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

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find that exhaustively handling the critiques of a high-level argument in a field and properly parsing the logic of that argument, from the top of its conclusion, down through its empirical data, all the way down to the bottoms of its term definitions, entails becoming an expert in that field. It would take years for a layperson to do that.

4 years, in the case of a bachelor's degree.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

'I think you'll find that exhaustively handling the critiques of a high-level argument in a field and properly parsing the logic of that argument, from the top of its conclusion, down through its empirical data, all the way down to the bottoms of its term definitions, entails becoming an expert in that field. It would take years for a layperson to do that'

Or they can do what most laypeople do and crib other critiques and go back and forth needling others with them till they get a response that can't be answered.

Essentially, it's what we're doing right here in debating the ability to weigh knowledge. How are we to determine if you or myself is right? These are pretty heady issues in philosophy. And yet one of us will walk away confident we've done our best to explain our position and that we've given the other something to think about.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

crib other critiques and go back and forth needling others with them till they get a response that can't be answered.

I'm pretty sure you just described an undergraduate philosophy curriculum.

This thread will almost certainly end before either of us overturns any of our deeply-held misconceptions. If we were to quit our jobs and social lives and devote our time to arguing for however long it takes for us to agree on a conclusion, I'm reasonably sure that one or both of us will have in the process taught ourselves the equivalent of an actual education.