High seas eroding Texas coastline

Several neighboring houses in this sleepy coastal town will meet the same fate this very day.

Forty years ago, 200 feet of sandy beach buffered Beach Drive from the sea. But today, the surf runs freely between the pilings and over the remains of concrete foundations.

The erosion has become so severe that Texas declared the property a public beach and gave the owners a choice: Take state money to cover the cost of moving the house or go to court.

Another stretch of Beach Drive in the same condition has qualified for a federal buyout. Eventually, all 37 homes on the gulf side of the road will be removed or torn down.

Given the choices, and the expense of buying new property for the aging beach house, Watson's family decided to sell the home only a few days before to a Houston company that bought several on the block.

"It's sad," Watson said. Before him lay the mangled sheet-metal remnants of a bulkhead that was overwhelmed by the surf. "But this is a harsh environment. You've got the sun, the sand and the water, and I think the highest point out here is 6 feet high. It's really a war of attrition."

Beach Drive lost this war with nature, an early victim of rising seas and global warming and in many ways a harbinger of the effects of climate change on Texas.

Global warming often is associated with exotic places. The United Nations chose the Indonesian island of Bali as the setting of its international climate change summit that begins Monday. And to much of the world, melting polar ice caps, receding Alpine glaciers and the rapid decline of polar bear populations represent the most visible and immediate effects.

But climate change also has reached temperate Texas. Rising seas and sinking land have created some of the worst erosion rates in the world along the state's Gulf Coast. Extreme weather, which many scientists believe will become the norm because of global warming, has produced torrential storms and severe droughts in recent years.