Slashdot Mirror
New Science Suggests the Ocean Could Rise More -- and Faster -- Than We Thought (washingtonpost.com)
Chris Mooney, writing for the Washington Post: Climate change could lead to sea level rises that are larger, and happen more rapidly, than previously thought, according to a trio of new studies that reflect mounting concerns about the stability of polar ice. In one case, the research suggests that previous high end projections (PDF) for sea level rise by the year 2100 -- a little over three feet -- could be too low, substituting numbers as high as six feet at the extreme if the world continues to burn large volumes of fossil fuels throughout the century (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled). "We have the potential to have much more sea level rise under high emissions scenarios," said Alexander Nauels, a researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia who led one of the three studies. His work, co-authored with researchers at institutions in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, was published Thursday in Environmental Research Letters. The results comprise both novel scientific observations -- based on high resolution seafloor imaging techniques that give a new window on past sea level events -- and new modeling techniques based on a better understanding of Antarctic ice. Further reading: Sea levels to rise 1.3m unless coal power ends by 2050, report says (The Guardian).
Goodbye Florida. I will miss you.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
...it's overpriced, it's over-hyped. Beach property, near the sea, near the beach, near a pond - and cost 3-10 times as much as a normal property. You're investing badly, and you're gonna find out the hard way.
I already knew this when I moved from Denmark to another country (several Danish cities is suffering from the ocean eating up the ground, and houses are constantly falling into the sea when the ground gets eaten up by the sea). I now live 80m above sea level - and 10 times cheaper, with the same solid building.
To quote Nelson from the Simpsons -> "Ha haa!".
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Early projections had wide uncertainties, which means that the upper limits based on some projection technique could be quite eye popping. However so far as I know there was never any widely held scientific opinion that there would be a 3m rise by 2020. More typical projections from about 20 years ago were talking about maybe 12 cm against an 1800s baseline, which turn out to be pretty accurate. However the upper range was on the order of 30 cm and the lower showed an actual decline to pre-20th century levels by 2020 -- which goes to show there was still considerable uncertainty.
Estimates from back in the mid 90s were for a 40cm to 65cm rise by 2100, mainly based on thermal expansion. That's a fairly safe assumption: warmer atmosphere = warmer ocean = more ocean volume.
Now there have been hypothetical scenarios proposed in which sea level could rise rapidly. Obviously those have not happened ... yet. But as they are based on certain discrete and unpredictable events that they haven't happened is not evidence that they won't happen. These events are not particularly exotic in terms of the Earth's climate history, but would be unprecedented in recorded human history.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Except the price has only gone up. Yes, longterm, like say, the year 2100, beachfront property will have been a bad investment. But for now, you can buy it, enjoy the beach, then sell in ten years for a nice profit.
So these predictions are based on events that haven't happened. Got it...
That is rather entailed in the world "prediction".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And none of those were mainstream positions that had scientific consensus. You've confused yourself by taking many different views and bundling them together as a single mind. It's entirely possible for there to be 10 different wrong views on climate change but still end up with climate change being real.
Seriously, man: there are actual climate changes that we have to seriously cope with. That isn't being helped by alarmist bullshittery like this.
Then why are you posting alarmist bullshittery links?
I don't respond to AC's.
Al Gore In 2005: "Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro." Kilimanjaro In 2015
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Pretty much this.
It's not just wealthy western nations. We're actually making renewable energy sources cheaper than coal and gas--unsubsidized--by sheer technical progress. That's always been the problem: burning fossile fuel might or might not be causing something called "Climate Change"--a point of contention in political discussions--but you can't really do anything about it because making your $THING more-expensive means people get $THING from dirty-coal high-emissions import instead. US becomes poorer by going to Solar 30 years ago, China ramps up production and turns the Asian continent into one giant black cloud.
We took a third option and just tightened up emissions standards as technology became available to do so without compromising our economy. The Republicans complained, the Democrats took a careful hand, and the really left-wing liberals with no concept of anything just screamed that it wasn't enough. That's the best you can do.
Well, it was.
Like you noticed: the really low-emissions energy tech is just plain taking over. It's more viable economically now, and so will come into play without compromising our economy. Leading up to this, we had an offset program where solar generation produced credits which you could sell on the open market in a cap-and-trade scheme; and suddenly solar is so cheap that SRECs trade for $20 instead of $200. A massive amount of capacity sprung up in two years, and more is coming.
I want to preserve our agricultural land by moving off traditional farm subsidies and onto a scheme where we subsidize farmers to lay non-permanent Solar installation, and reduce the subsidy as the solar installation starts generating a profit. Need the ag land again? Get a crew to unbolt the panels, stack them in a nearby shed, pull up the racks, dismantle, store, and you have ag land. Actually tearing down a city costs more than our GDP; removing a non-fixed solar installation is a cheap job.
That will save the taxpayer the cost of farm subsidies; protect our agricultural reserve land from permanent destruction by urban development; and derive useful economic productivity from that land area--you know, land area in a place with lots of sun, because a farm is basically a solar food generation operation--instead of just waste expense trying to prevent its development. Because that economic productivity is electricity, it offsets our need for mercury-belching coal plants.
Leading-edge recouperating CAES--the kind that stores heat and uses it to expand the tanks, not the natural gas booster kind--will become common tech soon enough. It's cheaper than batteries, and hasn't taken off because we keep trying to use natural caves as compression tanks--folks keep selecting sandstone caverns, then finding out that won't work. Going to have to build an actual sealed storage tank underground. Batteries will still be more-expensive, but not 300x more-expensive; even so, hundred-million-dollar-scale R&D tech doesn't just happen at a fast pace, even with those kinds of potential profits, and with the technology pretty much ready-to-go. It's weird to see something that's current-generation technology held back by... well, technology. Paradox.
Put the two together and you get a bona fide solar grid for basically nothing. I'm so glad there are only 50,000 coal workers in the US, because they're right in the path of progress and a bigger industry would be a recession waiting to happen. We'll bleed the coal mining industry slowly, not overnight; and my Universal Dividend should help hold these people up and rebuild their local economies as we pick them apart. One can only hope--we are definitely going to profit from their loss, and we owe them for that.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth" said that a collapse of a major ice sheet in Greenland or West Antarctica could raise sea levels by 20 feet "in the near future". The near future has not yet passed and neither ice sheet has melted yet so the jury is still out on that one.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Yeah! And didn't science say that man could never fly or go in space? Because science never gets better and past theories will always be right forever!
I don't think anyone with a brain ever said those things. We saw birds flying all the time. It was just a matter of weight and power.
We saw the moon and later were able to measure its distance. It was just a matter of escape velocity.
What next? Flat Earth? Sound barrier? People like to make false attributions about claims that were never seriously made. They do well in shitty chain emails.
Answer this:
Where is the science that says the current global average temperature is optimal?
It isn't "optimal". It is, however, what we have built our society's infrastructure around, and what the Earth's ecology has adapted to.
We could rebuild our infrastructure to a different temperature. It will have a cost. The Earth's ecology can adapt to a different set of climates. It will take time, and result in some amount of species loss, but inside of ten thousand years or so, they'd adapt.
It's only the short term-- the next few centuries-- that would be hard.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
We haven't had a hurricane season worth a damn since Katrina, actually. Hurricanes have been tame as shit until this year. (And don't get me started on "Superstorm Sandy", which wasn't even a hurricane when it hit New York. It only cost so much because NYC was unprepared, and it was hyped up because it was NYC and the media fucking LOVES NYC.)
As for fires, California is ALWAYS on fire.
Optimal for what? If you're saying "optimal for large scale civilization heavily reliant on specific climactic conditions for large-scale land-based agriculture and complimentary ocean food sources", then I'd say the post-Glacial epoch is pretty damned optimal. Yes, bacterial mats and Archae populations and cockroaches may have a wider window of optimal conditions, but the capacity to support large concentrations of humans is a good deal narrower.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If people with power and money REALLY THOUGHT anything like this sea level alarmism was true, you would absolutely see this priced into seafront real estate prices. But they just continue to climb.
We also WOULDN'T see pro-natalist policies.
For instance: importing large numbers low-income people from countries with cultures that encourage large families and giving them jobs and child support which enables them to have LARGER families and an income sufficient for all the kids to drive gas-guzzlers and otherwise consume more goods that are produced by carbon dioxide emitting processes and/or processes powered by carbon dioxide emitting utilities.
If the politicians REALLY believed the climate-change hype, they'd close the borders. Since they don't, it looks more like they think it's a convenient excuse to increase their power (by writing laws and regulations) and wealth (by rent-seeking schemes like carbon-credit exchanges).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They already have. Insurance actuaries have been factoring in climactic effects for years now. Every time you buy house or property insurance, you're paying into the "AGW Fund".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"New computer modeling suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in summer as early as 2014, Al Gore said today at the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen."
Predictability and reproducible are required for "Science". This is prophecy, and it belongs in the Religion section of Barnes and Noble. Inconvenient that the Truth isn't what has been prophesied by the likes of Al Gore.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's entirely possible for there to be 10 different wrong views on climate change...
You want him to... ignore the consensus because the people contributing to it are routinely proven to be hilariously incorrect?
10 different wrong views do not make a consensus. This does.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
New Science Suggests the Ocean Could Rise More -- and Faster -- Than We Thought
Maybe. Possibly.
But aren't we already suppose to be under ten feet of water?
Huh? Where did you get that? Nobody predicted ten feet-- over three meters!-- of sea level rise by 2017.
The very first IPCC report-- back in 1990--predicted "an average rate of global mean sea level rise of about 6 cm per decade over the next century (with an uncertainty range of 3 – 10 cm per decade), mainly due to thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of some land ice. The predicted rise is about 20 cm ... by 2030, and 65 cm by the end of the next century."
The most recent (5th, 2014) report (here https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assess... ) says 25 cm to 70 cm by 2100. (That's the one that this news item is reacting to).
Nobody predicted 10 feet by 2017-- you should look back and find who told you that had been the prediction and never believe them again.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
New Science Suggests the Ocean Could Rise More -- and Faster -- Than We Thought
Maybe. Possibly.
But aren't we already suppose to be under ten feet of water?
I don't know what you suppose, but the first IPCC report, published 1990, said "For the IPCC Business-as-Usual scenario at year 2030 global-mean sea level is 8-29 cm higher than today, with a best-estimate of 18 cm. At the year 2070, the rise is 21-71 cm, with a best-estimate of 44 cm." (page 261) According to NASA satellite data, we are at ~8.5cm since 1990 (and the IPCC AR5 has similar results (SPM page 11)) We have 13 years at (currently) ~3.5mm/year left, so we probably will end up at about 14cm, well within the uncertainty interval, and not far from the best estimate - and very far from the 10 feet you have apparently heard from some crap source.
Stephan
That phrase "as early as"--what does it mean, exactly? If you call this a "prediction"-- what did it predict, and how can you tell whether it is accurate?
Here's a good discussion: https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu...
And here's a nice one with a pretty graphic visualization: http://sciencenordic.com/when-...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
And none of those were mainstream positions that had scientific consensus. You've confused yourself by taking many different views and bundling them together as a single mind. It's entirely possible for there to be 10 different wrong views on climate change but still end up with climate change being real.
You want him to obey the consensus because it's a consensus but ignore the consensus because the people contributing to it are routinely proven to be hilariously incorrect?
I would call "scientific consensus" as incorporating "stuff that is said by actual scientists." So, yes, I'd indeed say "ignore the consensus" when by that you mean stuff not said by actual scientists in actual scientific publications. Not because it is "hilariously incorrect" but because it's not the scientific consensus, it's the result of people trolling the internet to find the most-wrong thing ever said by non-scientists so they can say "look at how wrong they were".
The IPCC reports are a good place to look for a summary of the actual consensus (with references to the actual scientific literature)-- try this one: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Somebody needs to make a study about how many *different* conclusions have been made in the last 20 years and how those studies have faired when compared to reality.
That's been done. Read the IPCC report. And I mean, actually read it. They do a lot of comparing different models.
I'm just going to guess that two things are true. 1. The ones the press cover and are most often cited by activists are the most inaccurate over time.
Now, that has an element of truth in it: the press likes catastrophe, so they tend to emphasize the flamboyant studies, and write headlines that make them sound even more dire. It's only two or three paragraphs in that they mention the actual consensus.
And 2. Not one study, if old enough to verify, shows the dire consequences we are routinely told about.
I've been graphing the predicted temperatures from the oldest greenhouse effect models (Manabe & Wetherald, and the original NAS report), and they have been matching the actual temperatures to well within error bars. So, on this one, no, the studies "old enough to verify" actually do check out pretty well.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So Al Gore was wrong by 5 or 10 years?
So you completely missed his point?
turp182 posted this as answer to you: https://www.google.com/maps/pl...
Hint: look at the damn picture. When the ice cap is gone ... all the green area around the mountain will be desert.
Kilimanjaro is watering (via aqueducts thousands of years old) areas 100ds of km away. Everything there will simply be dead
Wo the funk cares if Al Gore missed the date by 5 or 10 years?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, one of the scenarios I'm referring to is the collapse of a major land-based ice sheet like Greenland or Antarctica. At present evidence does not point to any imminent dramatic collapse in Greenland, although it will contribute somewhat to sea level rise. Antarctica is more of an open question.
In any case we have no firm basis to predict that Antarctica will do anything dramatic in the next 80 years, but there is evidence that it may contribute at higher rates than it is now.
As things stand, we aren't looking at the end of civilization by a long shot -- although a certain mentality needs that kind of thing to get up and do something. What we are looking at is major expenses, probably in the trillions of dollars for the US.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The term "near future" could be in interpreted many ways. If you go on a geographic time scale the near future could be 10 or 20 million years. In that time plate tectonics will certainly carry both Greenland and Antarctica in to warmer climate zone.
Thus Al Gore is 100% correct that the ice sheets will collapse and raise the sea level.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
We invented agriculture because the conditions were right to do so. We couldn't have invented agriculture in Eurasia a few thousand years earlier because, well, you know, a mile of fucking ice on top of much of what we would call arable land is not conducive to growing things.
And I'm sure we will adapt, it's just going to cost vast amounts of money and resources, whereas if we can actually stop puking greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, well, you know what, it will cost a lot less money. It depends on how you feel about it. If you despise your grandchildren and want to kick them in the crotch as hard as possible, just keep defending the way we produce energy today. If you actually give a rats fuck about your grandchildren, then advocate for solutions that get us away from the hydrocarbon economy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
An here is our daily dose of TDS.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Until Republicans are screaming "helbb helbb!" with water up to their noses, they won't believe and won't do squat about it.
So lets be clear here. You want to blame all this on a relativity small group of people, compared to the rest of the worlds population. In a country where CO2 and other all pollutants are on a downward spiral. A small group of people that only got power in the last 10 months and odds are will not have power again in 2020.
You want to this while ignoring rising emissions in Africa, India, and China giving them a free pass?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Heck we are already in a runaway warming situation, GISS temp data already proves it.
https://suyts.files.wordpress....
Inland ports aren't quite as silly as they sound. West Sacramento built a channel to become a deep water ship port.
This space intentionally left blank
No, hurricane seasons haven't been "tame as shit". Hurricanes have hit other areas. Hurricanes have gone out to sea. But hurricanes didn't suddenly "stop". You just didn't hear about them because they weren't hitting the US.
Superstorm Sandy was a hybrid tropical system, transitioning to extratropical. The reason it cost so much was because there was no way TO PREPARE. What, you think they could erect a 6 foot sea wall along all of New York in a span of days? You think New York was the only place to suffer damage? you're either stupid or terribly ignorant. Even if they had a weeks notice there would have been little that could have been done to prevent the damage. Get people out of harms way? Sure. Prevent the damage? Not even remotely. It would take a major public works project to do so, and likely a good 5-10 years to complete.
But more to the point, when you're establishing a premise, pick a side. "The storm was overhyped" or "they weren't prepared". Pick one.
Also, no California isn't always on fire. It's really not that hard to look up wildfire statistics and notice the trend.
~X~
The word you want is "trawling".
OK, you don't appreciate wordplay. Got it.
And you're committing the same error. You're appealing to authority and claiming a consensus while selectively choosing who is an authority or not and rejecting predictions as not being part of the consensus in order to construct the imagined authority and consensus.
In discussing a post about scientific consensus, I said that scientific consensus should be restricted to actual scientists, and you say that is "appealing to authority,"
Yeah, right.
It's like flipping a coin after collecting 10 guesses, then claiming the 5 incorrect guesses weren't part of the consensus and weren't from approved guessers.
Scientific consensus is consensus among scientists. I don't know why you think that's hard.
Show me one single model that has predicted temperature changes accurately for 5 or more years.
OK: Manabe and Wetherald 1967, the very first numerical model. Now show me one that is not accurate. Include the error bars, please.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Where is the science that says the current global average temperature is optimal?
Literally in every agricultural study ever made. Oh wait you said optimal without defining optimal? Optimal for whom?
Our choices of where to live, how to survive there, where to grow food, how to get it around was based on the assumption that the climate is what it is, without plans to move population centres, production centres or anything elsewhere.
Where's the research that the current temperature is optimal? In every test, study and example conducted since humans stopped being nomads.
You act like that matters. They are 700 coal plants that where not there yesterday. They will add to the carbon emissions of the plant and it won't matter if they are in China or Timbuctoo. What matters is they are not US power plants.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
What does that have to do with anything?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.