Tag: Sea Level Rise

New Studies indicate that Sea Level Rise due to Climate Change over the next 100 years could be far worse than previously expected. Meanwhile the big Oil companies continue to make record profits.

Over the last several years various aspects of Climate Change have been getting a bit more attention in the news than previously. Both the continuing drought in the Western North America, East Africa and Europe as well as the abnormally severe storms, hurricanes, tornadoes along with massive floods throughout the world have been making so many headlines that global warming can no longer be completely ignored.

So far this year has been unprecedented in the number and destruction of Tornadoes here in the US. How anyone can continue to doubt the reality of Climate Change is beyond my understanding. (Credit: American Museum of Natural History)

Now all of that news coverage is a good thing but all of those stories about changing weather patterns have obscured another piece of the climate change problem, sea level rise. Sea level rise may not get the headlines, basically because we haven’t begun to see the worst effects of it yet, but millimeter by millimeter it just keeps it just keeps on building, a measured 20cm rise worldwide over the last 100 years. Already some of its effects have been noticed in low laying parts of the world like the Mississippi delta or islands like the Seychelles. At the same time the entire US gulf and Atlantic coasts have been subjected to an ever growing number of ‘King Tides’, periodic flooding of land areas even when there has been no rain for days. In the city of Miami seawater has been known to come bursting out of sewers while the Sun is shining brightly.

While Hurricanes, Tornadoes and Droughts get the most press coverage, King Tides caused by the slow but constant rise in sea level are becoming a regular nuisance in many coastal cities. (Credit: Science / How Stuff Works)

Now two news studies, each looking at the long term consequences of sea level rise from opposite directions have concluded that the problem will become much worse, much quicker than expected. The first study, published in the journal Nature Communications by an international team of scientists details the results of a series of model based computer simulations.

The ice in Greenland is melting faster than ever and now there is evidence that the ice is melting from the bottom up indicating that the whole ice cap could become unstable! (Credit: CNN)

Those results predict that not only will the melting of the ice caps on both Greenland and Antarctica continue, but that the melting will accelerate, causing a much greater rise in sea level by the end of the century. In fact the models show that, if global temperature rise should exceed 1.8ºC above pre-industrial levels the melting of the ice caps would reach irreversible, catastrophic amounts with a sea level rise by the year 2100 estimated at one meter above today’s level.

It was all smiles as the nations of the world agree to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees back in 2015. It seems however that nobody realized that meant that had to do something other than just smile! (Credit: State of the Planet – Columbia University)

Now remember, ever since the Paris climate accords of 2015 both scientists and politicians have been pushing for a limit of 1.5ºC rise in global temperature, and pretty much failing to do anything substantial to actually stop the world from going past that goal. Indeed, the latest estimates have the global temperature rise going above 1.5ºC sometime in the next five years. And once we’re past 1.5ºC can 1.8ºC be far behind. So the amount of water being dumped into the oceans by melting ice caps is going to increase rapidly, threatening the low laying areas of every nation on Earth.

Worst case scenario for sea level rise here in the US. Even without this extreme case many of our largest cities will become unlivable due to constant floodings and storm damage. (Credit: Forbes)

The second paper concerns those low laying areas and concludes that we have been greatly underestimating the amount of global land area that will be lost due to sea level rise. The study, published in the American Geophysical Union’s journal Earth’s Future, utilizes data from NASA’s ICESat-2 LiDAR satellite, which was launched back in 2018, to determine the elevation above sea level of land areas throughout the globe.

Well they finally did it, NASA put a LASER in space. Don’t worry this one is intended to measure land elevations not blast cities to rubble. (Credit: ICESat-2 -NASA)

Previous measurements of land elevations were carried out by airplanes using radar, but those measurements were inaccurate, primarily because radar cannot penetrate beneath vegetation to the true ground surface. The ICESat-2 satellite uses the much more precise Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) that is better able to determine the true elevation of land areas.

Elevation maps showing the hight above sea level of land areas are a common tool in geography but if sea level continues to rise we are going to need to redo all of them! (Credit: SERC)

What the researchers found was the elevation of much of the world’s low laying land areas was being overestimated. Not by much, only a meter or two for the most part, but when coupled with a one meter rise in sea level it means that just about twice as much of the world is going to sink beneath the ocean by the year 2100 than was previously thought.

Salt Marshes are among the richest and most important ecological environments in the world. A 1 meter rise in sea level would result in most of the world’s salt marshes simply disappearing. (Credit: The Pew Charitable Trusts)

That means that millions more people will see their homes swept away by floods. Whole nations like Bangladesh may simply cease to exist while seacoasts around the world will be inundated. Rich cities like Miami and Boston may be able to afford to build dikes to preserve them, but what about poorer cities like Mumbai and Bangkok? What about the numerous small coastal towns in New Jersey, North Carolina, Florida and Texas?

One of the most densely populated counties in the world Bangladesh is also probably the most threatened by sea level rise. (Credit: UCAR Center for Science Education)

So it may not be long before you start hearing more and more stories on the news about widespread flooding across the globe. It’ll happen slowly, millimeter by millimeter as the sea rises, but it’s going to happen.

By building a large interconnected system of dykes the people of the Netherlands succeeded in building a country that is mostly below sea level. However that task took centuries to complete and Holland isn’t that big a country. Imagine the cost of doing that for the whole world! (Credit: Quora)

Now, if you find the latest estimates on sea level rise and the flooding of the world’s coastlines associated with it to be a bit depressing then here’s some news that I’m certain will cheer you up. The major oil companies have recently all announced that they made record profits during last year 2022. So even as the planet burns up you can still have a safe investment for your 401K that will be paying dividends in the post-apocalyptic hellscape to come.

Is this what the future holds for New York and other coastal cities? (Credit: Rolling Stone)

For the record, Exxon-Mobile posted a profit in 2022 of $55.7 Billion, that’s profit, not sales, while Shell announced $39.9 Billion in profit. The other oil giants saw similar levels of profit, Chevron $35.5 Billion, BP $27.7 while France’s Total Energies announced $36.6 Billion. All of these numbers were records for each company and came while the world was recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic and tittering on the brink of a recession.

Even as people all over the world complained about the sharp rise in the price of gas the oil companies were quite happy. (Credit: Bloomberg.com)

Of course the oil giants insist that they did nothing wrong, it was the pandemic’s fault really. You see during all of the Covid lockdowns the demand for oil and natural gas dropped so they all had to cut way back on production. Then last year, as life throughout the world began to return to normal the demand for oil and natural gas shot up. Add to that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia is the world’s third largest oil producer and second largest producer of natural gas, and the price for a barrel of oil went through the roof. There was nothing the oil companies could do; the law of supply and demand literally forced them to make ungodly amounts of money.

How much is Russian oil paying for Russia’s war in Ukraine? How many wars so far this millennia have been fueled by oil? (Credit: Fair Observer)

All of which is just more evidence of how hard it is going to be to get the human race to stop polluting the world with fossil fuels. There are simply too many people making too much money from oil and natural gas, I won’t even mention coal, for them to be simply outlawed. The question therefore becomes how much of the world’s land mass has to be flooded, how severe do storms have to become, how many people have to suffer in droughts or wildfires before we finally do something? And will it be too late by then?

Global Warming Update for December 2021: Tornado outbreaks strike the US twice in a week, in December! And that’s not the worse news!

It’s an easy thing to understand, severe weather, as typified by lightning and tornadoes, normally occurs during the warmer part of the year. That’s not only because warm air just has more energy than cold air does but also because warm air carries a lot of moisture with it. You see, because of what chemists call the latent heat of evaporation, water vapour has a lot of energy associated with it, that’s what makes steam engines so powerful!

It takes more than twice as much heat to boil a gram of water already at 100 degrees C than it does to heat a gram of water at 0 degrees C to 100 degrees C. There’s a lot of energy contained in water vapour, that’s why thunderstorms can be so powerful! (Credit: Coquitlam Weather and Climate)

That’s why for decades the spring and summer months in the great plains states were known as ‘Tornado Alley’ where hot, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico would encounter cool, dry air coming down from Canada. These conditions were perfect for the outbreak of tornadoes and year after year growing up I can recall hearing about the their destructive power in states like Oklahoma, Nebraska and to a lesser extent Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. That’s the reason why ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is set in Kansas, ’cause that state was ground zero for tornadoes.

What used to be ‘Tornado Alley’ in the US. Thanks to global warming a much larger part of the country now gets to ‘enjoy’ all those twisters. (Credit: Pinterest)
The Wizard of Oz is set in Kansas because everyone knew that tornadoes were a constant threat in that state. (Credit: Gifer)

Not any more, Tornado Alley is now a much bigger place thanks to global warming. This year massive tornado outbreaks happened in the states of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia during the months of February and March, cold months that used to have calm weather in the Deep South. And then in early September there was a tremendous outburst of severe storms in the Delaware valley brought on by the passage of the remnants of hurricane Ida. As they were reporting on that storm the local TV meteorologists kept repeating. ‘This doesn’t happen in the Delaware valley, it just doesn’t happen here!” See my post of 8 September 2021. In all this year the Delaware valley has received over 50 tornado warnings from the National Weather Service, more than were called during the first 50 years of my life.

Now the Delaware valley has become a part of ‘Tornado Alley’ as year after year new records are set for severe storms. (Credit: WPVI)

Still the worst was to come, for on the night of the 10th of December, the first month of winter, a huge mass of warm, moist gulf air pushed its way up the Mississippi river valley. Starting in Arkansas and Mississippi a severe thunderstorm erupted that grew in intensity as the storm pushed northward into Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois. Over 50 tornadoes were spotted across 8 states causing a trail of death and destruction. At the latest count more than 90 people are known to have died and almost as many are still missing.

The town of Mayfield in Kentucky saw the worst of the tornadoes with much of the town being reduced to nothing but rubble! (Credit: NPR)

The greatest destruction took place in Kentucky where the town of Mayfield was virtually wiped out by an EF4 tornado with peak winds of 300 KPH. That tornado is now known to have traveled over 200 km and spent more than two hours on the ground. Indeed, it is possible that the Mayfield tornado may have had the longest track of any measured tornado, anywhere, ever! And again, the commentators who described the chaos on TV kept repeating. “This doesn’t happen in December.”

The tornado struck a candle factory in Mayfield while more than 100 employees were at work. Some were rescued from the wreckage but many were not. (Credit: Reuters)

But it happened again not a week later as on the 15 of December as another gulf air mass pushed its way through Nebraska into Iowa and Minnesota. This storm system only produced about 20 tornadoes causing only 5 known deaths. Still, this doesn’t happen in December.

Only a week after Kentucky was struck by tornadoes another severe storm system ignited from Nebraska through Wisconsin. (Credit: National Weather Service)

We have to get used to the plain fact that when it comes to severe weather all the old ‘rules of thumb’ no longer apply. Global warming is simply putting more energy into the sky and that energy is generating more violent, more destructive weather, everywhere. Unprecedented violent storms have become ‘the new normal’.

Seems we’ve had to learn to live with several ‘New Normals’ the past few years, none of them very pleasant. (Credit: UiO)

And there’s even worse news. For at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) a group of researchers announced on the 13th of December that there is strong evidence that the foundation of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is becoming unstable. This instability could lead to a major breakup of the world’s largest ice formation within three to five years.

Larger than Scotland and averaging more than a kilometre in thickness the Thwaites glacier could cause a sea level rise of a metre or more if it all melted. (Credit: The Sun)

As large as the state of Florida and with ice depths of between 800m and 1 km Thwaites already is pouring an estimated 50 billion tonnes of ice melt into the ocean every year making it responsible for about 4% of current sea level rise. Recent studies however have shown that warm ocean waters have been undercutting the glacier’s foundation and support. Already cracks are appearing on the Thwaites’s surface and the fear is that further undercutting could lead to a massive collapse of the entire glacier.

Warm waters are undercutting the Thwaites glacier. Scientists are now concerned that the whole glacier could become unstable within the next five years. (Credit: Daily Mail)

Such a breakup would be a major disaster for if the entire Thwaites glacier were to slide off into the Antarctic Ocean the result could be a sea level rise of as much as 70 cm! And since Thwaites acts as a roadblock holding back several other large glaciers there is that possibility that a breakup of Thwaites could begin a general destabilization of the whole western part of the Antarctic ice sheet. If that were to occur the resulting rise in sea level could be as much as three meters.

A sea level rise of only one metre (3.3 ft) could submerge a huge portion of the state of Louisiana yet this state is so dependent to the petroleum industry that its members in congress oppose all measures to cut down on carbon emissions. (Credit: Pinterest)

Now such a catastrophe of that scale would not happen overnight but rather over a period of years if not decades. Nevertheless the scientists at the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) are convinced that over the next few years the glacier’s melting will rapidly increase, leading to a large increase in the rate of sea level rise.

The small Louisiana town of Isle de Jean Charles has had to be abandoned due to sea level rise. The people of Isle de Jean Charles are now considered to be America’s first climate refugees. (Credit: NRDC)

Just two more signs that Climate Change is no longer a long term problem, the long term has become the here and now!