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Hidden threat: Global underground infrastructure vulnerable to sea-level rise — Dr. Shellie Habel of the University of Hawai’i measures the salt concentration of emerging groundwater in a basement in Waikiki. Credit: Chloe Obara, University of Hawai’i

As sea levels rise, coastal groundwater is lifted closer to the ground surface while also becoming saltier and more corrosive. A recent study by Earth scientists at the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Mānoa has compiled research from experts worldwide showing that in cities where there are complex networks of buried and partially buried infrastructure, interaction with this shallower and saltier groundwater exacerbates corrosion and failure of critical systems such as sewer lines, roadways, and building foundations.

The research is published in the journal Annual Review of Marine Science.

“While it has been recognized that shallowing groundwater will eventually result in chronic flooding as it surfaces, what’s less known is that it can start causing problems decades beforehand as groundwater interacts with buried infrastructure,” said Shellie Habel, lead author and coastal geologist in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH Mānoa. “This knowledge gap often results in coastal groundwater changes being fully overlooked in infrastructure planning.”

The research team aimed to create awareness about these issues and offer guidance from world experts on managing them. Habel and co-authors reviewed existing literature to examine the diverse effects on different types of infrastructure. Additionally, by employing worldwide elevation data and geospatial data that indicate the extent of urban development, they identified 1,546 low-lying coastal cities and towns globally, where around 1.42 billion people live, that are likely experiencing these impacts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Melting polar ice sheets will alter weather

February 15, 2019

Melting polar ice sheets will alter weather

Melting ice off the coast of Greenland. Image: By Frank Busch on Unsplash

Sea level rise and melting polar ice sheets may not cause a climate catastrophe, but they will certainly change weather patterns unpredictably.

LONDON, 15 February, 2019 – The global weather is about to get worse. The melting polar ice sheets will mean rainfall and windstorms could become more violent, and hot spells and ice storms could become more extreme.

This is because the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting, to affect what were once stable ocean currents and airflow patterns around the globe.

Planetary surface temperatures could rise by 3°C or even 4°C by the end of the century. Global sea levels will rise in ways that would “enhance global temperature variability”, but this might not be as high as earlier studies have predicted. That is because the ice cliffs of Antarctica might not be so much at risk of disastrous collapse that would set the glaciers accelerating to the sea.

The latest revision of evidence from the melting ice sheets in two hemispheres – and there is plenty of evidence that melting is happening at ever greater rates – is based on two studies of what could happen to the world’s greatest reservoirs of frozen freshwater if nations pursue current policies, fossil fuel combustion continues to increase, and global average temperatures creep up to unprecedented levels.

“Even if we do include ice-cliff instability … the most likely contribution to sea level rise would be less than half a metre by 2100”

“Under current global government policies, we are heading towards 3 or 4 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, causing a significant amount of melt water from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to enter Earth’s oceans.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rising Sea Levels – by How Much, and Why? A Current Commentary.

January 14, 2019

Rising Sea Levels – by How Much, and Why? A Current Commentary.

The following was published in the journal Science Progress recently, of which I am an editor. Since this blog typically covers issues of environment and energy, I am including the present topic, which I hope will be of interest to its regular readers, and indeed to anyone else with concerns about the direction of “the changing climate”.

Introduction.

The term “sea level rise” normally refers to an increase in the global mean sea level (GMSL), caused by an increase in the volume of water in the Earth’s oceans, primarily as a result of thermal expansion, the addition of further water from the melting of land-based ice sheets and glaciers, and to a smaller degree from changes in land-water storage, including the transfer of groundwater that has been pumped from aquifers¹. As measured on the local scale (Section 4), sea levels may be higher or lower than the global mean value, as a result of various factors, including land subsidence, glacial rebound, tectonic effects, and the influence of currents, local temperatures, winds, tides, storms, and variations in local barometric pressure² among the particular locations where the measurements are being made. There is strong evidence that the GMSL is increasing, and as a result of long response times from various components of the climate system, this process may continue over the course of centuries³. It has been estimated that more than half of the observed sea level rise during the 20^thcentury was due to global warming⁴. According to satellite altimetry measurements, the GMSL is currently^5,6 increasing by 3.2 ± 0.4 mm yr^-1, which is about double the rate determined to have prevailed throughout the 20^th century⁶, and it has been predicted that, for each degree Celsius rise in the mean global temperature (MGT), over the next two millennia an increase in the GMSL of at least 2.3 m can be expected⁷.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Some Thoughts On Climate Change

October 9, 2018

Some Thoughts On Climate Change

A new IPCC report written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies says we’re looking at climate catastrophe as early as 2040 unless changes are made worldwide on a scale and speed which has no historic precedent. $54 trillion worth of damage is predicted to result from the 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global average temperatures we’re expected to be facing at that time if drastic changes are not made.

To be clear, when climate scientists talk about a 1.5 degree hike in global average temperatures, they are not saying that days will tend to be around 1.5 degrees warmer, which doesn’t sound bad at all. What they are saying is that there will be drastic heat spikes which elevate the overall average by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) around the globe. This means moving into a world which sees sea levels rising and destroying coastal and island civilizations, it means mass famine due to destruction of crops from heat spikes in summer months, freezes in the winter and other extreme weather events, it means potential worldwide violence and predation as livable regions and resources become scarce on a rapidly changing planet.

This is coming off the back of the Trump administration’s seamless shift from claiming climate change is a Chinese hoax to saying it’s very real and very bad but there’s nothing that can be done about it. In a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, Trump’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that a temporary freeze in fuel efficiency requirements for cars won’t be that big of a deal in terms of environmental impact because we’re headed toward a four degree Celsius increase in global average temperatures by the end of the century and avoiding that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Antarctic melt accelerates sea level rise

July 21, 2018

Antarctic melt accelerates sea level rise

While renewable energy is on a roll—setting records in Europe over the last few months[1], and racking up impressive numbers in capacity buildout in 2017 [2], it’s easy to forget what is happening behind the scenes.

Extreme weather gets all the headlines: the wild fires in Canada and Sweden [3], the flooding in Japan, the heatwaves in Canada and the US. But what are called the slow onset climate change events are inexorably moving forward.

Think or swim

Let’s start with sea level. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently published a report called Underwater, which examined more closely the impact of future sea level rise on coastal cities in the US. The UCS took as their baseline that global mean sea levels would rise about 2 meters between 2010 and the end of the century—a projection judged as being very likely in several reports published last year.[4]

The UCS report looked at the impact on coastal communities of chronic inundation due to sea level rise—defined as a zone experiencing at least 26 floods a year. By the end of the century, the UCS analysis shows that as many as 2.4 million of today’s residential properties and about 107,000 commercial properties, worth roughly $1.07 trillion, would be at risk of chronic flooding.[5]

As several million American coastal residents are forced to move inland, coastal property values collapse. The tax base of coastal towns drops catastrophically—resulting in the dramatic reduction in numerous critical social services and the total impoverishment and eventual abandonment of many coastal communities.

In the US, Florida and New Jersey are most at risk. Over the next 30 years, roughly 64,000 homes in Florida and 62,000 in New Jersey will be at risk of chronic flooding.

These states are just the worst affected, but the whole of the eastern shoreline of the US and the coast of Atlantic Canada are all hugely at risk—particularly the low lying areas of Nova Scotia.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Change & How It Has Made Us Who We Are Today

August 8, 2017

Climate Change & How It Has Made Us Who We Are Today

All we ever hear is how Climate Change is caused by humans and it will destroy the world. They have been yelling that New Orleans and Miami will be UNDER WATERwithin the next century as rising sea levels put more than 400 US cities ‘past the point of no return’ unless we suddenly raise taxes and hand the power to government to change the climate. In Princeton, New Jersey, the actual construction of the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library was set in motion at the University. Excavation begun January 2, 1946, and the building opened for use on September 7, 1949. This was where I conducted my research that produced the Economic Confidence Model.

The excavation for the underground floors of the Firestone Library was difficult. In the spring of 1946, a group of Princeton geologists found fossils from fish of the late Triassic Age in a section of shale. The fossils, which had been buried there for 175 million years, were amazingly well-preserved and revealed new details about the prehistoric fish. This site proved one of the richest grounds for finding Triassic fish fossils in the world. The fossils were sent to museums. Clearly, most of New Jersey was under water before. The Global Warming crowd made it seem that we are responsible for everything – not nature. New Jersey was once below sea-level.

An interesting book Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos, is documenting how humankind dealt with the extreme challenges of the last Ice Age and climate change the Global Warming people ignore. Climate change has affected the evolution of humankind and is responsible for spreading humanity across the globe. Our genetic history in the context of climate change during prehistory, reveals another dimension to the argument.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat

May 7, 2016

Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat

Ninety-nine percent of the planet’s freshwater ice is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. Now, a growing number of studies are raising the possibility that as those ice sheets melt, sea levels could rise by six feet this century, and far higher in the next, flooding many of the world’s populated coastal areas.

Christopher Michel/Flickr

West Antarctica’s glaciers and floating ice shelves are becoming increasingly unstable.

Last month in Greenland, more than a tenth of the ice sheet’s surface was melting in the unseasonably warm spring sun, smashing 2010’s record for a thaw so early in the year. In the Antarctic, warm water licking at the base of the continent’s western ice sheet is, in effect, dissolving the cork that holds back the flow of glaciers into the sea; ice is now seeping like wine from a toppled bottle.

The planet’s polar ice is melting fast, and recent satellite data, models, and fieldwork have left scientists sobered by the speed of the sea level rise we should expect over the coming decades. Although researchers have long projected that the planet’s biggest ice sheets and glaciers will wilt in the face of rising temperatures, estimates of the rate of that change keep going up. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put out its last report in 2013, the consensus was for under a meter (3.3 feet) of sea level rise by 2100. In just the last few years, at least one modeling study suggests we might need to double that.

Eric Rignot at the University of California, Irvine says that study underscores the possible speed of ice sheet melt and collapse. “Once these processes start to kick in,” he says, “they’re very fast.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cloud blanket warms up melting icecap

January 31, 2016

Cloud blanket warms up melting icecap

Ominous clouds over the icecap near Kangerlussuaq in Western Greenland.
Image: Nikolaj F. Rasmussen via Flickr

New study shows that up to 30% of the Greenland icecap melting is due to cloud cover that is helping to raise temperatures − and accelerate sea level rise.

LONDON, 30 January, 2016 – Researchers have identified another piece in the climate machinery that is accelerating the melting of the Greenland ice cap. The icy hills are responding to the influence of a higher command system: the clouds.

An international research team led by scientists from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium report in Nature Communications journal that cloud cover above the northern hemisphere’s largest single volume of permanent ice is raising temperatures by between 2° and 3°C and accounting for 20-30% of the melting.

The conclusion, based on imaging from satellites and on computer simulations, is one more part of the global examination of the intricate climate systems on which human harvests, health and happiness ultimately depend.

Disastrous consequences

“With climate change at the back of our minds, and the disastrous consequences of global sea level rise, we need to understand these processes to make more reliable projections for the future,” says the study leader, Kristof Van Tricht, a Ph.D research fellow in Leuven’s Division of Geography and Tourism. “Clouds are more important for that purpose than we used to think.

“Clouds always have several effects. On the one hand, they help add mass to the ice sheet when it snows. On the other, they have an indirect effect on the ice sheet as well.

“They have an impact on the temperature, and snow and ice react to these changes by melting and refreezing. That works both ways. Clouds block the sunlight, which lowers the temperature. At the same time, they form a blanket that keeps the surface warm, especially at night.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

World’s Oceans Could Rise Higher, Sooner, Faster Than Most Thought Possible

July 30, 2015

World’s Oceans Could Rise Higher, Sooner, Faster Than Most Thought Possible

New research shows that consensus estimates of sea level increases may be underestimating threat; new predictions would see major coastal cities left uninhabitable by next century

‘Roughly 10 feet of sea level rise—well beyond previous estimates—would render coastal cities such as New York, London, and Shanghai uninhabitable.’ (Image: Woodbine)

If a new scientific paper is proven accurate, the international target of limiting global temperatures to a 2°C rise this century will not be nearly enough to prevent catastrophic melting of ice sheets that would raise sea levels much higher and much faster than previously thought possible.

“Parts of [our coastal cities] would still be sticking above the water, but you couldn’t live there.”
—Dr. James Hansen

According to the new study—which has not yet been peer-reviewed, but was written by former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 other prominent climate researchers—current predictions about the catastrophic impacts of global warming, the melting of vast ice sheets, and sea level rise do not take into account the feedback loop implications of what will occur if large sections of Greenland and the Antarctic are consumed by the world’s oceans.

A summarized draft of the full report was released to journalists on Monday, with the shocking warning that such glacial melting will “likely” occur this century and could cause as much as a ten foot sea-level rise in as little as fifty years. Such a prediction is much more severe than current estimates contained in reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the UN-sponsored body that represents the official global consensus of the scientific community.

“If the ocean continues to accumulate heat and increase melting of marine-terminating ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland, a point will be reached at which it is impossible to avoid large scale ice sheet disintegration with sea level rise of at least several meters,” the paper states.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We May Have Already Committed Ourselves to 6-Meter Sea-Level Rise

July 24, 2015

We May Have Already Committed Ourselves to 6-Meter Sea-Level Rise

Even if humanity were to stop throwing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere today, a catastrophic rise in sea levels of six meters may be inevitable. Two previous prehistoric interglacial periods, in which the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was believed to be about what it is today, resulted in dramatic rising of the oceans.

High-latitude ice sheets are melting, and given that global warming is most pronounced in the Arctic, it may already be too late stop a rise in sea levels that would flood out hundreds of millions around the world. Two new papers, the latest in a series of scientific studies, paint a picture considerably less rosy than conventional ideas that major damage can still be avoided.

One of these papers, a nine-scientist report led by geologist Andrea Dutton at the University of Florida published in the journal Science, found that modest rises in global temperatures in the past led to sea levels rising at least six meters. She summarized the findings this way to Climate Central:

“Even if we meet that 2°C target, in the past with those types of temperatures, we may be committing ourselves to this level of sea level rise in the long term. The decisions we make now about where we want to be in 2100 commit us on a pathway where we can’t go back. Once these ice sheets start to melt, the changes become irreversible.”

Professor Dutton was referencing the widely held belief that catastrophic damage can be avoided if global warming is held to no more than 2 degrees C. from pre-industrial levels. The “permissible” level may be less than that, however. More sophisticated “sea-level reconstructions” through interdisciplinary studies of geological evidence and better understanding of the behavior of ice sheets enabled the paper’s authors to infer that temperatures only slightly higher than what we are experiencing today upset the climatic balance. A summary of the paper concludes:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations

July 24, 2015

The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations

Last week’s post covered a great deal of ground—not surprising, really, for an essay that started from a quotation from a Weird Talesstory about Conan the Barbarian—and it may be useful to recap the core argument here. Civilizations—meaning here human societies that concentrate power, wealth, and population in urban centers—have a distinctive historical trajectory of rise and fall that isn’t shared by societies that lack urban centers. There are plenty of good reasons why this should be so, from the ecological costs of urbanization to the buildup of maintenance costs that drives catabolic collapse, but there’s also a cognitive dimension.

Look over the histories of fallen civilizations, and far more often than not, societies don’t have to be dragged down the slope of decline and fall. Rather, they go that way at a run, convinced that the road to ruin must inevitably lead them to heaven on earth. Arnold Toynbee, whose voluminous study of the rise and fall of civilizations has been one of the main sources for this blog since its inception, wrote at length about the way that the elite classes of falling civilizations lose the capacity to come up with new responses for new situations, or even to learn from their mistakes; thus they keep on trying to use the same failed policies over and over again until the whole system crashes to ruin. That’s an important factor, no question, but it’s not just the elites who seem to lose track of the real world as civilizations go sliding down toward history’s compost heap, it’s the masses as well.

Those of my readers who want to see a fine example of this sort of blindness to the obvious need only check the latest headlines. Within the next decade or so, for example, the entire southern half of Florida will become unfit for human habitation due to rising sea levels, driven by our dumping of greenhouse gases into an already overloaded atmosphere.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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