Sea level rises are not some distant threat; for many Americans they are very real. In an extract from her chilling new book, Rising, Elizabeth Rush details how the US coastline will be radically transformed in the coming years
‘Take the six million people who live in south Florida today and divide them into two groups: those who live less than six and a half feet above the current high tide line, and everybody else.’ Photograph: Milkweed Editions
In 1890, just over six thousand people lived in the damp lowlands of south Florida. Since then the wetlands that covered half the state have been largely drained, strip malls have replaced Seminole camps, and the population has increased a thousandfold. Over roughly the same amount of time the number of black college degree holders in the United States also increased a thousandfold, as did the speed at which we fly, the combined carbon emissions of the Middle East, and the entire population of Thailand.
About 60 of the region’s more than 6 million residents have gathered in the Cox Science Building at the University of Miami on a sunny Saturday morning in 2016 to hear Harold Wanless, or Hal, chair of the geology department, speak about sea level rise. “Only 7% of the heat being trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the atmosphere,” Hal begins. “Do you know where the other 93% lives?”
A teenager, wrists lined in aquamarine beaded bracelets, rubs sleep from her eyes. Returns her head to its resting position in her palm. The man seated behind me roots around in his briefcase for a breakfast bar. No one raises a hand.
“In the ocean,” Hal continues. “That heat is expanding the ocean, which is contributing to sea level rise, and it is also, more importantly, creating the setting for something we really don’t want to have happen: rapid melt of ice.”
A woman wearing a sequined teal top opens her Five Star notebook and starts writing things down. The guy behind her shovels spoonfuls of passionfruit–flavored Chobani yogurt into his tiny mouth. Hal’s three sons are perched in the next row back. One has a ponytail, one is in a suit, and the third crosses and uncrosses his gray street sneakers. The one with the ponytail brought a water bottle; the other two sip Starbucks. And behind the rows and rows of sparsely occupied seats, at the very back of the amphitheater, an older woman with a gold brocade bear on her top paces back and forth.
A real estate developer interrupts Hal to ask: “Is someone recording this?”
“Yes.” The cameraman coughs. “Besides,” Hal adds, “I say the same damn thing at least five times a week.” Hal, who is in his early seventies and has been studying sea level rise for over 40 years, pulls at his Burt Reynolds moustache, readjusts his taupe corduroy suit, and continues. On the screen above his head clips from a documentary on climate change show glacial tongues of ice the size of Manhattan tumbling into the sea. “The big story in Greenland and Antarctica is that the warming ocean is working its way in, deep under the ice sheets, causing the ice to collapse faster than anyone predicted, which in turn will cause sea levels to rise faster than anyone predicted.”
‘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.’ Photograph: Milkweed Editions
According to Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida, rising sea levels are uncertain, their connection to human activity tenuous. And yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects roughly two feet of rise by century’s end. The United Nations predicts three feet. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates an upper limit of six and a half feet.
Take the 6 million people who live in south Florida today and divide them into two groups: those who live less than six and a half feet above the current high tide line, and everybody else. The numbers slice nearly evenly. Heads or tails: call it in the air. If you live here, all you can do is hope that when you put down roots your choice was somehow prophetic.
But Hal says it doesn’t matter whether you live six feet above sea level or sixty-five, because he, like James Hansen, believes that all of these predictions are, to put it mildly, very, very low. “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.”
It’s a little after nine o’clock. Hal’s sons stop sipping their lattes and the oceanographic scientist behind me puts down his handful of M&M’s. If Hal Wanless is right, every single object I have seen over the past 72 hours – the periodic table of elements hanging above his left shoulder, the buffet currently loaded with refreshments, the smoothie stand at my seaside hotel, the beach umbrellas and oxygen bars, the Johnny Rockets and seashell shop, the lecture hall with its hundreds of mostly empty teal swivel chairs – will all be underwater in the not-so-distant future.
One of the few stories I remember from the Bible vividly depicts the natural and social world in crisis. It is the apocalyptic narrative par excellence – Noah’s flood. When I look it up again, however, I am surprised to find that it does not start with a rainstorm or an ark, but earlier, with unprecedented population growth and God’s scorn. It begins: “When human beings began to increase in number on the earth.” I read this line and think about the 6,000 inhabitants of south Florida turning into 6 million in 120 short years. “The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become.” I think about the exponential increase in M&M’s, Chobani yogurt cups and grande lattes consumed over that same span of time. The dizzying supply chains, cheap labor and indestructible plastic. “So God said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them.’” And then the rain began.
I do not believe in a vengeful God – if God exists at all – so I do not think of the flood as punishment for human sin. What interests me most is what happens to the story when I remove it from its religious framework: Noah’s flood is one of the most fully developed accounts of environmental change in ancient history. It tries to make sense of a cataclysmic earthbound event that happened long ago, before written language, before the domestication of horses, before the first Egyptian mummies and the rise of civilization in Crete. An event for which the teller clearly held humans responsible.
****
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.
He shows us a clip of the largest glacial calving event ever recorded. It starts with a chunk of ice the size of Miami’s tallest building tumbling, head over tail, off the tip of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Then the Southeast Financial Center goes, displaying its cool blue underbelly. It is a coltish thing, smooth and oddly muscular. The ground between the two turns to arctic ice dust and the ocean roils up. Next, chunks of ice the size of the Marquis Residences crash away; then the Wells Fargo Center falls, and with it goes 900 Biscayne Bay. Suddenly everything between the Brickell neighborhood and Park West is gone.
The clip begins again and I watch in awe as a section of the Jakobshavn Glacier half the size of all Miami falls into the sea.
“Greenland is currently calving chunks of ice so massive they produce earthquakes up to six and seven on the Richter scale,” Hal says as the city of ice breaks apart. “There was not much noticeable ice melt before the nineties. But now it accelerates every year, exceeding all predictions. It will likely cause a pulse of meltwater into the oceans.”
In medicine, a pulse is something regular – a predictable throb of blood through veins, produced by a beating heart. It is so reliable, so steady, so definite that lack of a pulse is sometimes considered synonymous with death. A healthy adult will have a resting heart rate of 60 to 100 beats per minute, every day, until they don’t. But a meltwater pulse is the opposite. It is an anomaly. The exception to the 15,000-year rule.
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.
As the ice sheets above Hal’s head fall away and the snacks on the buffet disappear, topography is transformed from a backwater physical science into the single most important factor determining the longevity of the Sunshine State. The man seated next to me leans over. “If what he says is even half true,” he whispers, “Florida is about to be wiped off the map.”
45 Comments on "Florida is about to be wiped off the map’"
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:12 am
Cute girl, very bright, but like the rest of us, her beliefs are based on conjecture. What we think we know is vastly outweighed by what we don’t know. Climate can go in any direction. We can have global warming or global cooling. Sea levels can rise or they may fall. In fact on a long enough time line sea levels will rise and fall. A cosmic cloud or a super volcano eruption could cast us back into an ice age. The hubris lies in the assumption that we can predict weather a century out.
twocats on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:36 am
yep ignore all the things that are happening around you in this very hour (wildfires) and base your life on a cosmic event (god aka cosmic cloud) that will never happen. that’s the ticket.
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:42 am
You presuppose you know how all of this is going to turn out. Some dweeb set a good portion on Northern California ablaze destroying millions of dollars in property and displacing thousands of people. A crack head burned down a concrete bridge in Atlanta costing millions and snarled traffic for months. Assault weapons, bomb plots and teams of terrorists were not needed to collapse these systems and unleash this chaos. All that was needed was a cigarette lighter.
We live in a very fragile interdependent system that can collapse in a heartbeat. The trigger is more than likely unknown and it may be pulled at any moment.
Look to your own security and make at least a modest preparation for the unexpected.
Cloggie on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:52 am
The concensus is that Holland can handle 3 but not 6 foot. The latter means the end of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Hague. My town Eindhoven would become the new capital of rump-Holland:
I have her book on the end table next to me, bought as soon as I heard of it. Can’t wait to dive into it. This has long been a worry of mine ever since I researched sea level changes at the end of the Ice Age. I suspect the author is only beginning to see the real picture of what maybe coming. How I hope that I am wrong.
Shortend on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 9:14 am
Darrell is incorrect. Instead of “we” he should of wrote “I” and no one is “predicting the weather” as he claims.
The science is based on Physics and Chemistry and as twocats pointed out observations that in turn forms a body of evidence.
The IPPC reviews the research and collects a consensus to provide projections, not predications, based on the research.
FYI
For the past 6000 years the earth was cooling until we dumped 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Using carbon isotope analysis, the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past 2.5 centuries can be attributed directly to the burning of fossil fuels.
The GHG qualities of CO2 have been known to since for the past 2 centuries.
Prior to the Industrial revolution the primary force in long range climate chnage was Milankovitch cycles, according to which we should still be cooling.
According to solar activity we should be cooling.
H20 is a dominant GHG, who levels increase as temperatures increase.
We can control how much CO2 we emit, we cannot control natural forcings.
Human activity has overwhelmed natural forcings.
The last time atmospheric CO2 was at 400 parts per million was during the ancient Pliocene Era, three to five million years ago.
– Global average temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees C warmer than today (5.4 to 7.2 degrees F).
– Polar temperatures were as much as 10 degrees C warmer than today (18 degrees F).
– The Arctic was ice free.
– Sea level was between five and 40 meters higher (16 to 130 feet) than today.
– Coral reefs suffered mass die-offs
joe on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 9:34 am
Cloggie on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:52 am
If Rotterdam becomes unusable as a port then there’s little hope for the rest of Europe. Probobly well just build new ports. But the geopolitical math will change. Rising sea levels puts northern Europe out of the picture as a place to live, southern Europe will be either desert islands or just desert. The ‘climate refugees’ are on to loser. Russia and central Asia will be the best places in eurasia to wait out cc, if it’s possible at all.
Cloggie on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 9:51 am
If Rotterdam becomes unusable as a port then there’s little hope for the rest of Europe. Probobly well just build new ports. But the geopolitical math will change. Rising sea levels puts northern Europe out of the picture as a place to live, southern Europe will be either desert islands or just desert. The ‘climate refugees’ are on to loser. Russia and central Asia will be the best places in eurasia to wait out cc, if it’s possible at all.
Thanks joe, for your assessment. I already had a fairly accurate picture of your wishes concerning continental Europe, thank you very much. No doubt in your view, the British empire on contrast will get a second lease on life, right?
“Army on standby for Brexit chaos: Troops will deliver food, medicine and fuel if Britain crashes out of EU without a deal as supermarkets issue warning to stockpile essential items”
Well, well, well. Probably it is just the DailyMail in need for a catchy headline.
“Now America’s top firms warn investors over Brexit: Panic crosses the Atlantic as firms including Ford, Nike and FedEx speak out”
I’m sure it is all a storm in a glass water. Nothing to be seen here, walk on. (did I already say that after Unilever, we want Shell HQ back? And the leading role of Schiphol over Heathrow? No?)
What’s the difference again between conducting business from a jail or conducting business from Britain with continental Europe after a heard Brexit?
Iran threatens to “wipe Israel off of the map”..LOL that is my favorite lie the media says..
MASTERMIND on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:01 am
Clogg
Why do you spam this board with a British tabloid? The dailymail is owned by a crabby old man..You are wasting your last remaming years alive on bullshit propaganda that nobody cares about here.
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:33 am
Short, I understand the trends that are currently touted. I also remember the time when the best rocket scientist on the planet were predicting we would go into a period of global cooling. Global warming will disrupt the lives of billions of people. Global cooling will starve billions of people to death. In 536 a dust cloud shrouded the northern hemisphere and the earth had a year with no summer. The resulting crop failures collapsed empires around the globe. Rome depopulated.
According to a congressional study on the danger of grid collapse, the taking down of as few as nine substations would collapse the grid for months. Somebody did a feasibility study on this possibility and took down a substation in California with rifles causing millions of dollars worth of damage. The same study estimated that we would lose 90% of our population within a year if the grid collapsed. Having been in grid down situations during hurricanes, I can assure you, civility would be lost within a week if the grid goes down in Tampa, Orlando and Miami. I see that as a very fragile system.
Estamos Jodidos on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:35 am
I don’t care if there will be seven feet of water in Trump Tower, NYC, or if Miami is swallowed up by the ocean, along with Galveston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and a dozen other coastal cities and population centers. Human kind will not make it because of shifts in agricultural zones because of temperature changes. When the wheat, corn, soy and rice crops fail because of abrupt climate change, human kind is finished. End of story. Estamos Jodidos
Shortend on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:45 am
Darrell, you do not understand, that is clear enough. I’ve been through this many times with deniers, like yourself.
jack dale Russ R. 7 months ago
I do look at the data and I look at the evidence. I do not use the MSM for my science; they get wrong all too often. Witness the 1970’s global cooling myth.; science was 6:1 warming:cooling.
Esta, you give the species too little credit. A remnant will survive and the process will begin again. Research the climate collapse in 536. Famine wrecked civilization. Long pork became an option. Then the sun came back out and we rebuilt. Our chromosomes suggest that the species passed through some kind of bottleneck roughly 8000 years ago. We have been here before.
MASTERMIND on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:58 am
Almost 80% of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck
The answer is right before us.
Just outlaw air conditioning , automobiles , airplanes , high rise condos , heating for houses , elevators and the internet.
There you go.
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 12:40 pm
Short, I am not denying global warming or the impact that humans have on the environment. I understand that full well having watched my own state fill up with millions of immigrants. What I am saying is that the narrative of the planet burning up is not a forgone conclusion. Yellowstone or any other super volcano could blow tomorrow and shroud the planet in a dust cloud. Our own political divide could cause saboteurs to take down the grid as could a solar flare or nuclear war. A grid collapse would end the United States as we know it. Our population would collapse and our demand for resources would drastically decline.
For whatever reason, we have had long periods of high temperatures followed by ice ages. I do not suffer from the hubris that assumes that some political movement in the U.S. or Europe will cause the Chinese to shut down their coal fired plants and end their exponential growth. I have driven the roads in Shanghai. The traffic is a thick as anything we have in the United States. A billion plus people are striving for the opulent society fossil fuels provide. They are not going to slack off until they are forced to. Truthfully neither will we.
Brandon on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 1:13 pm
Get off the the soapbox
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 1:27 pm
Your turn Bran step up.
Shortend on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 1:51 pm
Darrell stop with the double talk, 1984 doublespeak doesn’t work, sorry, been at it before with so-called “Luke warmers”, at the Willard Anthony Watts blog.
Easy enough to twist and spin, doesn’t change the Science.
Please name one science academy that supports your view.
jj@snet.net on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 2:31 pm
A lot of these wildfires are set by arson. Domestic terrorism and poor forest management.
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 2:43 pm
Sorry Short the only time I’m all in is when someone endangers my family. Too many unknowns out there. In respect for Bran’s request, I’m done with this topic and I’m off the soap box.
Duncan Idaho on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 2:49 pm
Well, when all the trash and chemicals are washed away, might be a ok dive site.
Saving Miami? Don’t think so—–
Houston? That is the question– free market delusional and destructive government, but I’m open for a argument—–
DerHundistLos on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 4:20 pm
@ Shortend
Nicely executed, although I’m perplexed by the inability of people to grasp the obvious. Denialism is another form of insanity prevalent these days.
Anonymouse1 on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 4:29 pm
jjtard
*Some* wildfires are set deliberately. That sort of thing is not exactly common, or routine.
Many wildfires are the result of human carelessness, accidents, negligence and so on.
‘Domestic terrorism’, is a meaningless , Orwellian, amerikan buzzword. It has no objective meaning and means even less in the context of your meandering comment.
Even in the Retarded States of amerika, besides you, I have not seen anyone try to pin the cause any wildfire as being attributed to, ‘domestic terrorism’. Though I supposed it is possible. Maybe I dont watch enough (any) CNN, Faux news, or MSNBC to know otherwise.
‘Poor forest management’. It is doubtful you understand anything about that subject either, even if there happens to be some truth in this statement.
Davy on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 5:02 pm
shut up asperger and contribute instead of bitch. you cunt
fmr-paultard on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 6:23 pm
anontard why u attack supertard? also why is eurotard against opposing opinion by preventing comments on his “blog?”. and why is dertard talking about “denialism?” what ultimate denial can surpass the refusal to produce evidence of probing by little green men? Instead the matter is swept under the rug and the only mild attempt at proving cattle mutilation is “FBI investigate”.
fmr-paultard on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 6:30 pm
what about supertard’s state of texas wind turbines extracting so much energy and creating wildfires in interior of US? good luck trying to prove causality.
Makati1 on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 6:35 pm
“Nicely executed, although I’m perplexed by the inability of people to grasp the obvious. Denialism is another form of insanity prevalent these days.”
Darrell is one of those who want to pretend things are not happening, DerHundistLos.
MASTERMIND on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 6:50 pm
The British Army is reportedly on standby to deliver food, medicines, and fuel in case of a no-deal Brexit
The picture is from New Jersey during the 2012 hurricane Sandy, not from Florida. This is how you create fake news. What the author also “forgets” to tell the reader is that South Florida is very easily reconfigurable, as it is made only of sand. It is easy to create higher ground by bulldozing the sand into islands. In fact, this is how this land was made habitable in the first place. Do yourself a favor, and look at South Florida on Google Maps, and you will see countless canals and ponds which are the result of land creation.
It is even worse than that https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article214173939.html
“This is a big game-changer,” Pathman says. “South Florida is ground zero, in many studies, for the economic impact of sea-level rise. So I’ve said many times that the tip of the spear of this economic issue is insurance.”
Rather than focusing on how high the sea level will be in 2060 or 2100, more concern should be on the economics, Pathman told The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board. “Because those things are already changing.”
The move to so-called “risk-based assessments” will likely jack up the cost of flood insurance to as much as wind-storm insurance “or more” in the next five to 10 years, said Pathman, a Miami attorney who is also chair of the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce. He sees rates rising 25 percent to 60 percent in the near term, and more after that.
In high-risk areas — and much of Florida is a high-risk area — real estate will get more expensive. The higher costs will ripple through banking, bonding and taxation. It might not be long, Pathman warns, before “30-year mortgages will be a thing of the past.”
Put it together, and investors could start bailing on South Florida long before the waters arrive. “Once risk-based assessment takes hold, it sends a message to the world that this place is too risky,” Pathman said at a community meeting reported by WLRN.
Yes Sir, money talks, BS walks
William Lane on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 12:41 pm
To understand the future, read “A CAnticle for Leibowitz”
Darrell Cloud on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 12:56 pm
Torrential rains have flood Highlands County as well. We were kayaking on Lake Jackson this morning and the lake is up over the sea wall at the boat ramp. The water has not been this high since Erma.
John Boothroyd on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 2:32 pm
We seem to forget that the land isn’t stable. Most of the drop in sea level over the past century on the east coast is due to the land dropping a foot as the continental plates drift. California slides an inch a year westward. Cali can at some point drop 30 or 40 feet as the plates release the built up stress. High water charts are corrupt and thus we have built in many areas tat are actually prone to flooding regardless of climate change effects. As we loose the Ice melting is going to increase in rate; who didn’t know this?? Ocean rise due the climate change is a symptom of a much bigger issues and as of yet not a major player in flooding. Beachfront property is nice ; however don’t blame the flood on anything other than you built where this would happen. The range of past ocean rise seen is from 15 to 130 feet when Historical co^2 levels were as high. This actually shows that over time the bigger issue is local geological changes and big waves that come with sudden changes. Flooding like co^2 is systematic of bigger issues that we have to address if we are to get anywhere.
turbot on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 4:37 pm
A pulse, in medicine, is the flow of blood through arteries, not veins.
John Doe on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 5:33 pm
Allow me to throw in another off shoot relevant to this already burdensome topic.
As the ice caps melt, The ocean rises due to more water….. AS there is more water it weighs more and the ocean beds are sinking under that weight. So Where Then Does That Put The Ocean Levels At??
HERMAN ALLMARAS on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 7:24 pm
too little, too late. That’s what the climatologists are lying about.
John on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 7:37 pm
Yes, a biblical framework using the convenient components of that framework, while leaving out any faith in the same God, or the inconvenient parts of the story – it wasn’t about population growth, it was about wicked people…do all that and expect your story to have a cognitive point?
Don’t think God is a vengeful God but I bet you believe in Karma. Golden rule et all says the same thing. Live your life good and the same comes back to you. Do the opposite and you reap that. Revenge has nothing to do with it. Humans wrote the Bible and every other Sacred book written.
Wickedness, in the form of The Watchers, who slept with human women when they weren’t human, reaped the rewards of what they had sown. Book of Enoch.
If you don’t want biblical feedback from an admitted flawed interpretation of sacred His- Story, then don’t postulate it as your frame of reference.
John on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 7:41 pm
…oh and by the way, if you’re wrong you just freaked the sh*t out of a lot of people.
So far, the climate change crowd, if they were playing baseball and we were keeping score, wouldn’t have a contract.
You can’t predict the weather next week. For the last two years, much of the globe has experienced cooling. And you have the peninsula of Florida underwater killing the masses.
“Each and every second 310 Kg of toxic chemicals are released into our air, land, and water by industrial facilities around the world. Of these, 65 Kg each second are recognized carcinogens.”
I will deal with climate change. Or perhaps I won’t have to, because by solving that problem I will have solved climate change as well.
duh on Tue, 31st Jul 2018 12:14 am
I wish. Muzzies need to get a hold of that little ugly bitch in the name of national security.
Shortend on Tue, 31st Jul 2018 11:56 am
John or whoever on Mon…cooling last two years? Better stop getting your research from the TV Weatherman Tony Willard Watts.
Afraid you, yourself, are lacking understanding of the vast climatic system.
No matter, because you are incorrect again, no surprise.
Natural processes like El Niño and La Niña are why we end up with graphs like this. There’s a lot of fluctuation, but overall the trend is up
MASTERMIND on Tue, 31st Jul 2018 12:03 pm
Facebook takes down suspected Russian network of pages
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:12 am
Cute girl, very bright, but like the rest of us, her beliefs are based on conjecture. What we think we know is vastly outweighed by what we don’t know. Climate can go in any direction. We can have global warming or global cooling. Sea levels can rise or they may fall. In fact on a long enough time line sea levels will rise and fall. A cosmic cloud or a super volcano eruption could cast us back into an ice age. The hubris lies in the assumption that we can predict weather a century out.
twocats on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:36 am
yep ignore all the things that are happening around you in this very hour (wildfires) and base your life on a cosmic event (god aka cosmic cloud) that will never happen. that’s the ticket.
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:42 am
You presuppose you know how all of this is going to turn out. Some dweeb set a good portion on Northern California ablaze destroying millions of dollars in property and displacing thousands of people. A crack head burned down a concrete bridge in Atlanta costing millions and snarled traffic for months. Assault weapons, bomb plots and teams of terrorists were not needed to collapse these systems and unleash this chaos. All that was needed was a cigarette lighter.
We live in a very fragile interdependent system that can collapse in a heartbeat. The trigger is more than likely unknown and it may be pulled at any moment.
Look to your own security and make at least a modest preparation for the unexpected.
Cloggie on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:52 am
The concensus is that Holland can handle 3 but not 6 foot. The latter means the end of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Hague. My town Eindhoven would become the new capital of rump-Holland:
https://goo.gl/images/4JQEzP
Wm-scott on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:56 am
I have her book on the end table next to me, bought as soon as I heard of it. Can’t wait to dive into it. This has long been a worry of mine ever since I researched sea level changes at the end of the Ice Age. I suspect the author is only beginning to see the real picture of what maybe coming. How I hope that I am wrong.
Shortend on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 9:14 am
Darrell is incorrect. Instead of “we” he should of wrote “I” and no one is “predicting the weather” as he claims.
The science is based on Physics and Chemistry and as twocats pointed out observations that in turn forms a body of evidence.
The IPPC reviews the research and collects a consensus to provide projections, not predications, based on the research.
FYI
For the past 6000 years the earth was cooling until we dumped 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
https://cdn.theatlantic.com…
Using carbon isotope analysis, the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past 2.5 centuries can be attributed directly to the burning of fossil fuels.
The GHG qualities of CO2 have been known to since for the past 2 centuries.
Prior to the Industrial revolution the primary force in long range climate chnage was Milankovitch cycles, according to which we should still be cooling.
According to solar activity we should be cooling.
H20 is a dominant GHG, who levels increase as temperatures increase.
We can control how much CO2 we emit, we cannot control natural forcings.
Human activity has overwhelmed natural forcings.
The last time atmospheric CO2 was at 400 parts per million was during the ancient Pliocene Era, three to five million years ago.
– Global average temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees C warmer than today (5.4 to 7.2 degrees F).
– Polar temperatures were as much as 10 degrees C warmer than today (18 degrees F).
– The Arctic was ice free.
– Sea level was between five and 40 meters higher (16 to 130 feet) than today.
– Coral reefs suffered mass die-offs
joe on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 9:34 am
Cloggie on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 8:52 am
If Rotterdam becomes unusable as a port then there’s little hope for the rest of Europe. Probobly well just build new ports. But the geopolitical math will change. Rising sea levels puts northern Europe out of the picture as a place to live, southern Europe will be either desert islands or just desert. The ‘climate refugees’ are on to loser. Russia and central Asia will be the best places in eurasia to wait out cc, if it’s possible at all.
Cloggie on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 9:51 am
If Rotterdam becomes unusable as a port then there’s little hope for the rest of Europe. Probobly well just build new ports. But the geopolitical math will change. Rising sea levels puts northern Europe out of the picture as a place to live, southern Europe will be either desert islands or just desert. The ‘climate refugees’ are on to loser. Russia and central Asia will be the best places in eurasia to wait out cc, if it’s possible at all.
Thanks joe, for your assessment. I already had a fairly accurate picture of your wishes concerning continental Europe, thank you very much. No doubt in your view, the British empire on contrast will get a second lease on life, right?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6004243/Theresa-faces-grassroots-revolt-Chequers-plan-scathing-backlash.html
Meanwhile Theresa M. is vacationing where her heart is, in Northern Italy. Brexit stills “Remains” to be seen.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6003837/Plans-drawn-troops-deliver-food-Britain-leaves-EU-without-deal.html
“Army on standby for Brexit chaos: Troops will deliver food, medicine and fuel if Britain crashes out of EU without a deal as supermarkets issue warning to stockpile essential items”
Well, well, well. Probably it is just the DailyMail in need for a catchy headline.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/news/article-6002877/Americas-firms-warn-investors-Brexit-piling-pressure-Number-10.html
“Now America’s top firms warn investors over Brexit: Panic crosses the Atlantic as firms including Ford, Nike and FedEx speak out”
I’m sure it is all a storm in a glass water. Nothing to be seen here, walk on. (did I already say that after Unilever, we want Shell HQ back? And the leading role of Schiphol over Heathrow? No?)
What’s the difference again between conducting business from a jail or conducting business from Britain with continental Europe after a heard Brexit?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6003199/Boris-Johnson-accused-bare-faced-cheek.html
Dazed an confused, or reality setting in with our flamboyant friend Boris Johnson?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6003199/Boris-Johnson-accused-bare-faced-cheek.html
Did the Russians push Britain out of the EU in order to tak its place?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6003127/MPs-say-Arron-Banks-used-foreign-money-fund-Leave-campaign.html
Where is Mueller when you need him?
MASTERMIND on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 10:30 am
Putin’s ‘unlimited range’ nuclear missile crashed after 22 miles
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/22/putins-unlimited-range-nuclear-missile-crashed-22-miles-us-intelligence/
Putin’s missiles are lemons..
LMFao!
MASTERMIND on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 10:58 am
Iran threatens to “wipe Israel off of the map”..LOL that is my favorite lie the media says..
MASTERMIND on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:01 am
Clogg
Why do you spam this board with a British tabloid? The dailymail is owned by a crabby old man..You are wasting your last remaming years alive on bullshit propaganda that nobody cares about here.
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:33 am
Short, I understand the trends that are currently touted. I also remember the time when the best rocket scientist on the planet were predicting we would go into a period of global cooling. Global warming will disrupt the lives of billions of people. Global cooling will starve billions of people to death. In 536 a dust cloud shrouded the northern hemisphere and the earth had a year with no summer. The resulting crop failures collapsed empires around the globe. Rome depopulated.
According to a congressional study on the danger of grid collapse, the taking down of as few as nine substations would collapse the grid for months. Somebody did a feasibility study on this possibility and took down a substation in California with rifles causing millions of dollars worth of damage. The same study estimated that we would lose 90% of our population within a year if the grid collapsed. Having been in grid down situations during hurricanes, I can assure you, civility would be lost within a week if the grid goes down in Tampa, Orlando and Miami. I see that as a very fragile system.
Estamos Jodidos on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:35 am
I don’t care if there will be seven feet of water in Trump Tower, NYC, or if Miami is swallowed up by the ocean, along with Galveston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and a dozen other coastal cities and population centers. Human kind will not make it because of shifts in agricultural zones because of temperature changes. When the wheat, corn, soy and rice crops fail because of abrupt climate change, human kind is finished. End of story. Estamos Jodidos
Shortend on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:45 am
Darrell, you do not understand, that is clear enough. I’ve been through this many times with deniers, like yourself.
jack dale Russ R. 7 months ago
I do look at the data and I look at the evidence. I do not use the MSM for my science; they get wrong all too often. Witness the 1970’s global cooling myth.; science was 6:1 warming:cooling.
http://journals.ametsoc.org…
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:49 am
Esta, you give the species too little credit. A remnant will survive and the process will begin again. Research the climate collapse in 536. Famine wrecked civilization. Long pork became an option. Then the sun came back out and we rebuilt. Our chromosomes suggest that the species passed through some kind of bottleneck roughly 8000 years ago. We have been here before.
MASTERMIND on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 11:58 am
Almost 80% of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/29/us-economy-workers-paycheck-robert-reich
george on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 12:10 pm
The answer is right before us.
Just outlaw air conditioning , automobiles , airplanes , high rise condos , heating for houses , elevators and the internet.
There you go.
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 12:40 pm
Short, I am not denying global warming or the impact that humans have on the environment. I understand that full well having watched my own state fill up with millions of immigrants. What I am saying is that the narrative of the planet burning up is not a forgone conclusion. Yellowstone or any other super volcano could blow tomorrow and shroud the planet in a dust cloud. Our own political divide could cause saboteurs to take down the grid as could a solar flare or nuclear war. A grid collapse would end the United States as we know it. Our population would collapse and our demand for resources would drastically decline.
For whatever reason, we have had long periods of high temperatures followed by ice ages. I do not suffer from the hubris that assumes that some political movement in the U.S. or Europe will cause the Chinese to shut down their coal fired plants and end their exponential growth. I have driven the roads in Shanghai. The traffic is a thick as anything we have in the United States. A billion plus people are striving for the opulent society fossil fuels provide. They are not going to slack off until they are forced to. Truthfully neither will we.
Brandon on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 1:13 pm
Get off the the soapbox
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 1:27 pm
Your turn Bran step up.
Shortend on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 1:51 pm
Darrell stop with the double talk, 1984 doublespeak doesn’t work, sorry, been at it before with so-called “Luke warmers”, at the Willard Anthony Watts blog.
Easy enough to twist and spin, doesn’t change the Science.
Please name one science academy that supports your view.
jj@snet.net on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 2:31 pm
A lot of these wildfires are set by arson. Domestic terrorism and poor forest management.
Darrell Cloud on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 2:43 pm
Sorry Short the only time I’m all in is when someone endangers my family. Too many unknowns out there. In respect for Bran’s request, I’m done with this topic and I’m off the soap box.
Duncan Idaho on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 2:49 pm
Well, when all the trash and chemicals are washed away, might be a ok dive site.
Saving Miami? Don’t think so—–
Houston? That is the question– free market delusional and destructive government, but I’m open for a argument—–
DerHundistLos on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 4:20 pm
@ Shortend
Nicely executed, although I’m perplexed by the inability of people to grasp the obvious. Denialism is another form of insanity prevalent these days.
Anonymouse1 on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 4:29 pm
jjtard
*Some* wildfires are set deliberately. That sort of thing is not exactly common, or routine.
Many wildfires are the result of human carelessness, accidents, negligence and so on.
‘Domestic terrorism’, is a meaningless , Orwellian, amerikan buzzword. It has no objective meaning and means even less in the context of your meandering comment.
Even in the Retarded States of amerika, besides you, I have not seen anyone try to pin the cause any wildfire as being attributed to, ‘domestic terrorism’. Though I supposed it is possible. Maybe I dont watch enough (any) CNN, Faux news, or MSNBC to know otherwise.
‘Poor forest management’. It is doubtful you understand anything about that subject either, even if there happens to be some truth in this statement.
Davy on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 5:02 pm
shut up asperger and contribute instead of bitch. you cunt
fmr-paultard on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 6:23 pm
anontard why u attack supertard? also why is eurotard against opposing opinion by preventing comments on his “blog?”. and why is dertard talking about “denialism?” what ultimate denial can surpass the refusal to produce evidence of probing by little green men? Instead the matter is swept under the rug and the only mild attempt at proving cattle mutilation is “FBI investigate”.
fmr-paultard on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 6:30 pm
what about supertard’s state of texas wind turbines extracting so much energy and creating wildfires in interior of US? good luck trying to prove causality.
Makati1 on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 6:35 pm
“Nicely executed, although I’m perplexed by the inability of people to grasp the obvious. Denialism is another form of insanity prevalent these days.”
Darrell is one of those who want to pretend things are not happening, DerHundistLos.
MASTERMIND on Sun, 29th Jul 2018 6:50 pm
The British Army is reportedly on standby to deliver food, medicines, and fuel in case of a no-deal Brexit
https://www.businessinsider.com/british-army-on-standby-to-deliver-food-medicine-fuel-if-no-deal-brexit-sunday-times-report-2018-7?r=UK&IR=T
John on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 11:29 am
The picture is from New Jersey during the 2012 hurricane Sandy, not from Florida. This is how you create fake news. What the author also “forgets” to tell the reader is that South Florida is very easily reconfigurable, as it is made only of sand. It is easy to create higher ground by bulldozing the sand into islands. In fact, this is how this land was made habitable in the first place. Do yourself a favor, and look at South Florida on Google Maps, and you will see countless canals and ponds which are the result of land creation.
Shortend on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 12:18 pm
Fake News? Hardly George. Just to please you and to correct the misplaced photo, here is actual video footage from Channel 10, here in South Florida, where I reside
https://www.local10.com/video/despite-new-pump-system-streets-flooded-in-miami-beach-after-heavy-rain
It is even worse than that
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article214173939.html
“This is a big game-changer,” Pathman says. “South Florida is ground zero, in many studies, for the economic impact of sea-level rise. So I’ve said many times that the tip of the spear of this economic issue is insurance.”
Rather than focusing on how high the sea level will be in 2060 or 2100, more concern should be on the economics, Pathman told The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board. “Because those things are already changing.”
The move to so-called “risk-based assessments” will likely jack up the cost of flood insurance to as much as wind-storm insurance “or more” in the next five to 10 years, said Pathman, a Miami attorney who is also chair of the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce. He sees rates rising 25 percent to 60 percent in the near term, and more after that.
In high-risk areas — and much of Florida is a high-risk area — real estate will get more expensive. The higher costs will ripple through banking, bonding and taxation. It might not be long, Pathman warns, before “30-year mortgages will be a thing of the past.”
Put it together, and investors could start bailing on South Florida long before the waters arrive. “Once risk-based assessment takes hold, it sends a message to the world that this place is too risky,” Pathman said at a community meeting reported by WLRN.
Yes Sir, money talks, BS walks
William Lane on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 12:41 pm
To understand the future, read “A CAnticle for Leibowitz”
Darrell Cloud on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 12:56 pm
Torrential rains have flood Highlands County as well. We were kayaking on Lake Jackson this morning and the lake is up over the sea wall at the boat ramp. The water has not been this high since Erma.
John Boothroyd on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 2:32 pm
We seem to forget that the land isn’t stable. Most of the drop in sea level over the past century on the east coast is due to the land dropping a foot as the continental plates drift. California slides an inch a year westward. Cali can at some point drop 30 or 40 feet as the plates release the built up stress. High water charts are corrupt and thus we have built in many areas tat are actually prone to flooding regardless of climate change effects. As we loose the Ice melting is going to increase in rate; who didn’t know this?? Ocean rise due the climate change is a symptom of a much bigger issues and as of yet not a major player in flooding. Beachfront property is nice ; however don’t blame the flood on anything other than you built where this would happen. The range of past ocean rise seen is from 15 to 130 feet when Historical co^2 levels were as high. This actually shows that over time the bigger issue is local geological changes and big waves that come with sudden changes. Flooding like co^2 is systematic of bigger issues that we have to address if we are to get anywhere.
turbot on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 4:37 pm
A pulse, in medicine, is the flow of blood through arteries, not veins.
John Doe on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 5:33 pm
Allow me to throw in another off shoot relevant to this already burdensome topic.
As the ice caps melt, The ocean rises due to more water….. AS there is more water it weighs more and the ocean beds are sinking under that weight. So Where Then Does That Put The Ocean Levels At??
HERMAN ALLMARAS on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 7:24 pm
too little, too late. That’s what the climatologists are lying about.
John on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 7:37 pm
Yes, a biblical framework using the convenient components of that framework, while leaving out any faith in the same God, or the inconvenient parts of the story – it wasn’t about population growth, it was about wicked people…do all that and expect your story to have a cognitive point?
Don’t think God is a vengeful God but I bet you believe in Karma. Golden rule et all says the same thing. Live your life good and the same comes back to you. Do the opposite and you reap that. Revenge has nothing to do with it. Humans wrote the Bible and every other Sacred book written.
Wickedness, in the form of The Watchers, who slept with human women when they weren’t human, reaped the rewards of what they had sown. Book of Enoch.
If you don’t want biblical feedback from an admitted flawed interpretation of sacred His- Story, then don’t postulate it as your frame of reference.
John on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 7:41 pm
…oh and by the way, if you’re wrong you just freaked the sh*t out of a lot of people.
So far, the climate change crowd, if they were playing baseball and we were keeping score, wouldn’t have a contract.
You can’t predict the weather next week. For the last two years, much of the globe has experienced cooling. And you have the peninsula of Florida underwater killing the masses.
Very sweet.
Permavillage on Mon, 30th Jul 2018 10:23 pm
When that problem is solved:
“Each and every second 310 Kg of toxic chemicals are released into our air, land, and water by industrial facilities around the world. Of these, 65 Kg each second are recognized carcinogens.”
I will deal with climate change. Or perhaps I won’t have to, because by solving that problem I will have solved climate change as well.
duh on Tue, 31st Jul 2018 12:14 am
I wish. Muzzies need to get a hold of that little ugly bitch in the name of national security.
Shortend on Tue, 31st Jul 2018 11:56 am
John or whoever on Mon…cooling last two years? Better stop getting your research from the TV Weatherman Tony Willard Watts.
Afraid you, yourself, are lacking understanding of the vast climatic system.
No matter, because you are incorrect again, no surprise.
Natural processes like El Niño and La Niña are why we end up with graphs like this. There’s a lot of fluctuation, but overall the trend is up
MASTERMIND on Tue, 31st Jul 2018 12:03 pm
Facebook takes down suspected Russian network of pages
https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/31/technology/facebook-removes-pages/index.html?utm_term=image&utm_source=twmoney&utm_content=2018-07-31T16%3A57%3A03&utm_medium=social
Putin again! this means war!