It’s coming, they say. It’s coming. No, no, it’s really coming this time.

For many years now, on this spur of the southern North Carolina coast, we have been fooled by the Cantore who cried wolf. I’m of course referring to Jim Cantore, the Weather Channel’s legendary face of hurricane coverage, who on Monday arrived in my town of Wilmington, the projected first stop tonight on Hurricane Florence’s unprecedented Category 4 path.

We fall for it every time. He stands out there bravely, on our sand below our piers, and warns us of peril. He and his ilk foretell our doom, though their stern warnings are slightly subverted by the fact that you will always see, at least on the beach near where I live, surfers trotting out to the water behind him, waving to the camera. Once—and I swear this is true—just as our local Cantore-wannabe was telling a TV camera that No one should go out in the storm (except for him of course), I saw a woman behind him pushing a stroller, thinking perhaps that her newborn might like the feel of the wind on her face. This of course somewhat undermined the point the reporter was so emphatically trying to make. 

What I’m trying to say is that we here in Wilmington are skeptics. We are the bullseye that is never hit. The land of close calls. So that every time, and yes even this time, we regard the warnings with a grain or two of sand. We board, we evacuate, we pack, we panic, and then . . . pfftt. They promise, those priests of the Weather Channel, they promise us that this time there will be no pffting.

It is Tuesday as I type this, two days until Florence hits. An hour ago I was standing under Johnny Mercer Pier in nearby Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, where I spent some time observing the Cantore crowd and their hangers on. It is a meta scene: people filming using their phones to film the cameramen who in turn are filming the handsome weathercasters who are pointing out at the calm sea, uttering warnings (apparently untroubled by false prophecies from their pasts).

And yet even we, deep skeptics that we are, are worried. On my way back from the pier, I drive along the beach, past people nailing up plywood, before arriving at the apartment where I lived for six years and rode out a storm or two, the same apartment near the water where my daughter grew up. My former neighbors Robert Boyce and Star Sosa are cleaning out their ground-level garage for fear of the storm surges, something they have never done before.

“This one feels different,” says Sosa, a 20-year veteran of Carolina storms.

Boyce, an almost daily long-distance swimmer out in the Wrightsville Beach waters, is worried too. “I’ve never felt the water warmer,” he says. “Never.”

We are skeptics, but we are not stupid.

My wife and daughter have already evacuated with one of our yellow labs and the cat, and early tomorrow morning, I will take our second yellow lab and follow them.

But first I need to say goodbye. Though I no longer live on the beach I still live on the coast, along a creek that we call Hewletts but that might be more familiar to you as Dawson’s Creek, its television alias. Several years ago, as a birthday present to myself, I built an 8' by 8' writing shack right on the edge of the marsh that the creek runs through, and coming out here every night, listening to the clapper rails and watching the kingfishers dive while sipping a beer or two, has become one of the best things in my life. I have watched the waters literally rise in the shack over the last seven years, and despite its flimsy porous character, it has survived three hurricanes.

During the last one, I kayaked out to see how it was doing. But I don’t think it will live to see another Tuesday. While I might joke about my and my town’s skepticism about storms, what is coming is going to be the end of a lot of things here, the shack being the least of it.           

With any luck, it will also be the end of the sort of false confidence that I exhibited at the beginning of this piece. It should be. Because as powerful as Florence might be, something bigger is coming, something no reasonable person should remain skeptical about. That something is a change on an almost unimaginable scale. My neighbor, my conservative Trump-voting neighbor I should add, said something to me this summer after our third straight week of rain, a period that included almost daily morning thunderstorms. 

“They told us this place would become a temperate rainforest by 2050,” he said. “I think it’s way ahead of schedule.”

 The point is that while we can be skeptical of Cantore, we will soon have to believe in something larger. Not the scary weather but the scary climate. We need to feel this with at least some of the urgency that drives those boarding up their windows today. The challenge is that long-term danger has never gripped the human mind the way that short-term crisis does. Hurricanes are like being hanged on the fortnight. They concentrate our minds.

Luckily, North Carolina has the closest thing to a climate Cantore. For 30 years now, Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of geology at Duke University, has been warning us, not of individual storms, but of a greater pattern and its monumental consequences. 

“It’s such foolishness,” he says. “The seas are rising and the storms getting bigger, but rather than retreat we draw a line in the sand. The thing is that you can’t bargain with or threaten nature. It is no surprise when homes built so close to the water are wiped out. And then when they are rebuilt they are wiped out again. It is a pattern, and while the pattern is just beginning, all the good science says it will continue. So we keep throwing massive amounts of federal money at the problem, money that allows homeowners to rebuild so that their houses can be knocked down again by the next storm.” 

Pilkey has long been a galvanizing figure in the coastal battles in North Carolina and beyond. In his 80s now, he’s bearded, short, wide, and still strong, and still pushing the message that he has pushed for so many years: Why do we keep building in danger zones, having our houses knocked down, and then setting them up again like bowling pins?

Human beings are slow to learn. Just as we here in Wilmington are skeptical about the coming storm—will this one pfftt out like the others?—few of us have time to really get worked up over a few inches of sea level rise. Of course we are going to rebuild after the storms. I get it. Won’t I be rebuilding my shack in a few weeks after all? But it is Pilkey’s job to shake us out of our complacency. To make us realize that only idiots repeat idiotic behavior.

Orrin Pilkey, Duke University professor emeritus of geology, and David Gessner, author, in coastal North Carolina

Thanks to the warnings of Pilkey and his colleague and friend Stan Riggs, a coastal geologist at East Carolina University, for decades North Carolina was actually ahead of the curve in applying coastal science to the actual coast (for instance, making terminal groins and other coastal armaments illegal). That was then. Over the last six years, our state’s conservative legislature has buried its head deep in the sand, excising any mention of climate change or sea level rise from official documents while catering to developers, many of whom couldn't care less if the ground they build on is dangerous or even deadly. Ignore the problem and it will surely go away.

Pilkey has seen it all. The willful ignorance of politicians. The years of record-breaking heat becoming a decade of record-breaking heat. The larger, fiercer, more slowly moving storms. The increased flooding of coastal cities that we continue to see as individual events, not as part of the greater pattern that must be addressed.

He has seen it all, but it sure can be hard to get the point across. And maybe a little Weather Channel sex appeal wouldn’t hurt. While I have been a little mean to the Cantores of the world in this article, I also want to give them credit: They sometimes exaggerate and build things up too much, warning of waves while the baby stroller wheels behind them. But they do their job. Their job is to scare us.

If you really want to be scared, however, have a beer with Orrin Pilkey some time and talk about the big picture. Five years ago we traveled up the East Coast together, from North Carolina to New York, to survey the wreckage after Hurricane Sandy. What I saw in those shattered homes along the coast was a small vision of environmental apocalypse. What Pilkey saw was the future.

“Seven feet,” he said as we stared out at the Atlantic. “That’s not a prediction, mind you, but a working figure I’ve now arrived at.  If I were in charge of things, that is the figure I would use. I would expect the seas to rise seven feet by 2100.”

There are a hundred different numbers predicted for sea level rise, and Pilkey’s estimate of seven feet is twice that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which puts it at a little over three feet. But Pilkey believes that the panel’s number is far too conservative, not taking into account melting of the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets, and when I contacted James Hansen, who was then the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, he replied that Pilkey’s was a “good working number” as we prepare for what is to come.

“Of course it could be a lot more than that,” Pilkey continued. “If the ice of Antarctica and Greenland continue to melt we’ll see the most radically changing shoreline in thousands of years. The last IPCC report on sea level is very conservative. But it doesn’t factor in what is going to happen in Antarctica and Greenland, and all indications are that the ice melt is increasing in both of these places. A more realistic assessment comes from the state of Rhode Island, a state that obviously has a lot invested in getting the estimate right. They’re assuming that the rise is going to be between three and six feet.” He added, “The glaciers are the key.”

Then he rattled off some numbers. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted, we could expect an 11-foot rise; if the Greenland ice cap went, 13 feet; and if all of Antarctica were to melt, the global seas would rise 170 feet.

That is a crazy number, but it isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound. Hansen, who retired from his position at NASA at about the same time Pilkey and I began our New York trip, wrote this after Katrina:

How much will sea level rise with five degrees of global warming? Here, too, our best information comes from the Earth’s history. The last time that Earth was five degrees warmer was 3 million years ago, when sea level was about 80 feet higher.

The Earth’s history reveals cases in which sea level, once the ice sheets begin to collapse, rose one meter (1.1 yards) every 20 years. That would be a calamity for hundreds of cities around the world, most of them larger than New Orleans.

Eighty feet. You want scary? There it is.

The problem is that that number, floating off in the abstract future, will never scare us into action the way Florence has us boarding up our windows. Pilkey and Riggs have done an admirable service to our state and the country, but maybe what we need is a new climate Cantore, standing on the shore in a too-tight T-shirt and speaking in an emphatic voice as the wind howls.

“This is just one storm,” he will say. “But please realize that this fits into a greater pattern. We have warmed the world and if we don’t stop the waters will rise. This is just the beginning. Listen to your scientists who study this! Heed their warnings! Please!”

In the meantime, I am going to say goodbye to my shack and heed the more immediate warning. It is time for me to evacuate.

Days or weeks from now when this is over—after Hurricane Florence’s heavy rains very likely cause an environmental disaster here in North Carolina, where waste from hog manure pits, coal ash dumps, and other industrial sites are expected to threaten drinking water supplies and wash into homes—I will return to see what the storm has done to my home and my town. Then, no doubt I'll be caught up in the moment, will begin the process of rebuilding. But my dream is that we will pause and think for a moment before we rush back and do things the way we always have. That we will, perhaps, despite our natures, heed the larger warning.