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Estimates of sea level rise are very difficult and always changing. New research suggests that it could be "several meters", as published in a paper a few weeks

• at-fates-hands 11y ago
  >> Estimates of sea level rise are very difficult and always changing. Trust me, I'm pretty sure the people in the pacific islands are going to be a bit more paranoid about these changes than we are. And yet, some of the predictions have been wildly off the mark. Remember the United Nations Environment Programme who said in 2005: Imminent sea-level rises, increased hurricanes, and desertification caused by “man-made global warming” would lead to massive population disruptions. In a handy map, the organization highlighted areas that were supposed to be particularly vulnerable in terms of producing “climate refugees.” Especially at risk were regions such as the Caribbean and low-lying Pacific islands, along with coastal areas. The 2005 UNEP predictions claimed that, by 2010, some 50 million “climate refugees” would be frantically fleeing from those regions of the globe. However, not only did the areas in question fail to produce a single “climate refugee, by 2010, population levels for those regions were actually still soaring. In many cases, the areas that were supposed to be producing waves of “climate refugees” and becoming uninhabitable turned out to be some of the fastest-growing places on Earth.” Whoops. When I read stuff like this, it makes hard for objective people like myself to determine where the hype ends the facts start.
  • Houshalter 11y ago
    Some people do blame the civil wars in the Middle East on climate change, though its a bit indirect. That worse weather caused food prices to soar that year. That did happen around that time and caused a refugee crysis.
    • jessaustin 11y ago
      Food prices in the Middle East have far more to do with Mubarak's disastrous cronyist agricultural policies than with global warming.
      • Houshalter 11y ago
        But there were bad droughts that year that affected food prices world wide, and it wasn't just Egypt that was affected.
        • vonmoltke 11y ago
          So, if the government is capable of developing contingency plans for handling droughts and doesn't, it's the drought's fault when shit hits the fan?
          • Houshalter 11y ago
            Do you not understand that events can have multiple causes? Rarely does disaster require just one single thing to go wrong. In any case, it wasn't just egypt that had uprest that year. Egypt wasn't even the first country to have problems.
        • jessaustin 11y ago
          You're looking at the short term. Yes, grain prices would have been high that year anyway. But Egypt is not naturally dependent on imported grain; it took decades of mismanagement to make it so. If planting decisions had been made by independent farmers as they had been for millennia, Egypt would have retained the wheat-growing capacity that it had for millennia. In that situation, higher grain prices would actually have been good for Egypt. Instead, through Mubarak's twisted cronyist version of land reform, farmland was taken from real farmers and given to shadowy corporations who misused it in various frivolous schemes like growing flowers for Europe for a few years until it was unsuitable for further agricultural use.
  • greeneggs 11y ago
    > When I read stuff like this, it makes hard for objective people like myself to determine where the hype ends the facts start. You are confusing a political prediction with a scientific prediction. What scientists were saying that there were going to be large sea-level rises between 2005 and 2010? (Assuming that you are serious, since you don't point to any source, and your text is incorrectly quoted.)
• merpnderp 11y ago
  I go by what the IPCC states. As poor as its past performance has been in refining the science into accurate predictions, it is by far the best source of "scientific consensus" we have. And there have been many papers published over the last 20 years claiming a whole number of things. James Hansen has been wrong so many times in the past, I'm not sure why anyone still listens to him. And if you have any feel for the data at all, several meters of sea rise in 50 years should strike you as nearly impossible. There's certainly no strong (or even weak) evidence for this.
  • vonmoltke 11y ago
    Hansen, at this point, is about supporting his preconceived notions rather than trying to understand what is actually going on with the climate system.