But, this is not just limited to Florida. We now do a lot to keep coastline looking like you're used to. The barrier islands around North and South Carolina are largely man made structures at this point.
However, beach houses are built on stilts and you can keep moving sand so it's not that noticeable. But, the larger context of what's going on is flooding keeps getting worse. NYC for example was underwater in a recent storm doing a lot of damage and largely shutting down the city. Such events are going to become more regular as it goes form Massive storm surge, to normal storm surge, to unusual high tides, to regular high tides. But, NYC is on bedrock so they can use dikes and keep things ok. Other areas like Miami with different geology can't use the same approach.
PS: Also, don't forget, Chicago Was Raised Over Four Feet in the 19th Century. So, if you’re willing to spend a lot of money we can keep building in swamps.
Why then would you invest at Bay Area-level prices for a condo in a building which cannot keep its lobby dry, already?
The entire Gulf is based on porous limestone bedrock which makes sea walls completely untenable as a solution. Water will find a way in.
QED absent some truly miraculous black swan technological advance, Miami etc. are literally doomed to drown.
WTH are people thinking?
The only thing I can come up with is that it's a temporary parking place for foreign money banked at a loss if necessary to exfiltrate it into the US. :P
>Why then would you invest at Bay Area-level prices for a condo in a building which cannot keep its lobby dry, already?
>WTH are people thinking?
Because the people of Miami simply don't believe you and don't believe that there's any climate change happening. And it's now the official position of the US government that there's no climate change.
The whole city suffers from high tides to the point where they have a different electrical system compared to the rest of Italy. San Marco square is usually under knee-high water; a problem to which solution they spent €6B, but that didn't work out almost at all. Add the fact that the whole place smells like a sewer most of the time, and you have a better picture of what it is like.
It might be a cool place for a 1 or 2 day visit, but definitely not a nice place to live.
So, was it sea level rising or not? You gave some examples of the effects of storms and erosion (which are not new, even in geological time), but didn't actually address the concerns of the person you were replying to.
So, I continued by mentioning barrier islands / coastal cities and what's happening to them.
Exactly, but you failed to mention how "what's happening to them" is in any way related to sea level rise. You made the claim that "flooding keeps getting worse" and "Such events are going to become more regular" but didn't actually back up those claims. Instead, you seem to imply that sea level rise is responsible for some recent observations, despite the fact that even the most extreme projections of sea level rise couldn't possibly be responsible for the flooding you mention (in your own words, those events were the result of "storm surge" activity).
Further, going from 1cm to 2cm or 20cm to 21cm of rise again makes the problem worse. The point is you don't wake up one day and the worlds on fire, just spend slightly more on reconstruction year after year.
NYC was not underwater. A small part along the rivers got flooded due to poor drainage and river water water backflooding the sewer system. That is, water went into the sewers from the rivers and then got pushed up. The water then settled into low areas (basements and such), causing lots of damage.
At no time was any part of NYC "underwater".
The expected sea level rise this century does not (most likely) put NYC underwater at high tide, but it does whenever there is a storm surge associated with high tide [1]. Sandy alone cost NYC at least $19 B [2].
[0] http://www.tribecatrib.com/sites/default/files/images/Ball%2... [1] http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/10/sandy-anniver... [2] https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20121126/new-york-city/bloo...
As I understand, the main point of the article is that if the huge sheet of ice dislodges from main land, it is essentially going to melt entirely and no longer slow more land ice from getting to the ocean faster.
The timeframe in which the ice will melt is uncertain, but it will surely melt. So by the time you noticed water rising, it will be too late. By taking this wait and see approach, you are basically negligencing the problem to the next one or two, maybe three generations to helplessly endure.
The main test for humanity here is if it can coordinate and take one for the team economically so as to prevent itself from actual catastrophe in the future generations. So far it's not looking good.
Also, if one is doing a cost benefit analysis - one has to include things like political instability caused by oil dependence(see Middle East politics), funding of extremist groups, and health benefits due to reduction of air pollution.
Once religion demands dedication most people will find paradigm where they skip working while still consider themself pious.
It is not a good sign if your worldview rests on reasoning like this...
1. Infinite badness of hell;
2. Infinitesimal possibility of religious truth.
Reasoning about climate change doesn't really involve multiplying infinity by zero. There is more evidence to back up a non-zero chance of catastrophe, and we don't have to rely on inifinite badness to make action worthwhile. Finite badness does the trick just fine.
Unlike Pascal's wager, the question of climate change action is rooted in knowable quantities. Unfortunately, a lot of these are still unknowns to a degree, and a lot of misinformation exists, making it difficult for non-experts to keep up.
EDIT:
Looking at that a bit closer, I get peak temperatures at ~ 412.5k, 322.5k, 237.5k, 127.5k, and 7.5k years ago.
> It is not a good sign if your worldview rests on reasoning like this...
Are you saying that it's not a good thing to have lived a good life and done good by your fellow humans?
Premise A: Pascal's wager is based on sound reasoning.
Premise B: People who live by pascals wager "live a good life", etc.
Premise C: "Living a good life" is a desirable thing.
Somehow you are arguing that if I reject premise A I must also reject premise C (if I were to act rationally), but I don't follow it.
The problem is that the religious books want you to do a bunch of things that really are bad and awful. Aside from the bits about murdering unbelievers and apostates, and stoning your disobedient children, and not eating pork (which is actually good for the pigs I guess if you follow it), they'd also have you do things like forgo all contraception, leaving you with a bunch of children you're not prepared to take care of, or being celibate, which really isn't fun or healthy, and basically living like they did in Victorian times (see the other article here today about the "scandalous" behavior at Victorian beaches with some men and women actually swimming together--the horror!). If there isn't a really good reason to enjoy various human activities that really aren't harmful, then why shouldn't you?
If it's replaced by what alarmists actually claim is necessary, it becomes very clear why it's not that simple.
Transformation has costs, it's not a free ride. The investment that you do there is not being done somewhere else.
Care to elaborate about the benefits of the Apollo project?
For Apollo in particular: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/flyers/apollo.htm
Good search query for finding more detailed analyses (not in a snarky LMGTFY way, there's just so much to list either as a direct benefit or as something made possible by those early innovations): apollo spin off technologies
I look forward to home solar and the supporting technology. The prices aren't quite there for me but I think they will be in the next five years.
In the meantime, I grew up being told "turn off the lights to save electricity!" and now with more efficient bulbs, power consumption is down about 80-90% to where energy for lighting is rounding error.
This should be of interest: http://industrialprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MCF...
The unmet need for cheap, plentiful, reliable energy:
There are 7 billion people in the world who need cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to flourish. Some 3 billion have virtually no energy by our standards, which means we need vastly more energy.
It is extremely difficult to produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. In the entire history of humanity, only three industries have achieved this on any scale: the hydrocarbon (fossil fuel) industry, the nuclear industry, and the hydroelectric power industry.
>> For the last 40 years, so-called environmentalists have held back industrial progress around the world. That's why we're helping industry fight for its freedom, with new ideas, arguments, and policies that will improve our economy and our environment.
I don't think anyone would argue against the idea that fossil fuels have helped technological progress over the last century and a half, which seems like the core of his thrust.
The problem is the almost dismissive attitude about the future prediction consensus. Generally, the scientific consensus is against his statement: "The [future] warming impact of CO2 is mild and quite possibly positive".
From there, it seems like he is selectively framing his arguments. For instance, higher CO2 concentrations does increase crop yields (as stated), but scientists believe this will be offset by higher temperatures and drier conditions. (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-...). Statements like "Warming is almost universally desired among civilizations" seem to ignore that there is such a thing as too hot for the human body, let alone for other things such as food or having a reliable water supply (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5188e.pdf).
It seems like a strange bias to think that there is zero room to improve our energy pattern and sources compared to what we have now. Or that only three industries (hydro, fossil fuel, nuclear) will possibly ever exist to provide cheap, plentiful energy. (For a start, I'll ding him an additional point for forgetting about the original cheap, plentiful energy source humans used: "traditional biomass". EG: wood, crop waste, dung, etc.)
But many implicitly ignore the benefits of fossil fuels. I hear many variations of the comment I originally replied to, i.e., "even if there's no climate change, reducing fossil fuel use is pure win". I think many imagine we could keep roughly the same quality of life with the majority of our power coming from solar panels and wind farms. Smarter environmentalists realise this is not true, but the general public is very confused on the issue, especially as the more rational greens get lumped in with the activist crazies.
(One very important point in to explain Alex's context: many greens (not all, granted) are opposed on moral grounds to nuclear, and even to hydro, which floods valleys and messes with nature. The root of this is the desire to minimise human impact, but "minimising human impact" is ultimately at odds with "maximising human flourishing").
to think that there is zero room to improve our energy pattern and sources compared to what we have now
He doesn't think this. Obviously improved nuclear power, ultimately fusion power, is the real long-term solution. However, hopes that we can significantly improve solar or wind power are doomed to crash into reality -- there's fundamental limits to how much energy you can extract from the wind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law) or from photons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...). Burning wood and dung works for poor countries that lack infrastructure, but it's more expensive that fossil fuels, and more polluting, even more polluting than coal.
Yes, there are limits to extraction, but solar and wind power's advantage is that, location wise, it is viable in far more places than something like hyrdo power; it also can be set up in a more decentralized fashion which can be advantageous for some scenarios (remote areas with little existing infrastructure for instance). I've always thought that solar and wind's biggest challenge to overcome is more the non-continuous nature of that power source. At any rate at this time I don't think it's safe to predict what a long term solution might be or might not be. There probably is (as like now) no single solution that is right for every location.
In this specific situation, I'd rather not know we were wrong that know for a fact we were right.
Just because we averted disaster doesn't mean it wasn't going to happen.
Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean we "averted disaster." It's entirely possible that much (or even all) of the build up was normal media fear mongering and loosely based on reality.
We're in the same position with climate change. All we've gotten out of it so far is affordable renewable energy, better tech for power monitoring and distribution, and a lot of new jobs. So far, solving a maybe is proving to be a good investment, and may save us all if the worst case scenarios are realistic.
TANSTAAFL.
Also, there are plenty of costs for the default option which should be included in the analysis. These are severe especially for low lying countries with a big coastline. But even for other countries, public health suffers due to burning fossil fuels, and political instability in oil rich countries has a big effect on the world.
He does argue that we should be spending a lot more on research to find cheaper solutions, however.
[Update]
While you're downvoting me, you should understand that I'm simply passing along one of main arguments made by the Republican party. You live in your echo chamber and they live in their's.
Can anyone guess why we are moving backwards in addressing the problem?
For example, he argues that fixing poverty with cheap energy has bigger economic impact than fixing climate change. He then puts up a statistic connecting expansion of coal energy in China with a fall in extreme poverty. However he doesn't mention that the fall in poverty can mostly be attributed to improved agriculture and happened a decade before the coal expansion. Further, if you really wanted to get energy to rural areas far away from the power grid, distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable.
Bjørn is not the worst denier, but he is also not intellectually honest and you get a strong feeling that he intentionally tries to make preventing climate change seem at odds with fighting poverty, when it is really to sides of the same problem.
Do you believe it's possible for intelligent, informed, people of good will to look at a set of facts and come to different policy proposals?
Public policy is informed by science, but it is grounded in values. It seems to me that you call Bjorn Lomborg intellectually dishonest simply because he disagrees with you on policy.
Also Occam's razor really doesn't apply: a) Bjorn Lomborg makes arguments in good faith and the parent is wrong b) Bjorn Lomborg makes arguments in bad faith and the parent is right
To my eye, a & b are equivalently parsimonious in their assumptions.
How can you claim that energy production subsidised with public money is cheaper than the same energy produced with no subsidies? The Chinese government could spend the money saved from solar subsidies in unemployment salaries or hospitals and free health care.
The numbers are a bit out of date. All I could find other than that is a reference to a study in 2015 on Wikipedia, but it links to a page that's missing the data the reference was pointing to.
Btw, I got downvoted because people don't like my comment?
I really wish HN readers would get out of their echo chamber and understand the other side. The controlling Republican party really does believe that it's not worth investing the money into fixing climate change because of arguments like Bjorn's.
Pick ANY article on the WSJ that discusses solar, climate change, or even Tesla, and it degenerates into bashing subsidizing solar, climate change bashing, etc
Here's today's article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-company-sunrun-was-manipu...
By the way, can you provide references for your claims?
Some time during the 21st century there will be a critical event that prods us into dramatic action, some real disaster that even the critics won't be able to deny. After that, things will be different. It may be the first time we have to abandon a major city. Perhaps Miami. Unfortunately, at that point, it will be too late to stop many large-scale effects.
See, for example, the current state of migration from Syria, Iraq, and Northern Africa. Slow and easy, right?
They say it is a combination of rising sea level and erosion. It might happen that way other places in the future, where a slight increase in sea level causes high tides and storm surges to reach father inland, resulting in land being washed away.
We have an area similar to that in the US..
Louisiana 1932: https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/LandLossinSouthe...
and in 2011: https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/LandLossinSouthe...
And land loss along the atlantic coast: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/atlantic-coast
And increased coastal flooding (note, some cities being flooded 40 days out of the year.. thats pretty significant): https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
People always mention 'rising sea levels' with loss of land but it seems to me the real issue is local human behaviour.
http://www.deltatimes.org/doc/deltatimes/turning-the-tide.pd...
Or is this the new denialist meme? Instead of "in the 70s they were warning us about a new ice age" it's evolved into "in the 70s they said we'd have drowned by now".
I suppose it's getting slowly closer to the actual state of science.
I'll try with this one, but at a certain point things just become willful ignorance, as is the case with the "in the 70's it was all about the new ice age" trope. In fact, willful ignorance would summarize OP's whole post.
Edit: But maybe initial models were decent enough:
The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly
http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-f...
The bigger problem is people taking the upper bound of that uncertainty and concluding they were wrong because reality turned out to not be near the upper bound. Kind of like how political polls are "wrong", even when the result falls within the margin of error.
There was a travelling exhibit that visited my high school which was an analog computer - you could set your energy sources (coal, hydro, nuclear, solar) and see how long society could run before we re-entered the Dark Ages (literally - no more electric lights!). Thinking about it - the consumption side was likely a rising wave function which predicted steadily-increasing use of electricity.
This was around the time when the EPA's Energy Star program got started, and I suspect it did a lot to counter the increase in demand.
You can also look at the films of the 70's to get some of the zeitgeist of the era - "Soylent Green", "Silent Running", "No Blade of Grass", "Damnation Alley", and so on, all with the theme that the Earth no longer nourishes life.
Miami is investing in mediating current and future floods. I feel the fact that flood prevention is a significant part of your budget and planning that says something https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1dnlHPzhQA
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-23/louisianas-coastline-...
Not rising sea levels.
Beyonce agrees with me too.
Isn't the difference with today the consensus among scientist. In any time period you can probably find some scientist making exaggerated claims about X. It feels a lot different when you have hundreds of scientist coming together to write things like IPCC reports. This isn't just some scientist says X. This is the vast majority of scientist more or less agree that X is a major problem.
What's going on? I struggle to believe this community is _that_ ignorant; either I'm wrong or there's a fairly intentional and sophisticated astroturfing campaign going on.
To be a climate sceptic requires wilful ignorance of evidence.
It's all horseshit of course, in the same vein as antivax.
You may disagree with climate change skepticism, but you still ought to recognize the fact that a group of government-funded scientists with incomes tied to political agendas all screaming "but almost all of us agree on this thing!" in every media outlet is a bit suspicious (as if the laws of nature have anything to do with size of your bandwagon). Add the fact that they've been demonstrably wrong over and over again for the past 50+ years, and it smells even more fishy. You may not change your position on the matter, but it shouldn't be surprising that even educated people (especially those who have heard these predictions for decades) are skeptical.
Are you referring to evidence that suggests climate is always changing (in which case I also agree!), or evidence of AGW? If it's the latter, I'm afraid you'd be ignoring an incredibly strong body of evidence on the contrary.
https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
(The link goes to a page with further references and papers)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/magazine/when-rising-seas...
(They're seeing the effect faster because it's not just rising seas at work, but the rising seas are definitely part of it. This pattern will be increasingly common over time.)
My real estate agent was relatively new to the business, but she said she hadn't heard of anyone bringing climate change up as a factor in deciding which house to buy, which I thought was odd. My house is safe up to about a 10 meter rise now!
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/glob...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/14/pacific-...
So a couple of Google searches show that there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of online lists of failed predictions of climate change maintained by climate change skeptics. For instance:
https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/18888-e...
From that list, I picked one story to track down:
> On June 30, 1989, the Associated Press ran an article headlined: “UN Official Predicts Disaster, Says Greenhouse Effect Could Wipe Some Nations Off Map.” In the piece, the director of the UNEP’s New York office was quoted as claiming that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.” He also predicted “coastal flooding and crop failures” that “would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”
Worryingly, searching for this headline mostly returned more climate change skeptics websites. But this isn't totally unexpected since it dates to before internet adoption, and I was eventually able to find this archive photo from a local newspaper that appears to substantiate it.
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/83413062/
Thats just sample size 1, though. Will see if I can find a NYTimes article.
Edit: So a lot of these lists look like copypasta. Some are partial, but here is a pretty complete version:
http://forum.weatherzone.com.au/ubbthreads.php/topics/109996...
There are several mentions of the NY Times, and the two I checked were real (including at least one which was just a letter to the editor, and so not endorsed by the paper.) Note that these predictions are generally for global cooling. Many people says it's unfair to quote these claims because they did not represent the consensus position at the time (but this doesn't invalidate the grandparent's claim; he doesn't say NY Times).
Anyhow, I would love to someone else take this further, but my initial impression is that the claim "there were a bunch of plausible sounding stories about coastal flooding in reputable newspapers" is probably true, but that this doesn't mean it reflected a consensus view back then. On the other hand, the current story also doesn't reflect a consensus view regarding any near- or medium-term claims.
But at least from your quote, the actual effects are not supposed to happen by the year 2000.
It's just that the amount of CO2 emitted by year 2000 has already committed us to a certain amount of climate change, that will just take a while to happen.
Here's one article with some actual sources, looking at predictions from the year 1981. https://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-predictio...
> It's just that the amount of CO2 emitted by year 2000 has already committed us to a certain amount of climate change, that will just take a while to happen.
I agree visible effects by 2000 are not strictly implied by the quote, but it's a bit strained to say it's not suggested. Carbon stays in the atmosphere for a long time, but, unless I'm mistaken, the earth thermalizes to the temperature associated with a steady carbon level (inducing a corresponding sea level rise) fairly quickly. (Original commenter said 2000s.) My understanding is that most of the worrying "inertia" for warming, where the damage appear later, comes from either more complicated climate mechanisms (beyond just sea level rise from melting ice) and the slowness of changing the energy sector.
This is a very rough sketch and going by memory so best to check for yourself: on Antarctica, there are certain "gatekeeper" glaciers in valleys between the sea and large lowlands with multikilometer thick ice. If the gatekeeper glacier is lost, then the sea will flow into the big basin, and the large area will melt rapidly / float away as ice bergs etc.
Eric Rignot has some interesting presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3ivlofypzE
But I don't remember ever reading a serious article about running out of oil by 2000 (saw a few about 2050), and about cities being under water by now.
There were plenty of those things in popular literature and movies. But not in serious reporting, even science reporting being as bad as it was.
That was pre fossil fuels and was really caused by erosion.
My point of posting it is that the sea takes things for various reasons and land is not static either.
Land can be sinking or rising for geological reasons and we have to be careful what some might attribute to sea level rise.
But... it's a catch-22. When you make those kinds of bold, sensational predictions you lose the thinking people who pay attention. They'll notice that your prediction is unlikely and later turns out to be false. They'll make a note of it and never listen to you again.
Some day we will really run out of certain fossil fuels, and if we haven't made them obsolete by then we are in big trouble. Some day if we keep dumping CO2 and methane into the atmosphere we will trigger some kind of runaway climate effect with potentially disastrous consequences. We also may trigger something like an ocean anoxic event. When will these things happen? Nobody knows, but it could be within our lifetimes (especially with life extension maybe coming) and it's even more likely within our childrens' lifetimes.
"Why didn't anyone say something!?!?"
They did, but they did too early and in the wrong way. But if they'd said it calmly and rationally nobody would have paid attention either.
P.S. I personally find ocean acidification far scarier than climate change. We can move cities a lot easier than we can figure out how to survive without the oceans.
I remember reading Bob Novak in the mid 2000s. Every week he'd predict that whatever the current news was, the United States would be pulling out of Iraq.
Finally I emailed him. "Bob! Keep it up! Sooner or later you're bound to be right"
He's not right yet, but my point holds. At some point, something really bad is going to happen that scientists have been predicting. Bound to happen. But once that happens, there will be a hundred other things that didn't make the cut.
The precautionary principle is great, but not when you have dozens or hundreds of things all of which with potentially catastrophic consequences. Then it's all just so much noise.
It's forty years later, and the only land that I've read about that we've lost to global ocean level rise is some "islands" in the South Pacific that were only a couple millimeters above sea level anyway. Can someone here point me to actual, significant, usable land loss due to rising sea level? I'm not saying it hasn't happened, but I figure, if it had, it would be something that gets trotted out at every one of these discussions.
Now we're getting a beautifully-rendered Times article where some NASA climatologist says that, in another 10 years, we could have some "significant retreat." After half a lifetime of hearing this, and not seeing anything like the kind of change that would threaten man's survival, I'm sorry, but I'm skeptical.