Global Warming & rising sea level

I would not worry too much about the rising ocean levels - I am sure there is some conglomerate developer or visionary entrepreneur who has a vision of an East and West Coast desalinated water pipeline system turning everything grassy and green from Texas to Palm Springs, maybe even filling up the Grand Canyon while they are at. Necessity is the mother of invention, or so they say........

You guys in SoCal could use a little water right about now.

I have seen some natural California landscapes that were done very well, and minimize the overall household water usage. There needs to be an overall adjustment to the typical green lawns in the front/back and surrounding areas of all our states home sites.

The boater, I fear, will get pushed aside and lost in the shuffle. There is no real effective voice for boating/fishing/recreational water usage in CA, politics and special interest groups that are not even stakeholders have the power. I hope the marinas will not charge excessively for dockside water soon, but if so, I can see a run on smaller sized declinators.

Agree on your first point. CA needs to look at going to desert type landscaping since essentially that's what SoCal largely is. It goes pretty well with houses that have tile roofs or an adobe-like style. I don't think having a bunch of tropical plants is too smart right now.

As to your second point, ocean boaters shouldn't be affected, but fresh-water boaters are likely to take a large hit, especially if their boat/houseboat is on a lake. The Sacramento River may have some navigational difficulties in the next year or so if things don't improve.

Unlikely, particularly since the air is arguably "cleaner" of industrial discharge (until China became an industrial manufacturer). The Permian-Triassic event is said to have been a series of die-offs; possibly one cascading to another as one animal died leading to another dying that depended on it. It mostly likely started as an ocean borne phenomena, which killed fish and marine reptiles, which led to other deaths and so forth.

But no one knows for sure what caused that. One really literally "out there" theory is that a nearby Gamma Ray Burst cooked a lot of the Earth.

And even if the Triassic extinction was due to greenhouse gases being trapped in our atmosphere, the average temperature BEFORE that occurred, from pole to pole, was like that of an equatorial jungle during the summer, because that's what a lot of Earth was.

I don't see what the big deal is. If Earth is heating up, and the ice caps melt, that just means more places to boat to

Today in Daily Express; 'We could DOUBLE Co2 emissions and still NOT reach critical global warming limit'

http://www.express.co.uk/news/natur...-Double-Co2-emissions-not-reach-warming-limit

We could also find aliens and dragons according to the Daily Express.

That must be one cool newspaper.

Sorry, I don't mean to beat a dead horse with this thread, and I hope I didn't sound callous about the ramifications of global warming. It's my understanding that solar emissions from the sun, that is the amount of radiation the sun puts out, outweighs all other factors in global warming.

That's not to dismiss the chemicals we put in the air that may be acting as an insulation agent, but I'm not sure (nor entirely convinced), given the Earth's climate history from now to before the dawn of the dinosaurs, that we're having as great effect as is claimed. That's not to dismiss the compelling evidence of chemical discharge in relation to a perceived warming trend, but the chart shown by the Weather Channel's founder, showing measured solar radiation output (note; not sun spot activity) compared with warming and cooling trends throughout the time we've been able to record solar radiation, shows that the sun's energy would seem to be the deciding factor.

If that's the case, then how much are we contributing to any effect?

I just felt I needed to add this.

The Earth is Flat and the Sun revolves around it.

And do we think we're so much smarter than scientists then were? It's amazing how very intelligent, knowledgeable scientists can reach totally conflicting conclusions and not just about the future, but even the present and past. A lot to sort through and then may turn out ultimately those you thought were right, were not.

Ultimately we know so little. We think we're advanced but then so did those centuries ago. Compared to those who will come after us, we're still at the 10% level of learning.

I don't profess to know the answers, but just a caution to those who think they do have all the answers and everything they state is fact. What we think is fact, often is found later not truly to have been. All we can do is evaluate, form conclusions knowing they may be wrong, and proceed along the best course we know.

Has mankind mistreated the environment? Absolutely. Not nearly as badly though as he's mistreated his fellow man, however.

Yes, the Earth is Flat, I keep trying to hold on so that I don't fall off!

+1

Well, I mean these are the same people who told us we were entering another ice age back int he 70s. Remember that one? When the US still had a huge manufacturing base, and were kicking out pollution into the air like no one's business?

And then there was the whole saccharine causes cancer thing. And then there was the health and jogging and health food craze, and the guy who wrote the #1 book on jogging died of a heart attack at 50.

I'm hoping we have better analysis than in previous decades, and that we have enough presence of mind to really examine data from all angles before drawing a conclusion.

As a casual boater I don't want to see the Earth go to crap, but how many alarms have we had in the past? I'm actually pretty accepting of global warming, I'm just curious as to how much of it is our fault and how much of it is the sun.

On the bright side, in a few years you might be able to cruise up and down the streets of St. Augustine in your boat.

This might be of interest to those of you taking part in this thread. At 9:00 PM (Eastern) tonight on PBS: Lethal Seas; "How carbon emissions are impacting the world's oceans. Included: a coral garden in Papua New Guinea that could offer a preview of what the seas will be like in a half-century."

I'm currently watching an episode of NOVA about acidity in the ocean caused by the same things (mainly carbon dioxide) as Global Warming, and it's affect on oysters, coral reefs and other delicate sea life. Interesting, but again I expect no changes until it's too late. Man destroys everything he touches to satisfy his greed. We are lousy guardians of our world, and so deserve what will happen to our grandchildren.

Global warming threads get pretty heated (pun intended), but if you're research oriented sea levels have been rising at a rate of around 1.8 mm/year since 1800 when the little ice age ended. This was clearly long before carbon emissions became a concern, so the question is whether this natural level of increase has changed as a result of recent human activities. The research is pretty contradictory, but it does appear that the answer is probably not or if so, sea level increases aren't going to be what some think they may be. This paper;

Trends and acceleration in global and regional sea levels since 1807. Global and Planetary Change 113: 11-22. Jevrejeva, S., Moore, J.C., Grinsted, A., Matthews, A.P. and Spada, G. 2014.

suggests that the acceleration of sea level rise is around .02 mm/yr +/- .01 mm. Based on the rate of annual increase since the start of the 19th century, this means that average sea level will increase between 5 inches and 15 inches over the next century. Over and above the natural rate of increase in sea level, if the augmented rate is solely due to human activities that cause between 1 and 3 mm more water in 100 years than would be there if humans didn't exist at all.

There is also a surprising report on south Pacific islands who were thought to be threatened by rising sea levels, but it appears that the coral grows faster and many of these Islands have grown in size even with higher sea levels.

There may be other reasons to worry about carbon emissions, but sea level increases due to human activities doesn't seem to be one of them.

Finally, if anyone is interested in hard data on what is actually happening in global ocean/land surface temperatures, this aplet from York University is valuable: http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html

With this, you can see that as carbon emissions have increased since 1900, the RATE of temperature increase has declined. It is still warming, but more CO2 has not resulted in an acceleration of warming, but a slowing of the rate of warming which is the opposite of what most people think should be happening. To see this, select the HADCrut 4 dataset for ocean/land and look at the trend from 1900 to 1950, from 1950 to 2000 and from 2000 to today. Very interesting.

When carbon emissions became a concern has little relevance. It's when they began polluting that matters, and that was the start of the industrial revolution. Also, there's no proof that Human activity is the only or even the primary cause. It's just the only cause that we can do anything about, and there's absolutely no down-side to treating our world better....except that it will reduce profits. The ironic thing is that we're the only species on the face of the earth that even has a concept of profit. So will we stop Global Warming? Probably not. We'll talk the issue to death until it's too late to do anything. Normal politics for profit.

Well, one argument against spending significant sums of money raised through taxation or increased costs from regulation is that it makes poor people poorer since energy costs go up. The addition of ethanol to gasoline has contributed to higher grain costs globally, which also affects the poorest. And when you spend money reducing something that appears to be weakly correlated to what you think is a problem, you have less money to spend on other problems, like eliminating malaria that kills a city the size of Portland Oregon every year.

I know we have to balance our resources and I am certainly not against spending to improve the environment, but balance seems to be a bit lacking in the whole debate.

And that's exact;y why very little will be done. We always balance doing the right thing against it's effect on profits and our fun. Do we think that future generations will forgive us with the rationale that 'It's okay that our world is destroyed; my grandparents got to have fancy stuff'? Do we really even care? Don't worry about the poor. That's a false argument which is very popular today. Once you go below zero it's irrelevant, and most poor and lower middle-income earners around the world are already in negative cash flow.

The Global Warming Industry is profiting on peoples ignorance, I don´t know if this is better than profits on "fancy stuff"...?