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How Soon Will the Seas Rise?
- okokwhatever 1y ago[flagged]
- FrustratedMonky 1y agoIt can be measured. The whole argument that "just because the sun rises today, does not mean it will rise tomorrow", line of reasoning is pedantic at best.
- bilsbie 1y ago[flagged]
- spicyusername 1y agoWhat? This is one of those comments that evokes an emotional response, but is devoid of actual content. Is there some sinister plot involving activist beachgoers!? What kind of data would anyone even have on whether or not climate change activists own oceanfront property and what percentage they own? What would it even matter? If anything, one would imagine that oceanfront property owners would in fact care more about the effects of climate change because they are most impacted, lol.
- Noaidi 1y agoI wonder how many activists own ocean front properties? Not of course counting wealthy people who are concerned about climate change but are not activists. But you should start worrying now. As someone who has been exposed to the environment all over the United States the change is here. And farmers are already adapting to it, they just do not believe it is caused from humans. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-farmers-think-about-climate-change/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-farmers-t...
- titzer 1y agoDespite this comment being an ignorant throwaway, the irony is that markets can sometimes force the price of scarce natural resources up, which attracts investments because the goods are becoming scarce. In the short term, it could cause a spike in coastal property prices that would cause superficial analyses to conclude that there is no problem whatsoever, further fueling an exploitative short term bubble. What will definitely be affected is insurance prices. Those are a better gauge of what the actuaries think is going to happen. We are already seeing that in Florida today and on the eastern seaboard, as insurance prices have skyrocketed. Some places are not even insurable.
- ltbarcly3 1y agoI think you might have overlooked the point they were making. Whether or not the market price is properly pricing in future risk is irrelevant. What OP is implying is that activists are engaged in cognitive dissonance, similar to what you commonly find in religious people. They say they 'believe' in something but you would not find any evidence of that 'belief' revealed in their behavior. For example: believing that the world will end tomorrow, posting to social media that the world is going to end tomorrow, and then checking your work email at 8pm. Yes, you can probably make a just-so story where they are buying beachfront property based on a belief they can unload it, or they will die, before it becomes worthless due to being underwater or destroyed by storms. I think the point stands however, and it underlines the importance of looking at revealed beliefs rather than simply stated beliefs. (To be clear, the point depends on climate activists actually buying beachfront property, which I doubt is very common at all, so I don't actually think it's a good argument at all. However your response still misses the point.)
- jghn 1y agoI believe that world ocean level will be catastrophic by 2100. I do not plan on living until anywhere near 2100. In fact, 2050 would be pushing it. If I wanted to have a nice seaside house *now*, why is that cognitive dissonance? Sure, it is likely that I'd have to give it up in 15-20 years, but I might not make it that long myself.
- jncfhnb 1y agoI’m gonna guess that sea level rise will end up being one of the lesser problems introduced by climate change
- simmerup 1y agoAs long as you don't live on an island or have coastal property...
- jncfhnb 1y agoI suspect most islanders and coastal property dwellers will be wrecked by volatile weather first
- michaelbuckbee 1y agoI think the point was more that even if you're on a coast a lot of other problems are more likely to impact you first: higher energy and more frequent hurricanes, insurance, costs, etc.
- jghn 1y agoIt's not as a-vs-b as this. Rising sea levels will increase the damage of those more frequent hurricanes long before one's house falls into the sea. And that increases insurance costs, and so on. The whole thing is a single system with a giant feedback loop.
- jncfhnb 1y agoIt could be an a vs b thing if a effectively finishes the conversation before b gets going. A lot of areas won’t make sense to insure due to storm risk well before they’re at risk from literal sea level risk.
- quickthrowman 1y agoOr say, a country bordering Bangladesh. Sea rise of 1 meter would inundate 10% of Bangladesh, a country of 170M in 150,000 sq miles. I suspect a refugee crisis in Bangladesh would end in genocide…
- d_silin 1y ago"Depending on future emissions, the IPCC now projects an average sea-level rise of half a meter to 1 meter by 2100"
- billfor 1y agoSomeday they will realize that we are still in an ice age.
- Windchaser 1y agoWe've been in an ice age for millions of years (standard definition of an ice age: there is persistent ice sheets at the poles; on Greenland and Antarctica). Within ice ages, there are glacials and interglacials. Glacial periods are what normal people think of when they say "ice age"; like when the ice sheets covered Canada and extended down to Chicago/NYC areas. Without manmade climate change, we'd be slowly sliding back to another glacial period. So in that sense, the warming is welcome, but we're overdoing it and shooting too hard in the opposite direction.
- nemo44x 1y ago> The model suggested that ice from Antarctica alone — before any additions from Greenland, mountain glaciers or thermal expansion — could raise the seas by more than a meter by 2100. > In a 2021 update that incorporated additional factors into the simulations, DeConto and colleagues revised that estimate sharply downward, projecting less than 40 centimeters of sea-level rise by the century’s end under high-emission scenarios. In essence, they have no idea.
- throwway120385 1y agoBut they know that it is coming and we need to plan for it. 40 centimeters is still half a meter. If you filled my office with half a meter of water it would be between my butt and my ankle where I'm sitting. There are a lot of berms that couldn't withstand king tides 40 centimeters higher, especially with storm swell factored in. A lot of seaside infrastructure where I live needs to be relocated even with a lower estimate.
- Windchaser 1y agoI'd think that "between 0.5 and 1 meters" is an idea. Like, we aren't worried about sea level dropping, and we aren't worried about +10m by 2100. This is still useful info, even if there's some uncertainty remaining.
- dingnuts 1y agoI like how you changed "less than .4 meters" into "between .5 and 1" That was some smooth propagandizing you just did, I wonder if anybody else noticed. Between less than .4 (0) and 1 (1) is a much bigger window than the one you invented wholesale in your reply. I think the grandparent might be right, and your willingness to bend the statistics when they are literally on the same page as your comment, along with others like you doing the same thing for decades, is the reason your side is losing and continues to lose the public's trust. If the problem is really so obvious and so serious you should not feel it necessary to exaggerate. So quit it.
- EddieRingle 1y ago
- rolph 1y agorising sea level, is only one symptom of whats happening. https://climatecosmos.com/climate-news/why-the-tropics-could-become-uninhabitable-by-2100/ https://climatecosmos.com/climate-news/why-the-tropics-could... it seems there will be big problems in the 50-75 year span.
- phendrenad2 1y ago[flagged]
- jghn 1y ago"see pockets of high heat and pockets of deep freezes" does not at all contradict a statement that overall global temperature is rising. In fact, one would expect that an overall rise in temperature would lead to local pockets of colder temperatures.
- rolph 1y agothe rise in temperature makes a more turbulent atmosphere, this disrupts familiar atmospheric distribution of thermal energy, we already have unusual atmospheric stalls and vortexes, along with changes in oceanic circulation.
- phendrenad2 1y agoThat isn't what I said, though. I was making a broader statement. I'm really surprised HNers don't spend more time familiarizing themselves with climate change fundamentals. It's the defining challenge of current and all future generations, might be worth looking into beyond a third-grade "things get hotter" level. But whatever.
- somerandomdude2 1y agoNot how soon will the seas rise, but in which direction are they trending? The world is not static - it's dynamic, always changing. Long before human civilization, the environment was getting warmer, then cooler, then warmer, etc. Instead of freaking out about it, work to understand how we as a civilization can make it through the changes. Attempting to hold the environment stable is like plugging dikes with your finger.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoHumans are causing a change to the environment drastically faster than any normal ebb and flow. In the same way that you can get from 0-60 either by pushing on the gas pedal, or being hit by a train, rates of change matter a lot.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- simonh 1y agoI don’t think anyone here is advocating for freaking out about it, and I do not see any suggestion we should that you’re replying to. Also, it’s pretty clear from the IPCC report that holding the environment stable isn’t an option. At this point about 0.5m minimum sea level rise this century is probably locked in. However a 1m rise might not be. So yes, the issue is that either way policy planning needs to be considered in the long term.
- skybrian 1y agoI think this can be summarized as “nobody knows but it might be very bad.” Mathematical models containing large uncertainties aren’t a crystal ball. They will likely be revised again. You shouldn’t dismiss disaster scenarios since preparation for tail risks is important. But maybe don’t focus on them exclusively, either? It’s possible to keep multiple scenarios in mind, rather than focusing on one exclusively. In California, there are wildfires, earthquakes, droughts, and (in some places) flooding to worry about, and this partly plays out via scarce and expensive property insurance.
- roadside_picnic 1y agoOne thing that a lot of people seem to miss is that we talk about sea-level rise so much in relation to climate change because it's one of the things we can at least reasonably predict (even if the how much and when is hard). But the impacts of climate change increasing become hard to model as the world falls out of predictable patterns. A great example of just how extreme things can get was the last major climate change event ~10,000-20,000 years ago (which will likely be minuscule in comparison to what we're going through now in the geological sense once this plays out). The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington[0] have a very distinctive geology. For many years it was believed that these features were carved out slowly over hundreds of thousands of years. It turns out they we created in hours, around 15,000 years ago (humans were already living in WA at that time). They were created by the Missoula floods. There used to be a glacial lake over what is now Missoula Montana which would have current day Missoula under 1,000 feet of water. The glacial damns holding back this lake started to break down resulting in frequent floods the scale of which it's hard to fathom. The peak flow is estimated to have been 6.5 cubic miles per hour (for context, the peak flow observed over Horseshoe falls was 0.0055 cubic miles per hour, the Amazon river flows at an average of 0.18 cubic miles per hour) Imagine driving East on 1-90 from Seattle towards Spokane, then as you get through the Cascades you suddenly see a 200 foot wall of water racing towards you across the horizon. That event was in the past and it still took us a long time to piece together what actually happened. As we head into states of climate never witnessed by humans, it's genuinely hard to predict what might happen other than "this probably won't be good". Humans have made a lot of progress in the last 10,000 years, but it's no coincidence that the last 10,000 years have been some of the most stable in the Earth's climate history. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channeled_Scablands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channeled_Scablands
- hyperion2010 1y agoLinking my comment from (checks notes) 9 years ago on this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12781933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12781933 To extend the though there, the main question is not if, not when, but how long it will take. Do you bet on 90 years, 90 months, 90 days, 90 hours? Even if the change happens over 90 months (about 7 years) is that enough time to rebuild major shipping ports, forget resettling a substantial portion of the human population.
- Mithriil 1y agoTIL that Earth crust is pushed down by glaciers, and that when glaciers subsides, the crust swells up a bit over years from the missing weight, pushing away water, slush and sliding glacier even faster. Hard to fathom how "fluid" our ball of magma really is.
- cakeday 1y agoInteresting notion, I'd never come across that before. I've seen many demos of what the Earth could look like with all the ice melted but I'm not sure any of them took what you're describing into account.
- bokohut 1y agoPosted 12 days ago under "Swiss Glaciers have shrunk..." and more previous to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503882 " The mass of ice on the earth's poles has also led to the shape of the planet via tectonics over thousands of millennia. As that mass melts and redistributes from a solid to a liquid spreading around the globe our spheroid will begin to rebound. We have sensors everywhere, even in space, so the resulting effects will not be a surprise to some when the 'mass'ive shift begins. As those tectonic events increase in frequency so too will volcanic activity so I ask if anyone else has been checking on such data? "