Re: The 2005 hurricane season

In message <ddfr-55B4A1.13485409042006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, David
Friedman <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes

The last actual figure I saw on that, I think from the relevant U.N.
group, predicted sea level rises of half a meter to a meter over the
next century. At that rate, talk of "disaster" is nonsense.

There are many parts of the world, including the US where a half-metre
rise in the sea level will cause "disaster", as homes and businesses are
swamped by regular storms that could otherwise be shrugged off. Seawater
will penetrate further up river estuaries increasing the salinity at
freshwater intake points affecting delta farmlands. That's the kind of
slow-motion trainwreck I'm talking about.

New Orleans 9th district probably can't be saved even with billions of
dollars of levee work, sad to say. It's not the storms like Katrina that
will cost the US a major city as such, it's the steady encroachment of
higher seawater levels that will kill it again. The rest of New Orleans
will go eventually too.

If it
happened overnight it would be a serious problem in a few parts of the
world, but a century is a long time.

Any change away from burning fossil fuels and a reduction in the rate
of rise of CO2 will not stop the current de-icing of Antarctica. There
is already a lot of heat-trapping CO2 around that isn't being reduced
fast enough by the usual natural processes. The one that is the best
candidate for massive reduction of atmospheric CO2 is absorption into
the sea but it's a very slow process as it only takes place on the sea
surface.

Mostly it
seems to be people jumping from "sea leavel rising" to "sea level rising
by a hundred feet," at which points large parts of the currently
habitable world would indeed flood.

Those regions are going to flood anyway. Reducing the amount of fossil
fuel burnt now will slow that down so that the locals have centuries
rather than decades to adapt.

There are technological solutions to global warming but they are also
decades away -- I like the concept someone mooted of large orbital
parasols, for example.
--
To reply, my gmail address is nojay1 Robert Sneddon
.

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