Katrina’s effects on New Orleans may have been a preview of what will happen to many more coastal cities if we continue to ignore global warming. This New York Times article points out that the floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in a century.
And the Times editorial board argues what that could mean for coastal cities in the United States: “According to one government study, a 20-inch rise in sea level by 2100 could put 3,500 square miles of the southern coast of the United States underwater — rendering efforts to restore the Everglades and the Louisiana coastline essentially pointless. A large-scale breakup of the polar ice sheets would, of course, make matters much worse. Dikes could protect some regions, like Manhattan and the Netherlands, but most coastlines would be inundated.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
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34 Comments
Cool. I can’t wait!
Tell me again why we declined the offer of help for New Orleans from the Netherlands?
Just to clarify, there’s been reports that the hurricanes are just a 25 year cycle. Then we hear the ice caps have melted to their smallest size in a century.
If it’s a 25 year cycle, I’d expect to see the same time line on the artic melt.
The aurgument is that if Global Warming is a natural cycle or is it all man… *cough* *cough* … Bush … *cough* made.
I read an article that Mars is experiencing global warming as well.
While I’m not denying that Global Warming exisit and is happening, other than the sea level rising and unusual weather in certain places that hasn’t experience much of it in the recent past, what is really so bad about it?
OK! Cities on the coast might flood and palm trees will start growing in Kansas. The real question is… Can we stop it or even reverse it?
Probably not! 1 degree increase in average temperature every 100 years is something we will have to get use to.
But of COURSE is it all Bush’s fault. Ignore the fact this has been an issue for decades. After all, isn’t Bush responsible for everything bad that ever has happened since time began?
*sigh*.
Well, I aways wanted a beachfront home.
Sounds like a good excuse to attack Iran.
Joe,Seaside in Kansas? Palm trees? No east or west coast snobs to give us crap? Washington under water? Sounds like paradise to me!
Add to the mix of results increased severity in sorms, droughts, disruption of rain patterns and global warming will have a number of deleterious effects. It is real, it is happening, it is bad.
Check the journal Nature for more information. This is not a political journal but rather a technical one.
http://www.nature.com/
Ben?
When has anything in the history of the World ever been a fine warm sunny day?
There has always been droughts, hurricans, volcano euruptions, ice ages, warm ages, floods, and you name it. History of the world.
Ben,Joe’s right. This world has seen much worse; global warming much worse than what’s coming this time, ice ages that covered the globe in ice for millions of years at a time, not to mention collisions, supervolcanos, mass extinctions etc.Let’s get one thing straight; all this is run-of-the-mill for the planet. It’s not in trouble; we may be, but the earth, and life, will continue, whatever. We will do what species have always done. We’ll adapt or go extinct.
The current extinction rate exceeds that of the end-Permian mass extection. The current warming is outside of the envelope for Cenozoic ice/warm cycles. Man-cause increases in the opacity of the atmosphere to infra-red is triggering positice feedback loops in both ice-albedo and carbon sequestration. These positive feedback loops are accellerating warming further.
The big effect is not just the temperature increase but rather disruptions in weather patterns, notably rainfall.
I think we all pretty much agree that global warming is real. I don’t think it is too big a stretch to say that humanity has at least some part in this. Given that we’d best address what part in it we do play and do something about it.
Even a dog knows better than to soil his own bed.
Ben,Sure, we’re causing some of it, but when that volcano under Yellowstone blows, it’ll put humanity’s greenhouse gasses to shame! Mother Nature is still boss!
Leftist chicken littles just want to shut down all capitalism so they can control everything. They love global “warming”, because it gives them cover for their plan to kick us all back to the stone age.
We have yet to see proof that a complete shutdown of human greenhouse gas production would make any difference.
We need real PROOF, not more agenda-polishing bull crap from so-called experts.
If we need to do something to avert a disaster, let’s do it; but the leftists don’t want a solution. They just want chaos.
Andy:
Go read the technical literature in the field. You can start with Nature which I linked above. Try a scientific source instead of a Junior-college flunkout like Rush Limbaugh.
When you need medical advice do you ignore the advice of MDs? After all, they are also “so-called experts”!
Ben,Yes, I have occasionally ignored MDs, and it has saved my life.
MDs have a “practice” you know. And when I am the one they are practicing on, I certainly will weigh the value of their advice. “Here, take a pill.” “I need a new Mercedes and you need surgery.”
The global warming debate is like a bunch of people arguing about who will win a close race by measuring the temperature of the racetrack for a few minutes before the race starts.
I’ve seen lots of the data, and find it to be unconvincing. No one can say what the total heat balance for the earth is or was. Historical insolation/reflectivity information is essential to understanding what we know about historical warming and cooling trends. But scientists don’t even know what the heat balance is today, let alone at any ime in the past. And there is no hope for getting past data.
Whether warming is man-made, sun-made, or both — the attention needs to be on what to do about it, not whose “fault” it is.
Andy:
Have you talked to any scientists about this? I have. The OVERWHELMING consensus is that it is real, manmade, and deleterious.
BTW, we DO get past data. We study air bubbles from ice cores, study the sedimentary record, and use other methods. Go read the geological literature.
Reflectivity (albedo) IS important as I already stated. We actually know a fair amount about that and we are now intering a positive feedback loop on that. In this case “positive feedback” is bad.
Yes, and the information is interesting, but not convincing; because it cannot be used for reliable climate predictions.
I know that weather and climate are two different things; but climate information amounts to aggregate long-term weather; and as a practical matter, weather prediction beyond a few days out is still a complete crapshoot. Monthly forecasts are as sketchy as a horoscope, and predictions beyond that are useless. Climate predictions are very possibly beyond useless.
So tell me, will the sea rise 4 inches or 20 inches during this century? I seem to recall reading both predictions. Maybe they were for different time periods. In any case, what should we do about it?
I’m all for getting on with a fix if we are sure about all this. Besides, the work to be done should also help protect against hurricanes and tsunamis. We already need to do something about them, anyway.
How big a fix do we need?
We need a big fix – not just for the coastal issues but for other climate issues – drought etc. Rainfall pattern changes will have devastating effects on agriculture worldwide.
Professional climatologists disagree with your assessment that such forecasts are “beyond useless”.
Have you read anything on the subject from any sources other than political? Any technical journals? Science? Nature? Even Scientific American?
Puny as Andy doesn’t read, Ben.
He listens . . . to Rush, to Sean, to Bill, to Michael Savage.
Hour after hour of those foam-at-the-mouthers, and he thinks an eclipse is caused by the night serpent swallowing the sun.
Maybe Andy is taking too many of those “Limbaugh Whites” and doesn’t have a clue!
The scientists are one thing, but the environmental movement has deteriorated into a religion, with all the attendant political and social agendas.Climate is an incredibly complex, and in many cases, unpredictable mixture of causes and effects. We are only beginning to get a handle on a few parts of it. To go charging off on a crusade to ban this or that “cause” is not only premature but counterproductive. We need to find out first what we know, what we don’t know and what we can know before we can plan a deliberate course of action. What we don’t need is to be stampeded by a bunch of activists who think their personal manifestos are humanity’s solution to everything!Remember when Penn and Teller went to an environmental conference and got all those signatures on a petition to ban Dihydrogen Monoxide (water)?
Jed:
I remember well the DHMO spoof. It was a gas! However, as a scientist I also know the reality of global climate change and that we need to deal with it. This is NOT some sort of “a bunch of activists who think their personal manifestos are humanity’s solution to everything!” but rather serious scientists. READ their articles in the technical journals listed above.
I don’t look to Sierra Club or any other such group for my information on this; I stick to the journals.
I am old enough to remember the cigarette industry swearing that there was no consensus that tobacco was addictive or bad for your health. They were lying then; their counterparts are lying today.
OH, Phen Blooie is a skientist, no less! WOW! He even reads mazagines !!!c !!!!! !!!!!!!
Science, Nature, and Scientific American are not technical journals, ass hole . They’re pulp media. Crap. Popular trash. Eye candy for jackasses. If it bleeds it leads.
Andy says we need to get moving, and you ass holes go back to your silly-ass partisan bickering.
Your rants amount to: “I ain’t lifting a shovel until you right wingnut neanderthals admit that you personally, wilfully, and malicioiusly drove SUVs over FDR’s grave to increase global warming.
Fuck off, buttheads. Deal with facts, not your wet dreams.
Nature is a very technical journal.
Although I’m not surprised you aren’t aware of that bilge.
Whereas the problem started long before Bush took office, his disdain for he Kyoto Treaty is part of the problem.
Bilge definitely has his own level of “class” – none whatsoever.
I could have included Reviews of Geophysics, Paleoceanography, Amer Geophys Union, Geology, Sedimentary Geology, etc etc etc but wanted to keep it to those that are “readable”
Of course, unless the jouranl routinely used f***, b***heads, etc ol’ Bilge won’t be able to understand it. Those words clearly show his intellectual level.
Bilge, you have very aptly named yourself – that is precisely what you are!
Andy and Bilge are the same person, B. Augustus.
The guy really needs to get a life.
Off Topic,I have a full year of Natures Biotechnology. There from several years back. If someone wanted them they could email me.
Ben,I have read the journals, as well as books by many noted scientists. I respect what they have to say, which leads me to the conclusion that we don’t know, and maybe can’t know, enough about climate yet to go off half cocked and do things that may end up being harmful to vast numbers of people without solving the problem. Of course we must pursue the knowledge with all deliberate speed, wherever it takes us, but until we know what we’re doing, adaptive measures are the way to go.About 60 years ago, social scientists and architects got together and devised a plan to end poverty by providing huge blocks of decent apartments for poor people to live in. Millions and millions were spent in many cities to replace slums with decent housing, but the problem was much more complex than the scientists of the day had figured. The Projects simply became a slightly different and sometimes worse form of slum. Many have now been razed, and the rest are a blight.Such solutions, applied to the climate will be much harder to reverse, when found to be based on mistaken or incomplete concepts. Yes, we need to deal with it, but it’s vital that we deal with it right!
Well Jed, I guess this scientist and virtually all of my colleagues disagree with you. We believe that warming in real, man-caused, and deleterious. We are excursioning outside of the envelope of the Cenozoic variations.
You tried, Ben, but there’s no arguing with those who want to justify the status-quo and their privilidged status in it.
If you can deny catastrophic global warming, you can deny having to sacrifice anything. Drive that motor home, run that air conditioner, buy a Hummer, cut down the forests.
In short, do whatever you want without hinderence or thought of the consequence.
Of course climate scientists disagree with me. They have a whole research industry of their own to protect by crying wolf all the time.
I’m still waiting for an answer to my question — How big a fix do we need? If this is all science, then the answer should be known, easy to find, indisputable,and agreed to by all knowing scientists.
So where’s the answer? Just one answer please. This is science, after all, not politics.
Right?
Reduce emissions of Greenhouse gases. Implement actions to increase the rate of carbon sequestration. Those should do for a start.
Still no satisfying answer. The question is “how big” or how much has to be done to be certain that temperatures go down enough to make the necessary difference.
If a student asks what it takes to get an A in a class it isn’t helpful to say:
“Reduce output of bad answers. Implement actions to increase the rate of wrong answer sequestration. Those should do for a start.”
So far, all I hear is “chicken little” all dressed up in a lab coat. There seem to be no definitive, quantitative, provable numbers to shoot for. This implies that the science is still too incomplete for useful predictions about the scope of the necessary fix.
Anyway, what would be the economically acceptable ways to best reduce greenhouse gases and sequester carbon?