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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!
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
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
Scroll down to figure 3... "Global mean sea level from 1870 to 2006 with one standard deviation error"
What is the first thing that you notice about the character of this plot? Is is linear? Does your statement make sense from what you know of trends and basic algerbra?
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.
The 303 gigaton number was for Greenland ice. Greenland ice is on land.
Since we are talking about NASA, why don't they measure the actual sea level instead of playing this numbers game?
They do. Read the linked articles. These are satellite measurements of sea level.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/n...
http://www.nasa.gov/risingseas...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I can tell from the comments most of you don't live near the ocean. Down here in South Florida it's already making an impact. There are storm drains that flow water during high tide up and down the coast and boat docks underwater. Miami is worse. Hallendale Beach has five of their seven fresh water pumps closed because of salt water intrusion.
The real problem that no one is talking about is what happens when Miami gets nailed by a Cat 4 or 5 hurricane? We're going to have boats washing up on I-95. Do we spend the money to rebuild Miami just to have it flood 40 years later? Or when it gets nailed by another hurricane?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The 9th Ward *will* be rebuilt with condos once all the poor people have been kicked out and the developers have their hands on it.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"None of the ice lost from Greenland is sea ice."
But if the sea level rises enough then Greenland will be underwater. Then the ice will have been going to be in the water, so it will be have been sea ice. So the sea level will be not have been going to rise!
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This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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.
"bit of land" = the displacement of hundreds of millions of people across the globe.
AKA your kids get to grow up in permanent refugee crisis world.
And you know what ? I am a fool to care about this, because I'll be dead before shit gets really real. Hope you leave your kids some money!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
There's only one thing to do: buy real estate in Greenland.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Oh, it will be noticed.
A one foot rise in sea level is going to create a lot more shallow water basins and tidal flat areas. All that increase in surface area is going to increase evaporation rates. That will result in an increase in atmospheric water vapor, which is one of the more potent greenhouse gases, which introduces a new positive feedback to global warming.
But in turn the increased atmospheric water vapor will, under some conditions, create an increase in clouds, which will lower the insolation of the land and ocean below them and tend to counter global warming. Since evaporation and cloud formation will be regional, there will be a stronger thermal differential between regions, which will make severe weather incidents more frequent and more intense.
People are going to be displaced by storm damage more than by the simple rise in sea level. If every year 3 to 5 port cities on the East Coast of the USA were hit by an incident on the level of Hurricane Katrina, what would that permanent stream of refugees look like? How could even the wealthiest nation keep up the infrastructure repairs needed to keep those cities functional?
No one knows how to model this, so there can be no scientific talk about it yet. All we can know is that somewhere along the way as the seas rise to 21 feet above their current level, these kinds of effects are going to occur. I think the flooding that will happen with a one foot rise will be enough to change the Earth's weather engine. I may be off by a few feet... or by a few inches. We'll have to wait and see.
Will
So where are the government founded profits, in launching satellites and building expensive computers for weather forecasts and climate modelling at $1.6 billion per year and which aren't profitable to sell, or in mining coal and oil and gas for $25 billion in subsidies, and which you can then sell for a profit on the market?
So whoever brings up the financial gain argument against the climate scientists, has to honestly conclude that the financial interest on the anti-climate-scientist-stance is much more plausible. If you want to follow the money, the big stinking trace goes to oil and gas, and not to climate research and renewables.
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.