Mick Keelty warns at climate change could cause refugees to flee countires due to sea level rises. He warns that China's available land could dramatically shrink and millions could be on the move.
All this from an at most 59cm increase in sea level in the next 100 years. Amazing.
The ABC take it one more step further suggesting that:
Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting. In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.
Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.
Its amazing what 59cm can do.
13 comments:
Simon Holgate, an oceanographer in UK, whose paper Geophysical Research Letters, 2007 has analysed nine long sea-level records from 1903-2003 found that the sea level rise from 1953-2003 was about 1.5 mm/yr while the sea level rise from 1903-1953 was about 2 mm/yr. There is no escalating sea level rise at present and if the earth's climate enters into a mini ice age by 2035-2040 as several solar scientists are suggesting, we may see sea levels falling. IanP, Surry Hills
The best scientific estimate of sea level rise at Tuvalu (Hunter http://staff.acecrc.org.au/~johunter/tuvalu.pdf) puts the rise at only about 0.8 to 1.2 mm/yr. It is going to be hard to get that 59 cm let alone the abc's scenarios of 2-3 metres!
You guys are absolutely hilarious. Are any of you aware that this value is almost exactly the average rate of sea level change since the last glacial maximum? Are you saying that the LGM was not climatically significant? Do you all know each other from the special bus?
So, for 12000 yrs post LGM the seas rose at about 1.1 mm/yr, then dropped back to a tenth or so of that for 6000 yrs then since about 1900 (pre CO2 rise) it has come back to the 1-2mm/yr. So what exactly are you saying, Chris? That the church of latter day greenhouse has suddenly claimed responsibility for the last 18000 years of sea rise, and that it will climb to 6 times that over a piddling century (20-30 times if abc can be believed!). Have you got anything scientifically constructive to say, or does your argument just rest on its insulting rhetoric?
That's exactly what I am not saying. 120 m of sea level 20000 years ago with the Holocene Climate optimum 10000 years ago. By your reckoning sea level should be going down, not up. Please do the sums and prove me wrong, it would somewhat restore my faith in humanity. And by the way I think you will find that the Tuvalu site is relative sea level site, not eustatic sea level. Perhaps someone else should do the sum, it is why you miss the point regarding 2 m.
Just what is your point, Chris? If you started arguing logically instead of trying to score snide comment points we might all learn something - or at least appreciate your point of view.
IPCC claim 1-2mm/yr for the 20th century and the Tuvalu data is, despite the wild fluctuations in datum points for the measurements, consistent with that figure. The Tuvalu reference actually tries to derive absolute rise but can't make a decent fist of it because of that datum variability.
Be that as it may, the abc scare mongering is clearly based on relative sea level rise (take a contour map and add 2 or 3 metres of sea and colour it blue so that your canal-front home is gurgling!).
What I need to see from you, Chris, is data to show that the absolute sea level rise is escalating significantly above the average since the LGM (about 1-2mm/yr)given that we have been is a relatively steady period for 5-6000 years.
What you can't seem to grasp is that most of us here don't have a preconception or a particular barrow to push - all we want to see is the scientific proof, not speculation or filtered dogma trotted out into media scare stories misleading the population and perpetrating the "climate of fear" that seems to pass for politics (including enviro-politics) these days.
OK, here is my point.
1) Glacial sea level rates are ten times that of interglacial sea level rates.
2) We are currently in an interglacial, but experiencing glacial sea level rates, ten times more than they should be.
3) You guys don't think it is significant
Can I get more succint? I think an order of magnitude quanitifies your degree of ideological compromise quite nicely
The way you argue here you could say that sea level change is dropping at 3 mm/yr because that is what is the tide gauge says at Hudson Bay in Canada. Do you really want to say that?
I'm interested in your argument, but would like to know the source of your data. As I understand it, the first 10000 yrs or so post-LGM the sea level rose at about 10mm/yr (that is about 10 times the current rate) and during the interim period the rate dropped down to 0.1mm/yr at times - a span of some 100 times during a natural cycle. Now the IPCC claims a rate for this century of between 1.1 and 7.0 mm/yr which is about as helpful as saying a horse will win the Melbourne cup. What does it mean vis a vis climate change? Thermal expansion alone could produce figures accounting for 1.0 to 4.3 mm/yr apparently based on projected temperature rises.
On a different matter, the rates claimed for past millenia are based on stratigraphy. Isn't that producing "relative" estimations? What sort of confidence can anyone have? It seems from most of the data sources I've seen that the error bars are several times greater than the trends that someone has drawn through their amplitude, eg. the answer lies between -1.1 and 3.0 but we say it is 0.8. Hmmmm.... I'd resign from my lab if that is the best I could report.
I'm finding it hard to see the significance based on that.
No, there are several different lines of evidence based on that. Chappell looked at tectonically uplfting terraces on the Huon Peninsula in Papua New Guinea, Bard took Uranium/Thorium ages for coral reefs in Barbados and Yokoyama dated infiltration events in Northern Australia using C14net. All confirm magnitudes and timing of LGM volume with 90 k advance and 10 k retreat. And all are independent of each other. And all ice and marine delta 18 O cores show a sawtooth like waveform of 90 k advance and 10 k retreat.
And yes it is thermal expansion causing most of the signal, as the CTD evidence suggests that Southern Ocean temperatures have increased by about 0.6 degrees in the last century. Sea level change is a symptom of climate change.
Hooray! At least we agree on something - sea level change is a product of climate change. I guess we differ as to where we think the evidence points as to the cause. I am yet to be convinced that it is anthropogenic - it is certainly difficult to get data of good statistical quality and has not been massaged or selectively filtered based on pre-conceptions.
If you want to call it massaging. Assuming radially symmetric changes in sea level means only one tide per day, with tidal amplitudes the same everywhere. I think you will find that is not the case, and the reason why the ABC says 2-3 m.
Not sure who's right here folks, but as an older bloke I (sadly) don't trust the ABC anymore. After all, I learned by watching their Lateline analysis of The great GW Swindle, that a small amount of CO2 is like a small amount of Ebola Virus - "small", also that claims the IPCC exaggerates are untrue because 1) the IPCC reject them, and, 2)the eg given in "Swindle" was from 1996. Investigative journalism at it best? I hope not.
Roger
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