by Peter Lehner, via NRDC’s Switchboard

In a recent PBS documentary, the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, Paul Fraim, talks about how flooding has become a monthly occurrence in his town, and how global warming and sea level rise are as much a daily issue for him as education and fighting crime. In some parts of Norfolk, streets turn into rivers at high tide. Homes are flooded five out of six years. People lose their carpets, their appliances, their savings. And they can’t afford to move elsewhere.

Sea levels have risen 14 inches in Norfolk since 1930–almost double the global rate. Part of this alarming change is due to the natural sinking of the area’s soggy tidal lands, but part of it is due to the rising sea levels brought about by global warming. Like stranded polar bears in the North Pole, like disappearing island nations in the Pacific, waterlogged Norfolk is yet another symbol of global warming at work. And even though Norfolk is within spitting distance of our nation’s capital, Congress still hasn’t seemed to grasp the seriousness of the situation.

Turning a blind eye to the realities of global warming is a dangerous game. Scientists predict that sea levels will rise anywhere from 7 inches to 78 inches in the next 100 years (depending, in part, on how much we do to curb global warming pollution), which means that in a few generations, nearly five million people who currently live within 4 feet of high tide could be in the same boat as the residents of Norfolk.

New research shows that global warming will double the chance of a hundred-year flood occurring in many locations within the next 18 years. In some areas, the chance is tripled.

Nearly half the states in the nation will be affected by rising sea levels. Despite these odds, for the most part, we are financially, structurally, and administratively unprepared to deal with the most immediate consequences of global warming.

Bailing out after a flood is a major expense not only for swamped cities, but for taxpayers all over the country. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, spent more than $100,000 per home in Norfolk to raise residences above expected water levels. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), run by FEMA, is nearly $18 billion in debt, and has had to borrow money from the Treasury to stay afloat.

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We knew that “deep ocean heat is rapidly melting Antarctic ice.” And we knew that these warm ocean currents melting Antarctica were so intense that, seawater appears to “boil on the surface like a kettle on the stove.”

We also knew that the the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) is inherently far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level (see below). And JPL has told us that polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up and is on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050.

Now a new study using NASA satellite data finds the WAIS in particular is “being eaten away from below by warm water” as the AP put it, which “suggests that future sea levels could rise faster than many scientists have been predicting.”

The Nature study itself, “Antarctic ice-sheet loss driven by basal melting of ice shelves,” concludes:

We find that ocean-driven ice-shelf thinning is in all cases coupled with dynamic thinning of grounded tributary glaciers that together account for about 40% of Antarctic discharge and the majority of Antarctic ice-sheet mass loss. In agreement with recent model predictions, we conclude that it is reduced buttressing from the thinning ice shelves that is driving glacier acceleration and dynamic thinning. This implies that the most profound contemporary changes to the ice sheets and their contribution to sea level rise can be attributed to ocean thermal forcing that is sustained over decades and may already have triggered a period of unstable glacier retreat.

This ought to be doubly worrisome since scientists told us in October that the Greenland Ice Sheet “could undergo a self-amplifying cycle of melting and warming … difficult to halt.”

The new study is behind a firewall, so I’m excerpting the NASA news release below along with a NASA video.

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Ousted Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, the subject of the new climate documentary “Island President,” told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell about the challenge of saving his nation from extinction by the effects of greenhouse pollution. “Climate change is a very real issue to the Maldives. It’s not something in the future. We already have 16 islands where we have to relocate people.” The entire nation lies below 1.5 meters above sea level. By 2100, sea levels are likely to rise by at least that amount unless immediate action is taken to reduce the amount of fossil-fuel pollution in the atmosphere. “What happens to the Maldives today will definitely happen the same to everyone else,” Nasheed said. “Maldives today, Manhattan tomorrow,” Mitchell agreed.

“The Island President” opens this weekend in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and next week in Washington DC and San Diego.

Rising Sea Levels Threaten Millions by Boosting Storm Surges

This map shows the odds of floods at least as high as historic once-a-century levels, occurring by 2030, based on Climate Central research. The two bars extending from each study point contrast odds estimates incorporating past and projected sea level rise from global warming (red bars), and odds estimates not incorporating this rise (blue bars). Global average sea level has increased more than eight inches since 1880, and the rise is accelerating. Most or all of the rise can be attributed to global warming, which warms and expands global oceans, and causes glaciers and ice sheets to decay.

A Climate Central repost, study here, interactive map here

Sea level rise due to global warming has already doubled the annual risk of coastal flooding of historic proportions across widespread areas of the United States, according to a new report from Climate Central. By 2030, many locations are likely to see storm surges combining with sea level rise to raise waters at least 4 feet above the local high-tide line. Nearly 5 million U.S. residents live in 2.6 million homes on land below this level. More than 6 million people live on land below 5 feet; by 2050, the study projects that widespread areas will experience coastal floods exceeding this higher level.

Titled “Surging Seas,” the report is the first to analyze how sea level rise caused by global warming is compounding the risk from storm surges throughout the coastal contiguous U.S. It is also first to generate local and national estimates of the land, housing and population in vulnerable low-lying areas, and associate this information with flood risk timelines. The Surging Seas website includes a searchable, interactive online map that zooms down to neighborhood level, and shows risk zones and statistics for 3,000 coastal towns, cities, counties and states affected up to 10 feet above the high tide line.

In 285 municipalities, more than half the population lives below the 4-foot mark. One hundred and six of these places are in Florida, 65 are in Louisiana, and ten or more are in New York (13), New Jersey (22), Maryland(14), Virginia (10) and North Carolina (22). In 676 towns and cities spread across every coastal state in the lower 48 except Maine and Pennsylvania, more than 10% of the population lives below the 4-foot mark.

Tidal gauge records show that the sea has already risen 8 inches globally during the last century, and projections point to a steep acceleration. “Sea level rise is not some distant problem that we can just let our children deal with. The risks are imminent and serious,” said report lead author Dr. Ben Strauss of Climate Central. “Just a small amount of sea level rise, including what we may well see within the next 20 years, can turn yesterday’s manageable flood into tomorrow’s potential disaster. Global warming is already making coastal floods more common and damaging.”

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by Peter Sinclair, cross-posted from the Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Since we have such an active community of armchair oceanographers and spreadsheet Glaciologists here, I thought it would be useful to speak to the real thing, the people who actually spend time on the ocean, on the ice sheets, do the measurements, and come back to share that knowledge with us. I had just that opportunity at the American Geophysical conference in December.

I spoke to Josh Willis, Oceanographer with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Josh is one of best known young ocean scientists on the planet. He pointed me to the recent Kemp et al study of tidal marshes on the US East coast, which has produced a long record of sea level over the last 2000 years, complete with a very Hockey-stickish uptick during the last 200 or so.

[JR:  For more on that study, see "NSF Study: Fastest Sea-Level Rise in Two Millennia Linked to Increasing Global Temperatures."]

Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Center at Ohio State was there, presenting evidence of acceleration in Greenland ice loss over the last 200 years. His bottom line: “If we talk 10 years from now, my expectation is that Greenland will be losing roughly double what it is now.”

I round out the video with takes from old pros lead NASA scientist Jim Hansen and Admiral David Titley, the US Navy’s Chief Oceanographer: 

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Ohio State News Release

The 2010 Uplift Anomaly (green arrows), superimposed on a map showing the 2010 Melting Day Anomaly (shaded in red). Click to Enlarge.

An unusually hot melting season in 2010 accelerated ice loss in southern Greenland by 100 billion tons – and large portions of the island’s bedrock rose an additional quarter of an inch in response.

That’s the finding from a network of nearly 50 GPS stations planted along the Greenland coast to measure the bedrock’s natural response to the ever-diminishing weight of ice above it.

Every year as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, the rocky coast rises, explained Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University.  Some GPS stations around Greenland routinely detect uplift of 15 mm (0.59 inches) or more, year after year. But a temperature spike in 2010 lifted the bedrock a detectably higher amount over a short five-month period – as high as 20 mm (0.79 inches) in some locations.

In a presentation Friday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Bevis described the study’s implications for climate change.

“Pulses of extra melting and uplift imply that we’ll experience pulses of extra sea level rise,” he said. “The process is not really a steady process.”

Because the solid earth is elastic, Bevis and his team can use the natural flexure of the Greenland bedrock to measure the weight of the ice sheet, just like the compression of a spring in a bathroom scale measures the weight of the person standing on it.

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Projected sea level rise IF we don’t get off our current emissions path (which is between A2 and A1FI).  The WashPost omitted any mention of climate change in its sea level rise story, even though a key source talked about it with the reporter.

by Elliott Negin, Union of Concerned Scientists, in a HuffPost repost. [I add some comments of my own at the end -- JR.]

The Washington Post flunked Climate Science Reporting 101 this week, fumbling an opportunity to remind its readers about the threat global warming poses right here, right now.

On Monday, the day the latest round of annual U.N. climate negotiations opened in Durban, South Africa, the paper ran a scene-setter in its front section headlined “Global pact gives way to local action.” It pointed out that countries, states, provinces and municipalities are initiating their own policies to cut carbon emissions in the absence of a universal binding agreement. That story was not the problem.

The second story, which was plastered on the paper’s front page, is where the Post fell down on the job.

“In Chincoteague, a stampede against beach changes” reported on a dispute between the federal government and town leaders in a small Virginia coastal resort town best known for its wild ponies. The town’s 4,300 year-round residents survive on tourism — some 14,000 vacationers visit daily every summer, according to the state transportation department. But its beach — a part of the Assateague Island National Seashore and the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge — is threatened by sea-level rise.

Without getting bogged down in the details, suffice it to say that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency that manages national refuges, recently proposed a new, 15-year plan to safeguard the more than 300 species of birds and other wildlife at Chincoteague. One of the options would move the public beach about a mile north where it would be less vulnerable to sea-level rise, build remote parking lots in a more stable area, and shuttle beachgoers in buses. The town mayor and many residents oppose the plan, fearing the proposed changes would turn off tourists.

The Post story included the what, who, where and how of basic journalism. What was missing was the why. Why is sea level rising and eroding the beach in Chincoteague?

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