Buy a boat, not oceanfront property
I’m shocked oceanfront property commands such a premium (and remains insurable) because I’ve long assumed today’s beaches will be underwater within my lifetime. And I’m totally baffled why China has invested so heavily in Shanghai, a city that sits right on the ocean. From some angles, Shanghai’s skyscrapers appear to rise out of the water.
Data increasingly suggests rising oceans will disrupt the lives of billions. Here’s the latest:
Researchers have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica.
As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 — an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over.
And the calculations suggest that the rise could conceivably exceed six feet, which would put thousands of square miles of the American coastline under water and would probably displace tens of millions of people in Asia….
Climate scientists readily admit that the three-foot estimate could be wrong. Their understanding of the changes going on in the world’s land ice is still primitive. But, they say, it could just as easily be an underestimate as an overestimate. One of the deans of American coastal studies, Orrin H. Pilkey of Duke University, is advising coastal communities to plan for a rise of at least five feet by 2100….
Thermometers on land, in the sea and aboard satellites show warming. Heat waves, flash floods and other extreme weather events are increasing. Plants are blooming earlier, coral reefs are dying and many other changes are afoot that most climate scientists attribute to global warming….
With the waxing and waning of ice ages, driven by wobbles in the earth’s orbit, sea level has varied by hundreds of feet, with shorelines moving many miles in either direction.
Greenland’s ice could raise global seas 20+ feet, and Antarctica holds ten times as much ice. So it’s scary that one scientist says “the things I’ve seen in Greenland in the last five years are alarming. We see these ice sheets changing literally overnight.”
Given this, it’s inexcusable that ICESat is dead and most other climate-studying satellites are dying:
After a decade of budget cuts and shifting space priorities in Washington, several satellites vital to monitoring the ice sheets and other aspects of the environment are on their last legs, with no replacements at hand. A replacement for ICESat will not be launched until 2015 at the earliest.
“We are slowly going blind in space,” said Robert Bindschadler, a polar researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who spent 30 years with NASA studying ice.
Posted by James on Sunday, November 14, 2010