It's not often I hear about the WSJ getting a story on global warming right, but today is a good day, a tip of the hat to the WSJ.
Clearly and directly, with charts and date, today the WSJ wrote their own story and got it right. Ice melt is causing sea level rise, and the latest observations indicate the rate is accelerating beyond what the models predicted. At least 1 foot of rise is due before 2050.
This ain't good news for anyone. The science refuseniks must be squirming like a jug full of ants upon reading this in a Murdock rag, how to spin it?
Fossil fuel boys must be crestfallen, after all this is their paper. Maybe someone can be fired? It has long been a well kept secret concern among them that one day they will be subject to humiliation if not law suits for contributing (through lies and misdeeds) to global warming.
South Carolina outlawed the terms sea level rise and global warming in any long range planning of the coastal infrastructure or communities. 1984? Maybe they can have the WSJ arrested.
A foot of rise in the ocean increases the surface by millions of square miles, more evaporation, more water vapor aloft meaning more flash flooding and blizzards and suffering from high temps and high humidity, more rot, disease. Coastal cities around the globe will spend trillions either in protections or losses, either way it's trillions.
WSJ readers are not accustomed to reading this in their paper. Unless the editor later flat out renounces it, this is going to shake and inform their readers. It's the camels nose inching under the tent, the high dollar tent.
Darrel,
ReplyDeleteI think I read where Hong Kong and Singapore have higher sea levels. And, islands in the western Pacific are seeing that too.
Now, think about the implications of that in the Bay Of Fundy (world's highest tides) and in the Yellow Sea at Incheon - Port of Seoul.
Ron
Your right, sea level rises more in some areas than others. The ocean is not flat, seems impossible but true. Along the central east coast of the US the sea is higher than in Florida or upper New England. Not only that, it has risen in the last few years more than the others. The Panama Canal connects two uneven seas, I think the Pacific is a couple feet higher than the Gulf. Why doesn't it run around the tip of South America and even out? It tuns out over large open areas water does not flow downhill and level out, but is controlled by local variations of gravity, current, temperatures.
DeleteAnd yes, lots of cities are going to lose money building dykes or lose money when they lose the land to rising oceans.