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NASA Scientists Paint Stark Picture of Accelerating Sea Level Rise
A NASA panel yesterday announced widely reported finding that global sea levels have risen about three inches since 1992, and that these levels are expected to keep rising as much as several more feet over the next century -- on the upper end of model-based predictions that have been made so far. From the Sydney Morning Herald piece linked above: NASA says Greenland has lost an average of 303 gigatons [of ice] yearly for the past decade. Since it takes 360 gigatons to raise sea level by a millimetre, that would suggest Greenland has done this about eight times over just in the last 10 years or so.
"People need to be prepared for sea level rise," said Joshua Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. "It's not going to stop."
If this is actually a credible report, then the U.S. government needs to stop funding the rebuilding/construction of areas that are CURRENTLY under sea level like New Orleans and the dikes and berms around it. No more federal funds of any kind for regions currently under water!
Until basic common sense measures like these happen, then we can rightly conclude this is just another "climate change hysteria" study. If the government doesn't believe in their own studies, then it is wrong to use them to force actions on others.
If this is actually a credible report, then the U.S. government needs to stop funding the rebuilding/construction of areas that are CURRENTLY under sea level like New Orleans and the dikes and berms around it. No more federal funds of any kind for regions currently under water!
By that logic we should just write off large swathes of the Netherlands. Dykes and berms work just fine, and we have the engineering means to keep portions of land we consider valuable dry even if the waters rise 10 or 20 feet. New Orleans would fit in this category in my opinion. It is a unique part of American heritage and a cultural gem (one of not-so-many the US possesses), well worth the investment of Federal dollars to keep around.
Not to mention that it is by far less expensive to retain land by shoring up or building new dykes, than it is to reclaim land already submerged. Not as cheap as ditching it of course, but in places where it is worthwhile (New York City, Hoboken, New Orleans, Holland, and various other places) it is much smarter to keep existing places dry than leave them to be inundated and then realize our mistake later and either lose them forever, or pay even more to reclaim them.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Scientists dumb down data so science magazines can understand. Mainstream media further simplifies for the general population to understand. Even the summary states that this guestimation is based on a different guestimation of how many gigatons of ice have melted. If 360 gigatons of ice on land melt, it is estimated that it will raise the sea level by 1 mm. However, if the ice is already in the sea, it won't raise the sea level. The dumbed down story doesn't say how much of the missing ice was already in the ocean vs on the land, so we can't use numbers to say that sea level has risen 8mm over that decade.
Since we are talking about NASA, why don't they measure the actual sea level instead of playing this numbers game?
In fairness, you should mention that the sea level rises about 3mm a year, and has done so since at least 1650, which I think is when they first started measuring it. It hasn't been a major problem for the last 350 years, so I don't expect it will be a problem for the next 350. After all, we are much more advanced now.
Sure. Or sooner if you are economically tied to businesses or people near the coast; or businesses or people not near the coast; or businesses or people not near the coast but dependant on others that are. That's the downside of living in a modern economy. I didn't hold any toxic mortgage backed financial instruments, but I sure felt the pain when the capital markets went tits up in 08.
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what's been accounted for in the studies?
I'm just asking why anyone would care about 9 more centimeters after the 12,500 we already had.
One foot of sea level rise is not a loss of one foot of beach, unless the beach has a 45-degree angle. A few feet of sea level rise is going to displace many millions of people.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Oh, it will be noticed.
Perhaps it will be... maybe all that you say is correct...
The real issue is that some people take that and then say, "now you have to give other people lots of your money to do something about it".
Except, all that money won't do anything about it, either way. Regardless of your take on AGW, it is going to happen or it isn't.
We aren't going to, as humanity, stop burning coal, oil, or natural gas. We just aren't.
So if they cause AGW, then we're going to get it.
I think his point is that a lot of the alarmism seriously damages the ability for AGW proponents to reach people. Cities are quite fluid creatures, and as long as the seal level rise doesn't make specific sections of land uninhabitable overnight but rather in a 10-20 year period, we can plan for it and react timely. Of course, this doesn't account for problems like the severe weather you mentioned and a Katrina-level event, but we have completely different systems in place to deal with the more severe changes associated with them ("National Emergeny", aid injections, etc).
There's a lot of people who aren't deniers that anything is happening, but just don't see a reasonable solution available that would prevent the problems we anticipate happening. Our global society is simply too fragmented to apply and enforce a stop or reduction in CO2 PPM. So, we focus on damage prevention rather than problem prevention - what technical solutions can we come up with over the next 30 years that might make this problem, not a problem at all. Or, what problems are something we can adapt to on a normal time scale with our current setups. This latter category is one that I and many others think the "sea level rise" problem falls into, and feel that people terrified of New York City magically being underwater in 100 years drastically underestimates human ingenuity.