414 US cities at risk of flooding...

[Workingman]

...when, not if, sea levels rise.

They include New Orleans and Miami as well as parts of New York, Boston and San Diego. All coastal states will be affected with 26.3 million people dispersed.

Of course it is not only yhe US which will suffer, as this site shows. Go have a play. Say goodbye to Lincolnshire say hello to Cambridge-next-the-sea.

[cromwell]

I would have though London would be more affected.

Still - I wouldn't have to go far to get to the coast, just the other side of Pontefract. Result!

[pederito1]

I am OK here for a while anyway. As I keep,saying " When the water is lapping the top of the Cathedral Tower it will be time to think of moving out"

[Suff]

The Sea Level Rise explorer is very good for working that out.

I doubt many will be surprised at the impact to the East Midlands. London is in quite a lot of danger too.

The key issue is never really broached in these discussions though. Namely that long, long before even the lowest areas are inundated (which is what this map shows), they become susceptible to flooding by storms on top of a high spring tide.

Just 2.5 inches more and they are going to be in more trouble and the defences designed for 1950's style extreme storms are not going to suffice.

Sea level rise is averaging about 3.3mm per year. So 20 years from now we are looking at the realistic scenario where our sea defences are no longer sufficient.

Food for thought and, yes, it's a losing game... Another 2 decades at that and it's pretty much game over for a lot of coastal areas in high spring storms.

The fun part? 3.3mm is the lowest rise, on average, that we can expect each year. In fact it's been higher and will be higher as things continue to warm and we continue to lose ever increasing volumes of ice from both Greenland and Antarctica. The Jakobshavn glacier seems to have finally reached the point where the rising glacier is calving direct into the sea, the protecting sea level grounded ice shelves having finally collapsed back to the main glacier.

The Pine Island ice shelf is now floating 300m behind the tongue and the only reason the glacier is not going much, much faster is that there is an inland hill range over which the glacier has to flow. When that encroaching water finally washes out the last of the landfast ice under the shelf, it will start to work on ice around the hill range. If the gap between the hills and the main glacier fills with water, then that glacier is going to start taking off.

Of course there are a lot of if's and buts around there. But there is only one certainty. The Antarctic sea is warming below the surface and the landfast ice shelves are being eaten away. All glaciers, east and west are accelerating discharge to the sea. Accumulation of new ice on Antarctica has increased due to the more moist air, but the ratio is heavily towards discharge.

Meanwhile, 2016 will be the last year that we, or any of our descendents alive today, will see global CO2 levels below 400ppm at any point in the year (it varies about 3 points over the year). From 2017 onwards, the lowest levels anywhere will be 400ppm and any area which is higher will be a lot higher.

Just to put it in perspective, there is an active climate lobby which has stated that a viable biosphere to live and grow food in for the current population requires a maximum CO2 ppm of 350.

Now the fun bit for those of us who try to get this message over and get nowhere. The entire output of Human CO2 emissions (vehicles, power stations, land use, herds of animals), raises CO2 levels by around 2.2ppm per year. Granted the sea absorbs about 50% of it so that's a +, but then it would mean we would have to shut of about 85% of our vehicles and power stations or move them to 100% clean energy, then we would have to find a way, without emitting CO2,to remove CO2 for the next 25 years (at the same global rate as we emitted it at our highest levels {now}); to have a prayer of reducing it to 350.

Then we get to the really great part. The IPCC submission which assumes we will reach 2-3 feet of sea level rise by 2100..... Already assumes that we will reduce CO2 to 350ppm by 2050.....

Some think the Scientists are lying to us. Yes they most certainly are. Our world and biosphere and society as we already know it is already dead. We're just waiting for it to rot away. That is the truth they are not telling us. Most people can't even accept the politically massaged puerile message that is going around today about reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. If they were told the whole truth and shown it to be an absolute fact, there is no model to tell us how people would react.

What would help us in our quest of resolving this?

Take all the great plains, American, Russian, Argentinian, Chinese and plant them to specialised CO2 capturing trees. Yes that means we stop growing food on them.
Re-plant all rainforest areas with trees not crops
Use nuclear desalination to water all the great deserts, Russian, Chinese, Australian, American and plant them with the same types of trees the Israeli's use to lock water into the land in Israel.

At the same time reduce our current carbon fuel emissions by 50% immediately as a start followed by a further 10% per decade.

If we were to do that, in that scale, starting immediately. We would stand some small chance of our current population and cultures surviving the next 100 years.

Chances????

The next time you read an article saying "The Scientists are Lying to you". Just think about what I have just written...

[Workingman]

Suff, the thing that always gets me is that the things you have said are not models based on data and spreadsheets. They are observable and measurable events, there for all to see. The cause of them might be up for debate, especially with deniers, but the numbers cannot be argued with. Things are happening!

I mentioned a few weeks ago the Jakobshavn calving directly into the sea rather than forming an ice sheet. I also noted the lubricating effect of land based melt water on the underside of glaciers speeding their flow into the sea where they then melt. The seas are not bounded like the waters in a bath, they will flow to the lowest point.... and there is no plug to pull.

The CO2 thing. Well it has been past 400ppm in the past, and it has peaks and troughs, and there is the solar thing as well as the Industrial revolution thing, and... It is so easy to explain away if enough effort is put in, yet not one of the deniers, to my knowledge, has ever explained its unprecedented rise over such a short geological period.

[Suff]

The CO2 thing. Well it has been past 400ppm in the past, and it has peaks and troughs, and there is the solar thing as well as the Industrial revolution thing, and... It is so easy to explain away if enough effort is put in, yet not one of the deniers, to my knowledge, has ever explained its unprecedented rise over such a short geological period.

I try not to deal in models too much. Averages of averages will only ever change on constant year on year records. The outlier years which do so much damage are always massaged away.

It is very true that CO2 has been over 400ppm before. In fact it's been well over 500ppm.

So much is true.

What is also true is that it has never been this high at these sea levels at these temperatures. Temps have always preceded these high CO2 levels and it has been a case of cause and effect. What is happening today is that we have ramped up CO2 (the cause) and the effect is temperatures and sea levels rising. In nature it tends to be the opposite way around.

I no longer have the ability to influence. I can simply observe, explain and heckle. But if you ask any really reputable climate scientist (non climate scientists are not qualified to comment), when we should have stopped impacting the gas balance of the climate and destabilising the climate, the answer varies from 20 to 50 years ago. They are all agreed, starting now means catastrophe will follow. The reason they are working so hard to get us to start instead of just letting us carry on destroying ourselves?

Size and numbers.

Size is the size of the catastrophe. Numbers are the number of people it will kill.

They could just back off and let us get on with it. But, sadly for them, they are honourable people and just cannot sit by and let it go.

Denialists, on the other hand, are a very different breed of people. It takes a very special kind of viewpoint to ignore all evidence and search out other evidence which meets your political ideology. Plenty of them at wattsupwiththat. I don't go there any more, you can't even point out that everyone agrees with everyone else so long as it meets their political ideology of rubbishing scientists and governments who want to "take away their freedom to burn fossil fuels". Even when you point out that 6 people with six differing and negating views all agree with each other that they have proved the point that AGW does not exist, they continue to spout this idiocy 24x7. Not worth the effort.

The interesting thing is how the simple sea level rises we are seeing impacts at storm time. 1 inch of water over the North Sea is a LOT of water. When a deep low humps that water into a central bulge in the middle of a storm, riding on top of the high tide, that bulge can be many feet higher than it would have been with an inch less water.

The impact on, say, the London Barrier, is that one inch can turn a thousand year event into a hundred year event. 2 inches turns it into a decadal event and 3 inches means every storm on top of the spring tide could have the level of water to overtop it.

Now here is the fun bit. Since it was built, the water has risen about 1 inch. By 2025 it will have risen about 1 inch more. By 2035 that will be about 3 inches....

The London barrier was designed and built to withstand a thousand year event.... Do we feel lucky? because the sea level is not going to stop rising for at least 200 years even if we stop producing CO2 right now. Eventually the sea will have risen so much that even a moderate storm at mid normal tide will overtop the barrier and they are a hell of a lot more common than a severe storm at high tide.

There are groups who tell us it's still not happening. I'd like to move them to just above the Thames Barrier and forget to tell them when such a storm comes through....

[cromwell]

I'm a bit in the dark about how this country at least can be polluting more than we did forty years ago, say.

We used to have coal fires. If you walked through our village on a winter night you'd go home smelling of the smoke. We used to have more coal fired power stations, dirtier diesel cars - is it because there are more people in the country now, more cars overall?

[Workingman]

An interesting question, Cromwell.

Over the last 50 years:

The population has risen by about 30% from 54 million to about 71 million.

Energy consumption has dropped 5% since 1965

The number of vehicles has almost trebled from estimates of 12.6 million to 35+ million.

It is only a snapshot, but even though there are more of us with more electrical gadgets they have increased in efficiency so much that our electrical energy consumption has dropped. We also have better insulated houses and more efficient heating systems. Then there is the way electricity is produced. In 1965 the National Grid was almost all coal-fired production. Today it is a mix of coal, nuclear, gas and renewables. It does not look as though much has changed over the years, and things might have got better!

That tends to point the finger at transport. Aviation fuel has risen sixfold, from 2MT to 12MT. Road fuels, derv and petrol combined, have gone up from about 16MT to approximately 44MT. However, in 1965 derv made up about 25% of fuel consumption, today it is about 50%. Engines have become massively more efficient over that period, but more of us making more journeys have tipped the balance.

I remember on days like today walking to school in thick smog. That was down to all the smoke belching from house and factory chimneys. The particles were black and sooty and tended to stick to things, including water. Washing brought in out of the rain was dirtier than before it was washed. Today's main pollutants are gases: Sulfur dioxide, Nitrogen oxides. Nitrogen dioxide, Carbon monoxide and Carbon dioxide. They are all almost clear and almost colourless and most of the time we cannot "see" them. But on a clear day go get a good viewpoint over a city and see the haze. The pollutants are there, and in great enough concentrations to do damage.

[Suff]

It's also useful to remember that whilst we had coal fires, relatively few of us had any form of central heating with a timer that ran 24 x 7. Whilst you would walk home smelling of smoke at, say, 11pm, if you were to walk home at 3am, it would be a much clearer walk with way less smoke from the dying coals of fires.

I remember the coal fire in the living room, the one bar electric heater in the bathroom and the two fan heaters we carried around the rooms we were in, but which went off after we went to bed. I recall the ice on the insides of the steel framed windows...

Whilst we have become more efficient in the energy we use, we just use a lot more energy. At least 10% more since 1970. If we had not been more efficient in energy usage that would have been a lot higher.

Whilst the gasses emitted by gas CH are a lot cleaner, they are not dramatically lower than coal in CO2 emissions. Although they are lower in sulphur and other deposits as WM says.

Here's a real bit of dark humour for you. In the 1990's we were all made aware of the crisis with the Ozone layer and the problem with the emissions of coal burning power stations and sulphur. We succeeded in that one and largely removed the sulphur we were emitting from the atmosphere.

The laugh? Sulphur is a greenhouse reflectant, it insulates the atmosphere from the rays of the sun, directly combatting the impact of CO2. When we removed that Sulphur from the atmosphere, we got an instant 30 year or so burst of additional heat into the atmosphere. Which then stabilised and continued to build.

Where are we now? CO2 emissions since 2000 have stabilised the global temperature at that pre 2000 high level. Now it's building on top of that again. Denialists deride the CO2 science done in a test tube; which proves that CO2 sequesters input heat from the environment around it. Increasing the heat in the tube and insulating it from radiating out again.

Java time. This 3rd rock from the sun has a given atmosphere which is just so large and no more. We have managed to change the balance of the gas mix in that atmosphere in exactly the same way that the scientists in that test tube did. The difference? When it became hot enough the scientists stopped shining the light into the tube and released the gas.

Anyone found an off switch for the sun?

The end result is not in doubt. It is simple physics and chemistry on a planetary scale. Double the CO2 and you double the heat conservation. 280ppm keeps the planet warm and viable for 7bn people. 180ppm drives us into an ice age which will only support a few hundred million.

280ppm is the difference, globally, between absolute zero and 20c on average. Or around 293kelvin.

560 ppm will sequester how much more heat? We don't know, but we do know that the last time the planet was there it was mainly hot, humid swamp land, the last time it was 800ppm the Dinosaurs roamed the earth and a truly massive asteroid had not hit the earth and disrupted the entire chemical balance of the atmosphere.

On the current emissions trajectory we will hit 560ppm at around 2087. That is based on today. In the 1990's the decadal average CO2 rise was around 1.5ppm per year. In the 2000's it was about 1.9ppm per year. In the 2010's, so far, it has averaged about 2.2ppm per year but I expect that to go up to 2.5ppm per year by 2019.

You get the idea? And this is all without the sea giving up on dissolving it. The sea already sequesters about 50% of the CO2 we produce. If that gives up???

More is just, well, more. The end is not in doubt. Only what we choose to do about it.