Golf course superintendents already know which famous holes are finished. These seven legendary courses will not survive the next thirty years, and the reason is the water they are grown with, not the wave you watch on the news.
A 2018 study commissioned by Golf Digest counted more than 1,100 golf courses in the United States sitting less than two metres above sea level, and the courses crowded at the front of that line are the expensive, famous ones, because prestige in golf is built on coastal location. You have been told this is a climate story about rising seas and bigger storms. It is not. Most of these courses will be finished long before the ocean ever reaches the 18th green.
Every putting green is a manufactured system: a specific sand, a specific rootzone, and a specific turf cultivar (bentgrass and Poa annua on the cool northern links, Bermuda and seashore paspalum on the warm coasts) calibrated to one water chemistry. A golf course superintendent never irrigates with the ocean. They irrigate with the fresh water under the property, and the entire turf spec is tuned to that water’s salinity. When saltwater intrusion pushes the underground salt wedge inland, or a rationed river forces lower-quality water, the irrigation source itself turns hostile. In southeast Florida the South Florida Water Management District tracked that salt front moving about a mile inland between 2009 and 2019. Flushing the salt takes more fresh water, which on a coast is exactly what is running out, and once a green fails you cannot rebuild it in place, because the water table it was engineered around has moved.