Virginia is headed for an iceberg. And Skip Stiles says what to do about it, and how to pay for the consequences, could make the current deadlock over transportation funding look like a diner discussion over how big a tip to leave.

Stiles heads up Wetlands Watch, a Norfolk-based environmental group that has been calling attention to rising sea levels. But he does not resemble the conservative caricature of a granola-munching tree-spiker in Birkenstocks. The former legislative director of the House Science and Technology Committee speaks with an engineer's clipped precision when he explains why Virginia is getting wet around the ankles (you may have read his recent Commentary column on this very topic):

First: Fourteen thousand years ago, give or take, glaciers covered much of the northern U.S.; ocean levels were 120 feet lower than they are now, and Virginia's eastern coastline was 60 miles further out. Time passed. Glaciers retreated. Water ran downhill, and the oceans rose. Not only that: As the glaciers to the north shrank, the geologic plate on which Virginia sits gradually tilted like a teeter-totter, and the land mass we're sitting on ever so slowly began to sink.

Second: The climate is getting warmer. On that, everyone agrees. (Whether global warming is man-made, wholly natural, or a mix of both is largely irrelevant to this topic.) Warm oceans expand. The net effect is that sea levels are rising off Virginia's coast at a rate roughly twice as fast as elsewhere around the world. Estimates vary from 4.2 millimeters a year (16 inches over the next century) to three feet over the next century. But NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, and a host of other scientific bodies all agree the water's going up, not down.

SO WHAT?

During the next few decades higher sea levels likely will catch Virginia off guard in a thousand different ways. There will be big ones -- such as when a major hurricane rips through Virginia Beach, which a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development lists as the 10th-most-vulnerable city -- in the world -- to catastrophic damage. And there will be small ones, like overcrowded beaches: A 2-foot sea-level rise would move the water line 200 feet further inland. Better buy a smaller blanket.

Higher sea levels mean higher tides during storm surges. Already, major insurance companies are refusing to write policies in many parts of the eastern half of the Old Dominion, and homeowners are raising their houses off their foundations -- with federal money (your tax dollars at work!).

Higher sea levels also mean higher water further inland all the time: Marshland will disappear under water; dry land will turn marshy; groundwater will become brackish; rivers and streams will grow saltier. Freshwater fish could have a hard time of it to the east.

Rising sea levels also could impose major civil-engineering headaches. Bridges in eastern Virginia, for instance, might have to be raised -- along with the roads leading up to them on each side. Virginia's commercial ports and Naval shipyards will have to adjust as well -- at a cost reaching into the billions.

Then there is the question of development: At what point, and at what political cost, do localities tell landowners in low-lying areas that they are free to build all the homes and shopping centers they want -- but city or county leaders won't lay any water or sewer lines because the land will be too squishy three or four decades from now?

AND THERE WILL be dilemmas of intermediate concern. Norfolk is looking forward to a new 7.4-mile light-rail system that should start ferrying people around downtown in 2010. The $232-million project -- funded by federal, state, and local money -- could carry up to 12,000 passengers a day. But projections show that during big weather events, parts of it would lie underwater. Oops.

In an unintended but exquisite bit of irony, the light-rail system is named . . . The Tide.

Virginia can do one of two things about all of this. The state's leaders can ignore it -- saying in effect what retired Horn Harbor waterman Sheddie Armistead told the Daily Press: "I'll be gone then, partner, so it doesn't matter." Or the state can start planning now for necessary adjustments to the inevitable, recognizing -- as Stiles wrote in this newspaper on June 1 -- that "the sooner we start, the less it is going to cost."

Seems like an easy choice. Stiles has been up in the crow's nest yelling about an iceberg dead ahead. If Virginia doesn't listen, we're sunk.

. . .

In a recent column, I wrote that three years ago the Templeton Foundation made a call for research proposals on intelligent design but never received any. Pamela Thompson, Templeton's vice president for communications, says a quotation from Templeton senior vice president Charles Harper in The New York Times on which the assertion was based is "total fiction." She stresses that Templeton does not support the theory of intelligent design. Thanks to alert reader Todd Wilson for calling this to my attention; I'm grateful for the opportunity to correct a mistake.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.
Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.