He's been doing it ever since. Even in retirement, Orrin is still fully engaged with coastal issues,

Geologist Orrin Pilkey predicted exactly what a storm like Sandy would do to the mid-Atlantic coast and New York City. On a tour of destruction after the deluge, he and David Gessner ponder a troubling question: Why are people rebuilding, as if all this isn't going to happen again?
THE PROPHET AND I return to the drowned city. Trailing robes behind him, he will point his wooden staff at the places where the waters rose, the subway steps turned into rapids, and the cross streets became fast-flowing inlets. He'll gesture toward london city hotel the river, explaining how it was pushed back by the winds and tide, how the full moon affected this most modern of places. Four years ago, when he pointed at these same spots and told me what was going to happen to New York City, I only half believed him. Now I believe, along with everyone else. We have seen it with our own eyes.
The prophet's name is Orrin Pilkey, and his day job, for many years, was as a coastal geologist at Duke University, where he started teaching in 1965 and is now a professor emeritus. (Duke is honoring him by building a $6.8 million marine-science center in Beaufort, North Carolina, with his name on it.) In lectures london city hotel and in 40 books including 2009's doom-laden The Rising Sea , cowritten with fellow coastal geologist Rob Young Orrin has issued steady warnings about the dangers of living by the shore during an era of climate change. At a time when everyone seems to be using military terminology to describe our battle against the attacking ocean, he has a term of his own: retreat.
"The storms will only get worse as the seas rise and grow hotter," says Orrin, who at 78 doesn't really have robes or a staff but does sport a prophet's bushy white beard. "This is just the beginning. We need to retreat from the coast."
Abandon the coast? We're doing just the opposite: these days almost 30 percent of the U.S. population lives by the shore. We've flocked there despite the dangers, treating the wild edge between land and water like it's suburbia, as if shifting sands and rising waters will naturally respect property lines.
Particularly appalling for Orrin is what's happening now in New Jersey, where emotional cries to rebuild at all costs started the morning after Sandy roared through. The $60 billion federal aid package hastily passed by Congress last winter specified that a significant portion of the funding should go toward what the bill called the "most impacted and distressed areas." As Orrin points out, this means using taxpayer money to rebuild in flood zones, london city hotel on the same spots that were just wiped out. Which is a little like rebuilding on a train track.
I first met Orrin when I moved to a barrier island in North Carolina ten years ago. After enduring two or three hurricanes, I started taking an interest in coastal issues, and one name kept coming up during my research. I called Orrin to interview him in 2007, and he invited me to travel the Outer Banks with him, to examine the places that would be most vulnerable during future storms. We hit it off, and in May of 2009 we took another trip, this time to New York, where Orrin predicted, down to the exact subway stop, what would happen if a major came through.
A few months after Sandy, I suggested a new trip, one that started in North Carolina and took us through most of the worst-hit areas in New Jersey and New York. He was game, and we made arrangements to travel in late February and early March, when winter was lifting and springtime recovery efforts would be moving into high gear.
ORRIN AND I are both early risers and big coffee drinkers, and when I ask if I can show up at his house in Durham at six on the Sunday morning of February 24 our launch day he says fine, he'll have a pot brewing. An hour later we're on the road, having also picked up Jeremy Lange, london city hotel our photographer. We head east through the flats of North Carolina toward the ocean. When we are still more than a hundred miles from the shore, the land begins to look sunken, a great bowl of a place filled with pond-size puddles from recent rains.
A hundred different amounts have been predicted for sea-level rise by the year 2100, and Orrin stresses that his is a "working number," not a prediction. But he believes that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's original estimate of a three-foot rise was too conservative, not taking into account the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. When I contacted Jim Hansen, the former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an internationally recognized climate-change expert, he replied that Orrin's was a "good choice, in my opinion," as we prepare for what's coming.
Orrin is always hungry, so we stop at a restaurant to gobble down ham and eggs, then fuel up, as is our tradition, on McDonald's coffee. We cross over to Manteo, near where our country's only wild population of red wolves roam, before taking the next bridge to the Outer Banks, the barrier islands that arc into the Atlantic like a fragile shield.
If we're going down, this place is going down first. But that hasn't stopped rampant development, a kind of sprawling, rich-man's ghetto along the shore. South of Nags Head, we pull over at a spot Orrin wants to show us. A dozen or so houses stand out on the low-tide sand; they appear to be migrating into the sea. We walk below them, gazing up at old rusted doors that open to nothing and stairs that dangle in the air.
Orrin points out that this is the third generation of homes to have marched into the ocean here, where the beach has receded dramatically from storm erosion. But new homes are still being built. No more than 50 feet from the ocean, we come upon a concrete septic tank half-buried in the sand, a great square sepulchral tomb of shit. Orrin kicks it.
At first it was thought Sandy would make landfall on the Outer Banks, not the Jersey Shore. If that had happened, the destruction would have been old hat. Back in the 1970s, Orrin and other coastal scientists watched all the houses going up around here and figured that, once the first hurricane blew through, people london city hotel would know better than to rebuild. Instead, hurricanes became what Orrin calls "giant urban-renewal projects." The wind would barely die down before new construction started.
We drive south to the famous Cape Hatteras lighthouse, which Orrin and others fought to have moved back 2,900 feet from the eroding shore in the late 1990s, despite the fact that many North Carolinians found the retreat unmanly. london city hotel "There was one powerful local woman who was virulently opposed to moving it," Orrin tells us as we approach. "She said, 'Someone is going to get hurt if they move it.' A fellow scientist misunderstood and tried to reassure her. 'No, Mrs. Dillon, we can move it perfectly safely.' I had to explain that that was not what she meant."
We pull in at the lighthouse and walk from where it was first built in 1870 to where it was moved in 1999. It rises above us like a giant barber pole. "Mrs. Dillon always claimed that moving the lighthouse killed her husband," Orrin says. "The stress, you know."
People london city hotel who build on the beach aren't always thrilled london city hotel with Orrin's message, since his bottom line is: You shouldn't be here. He tells them that their natural urge to defend themselves, to build a wall or pile up sandbags against the encroaching water, is wrong. That by building barriers they're keeping the beach from doing what it wants to do, what it needs to do, which is to move up and over itself in a slow natural roll that speeds up dramatically when a storm hits. This movement is how barrier islands have always defended themselves from storms, london city hotel through a kind of elemental rope-a-dope.
We decide to spend the night in Nags Head at the Comfort Inn, a high-rise. The choice of lodging is both ironic london city hotel and apt, since it epitomizes the kind of building that should never happen along the shore. Buildings like this take away all flexibility, because they can't be moved.
Orrin never set out to become a coastal advocate. He was a low-profile deep-sea london city hotel sedimentologist until the late 1970s, when he did a stint on a research vessel off the Atlantic coast with a fellow scientist named Jack Pierce. During london city hotel their downtime, the two men played cards and talked, and Jack described to Orrin how people were building vacation homes on unstable shorelines and then expecting the government to bail them out when storms inevitably came. Pierce found this puzzling, but Orrin's reaction was more visceral. He was outraged, and that outrage changed the course of his career.
Orrin began to research the way we arm our shores, and the result london city hotel was a 1975 book called How to Live with an Island , his earliest london city hotel attempt to express his philosophy of retreating from the beaches. He got a lot of responses many of them very angry, which he didn't mind. "I learned that I really like stirring things up," he says.
He's been doing it ever since. Even in retirement, Orrin is still fully engaged with coastal issues, rumbling through his days like a middle linebacker. He does this with both gusto and a sense of humor, london city hotel jokingly referring to himself as "world london city hotel famous." During our travels, he points at a sign on the beach that reads DO NOT ENTER and says, "That doesn't apply to us."
WE SLEEP TO the rhythm of the ocean splashing against heaped piles of sandbags. In the morning, we drive north to the Audubon Sanctuary in Corolla, North Carolina, where Orrin is impressed by the sanctuary's attempt to fight erosion with oyster beds and other soft defenses. Over the long haul, hard defenses like seawalls and rock jetties tend to destroy not just beaches but also the ecosystems of fish, birds, and crabs that help make the islands what they are. One of the high points of Orrin's career came in 1985 when North Carolina, pushed by the state's scientists, outlawed the building of new hard coastal armaments.
Our next stop, two hours up the road past swampy Virginia lowlands, is Norfolk, a place that has b