Sea Level Rise Can't Be Stopped 521
riverat1 writes "Sea level rise won't stop for several hundred years even if we reverse global warming, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. As warmer water is mixed down into the oceans, it causes thermal expansion of the water. Under the best emissions scenario, the expected rise is 14.2 cm by 2100; under the worst, 32.2 cm from thermal expansion alone. Any water pumped from aquifers or glacial/ice sheet melt is added to that."
Re:It's briefly touched upon in TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, this: http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/
But that map makes even a 60m rise seem not bad at all.
RTFS - 14-32cm only for thermal expansion (Score:0, Informative)
Maybe I am being overly optimistic, but 14.2cm in 80 years doesn't exactly seem so bad (or even 32.2cm for that matter). Surely cities that are going to be effected will have ample time to relocate those in "danger".
The 14 - 32cm is only accounting for thermal expansion, not Ice / glaciers / aquifers.
Re:Not too bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, for one, in the US alone, more than half the population [noaa.gov] lives in a coastal area.
Even if just 10 percent are directly affected, that's still a large number of people.
In the US, can you imagine all the lawsuits and politics about how to move people, does the government have the right to do it, does the government have the obligation to do it, and who is going to pay for it?
For countries like Indonesia that are mostly islands, or in countries or areas that are largely below sea level, this could result in a major loss of housing and usable land.
Anything that changes ocean patterns could affect shipping and fishing, both of which would be major blows to the global and regional economies. If we lose major fish populations, that will increase food prices, and if shipping becomes riskier, that will affect the price of virtually everything.
It's a lot more than avoiding getting wet.
Re:Bad news unless you are in North Carolina (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Overall rise (Score:3, Informative)
If the entirety of the Greenland ice sheet melted, over twenty feet of rise. There's a heckuva lot of ice sitting up on top of Greenland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet
Re:Yes we knew this (Score:5, Informative)
No, this paper is a theory. Observation of sea level rise is evidence.
Re:But then there's the laws of physics (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_expansion#Expansion_in_liquids [wikipedia.org]
Translation: You're a fucking idiot.
pshaw! (Score:3, Informative)
Something tells me that 32.2cm won't affect all of Florida.
It's call tidal surge. And increased atmospheric energy leading to more frequent and more powerful hurricanes.
Florida's not going to be a very hospitable place to live or grow crops if large parts of it are under saltwater frequently.
Anyhow, screw future generations, I've got mine. They can just adapt to the new normal, they'll never miss what they never had in the first place.
Re:remove excessive CO2? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RTFS - 14-32cm only for thermal expansion (Score:4, Informative)
Nope, it is densest at 4C. I know this from spending my summers swimming in 4C water. The thermoclines set up, you get a bottom of near-freezing water, and the visibility is spectacular.
Re:Not too bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a quick inventory of problems to cope with.
Florida has a maximum land height of 42 feet. A three foot rise in see level, plus shore erosion due to larger and more frequent storms could reduce Florida to a stub of the current state with central islands where the everglades are now.
Expanded erosion of barrier island and sand dunes along the gulf and eastern seaboard will eliminate thousands of square miles of existing shoreline, destroying some of the most valuable property in the country.
Much of the Mississippi delta and most of Louisiana will simply go away (a great deal of which is already below sea level due to subsidence from poor river engineering by the Army Corp of Engineers.)
The West Coast won't pass unscathed, because towns along the bays in both southern and northern California, will suffer significant land loss.
The simple fact is that the big cities of the world are virtually all coastal cities and as such will be seriously impacted. The amount of land shared be people and critters will shrink a couple percent (large coastal plains will be inundated... kiss Bangladesh and a number of small islands in the South Pacific goodbye.)
You bet we can engineer around it. Move cities slowly back. Build higher dikes and levees. Abandon places that are hopeless. Its just one more cost, and significant cost to consider as we continue to spew greenhouse gas into the air.
Re:Bye Florida! (Score:5, Informative)
From the parent post
Well, we only have 88 years to deal with a foot rise in water. Damn, that's devastating, we'd better get right to work.
From the summary
...32.2 cm from thermal expansion alone...
I know it is easier to ignore reality, but I think the parent poster has gotten so used to ignoring science that he ignores the clear language in the article summary. Here is a fact: Most sea level rise will come in the end from melting glaciers. And the melting is accelerating.
So the "twenty feet by 2100" thing is gone now then is it Mr. Gore, cause, gosh, that sure sold a lot of movies books and carbon taxes.
Except that Gore didn't actually say twenty feet by 2100 in his movie. Here is a link to the transcript (pdf) [hct.ac.ae] of An Inconvenient Truth. I believe the passage that is often referred to occurs when Gore shows the maps of water inundated coast lines. Here is the transcript of that part of the movie:
If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen in the San Francisco Bay. A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, the low-countries: absolutely devastating.
The above statement is basically true. If you broke up the entire Greenland ice sheet, the rise in sea level would be catastrophic. Mr. Gore does not say this will happen in the next 100 years. It is a conditional statement. If something happens, then something else will happen. The time scale is not certain, though given recent trends in melting, three feet by 2100 is not unlikely. A basic search of recent literature will support this.
Re:pshaw! (Score:5, Informative)
The only "theory" I know of concerning storms other than the obvious more heat == more turbulance is that the N. Hemisphere jet stream will ocillate more and the ocillations will move slower. This will increase the likeleyhood of Atlanitic hurricanes being "killed" by the sheraing of the jet stream, but on a global scale the monsoon rains will increase and the sub-tropic deserts will expand due to the more intense Hadley cells (Hadley cells = convection currents on either side of the equator that pump moist air up over the tropics where it dumps the moisture as rain after which the dry dry air falls down on the sub-tropical deserts). In other words heat will increase the amount of water traveling through the hydrological cycle, this is already happening as evidenced by the atmosphere already holding 4% more water vapour than it did 40yrs ago. Note also that the increase in water vapour is more evidence of a warmer planet since the atmosphere is basically chemically staurated with H20 and the only way to increase it is to raise either the temprature or the pressure (and I don't think gravity is any stronger than it was in the 70's).
So yeah, to a certain extent the jury is still out on storms. It's pretty certain we will get more floods/snow and more droughts/heatwaves but it won't necassarily comes via hurricanes and blizzards.