Climate change poses increasing threat for dead as cemeteries flood - USA TODAY
Climate change poses increasing threat for dead as cemeteries flood
Climate change is un-burying graves. It's an expensive, 'traumatic,' confounding problem.
Dinah Voyles Pulver
USA TODAY
A delicate hand points heavenward on the carved headstone marking the grave of Sarah Ewen Stewart, “at rest” in her scenic island location on Florida’s Gulf Coast for more than 145 years.
The stone, tilted over time in the Cedar Key Cemetery, shows Sarah was born in 1809, at the dawn of the 19th century, when a flurry of inventions were about to launch the world’s industrial revolution. The first steam locomotive was patented in the U.S. the year she was born.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.