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The sea level on a stretch of the US Atlantic coast that features the cities of New York, Norfolk and Boston is rising up to four times faster than the global average, a report said Sunday.
This increases the flood risk for one of the world's most densely-populated coastal areas and threatens wetland habitats, said a study reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Since about 1990, the sea level along the 1,000-kilometre (620-mile) "hotspot" zone has risen by two to 3.7 millimetres (0.08 to 0.15 inches) per year
Better move. Or stand there and drown when the water reaches above your head. Maybe some globals can form human levee and save us all from the seas swamping the world?
The "godfather" of global warming seems to have come to his senses.
Among his observations to the Guardian:
(1) A long-time supporter of nuclear power as a way to lower greenhouse gas emissions, which has made him unpopular with environmentalists, Lovelock has now come out in favour of natural gas fracking (which environmentalists also oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.
As Lovelock observes, “Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it … Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.” (Kandeh Yumkella, co-head of a major United Nations program on sustainable energy, made similar arguments last week at a UN environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro, advocating the development of conventional and unconventional natural gas resources as a way to reduce deforestation and save millions of lives in the Third World.)
(2) Lovelock blasted greens for treating global warming like a religion.
“It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion,” Lovelock observed. “I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use … The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air.”
(3) Lovelock mocks the idea modern economies can be powered by wind turbines.
As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel … We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price.”
(4) Finally, about claims “the science is settled” on global warming: “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”
More global warming information. I wonder what the names of these scientists are. According to them it is the melting of the glaciers on Greenland that will cause the water along this stretch of Atlantic coast to be deeper than along the rest of it. Maybe someone outside the global warming school will have to explain this one to me since I still believe that water seeks its own level.
Don't worry the squealers are still out there. These guys don't even realize the plague was helped spread by the little ice age and folks remaining indoors all the time and with all this warm weather all we'll have to worry about is sun screen production. We are all doomed though.
"Panelist William Chameides, dean and professor of the environment at Duke University, said adaptation is necessary in every phase of life to deal with the changes we have wrought. Changes are necessary from local land-use decisions — such as allowing or prohibiting new coastal development in areas threatened by rising water — to how we generate power.
“We're going to see climate change regardless of what we do the next few decades,” Chameides said.
He gave a sobering assessment that humans are headed toward “bad times.” It might parallel the period when the plague wiped out a third of the world's population, he said.
Trenberth provided a glimmer of hope by noting that the inevitable changes “might not be that bad” if they happen slowly enough. Climate change, he noted, “happened before.”
The rate of change is highly dependent on the rate of carbon production. Right now, it continues to grow. Humans across the planet burn a million years' worth of “ancient plant goo” in the form of fossil fuels every year, Dimick said.
If the carbon production grows unchecked, that spells trouble for the planet. By the time the general public realizes that something must be done because of direct consequences on the way they live, it will be “too late,” Trenberth said. “Fifty years from now, ecosystems won't be viable where they are now.”
The report and predictions were done by scientists and oceanographers from the USGS, pretty much what the scientists from NASA and other international organizations have been predicting. This will be very damaging to the wetlands and beaches along the eastern seaboard and fisheries, eventually the cities.
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