[Newfie]

Dissident,

Not to argue with your analysis. I just believe we don’t have 100 years or 80. Other factors, perhaps not related to climate change, or related but of a different mechanism, will kick in that will drastically reshape the human experience. To put it mildly.

[dissident]

Dissident,

Not to argue with your analysis. I just believe we don’t have 100 years or 80. Other factors, perhaps not related to climate change, or related but of a different mechanism, will kick in that will drastically reshape the human experience. To put it mildly.

That is highly likely. The negative feedbacks saving our collective a**es have not materialized and we have been instead finding more positive feedbacks or faster-than-expected feedbacks. We are only going to be aware of important processes and effects in a comprehensive way only in the rear-view mirror. By then, there will be global civilization collapse just as most of the previous local civilization collapses occurred due to climate variations. So there may not be any researchers analyzing observations to even obtain this knowledge.

The current crop of delayers and deniers is criminally insane. Playing with the only life-sustaining environment we can reach (forget about flying to the stars to escape our mess) without even a superficial understanding of the sensitivity of this system is insanity. But hordes of morons are using their political affiliation to decide on the validity of the science. It never even crosses their mind that their cherished infinite reservoir for human pollution assumption is utter BS. They know that people are now drinking Prozac in the water, but still believe in some magic self-removal of pollutants. No matter what humans do, they can never get any blowback. This is, again, insanity.

[dohboi]

"But hordes of morons are using their political affiliation to decide on the validity of the science"

Nicely put.

[Ibon]

"But hordes of morons are using their political affiliation to decide on the validity of the science"

Nicely put.

Ask yourself, how come nobody in the Maldives are using their political affiliation to decide on the validity of climate science?

Except that the Ministry of Tourism of the Maldives is aggressively promoting mass tourism with hundreds of flights per week landing there as Europeans and Asians flock to the beaches..... beaches that will soon no longer exist.

We live in true cognitive dissonance.

Me too!

[jedrider]

Sea Level Rise Can No Longer Be Stopped, What Next? - with John Englander
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvqY2NcBWI8

Or, how to explain SLR to Adults!

[AdamB]

Sea Level Rise Can No Longer Be Stopped, What Next? - with John Englander
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvqY2NcBWI8

Or, how to explain SLR to Adults!

"Can no longer be stopped" is amusing. Someone thought, considering it has been happening throughout the entire Holocene, that we WERE going to stop it?

[dohboi]

Actually, as he says just a couple minutes into the lecture, sea level hasn't really changed that much during the Holocene.

[AdamB]

Actually, as he says just a couple minutes into the lecture, sea level hasn't really changed that much during the Holocene.

I see. And "not changed that much" in your world is the same as stopped rising? I wish I could treat changes like this as synonyms, it would save me SO much time at work. "Sorry boss, obviously commodity prices haven't changed that much, so i didn't even need to bother calculating how much gross revenue dropped this month because of the change that did happen."

So that we now know how "not changed much" is defined by those scared to quantify things, here is the chart. What's 40 meters among friends? No big deal at all! Someone tell me, how are those tribes that were camping out along the Bering Strait landbridge doing nowadays?

[jedrider]

Good opportunity to understand the Holocene.

[dohboi]

The important part of the holocene for our discussion is of course since the beginning of something like civilization, when people started making permanent and ever bigger settlements near the oceans and seas. Since about 2000 BC there has been very little change in sea level, so people came to think over the millennia that this was the condition that would continue. We are now in a period of exponentially increasing levels of sea level rise, and those assumptions will now come back to bite us (and really already are).

[KaiserJeep]

Nobody is debating whether or not SLR exists. It obviously exists, and low-lying seaside communities are being flooded at a snail's pace. In fact in the past before we began burning FF's, SLR was orders of magnitude faster than today, as we withdrew from the last glacial age and thawing ice sheets released vast quantities of water. After migrating across the Bering Sea land bridge, modern humans made it just fine in the Americas with newly redefined seashores.

The entire controversy has always been whether or not humans are accelerating the natural thawing, and by how much. The possibilities range from no effects to quite serious acceleration, but considering the snail's pace of SLR, a sensible person would hold and opinion somewhere between "no effect" and "minimal impact".

But I expect some pushback to this idea. Doomies must cry "Doom" at every opportunity, whether sensible or not.

[Newfie]

KJ,

You have something of a point. The effects of SLR have been small to date. I think it’s safe to say that SLR is just not an issue for you and me, given our advanced age. .

Our Grandchildren and succeeding generations will likely see significant effects. Any infrastructure being planned, designed , constructed today should incorporate conservative SLR estimates. Cities and ports should be in advanced planning on how to mitigate for SLR.

[KaiserJeep]

Well Newfie, SLR will either accelerate, decelerate, or remain the same. I have seen no convincing argument for any of these three scenarios. But when you consider the sheer amount of ice that melted at the end of the last glacial age, hundreds of feet thick across multiple continents, versus the relatively minor amount that remains today, it's hard to feel much sense of peril.

You are of course entirely correct. However had the wife consented to be even two hours further from the grandkids, I would have had a beach property in a heartbeat. They are affordable and beautiful on the shores of Lake Michigan.

[jedrider]

I have seen no convincing argument for any of these three scenarios. But when you consider the sheer amount of ice that melted at the end of the last glacial age, hundreds of feet thick across multiple continents, versus the relatively minor amount that remains today, it's hard to feel much sense of peril.

As Kaiser does a face plant in the sand, I suppose. However, good observation about the sheer volume of ice that was once frozen - which I hadn't thought about before.

1. The Halocene started with a rapid temperature rise and then a constant plateau, more or less.
2. The SLR rose rapidly and kept on rising after the increase in temperature until it reached some equilibrium, I presume.
3. As we are in a warm spell for the foreseeable future, what little ice remains will melt quickly percentage wise.
4. Albedo (reflectivity) soars in the Arctic region (because there is so little ice there relatively speaking).
5. Antarctica has different mechanisms at play, but they are at play.

Ice is nice. Nice is nice, too, but I didn't go there.

[dohboi]

Newf, LOTS of people are struggling with the effects of SLR already, but yeah, it's gonna be a whole lot worse for the next generations.

[Newfie]

LOTS of people. Dohboi, I know you know the difference but most folks don’t.

I struggle with metaphors to use to explain CC to folks, here is my most recent.

It is like taking out a 200 year mortgage, every year, and each years mortgage is slight bigger than the previous year. And we have been at this for about 75 years. So obviously we have a huge debt to pass forward to our children.

Not a perfect model but perhaps a useful tool.

[rockdoc123]

Newf, LOTS of people are struggling with the effects of SLR already, but yeah, it's gonna be a whole lot worse for the next generations.

Hmmm, looking at global sea level rise over the past 60 years it has risen by ~ 4.5 inches. Unless you were living at sea level back then it is doubtful you are "struggling with the effects" of that sort of rise. The median age in the world is 26 years so thats about 2 inches of rise the "average" person would have experienced. The term "LOTS" seems over the top in this context.

[Newfie]

LOTS is an undefined number. It’s more than “many” but less than “humongous.” So it’s hard to argue. LOTS of folks in Bangaladesh and the Maldives are impacted. Perhaps Venice. Norfolk even.

But nothing like what will be impacted by cc in 100 years. A mere pittance, a small sample, an introduction.

[rockdoc123]

LOTS of folks in Bangaladesh and the Maldives are impacted. Perhaps Venice. Norfolk even.

please show the actual data to support those claims.

Bangladesh as an example has not had a problem given the Bhramaputra and Ghanges rivers dump tons of sediment into the region annually, offsetting increases in actual sea level.

The Maldives have been suffering from subsidence. The sea level they experience is relative sea level which means the combination of natural land subsidence versus the rise of oceans. Throughout North America this is quite evident as well with some areas having very high positive relative sea level rise (Gulf Coast) as a consequence of natural subsidence and other areas such as along the west coast where relative sea level has fallen as a consequence of isostatic uplift.

A practical way of looking at this is over the period of the average person currently living the oceans have risen up to their ankle bones. They wouldn't even have had to buy a set of wellies.

[Newfie]

I’ll let Dohboi respond, I was just trying to help out with his “lots.” Perhaps he has a better response than I did.