Sea Level Rise Can't Be Stopped
riverat1 writes "Sea level rise won't stop for several hundred years even if we reverse global warming, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. As warmer water is mixed down into the oceans, it causes thermal expansion of the water. Under the best emissions scenario, the expected rise is 14.2 cm by 2100; under the worst, 32.2 cm from thermal expansion alone. Any water pumped from aquifers or glacial/ice sheet melt is added to that."
Serves you right. You let all those New Yorkers in and bad things happen....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It will be ok in North Carolina since their legislature said you can only use linear extrapolations of sea level rise to plan building in coastal areas. Guess they didn't get beyond simple algebra in school (no quadratic equations etc).
Should have known better than to try to save that ungrateful environment. I'm buying an SUV.
Suck my balls, you lying hippies!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Screw Jesus. I want Noah. Praise be Noah!
Yes, this: http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/
But that map makes even a 60m rise seem not bad at all.
This may be a stupid question, but isn't there a way to collect massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, compress the carbon into some sort of solid composite, and store it somewhere where it's land-locked (similar to how trees store carbon in wood)?
I know, I never liked Florida either.
Well, for one, in the US alone, more than half the population lives in a coastal area.
Even if just 10 percent are directly affected, that's still a large number of people.
In the US, can you imagine all the lawsuits and politics about how to move people, does the government have the right to do it, does the government have the obligation to do it, and who is going to pay for it?
For countries like Indonesia that are mostly islands, or in countries or areas that are largely below sea level, this could result in a major loss of housing and usable land.
Anything that changes ocean patterns could affect shipping and fishing, both of which would be major blows to the global and regional economies. If we lose major fish populations, that will increase food prices, and if shipping becomes riskier, that will affect the price of virtually everything.
It's a lot more than avoiding getting wet.
32cm is like, over 12 inches. That's gonna be noticeable.
Somewhere in there is a "Your Mom" joke, straining against the seams to get out.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
It's a poorly understood fact that any unwanted facts can simply go "poof" if you scream LIBURAL LIBURAL LIBURAL over and over.
Because, of course, the laws of nature obey your political ideology.
Here's news, moron, the Universe doesn't give a fuck about Liberal vs. Conservative, Socialist vs. Capitalist. It does not fucking care. If pumping millions of years of sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere in the space of two centuries is going to cause serious climactic changes, it is absolutely fucking irrelevant who you fucking vote for, or whether you masturbate to Vladimir Lenin or Ayn Rand.
Fucking hell, you ideological fanatics are a tiresome, mentally handicapped lot. Don't like evolution because you think it falsifies your religion. Don't like acid rain or climate change because it means there are consequences to wide-scale and uncontrolled industrial activity. Don't like regulations because it kills your particular get-rich-quick-while-fucking-the-economy scheme.
Is there any part of you at all that isn't a selfish, greedy piece of stupidity? Is there any part of you that gives the least little fuck for anyone other than yourself? Or are you really the vile repugnant sociopathic troll you appear?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Now that there is nothing we can do about it, the shills can stop pretending it isnâ(TM)t happening.
Already, Exxon has stated the obvious - burning fossil fuels is warming the planet by increasing the co2 level; however had to mute it with a statement that we can handle the change.
I suppose a whiff of honesty is better than before.
Time to unload all that beachfront property. 32cm is like, over 12 inches. That's gonna be noticeable.
A-ha! I own the property just behind yours! I'm that much closer to having beachfront property!
I once opened a fortune cookie to read: You'll make your home in the mountains and by the sea.
I didn't realize it meant at the same time.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No, this paper is a theory. Observation of sea level rise is evidence.
What if Jesus sent you scientists warning you what you were doing was bad?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_expansion#Expansion_in_liquids
Translation: You're a fucking idiot.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That global warming is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until your tootsies are completely soaked.
Here's a quick inventory of problems to cope with.
Florida has a maximum land height of 42 feet. A three foot rise in see level, plus shore erosion due to larger and more frequent storms could reduce Florida to a stub of the current state with central islands where the everglades are now.
Expanded erosion of barrier island and sand dunes along the gulf and eastern seaboard will eliminate thousands of square miles of existing shoreline, destroying some of the most valuable property in the country.
Much of the Mississippi delta and most of Louisiana will simply go away (a great deal of which is already below sea level due to subsidence from poor river engineering by the Army Corp of Engineers.)
The West Coast won't pass unscathed, because towns along the bays in both southern and northern California, will suffer significant land loss.
The simple fact is that the big cities of the world are virtually all coastal cities and as such will be seriously impacted. The amount of land shared be people and critters will shrink a couple percent (large coastal plains will be inundated... kiss Bangladesh and a number of small islands in the South Pacific goodbye.)
You bet we can engineer around it. Move cities slowly back. Build higher dikes and levees. Abandon places that are hopeless. Its just one more cost, and significant cost to consider as we continue to spew greenhouse gas into the air.
The Netherlands seem to be doing just fine below sea level. It might cause some economic harm, but it's not going to be a tragedy. Also, most low-lying islands are coral islands that follow sea level.
Do you have a clue how expensive the water management system in the Netherlands has been? Do you realize that the Netherlands is tiny compared with the areas under threat from sea level rise in the US alone? Hell, it's tiny even compared with Florida. Do you realize that duplicating the Dutch diking system for American coastal areas would likely bankrupt the country? Not to mention how future sea level rise will make it even more difficult for even the Netherlands to maintain the integrity of their diking system.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I'm not a climatologist either but I have been interested in it for at least 30yrs. Having said that, wtf does the "MMGW" acronymn stand for?
The only "theory" I know of concerning storms other than the obvious more heat == more turbulance is that the N. Hemisphere jet stream will ocillate more and the ocillations will move slower. This will increase the likeleyhood of Atlanitic hurricanes being "killed" by the sheraing of the jet stream, but on a global scale the monsoon rains will increase and the sub-tropic deserts will expand due to the more intense Hadley cells (Hadley cells = convection currents on either side of the equator that pump moist air up over the tropics where it dumps the moisture as rain after which the dry dry air falls down on the sub-tropical deserts). In other words heat will increase the amount of water traveling through the hydrological cycle, this is already happening as evidenced by the atmosphere already holding 4% more water vapour than it did 40yrs ago. Note also that the increase in water vapour is more evidence of a warmer planet since the atmosphere is basically chemically staurated with H20 and the only way to increase it is to raise either the temprature or the pressure (and I don't think gravity is any stronger than it was in the 70's).
So yeah, to a certain extent the jury is still out on storms. It's pretty certain we will get more floods/snow and more droughts/heatwaves but it won't necassarily comes via hurricanes and blizzards.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.