Ice shelf holding back keystone Antarctic glacier within years of failure
science.org
science.org
Living 500 meters from the impact point of a catastrophe doesn't mean we aren't endangered by its consequences :/.
thanks.
But nobody buying a condo today looks at what the resale value will be in 50 years.
I don't think they built this was anticipating climate change--it was so if a bad combination of tides and storms pushed water far enough up the beach to reach where the house is it would be under the house instead of in the house. Nevertheless, it looks like a lot of these beachfront houses could take a meter or two of sea level rise and still be above water.
They'd have a lot less beach, so it would probably change the kind of person who wants to live in them, but it is quite possible that they would remain very desirable.
As far as things not actually on the beach goes, playing with the interactive sea level rise map from NOAA linked in kibwen's comment, it looks like there are a few places (such as the Long Beach area) where you get some extensive loss of land a ways in, but for most places on the Pacific coast it is just the beach itself that gets lost. It is more of a mixed bag for places not on the coast but on rivers or bodies of water connect to the coast.
Or, in other words, why would they react if their clients haven't?
I think in 50 years we might be about as limited as we are today -- some technologies significantly (but not magically) improved, but much more restricted energy and material availability. We've undergone the greatest revolutions in history in the last century, and fundamentally building technology and energy usage isn't in a magical state compared to early 20th century. NY's Empire State was built in the 1930s. Roman buildings are better in some way than modern equivalents.
A significant sea level rise (>10m) would mean rebuilding the housing of >25% of US's population (~40% are living within 100km of the coast). Imagine 1 in 3 people needing to rebuild their homes. Because of our current mode of action, we're quickly approaching most environmental limits at the same time. If we assume availability and (inverse) cost is approximately proportional to natural reserves of a mineral, and that consumption is also approximately inversely related to cost, then most minerals are expected to deplete at similar times. That I know of, copper, several rare earth minerals, lithium, phosphor, and who knows what else.
Imagine the social shock this will bring, specially if current cultural, social and economic paradigms are maintained.
(I invite you to join me :) Here's a plan for a paradigm shift: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28833230)
It's never an issue with resources. It's an issue with community and leadership, and the refusal of the community to appoint leaders who lead.
Fun ("fun") fact, the NOAA has a sea level rise map for the US, so you can see for yourself how this Florida-sized ice sheet impacts the real Florida's coastline.
Overview: https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/sea-level-rise-map...
Direct link: https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/
Select "Sea level rise" on the left and drag the slider up and down. Dark blue is the current sea level, light blue is area that would be inundated.
But most won't. We're just going to accept that the world's most populous cities will be underwater someday, some within a hundred years or so.
1.5 degree is about to become unreachable. Nobody really cares.
...
> A collapse of the entire glacier, which some researchers think is only centuries away, would raise global sea level by 65 centimeters. And because Thwaites occupies a deep basin into which neighboring glaciers would flow, its demise could eventually lead to the loss of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which locks up 3.3 meters of global sea level rise.
So, in the short term this isn't an immediate danger to anyone. In the long term it is, but the trouble with long-term problems is that it's hard to get the political will do do anything. (That's assuming that anything can be done to stop it at this point.)
On the other hand: maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems like climate predictions are getting worse and catastrophes are approaching faster than just the normal passage of time would suggest. Maybe "only centuries away" will be revised down to "only a century away" and then "only decades away" as more information becomes available.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/sites/www.e-educati...
Whether you like it or not, this is climate change and you cannot deny this. Obviously human activity has no impact on this.
You might look at more modern reliable data: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
We're up around 225mm or 22cm or 8inches over the last 100 years.
So about 100 years from now another 8inches or so. Hell, just go 1 foot.
New orleans, Miami, etc are probably going to need to build something to save themselves.
This is reality, but they have a long time to handle it.
What can an individual do these days? I attempted to do my bit, I bought a e-car, I recycle, I try to write efficient code.. But the world my kid is getting is fucked, and while it'll impact me, nothing like what he's in for if I use a bit of imagination....
I sort of hope he doesn't have children, I'm already kinda depressed thinking about the kind of life mine will have, thinking about his, yeeeee. Maybe I'm just too much doom and gloom but..
Fuck, it's looking dark.
Is there really any hope? Can we stop ourselves, as we say in scotland, from "fucking it into a tree" ?
With leaders like Boris, Trump/Biden, Xi and co, Apparently we can't..
Support legislations to tariffs imports and apply immigration quotas from countries that are not doing their part for the environment (emissions going up instead of down).
Recycling might not be as great as you think. 90%+ of the plastic in the oceans are coming directly from Asian rivers and countries that buy "raw" plastic from western countries in order to "recycle" it.
I mean, the way we're going now, an end is inevitable, but it always was.
But, are the number of years within the parameters that we, or I expected? Who knows, some of us are more optimistic about the future, and others less so.
It's a big tragedy of the commons; this time, only coordination can save us. A shared responsibility. (practically) Everyone, and specially our leaders, need to be on the same page. Disasters will come all at once... we're depleting most minerals as well, pollution will only get worse, and so on.
For the lack of a better word, this is Nature's ""test"" to see if we have the ability to
1) Think on a global and collective level;
2) Value the future and not just the immediate present.
The default mode of the test is failure, and we seem quite likely to fail anyways. We have to fight very hard. I do believe if we could reach some kind of consensus and mutual enlightenment the technical and social challenge is not that frightening, and maybe we even have a good chance to become a proper space-faring civilization. It's important to be hopeful. A thousand years of a sustainable high technology civilization can achieve what might be approaching the limits of physics of our Universe -- and I'm quite confident colonizing even the galaxy is feasible in such a scenario.
The classic on this topic is Scott Alexander's: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
My personal (idealistic, why not? ;) ) plan, my contribution, is to try to come up with a shared formalization of ethics most cultures/countries would accept (a sort of new version of human rights), which includes obvious stuff like valuing human life experience (and in general consciousness) as a primary target of our civilization. Recognizing we are all conscious individuals and so strict individualism is a silly, destructive paradigm, that truth can be well approximated and we can reason collectively towards a shared goal. I really want to prove it -- prove that significant divergences from such basic ethical systems are catastrophic or absurd -- thus we should all, regardless of other beliefs (or religions, or tastes), accept the basic premises and thus have a chance to not only survive, but to live well, to thrive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/ramgij/the_nat...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf5AMfIOqGw
That's how you can do better than 0 emissions: your influence has almost unbounded impact on future emissions. No pressure.
Hopefully some other nation of importance will lead us to water AND make us drink.
Not only are mature trees a beautiful gift to the next generation but the yearly ritual of planting trees is and will be an important one to inculcate for our progeny if we hope for them to stay on this planet.
We can at least stop electing them and people like them.