT: Well you don’t need to
touch it, you let him touch at?
But after
years of watching the land around them disappear they’ve had to turn to the US
government for help, last year the Obama administration granted them $48
million. It was the first time federal tax money had
been granted to move an entire community reeling from the effects of climate
change. That is why the residents of Isle de Jean Charles were dubbed America’s
first climate change refugees.
CHANTELL COMARDELLE: Of course nobody wants to leave
you know but I think they understand that for safety, it's for their safety.
This
Island is about to stop being home to the Billiots.
They are Biloxi Chitimachi Choctaw Indians whose
ancestors moved here in the 1830s after being forced from their lands. For 200
years the Billiots have lived, loved and died here.
BOYO BILLIOT: Well, I was born in 53.
GRANDFATHER: When I was a kid, I used to go walk over
there. It had marsh land.
REPORTER:
So it was marsh land?
GRANDFATHER: You can walk over there. It was hard but now,
nothing but water on both sides of the island, same way.
Isle de Jean Charles is sinking! Since
1955 the island has lost more than 98% of its land. What you’re seeing is the
2% that’s left. And as the land disappeared so too did the people.
REPORTER:
So there were about 150 families here when you were growing up?
BOYO BILLIOT: When I was growing up, yeah.
REPORTER:
And now there's like...
BOYO BILLIOT: 25.
Boyo,
Wen’s son left the island in the 1980s.
REPORTER:
This place right here was where your house used to be.
BOYO BILLIOT: Yeah, where the, where they cut from right
there to by that tree over there with that other tree.
REPORTER:
And what happened in '85?
BOYO BILLIOT: Hurricane took it, Hurricane Juan and we got
flooded twice in the same year. In August, we has
just finished fixing up the whole house and then October that’s when Hurricane juan hit us, I said that’s enough.
REPORTER:
Yeah, final straw.
BOYO BILLIOT: Final straw. We ain't
spending no more money for nothing.
Just
down the road from the Biliots lives Chris Brunet.
For years his family has resisted leaving the island.
CHRIS BRUNET, RESIDENT: We go back here on Isle De Jean
Charles around seven or eight generations.
REPORTER:
Because your parents left you this house, do you feel on some level that you
would also like to leave something there that
you can pass down to future generations?
CHRIS BRUNET: Yeah, I have my niece and nephew that live
with me over here and so whatever is over here it would be theirs. But then by
the time they would be my age, that's a great uncertainty you know I could see
10 years down the road Isle De Jean Charles will still be here but then another
40 years after that?
For
Chris, leaving is less about his family history and more about his family's
future.
CHRIS BRUNET: Looking at the difference now you see all
the trees and you don't see them anymore.
JULIETTE BRUNET, RESIDENT: It was so much prettier here.
Chris’s
niece Juliette will be the last of the Brunets to grow up on the island.
JULIETTE BRUNET: If we stay here maybe, his generation it
will be okay for it but not for like me and my brother. Me and my brother, it
will probably land will be gone 'cause look at that
picture here, you can see how much land they had before and, now, they barely
have any. It’s kinda sad because my whole
family lived here and, like, having to move away from live where all my family
lived is kind of hard but you've got to do what you've
got to do.
REPORTER:
And so how far is this location from the island?
ALBERT NAQUIN, CHIEF: Probably about 35, 40 miles I guess.
Give or take.
Albert
Naquin is the chief of Isle de Jean Charles, he’s in charge of the relocation
project.
REPORTER:
So what are we looking at here?
ALBERT NAQUIN: We're looking at the new site for our
new community.
REPORTER:
And what kind of things were you looking for in a new property?
ALBERT NAQUIN: The highest property we could find in Terrebonne Parish. So this area is
out of the flood zone so that's what we're looking for.
REPORTER:
And how big is it all up?
ALBERT NAQUIN: It's probably right there around 500 acres.
What
you’re seeing here is precious in Louisiana. On average, the state loses a
football field of land every hour. Decades of dredging, manmade levees and
naturally occurring storms are eroding the state’s coastline. Scientists say,
this is exacerbated by rising seas levels caused by man-made climate change.
But a recent Yale University study found that in this part of Louisiana, almost
40% of people don’t believe that to be true.
REPORTER:
What do you think is causing all of the problems that
you're facing with the environment on the island?
ALBERT NAQUIN: It’s washing away.
REPORTER:
Do you believe it has anything to do with climate change or with global warming
and warming sea levels?
ALBERT NAQUIN: sort of yeah, but not completely. I mean
climate change is here but I don't believe that the
island was affected that much by climate change as we know it today.
REPORTER:
But people would point to you guys and say that you're ground zero of climate
change.
ALBERT NAQUIN: Well, maybe we are. But I don't know if we
really are. We see the changes as, as manmade and Mother Nature together that
rooted up all the land around us. Okay.
REPORTER:
Do you think if Donald Trump was to visit do you think that he would come
around?
ALBERT NAQUIN: I think he would. Think his heart in the
right place, it's just that he's hard headed like I am. It's hard to, to kind
of change, make changes in what you see until you actually
see it.
If
seeing is believing, then President Trump should visit Kivalina, Alaska. 130km
above the Arctic Circle, Kivalina is in a region that is warming twice as fast
as anywhere else on Earth. Like Isle de Jean Charles, Kivalina is predicted to
soon be inundated by water. Unlike the people of that island, the people here
are stuck. For decades the local Inupiat people have been pleading for help to
move their community.
ALEXIS HAWLEY, RESIDENT: Welcome to Kivalina.
REPORTER:
Hi, how are you doing?
ALEXIS HAWLEY: Good, how about you?
REPORTER:
Nice to meet you.
ALEXIS HAWLEY: Nice to meet you too.
REPORTER:
I’m Jan.
ALEXIS HAWLEY: I’m Alexis.
The
year Alexis Hawley was born, 1992, was the first time Kivalina voted to
relocate.
REPORTER:
This is your home hey?
ALEXIS HAWLEY: Yeah.
She’s
now 25 years old and the village is still here.
ALEXIS HAWLEY: It's a race against time, race against the
ice melting. There's no telling how fast it will go away anymore, how long it
will stay.
REPORTER:
Have things gotten worse here in your lifetime?
ALEXIS HAWLEY: The most reliable animal that we rely
on for food is the seal and we haven't been getting much of that over the last
three years due to the ice going away quickly than usual.
REPORTER:
Are you worried about that?
ALEXIS HAWLEY: Yeah, I'm worried about it 'cause I can't go without eating
seal. I was raised on it, you can't buy it at stores. You know, we make it, we
make it.
ALEXIS HAWLEY: We're at the Kivalina native store where we
shop for groceries, where we get all our fresh produce and store bought like
potatoes and fruit.
REPORTER:
Where does all this stuff get brought up from?
ALEXIS HAWLEY: From Seattle, this is the only fresh
produce we get. We mainly buy like side dishes like rice and mashed potatoes
and then 'cause the meat is so expensive we like to
hunt for our own meat.
REPORTER:
Right. And if climate affects hunting and fishing and you don't hunt as much
and you don't fish as much but you can't afford to come to a place like this,
what happens?
ALEXIS HAWLEY: We'll starve.
Kivalina
prides itself on being a sufficient community, but it’s been feeling the
effects of shorter hunting seasons for almost two decades. It is becoming
increasingly reliant on food flown in from outside.
COLLEEN SWAN, RESIDENT: Things started to become chaotic because
the ice was not forming and we need the ice in order
to hunt. During the winter the ice becomes part of our landscape and we set up
camps out there, we go whaling, seal hunting but in early 2000s beginning we
noticed that the ice just wasn't forming to the thickness that it once did.
Colleen
Swan is a Kivalina elder. For years she’s been fighting to relocate her
community.
REPORTER:
Where do you see Kivalina in twenty years, ideally for you?
COLLEEN SWAN: On higher ground.
REPORTER:
So, not in this location?
COLLEEN SWAN: No, this is not a good place to be, it’s
never been a good place to be. Our elders knew that from the beginning, this
was just a seasonal hunting ground for them.
That
was until 1905 when the US government built a school on the island and forced
the community here permanently.
COLLEEN SWAN: They were forced to bring their children to
school so if they didn't they would either be fined or imprisoned. It was an
invasion, it was an invasion by the government.
Now
the same government that forced Kivalina’s people here won’t help them leave.
Kivalina, like Isle de Jean Charles is sinking, but this island has been given
no federal funding to relocate.
REPORTER:
How confident are you that government is going to come to your aide?
COLLEEN SWAN: I'm not confident at all because nothing is
more important than their bottom line so we get pushed
aside. Our issues get pushed aside.
REPORTER:
Are you less hopeful now that Trump is president?
COLLEEN SWAN: He is already taking actions to take funding
away from what existed before from previous presidents.
For
Washington the arctic has long been out of sight, out of mind. A US government
report from back in 2003 warned 180 native Alaskan villages were also at risk
of flooding and erosion due, in part, to rising temperatures. But in 2017 it is
not just remote villages like Kivalina struggling with the impacts of climate
change, making it harder and harder for governments to ignore.
COLLEEN SWAN: Our only hope for a better life in the near future is to rely on the private sector.
Government is not going to help - they're going to keep debating. For us the
debate about climate change was over a long time ago and maybe there was never
even a debate. When you live with the reality of things, there's no debate,
there really isn't.
Colleen
Swan may very well live out her lifetime on the island ,but
the majority of Kivalina’s residents almost certainly won’t. That’s because of
the 400 people who live here - half - are under the age of 18.
COLLEEN SWAN: From year to year something different
happens? Every time I think that we have experienced just about all the changes
that will happen something different happens the next year.
What
2018 holds for Kivalina, Isle de Jean Charles and Miami is uncertain. What is
certain is that climate change is not a top priority for the Trump
Administration, despite the small but growing number of Americans dealing with
a rapidly changing environment. And the fallout could likely turn what
President Trump believes to be a “very expensive hoax” into an even more
expensive reality.
reporter
jeannette francis
story
producer
lanneke hargreaves
camera/editor
adam rosenberg
editors
micah mcgown
simon phegan
david potts
title
music
vicki Hansen
24th October 2017