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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).
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.
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.
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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
The only choice Florida residents will have is to build rafts and try to make for Cuba.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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
An additional 3 feet means most of Florida won't have drinkable water and will increase storm surge damage from every 2-3 year "500 year" storms.
If you can build to that standard: bottom level not for living, more resistant buildings, power systems that can operate offline for 1-2 weeks (e.g. high grade roof solar like Tesla, mobile solar, mobile wind turbines), than you're good.
The main problem is people want to be bailed out when these events happen, but we will have to stop providing insurance guarantees in Florida on the whole, with zero exceptions, not just home and boat but auto.
That's what this means.
Me, I'll have waterfront property in Seattle with a great view.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
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.