First published on the Rag Blog April 23, 2014 Link — Sea level rise is accelerating. At some point, our barrier islands will cross a disintegration threshold and begin to disappear. Because every mile of every beach is created differently, we will see some beaches begin to suffer sooner than others. PADRE ISLAND — For…
Happy Earth Day everyone! My recent survey of sea level rise erosion on Padre Island has motivated me to produce another sea level rise documentary (see Beach Report 041414). Any funding out there? Donations? It will be a climate change adventure rockumentary with good news: the solutions to climate pollution will be no more expensive…
I just returned from a recon trip to Padre Island where I drove the entire 90 mile 4×4 beach from Brownsville to Corpus in preparation for a fund drive to make a new sea level rise film. Please donate if you can, otherwise—tell your friends and thanks! http://www.meltonengineering.com/donatepage.htm Mansfield Pass (boat access & jetties) cuts…
There is surprising new sea level rise news coming from the UK and Bangladesh is in trouble. Bangladesh is a tropical monsoon nation that gets hit by cyclones on average 16 times per decade. A cyclone struck the southeastern coast in May 1991, killing 136,000 people. One to one and a half meters of sea…
(See the new gallery about this trip to Padre Island National Seashore: link) Padre Island National Seashore, October 19 and 20, 2013 (PINS) First day out: Saturday October, 19th 2013. We had planned a leisurely trip, birding, staying in town at a hotel, eating seafood, light four-wheeling and enjoying the beach. Then, Friday night a…
The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation, have been taking a serious look at some radically crazy sea level rise figures. It seems that the Australian Outback has taken over sea level rise. Those widespread floods that ended (temporarily?) Australia’s latest 10-year…
The most recent discoveries in climate science bear little resemblance to what we hear in the media. Greenland’s melt in 2012 for example has been widely advertised in the media as just another weather event, similar to many in the past. The adage that we cannot tell for sure if any single weather event was…
Abrupt climate change has arrived. They told us this would happen twenty years ago if we did not reduce emissions. We did not and it has. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a Ronald Reagan Presidential Initiative formerly called the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, tells us an important truth in the climate change…
If sea level rises just three feet, 1.5 million housing units will be flooded and 3.7 million people displaced. Pick an amount of sea level increase, any old amount will do. The minimum is the IPCC estimate of about 15 inches (a half meter). This of course does not include any increase in discharge from…
Over the years I have been watching the reports reporting how sea level rise slowly increasing. Slowly however is a misnomer. Sea level rise has rapidly increased since about 1990. The papers tell the story. Throughout most of the 20th century, sea level rise was between 1.2 and 1.5 mm per year. About 1990, it…
Climate science moves ahead. Recent findings continue the increase in the rate of sea level rise (Grinsted, Moore, and Jevrejeva, 2009; Jevrejeva, Grinsted, and Moore, 2009; Rahmstorf, 2007; Vermeer and Rahmstorf, 2009.) It is not just that sea level continues to rise, the rate that it is rising is increasing. In other words, as our…
The Queens University press release announces that they and Carleton Universities have completed research that has, as the press release states "…uncovered startling new evidence of the destructive impact of global climate change on North America’s largest Arctic delta." The study looked at a storm surge during the summer of 1999 that created a widespread…
During the last interglacial warm period, this study says temps were 2 to 3 degrees warmer. There is considerable disagreement about this. James Hansen says a lot less. Hmmm… Maybe we are already warmer than when sea level was 24 feet higher. There are numerous different estimates of paleotemperatures, especially the last interglacial. they mostly…
Do you realize that ocean primary productivity has declined 40% since 1950? Or that, this year’s coral bleaching was worse than during the super El Nino of ’98? Or that, the Arctic was declared functionally ice free last summer for the first time in 14 million years? Read More — First published on the Rag…
A new publication in the Journal Science by Dorale et. al., looked sporadically submerged cave formations on the coast of Spain. Dr. Dorale says in an article in Time: "Dorale’s paper suggests the possibility that ice sheets may respond much more dynamically to changes in temperature, forming and melting at rates that are quicker than…
Remember those new, really fabulous gravity satellites called GRACE? (For more about Grace see the essay Antarctic Paradox on this site http://www.meltonengineering.com/Mythbusters/Antarctic%20Paradox.pdf) Velicogna, Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed b y GRACE, Geophysical Research Letters, October 2009
April 27, 2009 Teams from the Institute of Marine & Limnological Sciences, at the University of Mexico and the Institute of Marine Science in Germany published a report in the April 9 scientific journal Nature that shows a sea level rise of six and a half to ten feet in 10 to 24 years because…
More News From Copenhagen. 600,000 million people at risk. Likely sea level rise is now over four feet excluding dynamical ice sheet changes. To get to four feet (1.2 meters) of sea level rise in 2100 from where we are today, we must see on average of 13 mm of sea level rise per year…
This is 21 to 43 inches and it does not include dynamical ice sheet disintegration. Very important to note also in the Dutch study, sea level rise in the 22nd century will be 1.5 to 3.5 meters – that’s 11.5 feet. Most of the worlds major cities will be affected by eleven feet of sea…
(784 pages) The last time that the planet was as warm it is today, sea level was 13 to 20 feet higher. The temperature of the planet will warm about another 2 degrees even if we were to stop emitting all CO2 tomorrow morning. It is likely that sea level will rise to these levels…
