From Hell and High Water (paperback now at Amazon):
We could get a meter [of sea-level rise] easy in 50 years.
– Bob Corell, chair, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, 2006
The peak rate of deglaciation following the last Ice Age was . . . about one meter [39 inches] of sea- level rise every 20 years, which was maintained for several centuries.
– James Hansen, director, Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA), 2004
Sea-level rise of 20 to 80 feet will be all but unstoppable by midcentury if current emissions trends continue. The first few feet of sea-level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all of our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into pre-Katrina New Orleans–below sea level and facing superhurricanes.
How fast can seas rise? For the past decade, sea levels have been rising about 1 inch a decade, double the rate of a few decades ago. The Third Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released back in 2001, projected that sea levels would rise 12 to 36 inches by 2100, with little of that rise coming from either Greenland or Antarctica. Seas rise mainly because ocean water expands as it gets warmer, and inland glaciers melt, releasing their water to the oceans.
Sea-level rise is a lagging indicator of climate change, in part because global warming also increases atmospheric moisture. More atmospheric moisture probably means more snowfall over both the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets, which would cause them to gain mass in their centers even as they lose mass at the edges. Until recently, most scientists thought that the primary mechanism by which these enormous ice sheets would lose mass was through simple melting. The planet warms and ice melts–a straightforward physics calculation and a very slow process, with Greenland taking perhaps a thousand years or more to melt this way, according to some models.
Since 2001, however, a great many studies using direct observation and satellite monitoring have revealed that both of the two great ice sheets are losing mass at the edges much faster than the models had predicted. We now know a number of physical processes can cause the major ice sheets to disintegrate faster than by simple melting alone. The whole idea of “glacial change” as a metaphor for change too slow to see will vanish in a world where glaciers are shrinking so fast that you can actually watch them retreat.
The disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is a multistage process that starts with the accelerated warming of the Arctic….
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What, no pity for West Coast seaports? Or is it just that these do not (yet) have much prospects of enduring hurricanes?
1) I recommend http://flood.firetree.net/ : set 0, +1meter, etc up to +14m [not nice], anything in gray is below sea level [not necessarily underwater, of course.]
For a 1m rise:
2) The East Coast & Gulf Coast have:
a) Much development right on the coast, even on the beaches and barrier islands.
b) Numerous rivers.
c) Flat coastal plains.
d) Hurricanes.
3) The West Coast has:
a) Relatively modest development right on the coast, no barrier islands, and almost nothing built right on the beaches. The main exceptions would be San Diego… Santa Barbara, Monterey, Santa Cruz, one edge of San Francisco, some pieces of Vancouver [the airport, among others]. Although not on the coast, the San Francisco Bay has issues, as does a piece of the Central Valley [already below sea level]. SF Bay planners are certainly already working on the issues.
From SF North, until you get to Vancouver, there is relatively little development right on the coast, compared to the Gulf/East Coasts.
b) Relatively few rivers exiting to the coast, and that really helps, because it;s not enough to build sea walls, you have to build levees along the rivers.
c) The West Coast of course has coastal hills and mountain ranges. In a lot of places, a few meters’ rise would wipe out the beaches, but then there would be 5-10 meters worth of cliff, and thankfully, there’s a lot of open-space preserve or farmland in many cases.
d) No hurricanes.
Even +1m is going to be *really* expensive on the West Coast, but the water problems we worry about most are the supply problems due to worsening snowpack issues. But, compared to the East Coast, we’re better off, and as for the Gulf Coast…. sad to say, I really can’t see how New Orleans will exist in 2100AD, given that:
a) The land is sinking.
b) The Mississippi does flood, albeit rarely.
c) Hurricanes.
d) And the Mississippi *really* wants to go down the Atchafalaya:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_River
I’d be astonished if it doesn’t sometime during this century.
Cheap Internet service makes people rich … except when you need to buy steel, concrete, and earthmoving, which tend to use real energy in the real world, and you may be noticing Peak Oil, which won’t make any of this cheaper.
+1m will be messy and expensive, but you can try +7m (part of Greenland + Antarctic Peninsula), or +14m (some combination of Greenland and WAIS).
As you can check
http://www.solar.ifa.hawaii.edu/Tropical/summary.html
no tropical storms seem to have yet reached southern California with any intensity left. This will change over the next decade.
And don’t forget about Hawaii…
Climatatic extremes (http://www.agloriousfuture.com/extremes.php) have always been with us, and always will be, we just need to adapt….just shows how insignificant we are really.
Yeah. The threat of 40 to 80 foot sea level rise and up to 70% species loss has always been with us — NOT! Is that web link the best you can do to dismiss the work and concerns of thousands of scientists?
Hi Joe….was wondering if you could publish the reply I posted?
Cheers
Mark