Rising sea level puts US Atlantic coast at risk: report (money, states)

[d4g4m]

The planet is 3.4 billion years old and has gone through hundreds of heating and cooling periods, some lasting thousands of years. Sea shells can be found hundreds of miles inland from oceans. The writer of the Yahoo news article states that 'the melting Greenland ice sheets' are causing the rising of the sea level on the east coast of the U.S. Greenland is called Greenland because, guess what, it use to be green farm land. If the ice is melting, it's just part of the thousands of years of cycles and the east coast will be a couple of feet under water as it was thousands of years ago. Sea fossils can be found hundreds of feet above the Hudson River in the NJ Palisades. 11,000 years ago, NYC, NY Harbor was under a mile thick ice and Florida was twice the width as it is now.
To blame any conditions to humans driving vehicles of the last hundred years causing climate change and make ice melt in Greenland is just a ridiculous assertion. It's just another scheme to get more money out of the pockets of the producers to 'spread the wealth' and keep research professors employed.

[Hot_Handz]

Originally Posted by sickofnyc

...and humankind has had no impact on it whatsoever.

Are you old enough to remember the Radon fear mongering???

What happened to it??? It just went away??? That was backed by a whole lot of pseudo-science as well.

[Hot_Handz]

Report update: we will die

[plwhit]

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time - and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by BentBow

When the ice melts in the full glass of water, does the glass overflow?

While it's true the sea level would actually go down if it were only floating ice that's not the case, most of the ice is on land.

[sanspeur]

Originally Posted by plwhit

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show


Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

What is the A Register? They certainly misinterpreted the data... Here is the paper they reported on...It does NOT say that there is no melting, but describes the causes of melting.

Oceanic heat for basal melting is found to be sup-plied by two sources of warm water that enter below the ice: (i) eddy-like bursts of Modified Warm Deep Water accesses the cavity at depth during eight months of the record; and (ii) a seasonal inflow of warm, fresh surface water flushes parts of the ice base with temperatures above freezing, during late summer and fall. This interplay of processes implies that basal melting cannot simply be parameterized by coastal deep ocean temperatures, but is directly linked to both solar forcing at the surface as well as to coastal processes controlling deep ocean heat fluxes. Two years of oceanic observations below the Fimbul Ice Shelf, Antarctica

[waterboy7375]

So all the rich folks with waterfront props have to rebuild. That will be an economic stimulous. Can we speed this up?

[btownboss4]

The Lowest settlement in Boston is like 10 feet Above sea level, so oh my god, in 1000 years, we could face some problems.
Also Boston is extremly hard to get a surge into because the opening to the outer Harbor is the North East, and inner harbor is to the Southwest.

[workingclasshero]

wow(according to that 'news' opinion) in a century (100 years) it will go up a total of 8 inches

the sea level is the same as it was 150 years ago

the sealevel is nearly the same as it was in 1842
...infact it is BELOW the sealevel mark made in 1842

In 1842 the "Isle of the Dead" in SE Tasmania was selected for the site of a "Mean Sea Level" refernce mark by Capt. James Clark Ross. Today this mark can clearly be seen 35 cm ABOVE the current mean sea level.

For a wonderful examination of Sea Level change from 1841 to 2004, this picture is worth a thousand words:



Here is another view — this time, the mark has been traced over with line to emphasize it



The 1841 sea level benchmark (centre) on the ‘Isle of the Dead’, Tasmania. According to Antarctic explorer, Capt. Sir James Clark Ross, it marked mean sea level in 1841. Photo taken at low tide 20 Jan 2004. Mark is 50 cm across; tidal range is less than a metre.
Let’s read that again and consider four things:

#1) - the mark was placed at mean sea level. The word “mean” in this use denotes the “mathematical average”. The sea rose above it and set below it by an equal amount during the tidal cycle.
#2) - The mark was made in the middle of the tidal range in 1841 and it was photographed 163 years later at the bottom of the tidal cycle.
#3) - the tidal cycle is one meter and the mark is 50 centimeters or one-half meter long.
#4) - the mark is sitting about 30 or 40 centimeters above the water in the photograph. Given that there is some wave surge, it looks like the level of the ocean has not changed one bit in 163 years.


and here sealevels monitored in Stockholm




and lets not forget that sealevel rate changes all the time



oh and lets not forget that the 'land' is on MOVING TECTONIC plates.....and Mean sea level is not constant over the surface of the Earth. For instance, mean sea level at the Pacific end of the Panama Canal stands 20 cm (7.9 in) higher than at the Atlantic end.


Over most of geologic time, long-term sea level has been higher than today (see graph above). Only at the Permian-Triassic boundary ~250 million years ago was long-term sea level lower than today. Long term changes in sea level are the result of changes in the oceanic crust, with a downward trend expected to continue in the very long term.

During the glacial/interglacial cycles over the past few million years, sea level has varied by somewhat more than a hundred metres. This is primarily due to the growth and decay of ice sheets (mostly in the northern hemisphere) with water evaporated from the sea.

The Mediterranean Basin's gradual growth as the Neotethys basin, begun in the Jurassic, did not suddenly affect ocean levels. While the Mediterranean was forming during the past 100 million years, the average ocean level was generally 200 metres above current levels. However, the largest known example of marine flooding was when the Atlantic breached the Strait of Gibraltar at the end of the Messinian Salinity Crisis about 5.2 million years ago. This restored Mediterranean sea levels at the sudden end of the period when that basin had dried up, apparently due to geologic forces in the area of the Strait.

[SourD]

Someone needs to seriously explain how only a certain portion of the US coast is affected?!?!?! Water seeks it's own level, it doesn't rise in one area and not in adjacent areas. It either ALL rises or doesn't. What is being described sounds more like simple erosion of the coast line, not rising waters.