Climate Change: Seas May Rise 7 Feet:

[amborin]

Most climate scientists believe melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet will be one of the main drivers of sea level rise during this century.

How High Will Seas Rise?
Get Ready for Seven Feet

As governments, businesses, and homeowners plan for the future, they should assume that the world’s oceans will rise by at least two meters — roughly seven feet — this century. But far too few agencies or individuals are preparing for the inevitable increase in sea level that will take place as polar ice sheets melt.

by rob young and orrin pilkey

The reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are balanced and comprehensive documents summarizing the impact of global warming on the planet. But they are not without imperfections, and one of the most notable was the analysis of future sea level rise contained in the latest report, issued in 2007.

Given the complexities of forecasting how much the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will contribute to increases in global sea level, the IPCC chose not to include these giant ice masses in their calculations, thus ignoring what is likely to be the most important source of sea level rise in the 21st century. Arguing that too little was understood about ice sheet collapse to construct a mathematical model upon which even a rough estimate could be based, the IPCC came up with sea level predictions using thermal expansion of the oceans and melting of mountain glaciers outside the poles. Its results were predictably conservative — a maximum of a two-foot rise this century — and were even a foot lower than an earlier IPCC report that factored in some melting of Greenland’s ice sheet.

The IPCC’s 2007 sea level calculations — widely recognized by the academic community as a critical flaw in the report — have caused confusion among many in the general public and the media and have created fodder for global warming skeptics. But there should be no confusion about the serious threat posed by rising sea levels, especially as evidence has mounted in the past two years of the accelerated pace of melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.


snip

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2230

[thunder rising]

1. I am really tired of sensationalized headlines ... did you forget "this century"

[time_has_come]

3. I don't think the title of a blog entry/opinion piece should be called a "headline"

Nor do I see it as all that sensationalized.

[thunder rising]

4. Well then we disagree. The headline is all you see on the list and it's sensationalized

[Webster Green]

5. What list are you referring to?

I read the entire article, and it seemed balanced and not sensationalized.

It did say that we should plan for the worst case scenario, which makes sense to me.

Even a rise of two or three feet would have quite dramatic consequences.

[Igel]

20. Probably this list.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=103

[bertman]

10. thunder rising, I disagree with your take on the title of the thread, but I think it's

important to note that the IPCC report did not contain an estimate based on the melting shelves because they couldn't figure out how to come up with a suitable computer model. Not because they thought the rise would be less than seven feet, but because there were no models available YET that could accurately predict that.

We are seeing more extreme effects of climate change all over the globe. Many of them were not projected or anticipated because the changes are coming faster than scientists imagined they would. And in some cases the changes were not even imagined, period.

[Zoeisright]

22. Climate change isn't sensationalized ENOUGH.

Things are getting much worse much faster than models predicted.

We need a lot more sensationalizing of this issue. Even though it's probably too late.

[kestrel91316]

2. Antarctica is going to pose some problems, too. Much faster than expected.

Because that's how things seem to be panning out. The IPCC has been holding back on the bitter truth of our near future.

[Andronex]

11. The ice sheet is expanding in most of Antartica.

Ice expanding in much of Antarctica Eastern coast getting colder Western section remains a concern

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast.

Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.

However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week's meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recent decades".

more... <http://www.news.com.au/antarctic-ice-is-growing-not-melting-away/story-0-1225700043191>

[kestrel91316]

17. Antarctica is WARMING. That this has resulted in a temporary increase

in ice deposition in certain areas is no surprise. The continent as a whole is melting.

You don''t get out of Mom's basement very often, do you? Except maybe for tea parties?

[Andronex]

24. right...

You obviously have some information the scientific community does not have concerning Antarctica... I suggest you stop worshipping Al Gore and do a bit of real research yourself instead of making it up as you go along...


By Jack Williams, USATODAY.com

While the rest of the world has generally been warming up, much of Antarctica has been cooling for the last 35 years, scientists report.

At first glance, cooling the already-coldest continent might not seem to make much difference. Researchers say, however, it's making life even tougher for the few hardy plants and animals that struggle to live in the Antarctic Dry Valleys, the continent's largest ice-free area. No plants or animals, only microbes, live on the ice that covers about 98% of Antarctica.

Also, the cooling helps illustrate how little is known about some important aspects of Antarctica's climate.

Thirteen researchers, who work with the National Science Foundation's McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-term Ecological Research program, report in the Jan. 13 online edition of the journal Nature on both the cooling and its effects in the Dry Valleys, an a little larger than Rhode Island on the west coast of the Ross Sea.

Dry Valleys temperatures dropped an average of 1.23 degrees Fahrenheit a decade from 1986 to 2000, with the greatest cooling during the December through February Antarctic summer, they report.

This cooling is important because "summer temperatures are the driver of Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems, and our data are the first, to our knowledge, to highlight the cascade of ecological consequence that result from the recent summer cooling, " says Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the article's lead author.

more... <http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/cold-science/2002-01-13-antarctic-cooling.htm>

[ngant17]

6. storm surge and average rise of ocean

That data is significant because much of the highly-populated US Atlantic and Gulf Coast coasts are less than 10 feet above mean sea level, and this is the normal average not counting the monthly deviations due to new or full moon tidal variations.

Also this is not the same as a storm surge flooding from a hurricane, this sudden effect causes most of the deaths associated with a hurricane. So with global warming only, we're talking about a fairly gradual increase of sea levels over a slightly longer period of time. But the financial costs will be approximate to a hurricane surge.

I bring this up because hurricanes and their associated surges will only increase the problem, as hurricane activity will probably increase as ocean temps in the Atlantic increase.

7 feet would seem to be fairly conservative considering all the other factors. That's about half the rise of a typical Cat3 or higher hurricane making landfall on the Gulf or Atlantic coast (note that a Cat5 Katrina in 2005 was about 25ft.), so think of the global warming surge as like the coastal effects from a permanent Cat3 hurricane that never seems to go away.

Also increases in rainfall can produce almost the same effect as a small surge.

As article suggests, the coastal parts of Florida are one of the least prepared areas to deal with this problem in the US. There's too much money in ocean-front and ocean-view housing here, and the get-rich-quick, fly-by-night mentality is blinding developers to the long-term consequences to coastal construction.

[madrchsod]

7. Greenland melts..flips the conveyor...ice age!

[pokercat999]

8. I've seen that prediction also. Wonder why more

climatologists don't speak to this scenario?

[bertman]

9. Orrin Pilkey, one of the authors, has been a thorn in the side of the North Carolina

legislature for decades. He has relentlessly tried to make our state government understand that the Outer Banks and the other barrier islands on the N.C. coast are not suitable for development. His research and findings have been right on target time after time, yet the folks with big money want to build, build, build on those islands, so the legislature allows them to do just that.

It's pretty damn interesting watching homes that were once a quarter of a mile from an inlet that are now falling into the inlet because the wind and wave action--and especially the storms--cause such dramatic changes in the inlets. None of this would be happening if they had listened to Dr. Pilkey.

Just yesterday I was reading an article in National Geographic that was about the illicit trade in animals and reptiles and body parts such as rhino horn and shark fins. What amazed me the most was how blase the authorities are toward our decimation of the other species on our fragile planet. It's all about MONEY and potions for sexual fertility/virility or magical cures from drinking teas made of the essences of critters who live in the jungles, plains, deserts, and forests of the world.

We are such a short-sighted, self-indulgent, and unenlightened animal that it is very difficult for me to imagine that we will ever be able to prevent this planet from sloughing us off like a cancerous growth. Even with our technological know-how and our ever-increasing understanding of our interdependence with every other aspect of the planet, we still stick our heads into the sand like big, dumb, humanoid ostriches.

Rec.

[mudplanet]

12. Let them go ahead and build, but not with my tax dollar. Most mortagages

require insurance, and virtually all (all, to my knowledge) flood insurance is federally underwritten. Imagine how those of us that can't afford 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) vacation homes on the beach are going to feel if our tax dollars go to reimbursing the rich for their folly (heck, it's already being used to underwrite their insurance).

It's distinctly possible, though not probable, that the predictions/time line for the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are way too conservative. It could be that, once the glaciers begin sliding at a certain speed and are lubricated correctly, that we could see a rise in sea levels of a few feet within a decade. This isn't idle speculation, but a reasonable scenario within a range of possibilities. We just don't know. We do know that "the overwhelming bulk of evidence" (the standard of scientific proof) indicates that these ice sheets are going to slide into the ocean and that sea level will rise significantly.

I won't, personally, miss Florida but hundreds of millions of people in undeveloped countries are going to be devastated if (when?) this happens.

[bertman]

16. mudplanet, our federal tax dollars are ALREADY covering these vacation homes. Every

time a hurricane blows through, a few more of them wash into the sea or fall apart. KACHING! insurance to the rescue. It's criminal.

I can envision your theory of rapid sliding of glaciers happening, but I'm not a scientist so I'm in the "idle speculator" peanut gallery with you.

Personally, I think we'll all miss the Everglades. But some other parts of Florida, not so much.

[mudplanet]

18. The Everglades will still be there, they'll just move northward a few hundred miles

[jotsy]

21. Penned a little two line rhymer awhile back,

didn't know it then, but I think its for what you say in your last two graphs.

Speak I must at the very least
If only to stir the soul and soothe the spirit of God's most sentient, yet still savage beast.

We've been given every advantage which we appear to want to use to destroy ourselves; it is indeed a short sighted society that would allow itself to bleed so profusely from the mid-section and believe it would still be able to stand.

You're comments were quite excellently expressed, IMHO.

[Zoeisright]

23. Sadly, +1000000

Right on.

[mudplanet]

13. Check it out for yourself

See how the geography will change

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2009/08/google-maps-of-sea-level-rises.html

[TexasObserver]

14. Oh, boy. The beach will be 30 miles closer to my home!

[Quixote1818]

15. There goes Rush Limbaugh's house. nt

[BennyD]

19. 7-feet?? I don't beleive it. n/t

[winyanstaz]

25. K & R...

I don't think so.
The poles are slowly shifting so that would account for it being colder in some places and warmer in others.
My friend has a place right on the beach in New Brunswick and the waterline has not changed there at all in the last 25 years. I believe that in the places the shore has changed has been due to storms.
If you fill a glass with ice cubes and then fill it to the top with water...the cup does not spill over when the ice melts. The area taken up by the ice is replaced with the water..it takes up the same volume as before.

[Uncle Joe]

26. Set to music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91OIaPRrDts

Thanks for the thread, amborin