GWB is right about this however The reality is that North Carolina should of never allowed the construction of permanent structures on the barrier islands. It has cost the state a tremendous amount of money to preserve these structures via sand replenishment - that has not necessarily been re-paid in tourism taxation revenue over the past decades. The same is true for much of Fire Island in NY. And what aggravates me is that we are subsidizing flood insurance for these wealthy people via the Federal flood ins. programs.
The shaded area would be underwater in hundred years even if man did not even inhabit the earth. You do realize that most of the red areas on this map are existing swamp land.
Finally FC and I agree on something. *** looks out window to see if the sun now rises in the west ***
Oh yes. And cruise ships can stop on a dime. What, are you joking? Nothing short of extreme geoengineering of the climate via stratospheric aerosols is going to stop the rise. We can stop all emission of GHG's right now and it will still happen. Two hundred years of GW and consequent sea level rise is already baked into the cake no matter what we do now......short of geoengineering. Which is a scary prospect.
The cruise ships that drive around in less than five feet of water??? Im sure there will be a ton of cruise ships wanting to drive in the areas where there used to be land.
Here's How Climate Change Could Be Causing Antarctic Sea Ice To Increase, Not Shrink By Chelsea Harvey Antarctic sea ice reached a record high this year, topping 20 million square kilometers (nearly 8 million square miles) in September — a milestone it hadn't touched since 1979. It's a fact climate change deniers are fond of repeating. If the planet is warming, shouldn't sea ice be melting away rather than growing? It's true that the phenomenon is a confusing one — but it's no proof that climate change isn't happening. In fact, scientists believe that climate change is actually responsible for the strange events down in the Antarctic. Walt Meier, a scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, explains how this is possible in a new video from Science@NASA. The first thing to note is that sea ice and land ice are two completely different things. Sea ice is simply frozen ocean water, which forms a layer of ice on top of the sea. Land ice originates on land, forming from compacted snow to form glaciers and ice sheets. Land ice melting into the oceans is what causes sea levels to rise. While sea ice has been steadily growing in the Antarctic, land ice has actually been shrinking. In fact, a new NASA report shows that the melting rate of land ice in West Antarctica, the fastest-melting region on the continent, has tripled during the last 10 years. Researchers found that between 1992 and 2013, the region lost an average of 83 gigatons of ice every year. Meier believes all this melting land ice might actually be causing the increase in sea ice. As glaciers melt, they pour cold freshwater into the ocean. Freshwater is easier to freeze than salty seawater, so the influx from the melting glaciers could be adding to Antarctica's sea ice. Snowfall could also be a factor. As snow falls onto the existing sea ice, Meier explains, it weighs the ice down and causes it to sink just beneath the water's surface. Cold ocean water then seeps up and mixes with the falling snow, creating a slushy mixture that eventually freezes, thickening and expanding the sea ice. It's unclear how much snowfall has fluctuated over the past few decades in Antarctica, butexperts believe it will increase as the climate continues to warm. Numerous climate studies, including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have warned that climate change will lead to increases in heavy precipitation events and more frequent and intense storms. Even wind could be part of the answer. Climate change is altering weather patterns all over the globe, causing air flow to shift around the planet and storms to become more frequent and intense. This phenomenon is evident is Antarctica, which is becoming increasingly windy. Meier says these winds can carry cold air from the icy continent out over the ocean, where they aid in the freezing process out in the open ocean. Differing conditions and weather patterns around the world can lead to different outcomes — an impact of changing climate that we are literally seeing everywhere around us, from droughts in California to extreme November snow storms in Buffalo, NY. It's not so strange that different part of the world would react differently to global warming. And we have very strong evidence that sea ice is quickly disappearing in the Arctic, wreaking havoc on animals such as seals and polar bears who need it for their hunting and breeding grounds. So while the Earth's natural processes may sometimes be strange and confusing, there's no reason to doubt that climate change is really happening. In fact, as Meier suggests, science indicates that it may be responsible for some of the most surprising phenomena we're observing on the planet.
They call them “ghost moose.” These pale beasts have lately come to haunt forests across the northern United States. But they aren’t at all like the revered Kermode bears of Canada, which owe their cream coloring to genetics or, as some First Nations believe, to supernatural powers. Ghost moose are white because of winter ticks. More precisely, they are white because climate change makes them vulnerable to winter ticks. That may sound crazy at first. To most of us, climate change can seem like an abstraction, with consequences that we may not have to face till some vague time decades or centuries in the future. But the spectacle of a moose with thousands upon thousands of engorged winter ticks clinging to its body has a way of making it seem painfully here and now.
Warming Seas Drive Rapid Acceleration of Melting Antarctic Ice As warm ocean water rises up to melt them, glaciers around the Amundsen Sea are losing half a Mount Everest a year. Warren Cornwall for National Geographic PUBLISHED DECEMBER 4, 2014 Melting Antarctic glaciers that are large enough to raise worldwide sea level by more than a meter are dropping a Mount Everest's worth of ice into the sea every two years, according to a study released this week. A second study, published Thursday in the journalScience, helps explain the accelerating ice melt: Warm ocean water is melting the floating ice shelves that hold back the glaciers. The two new pieces of research come as officials of the World Meteorological Organization announcedWednesday that 2014 is on track to be the warmest year on record. Scientists have long worried that the West Antarctic ice sheet is a place where climate change might tip toward catastrophe. The ice sheet holds enough water to raise sea level by 16 feet (5 meters). The region along the Amundsen Sea is the sheet's soft underbelly, where the ice is most vulnerable. (See "Rising Seas" inNational Geographic magazine.) Earlier this year, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea—notably the Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers—were already doomed to collapse, and at the current rate of melting would be gone in 200 years. A study released Tuesday by members of the same team, published in Geophysical Research Letters, confirms those troubling measurements with ones made by other researchers using a total of four different techniques. The study shows that ice loss from the Amundsen Sea glaciers has accelerated sharply over the past two decades. Between 2003 and 2011 it averaged an eye-popping 102 billion metric tons every year. Mount Everest—rocks, ice, and all—weighs approximately 161 billion metric tons. (See also West Antarctica Glaciers Collapsing, Adding to Sea-Level Rise.) The decline is driven less by melting on the surface or changes in snowfall, and more by a speeding up of the glaciers' journey to the ocean, the scientists concluded. In some cases, glaciers reached speeds of more than a third of a mile in a year as they approached the Amundsen Sea, where they either merge into a floating ice shelf, or fall into the water and become icebergs. The momentum behind this moving ice means the glacier loss is unlikely to stop any time soon, said University of California, Irvine geophysicist Isabella Velicogna, one of the authors of the new study. Velicogna likened the process to a ball at the top of a hill. "Once you give the first push, the ball just keeps rolling," she said. Warming Ocean, Melting Ice The study published today in Science provides a reason why this conveyer belt of ice might be accelerating. A team led by oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Germany found that the shallow waters in the Amundsen and nearby Bellingshausen Seas have been warming over the last three decades. Warming ocean water has been a prime suspect for the decline of ice in the West Antarctic. Massive floating ice shelves there act like a cork, bottling up the ice sheets and glaciers behind them on land. Turn up the temperature in this water bath, and the ice shelves start melting faster, loosening the cork. This study offers new clues about how that's happening. Merging a variety of data sets, along with their own observations, the researchers found that deep and relatively warm ocean water known as Circumpolar Deep Water has warmed at a rate of roughly .1 degree Celsius per decade (.18 degree Fahrenheit) since 1975 around most of the continent. That's thought to be tied to broader climate change that's pouring extra heat into the oceans, Schmidtko said. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...e-melt-sea-level-climate-environment-science/
What complete nonsense - ghost moose were widely reported through the warmer years in the 1800s. Are you claiming the man-made "climate change" caused ghost moose back in the 1800s?