The Rising Tide

I have just begun a book called Extreme Cites, by Ashley Dawson. As I have discerned it thus far, its thesis is that the world's great coastal cities are destined for massive inundation and destruction because of rising sea levels. This likely now-irreversible fate is undergirded by the one of the central facts of contemporary capital: its rapacious appetite for continuous and unlimited growth. I won't bore you with the details except to recommend that you read the book.

Should you have neither the time nor the inclination, an article in The Guardian, about another book dealing only with American coastal inundation, can provide much useful information. It also explores the work of Harold Wanless, chair of the geology department at the University of Miami, who, in taking issue with the more conservative estimates of two to six feet sea-level rise over this century, has come to some damning conclusions about his city:

“The rate of sea level rise is currently doubling every seven years, and if it were to continue in this manner, Ponzi scheme style, we would have 205 feet of sea level rise by 2095,” he says. “And while I don’t think we are going to get that much water by the end of the century, I do think we have to take seriously the possibility that we could have something like 15 feet by then.”

Why?

Dig into geologic history and you discover this: when sea levels have risen in the past, they have usually not done so gradually, but rather in rapid surges, jumping as much as 50 feet over a short three centuries. Scientists call these events “meltwater pulses” because the near-biblical rise in the height of the ocean is directly correlated to the melting of ice and the process of deglaciation, the very events featured in the documentary footage Hal has got running on a screen above his head.

Fun fact:

From 1900 to 2000 the glacier on the screen retreated inward eight miles. From 2001 to 2010 it pulled back nine more; over a single decade the Jakobshavn glacier lost more ice than it had during the previous century. And then there is this film clip, recorded over 70 minutes, in which the glacier retreats a full mile across a calving face three miles wide. “This is why I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the largest meltwater pulse in modern human history,” Hal says.

A wealth of information and scientific studies demonstrates beyond doubt our headlong plunge toward disaster. Despite that, we argue incessantly over piddling and ineffective carbon taxes while ignoring the real work that mitigating disaster would require. It used to be said that knowledge is power. That is obviously no longer true as we choose to willfully, egregiously ignore that knowledge.

Our fate is all but sealed.

Paging King Canute

His lesson needs to be relearned, methinks.

Truly, Profoundly Disturbing

I have just finished reading a long article in National Geographic, one that, without any use of hyperbole, should disturb all of us deeply and profoundly. But thanks to our capacity to ignore anything that disturbs our worldview, the article's dire warning will likely provoke little concern and no alteration of our bloated, cossetted and unsustainable lifestyles.

The following video summarizes the situation well, but following it I am including some excerpts from the article, although I do recommend taking some time to read the entire piece carefully.



The problem, of course, is earth's warming temperatures, but those rising numbers are much greater in Antarctica, where the ice shelves that hold in the glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates:

Why should we care about Antarctica ice melt? Antarctica's ice shelves are disintegrating and the glaciers behind them are flowing faster into the ocean. This could spell disaster for coastal areas around the world, and scientists are in a race against time to understand how it's happening. Sea levels around the world could rise by 14 feet if all of the ice melted just on West Antarctica.

Large swaths of West Antarctica are hemorrhaging ice these days. The warming has been the most dramatic on the Antarctic Peninsula, a spine of ice-cloaked mountains that reaches 700 miles up toward the tip of South America. Catching the powerful winds and ocean currents that swirl endlessly around Antarctica, the peninsula gets slammed with warm air and water from farther north. Average annual temperatures on its west side have risen nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950—several times faster than the rest of the planet—and the winters have warmed an astonishing 9 degrees. Sea ice now forms only four months a year instead of seven.

The ice shelves, Fricker says, “are the canary in the coal mine.” Because they’re already floating, they don’t raise sea level themselves when they melt—but they signal that a rise is imminent, as the glaciers behind them accelerate. Fricker and her team have found that from 1994 to 2012, the amount of ice disappearing from all Antarctic ice shelves, not just the ones in the Amundsen Sea, increased 12-fold, from six cubic miles to 74 cubic miles per year. “I think it’s time for us scientists to stop being so cautious” about communicating the risks, she says.

The video, along with the above three excerpts, are merely the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Yet the signs are clear, ominous, and accelerating. I have little doubt that the predicted flooding cataclysms will occur much faster than mid-to-late century. Indeed, before my time is up, I fully expect the apocalypse to be well underway.

Can't Say We Weren't Warned

But then, it's all a hoax anyway, isn't it?

It's Called "Nuisance Flooding"

Posted by MoS, the Disaffected Lib:

It's the latest term spawned by climate change - "nuisance flooding." According to Insurance Journal, nuisance flooding is the periodic flooding being experienced due to rising sea levels.

Eight of the top 10 U.S. cities that have seen an increase in nuisance flooding - which causes such public inconveniences as frequent road closures, overwhelmed storm drains and compromised infrastructure - are on the East Coast, according to a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report.

This nuisance flooding, caused by rising sea levels, has increased on all three U.S. coasts between 300 and 925 percent since the 1960s, the report says.

Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland, top the list along with Atlantic City, New Jersey; Philadelphia and Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Other cities include Charleston, South Carolina; Washington, D.C.; and Norfolk Virginia.

What is a nuisance today could become something far more destructive in the not too distant future as sea level rise accelerates. At least one analysis suggests we could see up to 2.5 metres of sea level rise by 2040 which would mean a rapid increase beginning over the next few years.

For the most part, sea level rise is a problem we don't seem to talk about. Coastal residents should ask themselves when was the last time they recall sea level rise being discussed by their municipal, provincial or federal representatives? When was it debated on the floor of the House of Commons? What planning is underway? What funding has been allocated to deal with this threat? How much sea level rise do they foresee by when? What do they mean to defend, what do they expect to abandon to the rising sea?

The American example is disturbing. There we find little political will to even acknowledge the problem. Miami, for example, already sustains far worse than nuisance flooding on a regular basis. It cannot be defended and yet municipal and state authorities are doing nothing to rein in new development. Former New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, did commit the city to a major flood protection programme but even that may prove inadequate.

How will coastal Canada cope? I haven't got a clue and neither, apparently, do our elected officials. From documents I've read, low-lying municipalities in the Vancouver suburbs (much of Richmond is already well below sea level) are planning little more than raising their sea walls a metre or two. What do they do when high tides swell the Fraser River to overflow its banks?

Why aren't we talking about this? The answer is easy and powerful. Talking about sea level rise leads to any number of questions that can have immediate ramifications. What's the value of a multi-million dollar waterfront property that may well be submerged in two or three decades hence? What will be the toll on urban and suburban infrastructure? How do we decide what we will attempt to defend, what we will abandon? Who wins, who loses? Who pays, who collects? Decisions, decisions. Oh dear.

A Stark Prediction of Sea Level Rise By 2040

Posted by MoS, the Disaffected Lib:

There have been a number of reports over the past year or two that, taken collectively, seem to point to major changes underway in the Arctic. It's not one thing but a number of changes that are synergistic, each building on the other. These include the rapidly warming Arctic atmosphere and the creation of the more powerful polar jet stream; the loss of Arctic sea ice at rates that were not contemplated even a few years ago; the warming of Arctic Ocean waters, sea level rise and the recent observation of big waves where before there were none; the thawing and burning of the tundra; the exposure and melting of the permafrost beneath; the major increase in wildfires in the northern boreal forests; the spread of black and brown soot from these wildfires and the resultant accelerating deglaciation of the Greenland ice sheet.

We know that the polar jet stream is already playing havoc with us in the temperate zone. It manifests in Rossby waves - deep, slow-moving waves - that can alternately pull warm, southern air into the high northern latitudes and then send cold, Arctic air plunging far into the south. These waves can also leave severe storm events "parked" over certain locations leading to flash flooding of the sort seen in recent years.

What is beginning to emerge from recent observations is that we may have grossly underestimated sea level rise this century especially in the short- and mid-term. By one calculation, all these phenomena playing out today in the Arctic could lead to sea level rise of 2.5-metres by 2040.



I won't explore this forecast in detail. Follow the link, spend an hour or two, and you can come to your own conclusions. Whether 2.5-metres by 2040 is likely, I don't know. What I do know is that we should have very clear answers within 10-years at the outside. We will know by 2025 if this is in store for us by 2040. We might even know by 2020.

What this means is that, by 2020, we may know if we have crossed or are at the tipping point where natural feedback mechanisms, such as those listed above, have carried us into runaway global warming of some extent.

2.5-metres of sea level rise by 2040 wouldn't be the end of Canada or the end of the United States. It would be the end of various low-lying nations. For us, however, it would mean economic upheaval and major social dislocation. It would be an economic body blow. There are a lot of North Americans who live close enough to the sea that 2.5-metres of sea level rise, coupled with the impacts of storm surges, would necessitate retreat from the coast. There are some North American cities such as Miami or New Orleans that cannot survive that sort of rise and would have to be abandoned. The Jersey Shore? Fuggetaboutit.

NOAA has an interactive graphic depicting the impacts of sea level rise up to 2-metres on the United States. It stops at the Canadian border but you can roughly extrapolate from the U.S. picture.