Sea levels and impact on the United States.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

As a follow-up to airiefairie's excellent post on March 11, 2012 ("The drowning country: a case of climate migration"), I wanted to share a new report that has been released in the interim.


NBC Nightly News featured a new scientific report suggesting significant changes in sea levels will impact the United States much sooner than thought. The report entitled Surging Seas

finds the odds of “century” or worse floods occurring by 2030 are on track to double or more, over widespread areas of the U.S. These increases threaten an enormous amount of damage. Across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide — a level lower than the century flood line for most locations analyzed. And compounding this risk, scientists expect roughly 2 to 7 more feet of sea level rise this century. [see graphic below]

The report has been made available online, and Climate Central has designed a super elegant and user friendly interactive map to see what impact sea level changes will have on your own community. The map draws its information from a peer reviewed study. And it uses the National Elevation Dataset, a product of the U.S. Geological Survey.



The effects of a five foot sea rise on my home town of Hampton, Virginia. The solid blue line indicates the current shoreline, gray shows the areas affected by rising sea levels with the interior blue line the new coast line. The "city" of Poquoson would be completely wiped out. This portion of Virginia is called "Tidewater" and it would be affected the most because of the low laying tidal flats and swampy areas. On a personal note, two weeks ago, my insurance agency dropped home coverage due to my proximity to living near a flood zone in Brooklyn. The letter cited increased risks from hurricanes and other issues associated with climate change (i.e. rising sea levels).

Here what happens to Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens (5 foot rise):




This is the full feature from NBC Nightly News (you *MAY* have to refresh your browser page to reload the embedded video correctly ;)

Comments

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

The sentence is atypical for you and really wandering around in its relevancy.

I thought you cribbed something from somewhere as part of a joke.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Excuse me, but I'm capable of making sentences that contain more than 3 two-syllable words on my own. ;)

Would you like me to translate it in a more comprehensible language? Fine.

It's simple. You can use rhetorical tricks and "sound logic" all you want when arguing on scientific issues. But there are whole domains in science where the end result simply defies logic. I mean, who would've thought that a particle can behave both like a wave and like a piece of matter? It just doesn't make sense. There's no logic in that. Conversely, how would you ever guess that the universe is accelerating in its expansion rather than slowing down? Doesn't make any sense, it defies common knowledge - after all, wouldn't all the gravity cause it to slow down and re-collapse? But no, what we see is the exact opposite. Where's the logic in all that?

You can employ all your rhetorical and logical skills all you want, and yet you wouldn't achieve anything.

It's empirical observations and measurements that bring you on the right way to making conclusions that work. Same applies to the issue we're discussing here, climate change. So I think my statement was pretty relevant in fact.

When you make actual measurements, you make some progress. You modify the theories (hypothesis) and possibly improve it. That's your launching pad to a better theory and better understanding of the issue you're investigating. All I'm saying is that just relying on your awesome logical skills alone, is only half the job done, if not less.

Does it make sense that a slight raise of the ocean temperature overall would cause a mini ice age in Northern Europe? Hell no! Of course it doesn't. There's no logic in that. But if you rely on your common sense, you'd never understand how it's happening.

Better now?

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

'It's simple. You can use rhetorical tricks and "sound logic" all you want when arguing on scientific issues. But there are whole domains in science where the end result simply defies logic. I mean, who would've thought that a particle can behave both like a wave and like a piece of matter? It just doesn't make sense. There's no logic in that. Conversely, how would you ever guess that the universe is accelerating in its expansion rather than slowing down? Doesn't make any sense, it defies common knowledge - after all, wouldn't all the gravity cause it to slow down and re-collapse? But no, what we see is the exact opposite. Where's the logic in all that?'

You're using "logic" in such a way as to mean a "pre-conceived notion". That is illogical.

Logic would not presume an answer before weighing evidence.


'Does it make sense that a slight raise of the ocean temperature overall would cause a mini ice age in Northern Europe? Hell no! '

Why wouldn't it? If anything the "illogic" of this stems from how predictions hedge the bet in such a way that either response (Europe getting colder or hotter" is expected.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

You obviously are using logic in a very different way from what it means. Logic absent evidence is naked logic, hence my use of the term "equilibristics", i.e. useless gymnastics, mind-jerking, or whatever you like to call the pointless exercising of your sheer logical skills taken on their own, without having all the data that's necessary for making a working conclusion. That's what philosophers do, not scientists. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand.

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

THIS is so appropriate I had to show: