Plan for two metres sea level rise this century. That’s the message from Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey in a Yale Environment article published today.
“This number is not a prediction. But we believe that seven feet is the most prudent, conservative long-term planning guideline for coastal cities and communities, especially for the siting of major infrastructure; a number of academic studies examining recent ice sheet dynamics have suggested that an increase of seven feet or more is not only possible, but likely. Certainly, no one should be expecting less than a three-foot rise in sea level this century.”
The two professors are authors of a recently published book The Rising Sea which I expect to review on Hot Topic in the near future. But in the meantime a brief report of their article:
“Rising seas will be on the front lines of the battle against changing climate during the next century. Our great concern is that as the infrastructure of major cities in the industrialized world becomes threatened, there will be few resources left to address the dramatic impacts that will be facing the citizens of the developing world.”
The ramifications of major sea level rise are massive. The disruption of agriculture, the salination of water supplies, storm and flood waters reaching ever further inland, and the creation of millions of climate refugees. 15 million people live at or below three feet elevation in Bangladesh, for example.
Most vulnerable are the deltas of major rivers, including the Mekong, Irrawaddy, Niger, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Nile, and Mississippi:
“Here, land subsidence will combine with global sea level rise to create very high rates of what is known as ‘local, relative sea level rise.’ The rising seas will displace the vast majority of people in these delta regions. Adding insult to injury, in many parts of Asia the rice crop will be decimated by rising sea level — a three-foot sea level rise will eliminate half of the rice production in Vietnam — causing a food crisis coincident with the mass migration of people.”
When it comes to cities Miami is the most threatened in the world. Other US cities under threat include New York/Newark, New Orleans, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Tampa-St Petersburg, and San Francisco. Outside of North America Osaka/Kobe, Tokyo, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Nagoya are among the most threatened major cities.
The writers are concerned that the US is not preparing realistically for what lies ahead. “The continued development of many low-lying coastal areas — including much of the U.S. east coast — is foolhardy and irresponsible.”
They recommend the immediate prohibition of the construction of high-rise buildings and major infrastructure in areas vulnerable to future sea level rise. Buildings placed in future hazardous zones should be small and movable — or disposable. Rebuilding and replacing infrastructure after storm damage should be queried and not supported by government funding if it remains vulnerable. Local governments should not be left with responsibility as they are too influenced by local interests.
How would this sort of realism go down in New Zealand? Currently local bodies are advised to plan for a 59 cm rise and to consider what an 80 cm rise might mean. Environment Minister Nick Smith has said the government is working to establish a national environmental standard on planning for sea levels, and hopes it will be in place this year, after public consultation. However he added that it was likely that councils would still be required to plan for a rise of 59cm, and said: “The Government is not going to consider adjusting its policy every week.” One’s dignity can prove a precarious perch on which to stand.
If you can bear looking at the human cost of sea level rise, already being experienced in the Sundarbans around the mouth of the Ganges, this photograph exhibition from Peter Caton has just been published in the Guardian. An earlier Guardian article carries videos of families forced from their villages by flooding and sea inundation. Sea level rise is no distant prospect.
Related posts:
- Dealing with sea level rise: retreat, defend, or attack?
- The Rising Sea
- Ballad of broken seas
- What makes sea level rise uneven
- The dangerous sea
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“And is anyone cognizant of the fact that a substantial portion of the non-tropic northern latitudes has been hit by a very large outbreak of cold and snow, and that certain notables like Joe Romm at Realclimate are implicating AGW as causing pervasive cold?” – Terry.
Wrong. Look at the following land surface temperature anomalies:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.g.....p?id=42260
Some areas are much colder, but others are much warmer. Why it’s almost as if the Arctic Oscillation has dipped into an extremely negative phase. That’s weather for you.
Just imagine how bad it’s going to get in the future when rapid disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet occurs. I’m betting parts of Europe, the US and all of Great Britain are going to get rather cold then, and it won’t just be a weather event.
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Umm Terry, you do realize that storm surges will still occur as the sea rises?
So if we take your number of a transient two meter rise due to an extreme storm surge and add to that 2 metres of baseline sea level rise then you get a transient pulse of sea level to 4 meters above where it is now. This doesn’t sound very pleasant and is something we might want to avoid or at the very least plan for.
Ps: Jom Romm’s blog is Climateprogress not Realclimate. But if you can provide any evidence either has been attributing the (regional) cold snap to AWG I’d be interesting to know.
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Terry, your cherry-picking of misunderstood and/or misreported comments from particular individuals does not invalidate the science of AGW, which is not the project of any one person, but the result of centuries of collective effort to understand and predict the behaviour of earth systems.
If you are bona fide, which I doubt, there are plenty of excellent resources available for you to educate yourself with, such as
http://hot-topic.co.nz/notes-sources/
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“actor Danny Glover is linking the Haiti earthquake to AGW”
I was thinking today it was strange I hadn’t heard anyone say this, lol but it was only a matter of time! Of course the Asian Tsunami was made worse by sea level rise (yeah right), I guess the Haiti earthquake was made worse by warmer weather weakening the concrete (and here I was thinking that the only reason a 7.0 earthquake could do so much damage was the sorry state of the nation in the first place (due to a myriad of factors), interesting to look back on youtube vids of Copenhagen and see Monckton critising the conference as doing more harm than good to nations such as Haiti just a month before this happened(mentioning Haiti directly))
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About Danny Glover…
Perhaps you should listen to the entire telephone interview, instead of what Fox News is putting out.
Fox cut in after the interview was already under way and deliberately missed Danny’s opening statements.
Fox has taken it out of context and spun it into something that it is not.
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You can see watch/listen to Danny Glover’s remarks here on youtube.
Despite his rather fumbling speech it is very clear what he’s saying is that climate change will leave poor Caribbean islands vulnerable to climate induced disasters in the future unless AWG is stopped.
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“Sea levels have been rising for a long time, since the end of the last ice age in fact.”
A bit of calculation suggests that this is not true – if the current rate of ~2mm per year had been going on for thousands of years then you’re looking at 2 metres per millenium. Historical records show that there hasn’t been anywhere near that much rise in the last several thousand years (4-5m since the Greeks?). So the current rate is certainly much faster than what has happened over the previous few thousand years.
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What a lot of rubbish in one posting…
“One of the problems with climate change is that everyone wants certainty (eg: seas will rise 2.30744 metres, or temperature will rise exactly 4.27183C)”
The only person I have ever read wanting such ‘certainty’ is yourself.
Hockey stick and Al Gore – You should get the video out and watch it, you might learn something. The only ‘hockey stick’ shown in the film was the unprecedented rise in CO2.
Copernicus… You should check who was on the side of the scientific establishment in that case (and no, he wasn’t burnt at all)
” I’m thinking that these days its not ignorance but idiocy that leads them to their extremes. They are certainly not taking a scientific approach anyway.”
Never were truer words spoken in self-reference
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Actually, there is evidence that AGW may increase the incidence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Here is a slightly abridged New Scientist article (sorry, no link as subscription required):
Climate change may trigger earthquakes and volcanoes
23 September 2009 by Richard Fisher
FAR from being the benign figure of mythology, Mother Earth is short-tempered and volatile. So sensitive in fact, that even slight changes in weather and climate can rip the planet’s crust apart, unleashing the furious might of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and landslides.
That’s the conclusion of the researchers who got together last week in London at the conference on Climate Forcing of Geological and Geomorphological Hazards. It suggests climate change could tip the planet’s delicate balance and unleash a host of geological disasters.
Evidence of a link between climate and the rumblings of the crust has been around for years, but only now is it becoming clear just how sensitive rock can be to the air, ice and water above. “You don’t need huge changes to trigger responses from the crust,” says Bill McGuire of University College London (UCL), who organised the meeting. “The changes can be tiny.”
Among the various influences on the Earth’s crust, from changes in weather to fluctuations in ice cover, the oceans are emerging as a particularly fine controller. Simon Day of the University of Oxford, McGuire and Serge Guillas, also at UCL, have shown how subtle changes in sea level may affect the seismicity of the East Pacific Rise, one of the fastest-spreading plate boundaries.
The researchers focused on the Easter microplate – the tectonic plate that lies beneath the ocean off the coast of Easter Island – because it is relatively isolated from other faults. This makes it easier to distinguish changes in the plate caused by climate systems from those triggered by regional rumbles. Since 1973, the arrival of El Niño every few years has correlated with a greater frequency of underwater quakes between magnitude 4 and 6.
The team is confident that the two are linked. El Niño raises the local sea level by a few tens of centimetres, and they believe the extra water weight may increase the pressure of fluids in the pores of the rock beneath the seabed. This might be enough to counteract the frictional force that holds the slabs of rock in place, making it easier for faults to slip. “The changes in sea level are tiny,” says Day. “A small additional perturbation can have a substantial effect.”
Small ocean changes can also influence volcanic eruptions, says David Pyle of the University of Oxford. His study of eruptions over the past 300 years with Ben Mason of the University of Cambridge and colleagues reveals that volcanism varies with the seasons. The team found that there are around 20 per cent more eruptions worldwide during the northern hemisphere’s winter than the summer (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2002JB002293). The reason may be that global sea level drops slightly during the northern hemisphere’s winter. Because there is more land in the northern hemisphere, more water is locked up as ice and snow on land than during the southern hemisphere’s winter.
The vast majority of the world’s most active volcanoes are within a few tens of kilometres of the coast (see map). This suggests the seasonal removal of some of the ocean’s weight at continental margins as sea level drops could be triggering eruptions around the world, says Pyle.
The suggestion that some volcanoes erupt when sea levels drop does not necessarily mean that sea levels rising under climate change will suppress volcanism. In Alaska, Mount Pavlof erupts more often in the winter months, and previous research by Steve McNutt of the Alaska Volcano Observatory puts this down to a local sea level rise of 30 centimetres every winter due to low air pressure and high storm winds. Pavlof’s location means that the extra weight of the adjacent sea could be squeezing magma towards the surface.
In other regions, additional ocean weight at continental margins as sea levels rise could bend the crust, reducing compressional conditions, says McGuire. Magma may then find it easier to reach the surface at adjacent volcanoes.
All these examples may seem contradictory, but the crucial point is that any change in sea level may alter regional stresses at continental margins enough to trigger eruptions in a volcano already primed to erupt, he says.
Small changes in rainfall can also trigger volcanic eruptions. In 2001, a major eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat was set in motion by particularly heavy rainfall. This destabilised the volcano’s dome enough for it to collapse and unleash magma within. Now it seems even typical tropical rain showers could trigger an eruption. And climate models suggest that many regions, including parts of the tropics, are likely to get wetter with climate change.
Adrian Matthews of the University of East Anglia, UK, and colleagues measured the minute-by-minute response of Montserrat’s volcano after more than 200 bouts of precipitation over three years. The team found that these events, which Matthews says were typical of tropical weather, were followed by two days of increased volcanic activity.
A rainy day increased the likelihood of dome collapse from 1.5 per cent to 16 per cent. “It wouldn’t have to be spectacularly heavy rainfall,” says Matthews. “You don’t have to have a hurricane.” (Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2009.05.010)
Perhaps the greatest geological hazards during climate change will be the result of melting ice sheets. Apart from the risk that loose sediments exposed by melted ice could slip into the sea as tsunami-generating landslides, the removal of heavy ice could also trigger volcanic eruptions. “Even thinning of a few tens of metres could make a difference,” says Andrew Russell of the University of Newcastle in the UK.
For example, Iceland’s Vatnajökull ice cap sits over a plate boundary and several volcanoes. That ice is likely to disappear within the next two centuries. “If that happens you’ll get rid of an awful lot of weight that will allow an increase in volcanic activity,” says Russell. In the wake of the last ice age, volcanism was up to 30 times greater in northern Iceland compared with today (Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, DOI: 10.1002/esp.1811).
Icy eruptions could reverberate round the world. In 1783, the Icelandic volcano Laki sent a sulphurous smog over Europe, plunging it into an extreme winter that killed thousands.
For now, it is unclear just how much climate change will affect the frequency and intensity of quakes and eruptions, says McGuire, because Earth’s sensitivity to climate is only now emerging. There is not yet enough data to build predictive climate models linking the two systems. But it’s crucial that we consider just how easily our actions could provoke the planet, he argues. “It’s serious science, not scaremongering.”
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Rob, yeah I remember reading that article, a while back. The Pyle & Mason study (volcanic seasonality) pdf is available here:
http://web.cocc.edu/breynolds/.....ptions.pdf
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Thanks, DW.
This field of study takes the concept of “climate sensitivity” to a whole new level…
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