Skip Stiles stands on the edge of a small inlet known as the Hague, near downtown Norfolk, Virginia. The Chrysler Museum of Art is nearby, as are dozens of stately homes, all threatened by the water.
"We've got...[a] lot of old buildings around here: this apartment building, that church over there, been around since the turn of the last century," says Stiles, the executive director of Wetlands Watch, a Virginia-based environmental group. "You can sort of mark where the storms have come over the years and you can see the progress of these storms as they come farther and farther up onto these buildings."
Climate change may be an abstract concept to many people but in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, it's very real: Sea levels are rising, and the area is increasingly subject to flooding. At the same time, Virginia is a coal-producing state, and the nation's largest coal shipping port is in the region.
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