By Jim Steele

Salisbury Beach is part of a barrier island in the northeast corner of Massachusetts (Graphic C). It sits between the Atlantic Ocean to the east, extensive marshlands to the west and the Merrimack River to the south (graphic A). Such barrier islands consist of easily eroded unconsolidated sand and gravel.

Growing up just north of Boston, we often visited Salisbury Beach and adjacent Plum Island Beach each summer. As a bad little boy, I was enthralled with catching prehistoric looking Horseshoe Crabs that were common there, but I confess I enjoyed scaring little girls with them. I also noticed the beaches were never exactly the same 2 years in a row, but never gave it much thought. I assumed storms and currents were always constantly eroding or incrementing those beaches.

Salisbury Beach just made headlines a few days ago. Expanding beaches during the 1950s to 1970s had encouraged people to build beach-front homes on this unstable barrier island. But ever since the Blizzard of 1978, Salisbury Beach has been eroding, and protective sand dunes were vanishing. To protect their homes, about 150 residents chipped in to import a half million dollars’ worth of sand from Maine and erect protective “sacrificial” dunes. Those artificial dunes did protect the homes from a storm 3 days later, but their costly sand was almost entirely washed away.

I feel sorry for the owners’ expensive remedies, but like people building on flood plains, they knew they had put themselves in harms’ way. They would always battle the ocean for shoreline.

The dishonesty I hate, is how click-bait media turns this battle with nature into evidence of a climate crisis, while history clearly suggests otherwise.

For example, blaming climate change for making things worse, The Weather Station wrote, scientists say all of it “is likely to get worse due to rising global temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is linked to more intense storms packed with more rain, and more extreme weather in general.” Others claim rising sea levels exacerbated the situation, but there has not been any significant regional rising sea level trend in the last 25 years. (Graphic B)

The media fails to inform the public that the Salisbury Beach region has naturally experienced periods of massive beach erosion since the 1700s, long before rising CO2. The Fort at Salisbury Point was built to protect Newburyport, and manned from 1863 to 1865 during the Civil War. It disappeared shortly afterwards due to beach erosion.

A 2018 study of 100-year shoreline changes along Salisbury Beach does not reveal any trend correlated with rising CO2 (Graphic D). The greatest shoreline extent was seen in 1928 (red line). By 1952, the coastline eroded and moved inland (yellow line). However, by 1978 the coastline expanded again and exceeded the 1928 expanse in the most southern part of Salisbury Beach (green line).

Other researchers mapped shoreline changes as far back as the 1800s (Graphic E). Their research determined the Salisbury Beach coastline had been eroded to its greatest inland extent in 1827 (Graphic E’s red line).

Clearly, the current Salisbury Beach erosion has happened independent of any modern climate change. However, humans may still have a hand in the problem. Salisbury Beach is nourished by sand and sediments transported southward along the coast. To protect Hampton Beach just to the north, jetties were constructed to catch the sand and grow Hampton Beach. But that remedy starves Salisbury Beach of sands that could replenish its shores.

These competing effects of sand transports must be understood to better guide efforts intended to protect Salisbury Beach. Blaming CO2 warming is a distraction. Bad analyses encourage worthless and expensive remedies.