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Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows
- steve19 7y agoAt what point do we first see mass floodings from unusually high tides, such as during proxigean spring tide? Surely it must be soon if Veitnam will be underwater in just 30 years time?
- catalogia 7y agoApparently it's already happened. > The findings don’t have to spell the end of those areas. The new data shows that 110 million people already live in places that are below the high tide line, which Mr. Strauss attributes to protective measures like seawalls and other barriers.
- ekianjo 7y agoSo basically we have 110 millions of people living in "dangerous" areas so far yet nobody was impacted?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thrower123 7y agoWe've had cities and towns built in regular flood plains for thousands and thousands of years. Every single year there's a few weeks in the spring when the news is full of stories about snowmelt and ice dams or heavy spring rains causing massive flooding on the Mississippi and its tributaries.
- kijin 7y agoIf you include areas that are protected by seawalls and other barriers, I assume that number could include most parts of the Netherlands. Not exactly a helpful number. We should give priority to people who are currently unprotected.
- big_chungus 7y agoEssentially, yes. The Dutch have been living with this for hundreds of years; it will cost, but it is certainly possible to construct mitigatory measures.
- code_duck 7y agoSo the way it affects them is by requiring the expensive construction of seawalls, drainage and other defensive mechanisms.
- heavyset_go 7y agoThey're affected by floods.
- ekianjo 7y agoMore than before? Where are the stats for that?
- flukus 7y agoI don't know where you're getting no impact from, countries like Bangladesh are often being flooded (https://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/01/asia/bangladesh-south-asia-floods/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/01/asia/bangladesh-south-asi...), in 1998 they had 68% of the country under water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_Bangladesh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_Bangladesh). They are gradually getting more frequent and more severe, sooner or later they will be catastrophic.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThere's plenty of places that are experiencing all sorts of problems with flooding. Look into Miami and Venice for starters; their problems are well-documented in English media. Less-developed cities are experiencing it worse, but aren't as well-documented in English.
- comicjk 7y agoHurricane Sandy hit NYC during a spring tide, flooding downtown and knocking out power and a lot of subway tunnels. It cost 53 lives and about $19 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Sandy_in_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Sandy_in_...
- brohoolio 7y agoDid I just miss the link to the research material? How much higher will it be? 6 inches? 2 feet?
- luu 7y agoI believe the paper is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z. If I'm reading the paper correctly, the authors don't argue that sea levels will rise more than previously predicted. Rather, they argue that the classical technique for estimating impact by using elevation (SRTM) is overestimating elevation and therefore underestimating the impact of rising sea levels. The authors claim that their technique (CoastalDEM) also underestimates the impact of rising sea levels, but reduces the systemic bias present in previous estimates.
- radford-neal 7y agoThanks for the link. One statement from the paper: "this analysis assumes a static coastal topography". This seems like a significant limitation, especially when a lot of the affected area consists of river deltas (eg, most of Bangladesh, the Mekong delta in Vietnam). One would expect that a rise in sea level in a delta would lead to increased silt deposition on the newly-submerged parts of the delta, reducing the impact compared to a naive calculation, perhaps quite significantly.
- listenallyall 7y ago"Central estimates in the recent literature broadly agree that global mean sea level is likely to rise 20–30 cm by 2050 ref.3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10" But what the paper is claiming, is that accepted methods of determining elevation are positively biased (estimates of land mass being higher than this new paper says): "CoastalDEM reduces linear vertical bias from 4.71 m to less than 0.06 m."
- IanDrake 7y agoMore? I can't think of one that's been erased yet.
- asah 7y agoMore by 2050 i.e. more than previously predicted by 2050.
- mikhailfranco 7y agoIndonesia is moving Jakarta's capital status and government functions to a new city on Borneo. Of course, they cannot move Jakarta itself, which is also sinking due to groundwater extraction, and will be flooded unless they build a costly barrage system. They need to get the Dutch back to show them how (the Dutch will need a place to move anyway :) Thailand is also discussing a similar plan to move the capital from Bangkok to Ayutthaya, the historical capital before the Burmese invasion of 1767. New York is planning a sea wall system in southern Manhattan - The Big U - but what they really need is a truly BIG barrage from Long Island to Staten Island across the Narrows, and a smaller effort between the island and the New Jersey mainland. Closing the East River will be more difficult, depending on how much of the shoreline will be included. By coincidence, the Dutch also used to control New York.
- arkades 7y agoDoes anyone have any sources for good projects for the USZ?
- klyrs 7y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pmiller2 7y ago> Over all, the research shows that countries should start preparing now for more citizens to relocate internally, according to Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental group that coordinates action on migrants and development. How the hell is Vietnam supposed to prepare for non-existence?
- sithadmin 7y agoIt doesn't have to? Look at a map of Vietnam, then look at the (relatively small) portion of Vietnam presented in the article's graphics...
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoA "relatively small" portion that's still a major territory loss that includes everything south of Ho Chi Min, and much of the city - of 10m. I'd say they have to. Perhaps quickly as these estimates appear to be based on RCP2.6 - that's the most optimistic track assuming everyone is meeting Paris goals. Right now, no one is.
- wsc981 7y agoMakes you wonder when coastal property prices start plummeting. And when banks stop granting mortgages for buying coastal homes. I don’t believe this is happening yet.
- rectang 7y agoIs there a way to short these real estate investments and fleece climate-change-denying ideologues who are keeping coastal property values high? Do well by doing good! :D
- listenallyall 7y agoClimate-change-denying ideologues like the Obamas? Or are you the one being duped? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.masslive.com/capecod/2019/08/barack-and-michelle-obama-buying-29-acre-estate-on-marthas-vineyard.html%3foutputType=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.masslive.com/capecod/2019/0...
- badfrog 7y agoIf there was, you'd probably be paying a lot to hold the position for 30 years.
- CydeWeys 7y agoIt's gonna happen over too long of a time horizon (from now, anyway) to profit handsomely off of. There are much better investments you can make today because they will pay off sooner.
- shams93 7y agoYeah so far coastal prices are far above the inland prices
- GenerocUsername 7y agoOddly lots of rich and connected are buying coastal properties... You would think their financial advisors would prevent them even if the banks give no resistance
- leeoniya 7y agoweird how sea level rise is always used as the doomsday scenario rather than the much more serious threat of delicate ecosystems collapsing and famine that would affect everyone.
- shawnb576 7y agothis! i'm finding that people - educated, thoughtful, caring people - have real trouble wrapping their heads around this threat, how serious it is, and how fast its coming. these same people are very concerned about plastic pollution. real issue, but not civilization ending. and if we stopped the major sources tomorrow, we'd be fine. CO2 does not work this way. i think it's because people can see and feel plastic. but they look out their window and things look...fine (apologies to california and other places where things are not fine)
- turk73 7y agoIt's not that, it's that everything, literally everything is breathless, OMG we're all gonna die, 24/7. It's exhausting to be so concerned all the fucking time. So I'm not. This planet will shed the human race like a bad case of fleas. It would also help if every single solution proffered wasn't some kind of totalitarian, collectivist nightmare of epic proportions. Is there not one single solution that doesn't enslave us all for the rest of time? Between living like a 1500s serf and just simply dying, it's not a hard choice. The wealthly oligarchs aren't going to change the way they live.
- ycombonator 7y agoThey had predicted almost a foot rise in sea level for 2020-25 in 1984. So we will see what happens. Source: https://books.google.com/books/about/Projecting_Future_Sea_Level_Rise.html?id=c1Hls8bvKT8C https://books.google.com/books/about/Projecting_Future_Sea_L...
- ycombonator 7y agoI bet you didn’t even read the study before you down voted me. Facts don’t care about your feelings.
- williesleg 7y agoWE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! Of course except the Obama's, who just got a house on the east coast shoreline.
- jefftk 7y agoSummary: elevation estimates using data from SRTM [1] are too high in built-up areas, because unlike with LIDAR data it's not able to tell the difference between "this is high ground" and "this is low ground with a building on it". Which means many coastal urban areas are more vulnerable to sea level rise than people had previously estimated. They try to get a better estimate by building a more complex model, and calibrate it using LIDAR where that's available. This lets them say not just "things are worse than we thought" but "these specific parts of these populated areas are at risk". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Radar_Topography_Mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Radar_Topography_Missi...
- GrumpyNl 7y agoWhere does this fit in? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21310972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21310972
- jefftk 7y agoIf ice cliffs in the Antarctic won't collapse catastrophically that decreases our estimate for how quickly the sea is likely to rise, which is certainly good news! But we're still going to get some rise, and accurate elevation modeling is important for figuring out what effects that's likely to have. Roughly, you can think of these as two disconnected efforts: get the best estimate you can of the distribution of possible future sea levels, and get the best estimate you can of the impact of different sea levels on humanity. Your link is the former, this link is the latter.
- guelo 7y agoIt doesn't, this paper takes into account a wide error range in their analysis.
- yters 7y agoSince the threat is so imminent, are there specific climate change predictions that have come true?
- standardUser 7y agoThe sea level has risen around 5-8 inches since 1900 and the rate at which it is rising has increased over the last several decades (and continues to increase). This is compared to roughly 2000 years of stable sea levels prior to the 1900's.
- lurker458 7y agoOne of the predictions was that we'd get stronger heat waves in West Europe. We broke several old records this year. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49100271 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49100271
- romaaeterna 7y agoBut you've been in a warming trend for millennia in Western Europe -- the Danube and Rhine used to freeze over in the time of Tacitus.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y agoWarming trend vastly accelerated in a relatively short time frame to the point of the long term trend not holding much salience
- Xylakant 7y agoThe Danube and Rhine river froze over in times my parents can remember. A strong contributing factor to why rivers today don’t freeze any more is that we’re using them to cool power plants and similar.
- romaaeterna 7y agoThey froze frequently, and this was not something noted in the 18th century, before power plants. You had reindeer in the Black Forest in Caesar's time. Europe was quite a bit colder in historical times.
- keymone 7y agois there any noticeable effect of earth’s rotation and uneven gravity field on distribution of sea-level change?
- chris_overseas 7y agoYes gravity, and to a lesser extent rotation, have a (somewhat unintuitive) impact on how the sea level will change across different parts of the globe. There's a good overview of this topic here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/sep/12/greenland-antarctic-ice-sheet-sea-level-rise-science-climate https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/... Edit: video showing gravity changing over time due to melt: https://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2016/07/21/gravity-greenland-dropping-no-really/ https://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2016/07/21/gravity-gre...
- keymone 7y agothanks! nice video, seems like gibraltar is getting a lot of action
- 7952 7y agoThe sea level as it stands today is already effected by gravity. And this is in fact built into the wgs84 datum. So vertical elevation is measured relative to that assumed sea level after the effects of gravity. And a rise in sea level would presumably be measured relative to that existing datum.
- auto 7y agoSlightly unrelated, but first author on this paper is Scott Kulp, an acquaintance and fellow ACM member from my undergrad days, and above and beyond one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. As in, double majored in Math and Comp Sci in undergrad, completing it in three years while looking dreadfully bored in every lecture we had together, smart.
- seveneightn9ne 7y agoPlug for thisplacewillbewater.com - they have a great map of what 4C warming will look like and you can also buy biodegradable stickers to post around and raise awareness if you live in an area that will be underwater.
- adolph 7y agoLooks like SpaceX predicts <.5C rise given their Boca Chica launch site. https://seeing.climatecentral.org/#12/25.9917/-97.1329?show=lockinAnimated&level=1&unit=feet&pois=hide https://seeing.climatecentral.org/#12/25.9917/-97.1329?show=... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_South_Texas_Launch_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_South_Texas_Launch_Site
- wolfram74 7y agoOr that they'll have more than one launch site in 20 years.
- tengbretson 7y agoAny chance this gets published if it somehow found the opposite to be true?
- nabla9 7y agoTo answer your conspiratory rhetorical question: Yes it would. There are some good news from research reported, like "Slowdown in Antarctic mass loss from solid Earth and sea-level" feedbackshttps://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6444/eaav7908 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6444/eaav7908 Just because there is less good news than bad news, does not make science biased.
- tengbretson 7y ago> To answer your conspiratory rhetorical question: Yes it would. The accusatory tone of your response only reinforces my concern. It doesn't even require a "conspiracy" as you gibingly added. If a scientist considering publishing findings counter to consensus expects to be met with this kind of reaction from their peers, and shouts of "denier" at large, that's all it takes to put a finger on the scale to bias what gets published.
- SamBam 7y agoYou protest too much and show your clear intent. First, your "Any chance" question was clearly begging the question. The framing was that you believed the article wouldn't get published if it went the other way. Then, when shown evidence that such articles do, in fact, get published, and that there is no conspiracy against them, you somehow suggest that... that response will keep scientists from publishing their work?
- nabla9 7y ago> a scientist considering publishing findings counter to consensus expects to be met with this kind of reaction from their peers, They don't in climate science if their research is solid. Objectively bad research get shunned of course. There is no basis for your suspicion.
- 7y ago
- poutine 7y agoTo put this in context we're talking about 4 to 5 mm per year of sea level rise on average globally for the next several decades. Some areas will be more and some less as sea level rise isn't uniform (for instance isostatic rebound on the west coast of Canada will result in a net sea level drop in some areas). Mitigation will be key as even if we eliminated carbon emissions completely today there's already committed warming in the system that will result in sea level rise through the century. We're just talking about how many extra mm per year on top of the 3-4mm or so that it is now.
- nabla9 7y agoMap of the rebound areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PGR_Paulson2007_Rate_of_Lithospheric_Uplift_due_to_post-glacial_rebound.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PGR_Paulson2007_Rate_of_L... Mainly Canada and Fennoscandia.
- Gravityloss 7y agoWell, who knows what will happen in the areas with massive glacier melt? Earthquakes? Isostatic rebound of the under-glascier ground? Maybe some ground will lower. Iceberg tsunamis too.
- dredmorbius 7y agoDefinitely land rise. Whether or not that tends to be bound as lateral and subductive regions are, triggering earthquakes, isn't clear. My thought is that the risk is probablyl low, though impacts at/near subduction zones might be pronounced through induced earthquakes. A rising landmass (generally the over-riding plate) would tend to reduce the load on the oceanic (under-riding) plate, and allow stresses to be released. Those earthquakes can be massive (Mag 9 Richter in Indonesia, Japan, and Chile), and induce tsunamis. In which case global warming could make for some major seismic events, but only in regions with existing faults. The possibility of increased vulcanism has also been raised.
- peter303 7y agoThe rise has been 3 mm a year (1/8 inch) since 1990 or about 4 inches. http://sealevel.colorado.edu/ http://sealevel.colorado.edu/ This has been averaging millions of measurements of satellite altimeter over oceans. That is considered more accurate than tidal gauges which are subject to local changes such subsidence near river mouths. The 3 mm is a combination of land glacier melt and water thermal expansions. I have heard talks all over the map as to which factor is more dominant. So 4-5 mm a year in the near future is not too off.
- itcrowd 7y agoHere's a summary of the paper I gave before when a NYT piece covered it yesterday. For USA and Australia, high-resolution/precision lidar-based maps are available of coastal areas. For other regions of the world it is not the case (or severely limited). However, gaining an insight into the elevation of land is crucial to determine a region's vulnerability to sea-level rise. NASA’s SRTM has almost global coverage of elevation levels, but is known to be too low resolution to be meaningful for this application (esp. in urban areas). A neural network was trained on the USA lidar data to augment the SRTM data (i.e. make the resolution higher). The network was verified on the Australian lidar dataset (and they got a good match; the model was already published elsewhere before [1]). The point of this paper was to then have the newly-derived elevation maps be exposed to sea-level change. This is where the maps with flooded cities come from [which were in the NYT article]. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0034425717306016 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00344...