It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.

Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.

Thank you.

 

Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.

 

Rising Sea Levels Could Cost World Economy $100 Trillion Annually...

page: 3
25
<< 1  2    4 >>

log in

join
share:

posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 03:12 PM
link   

SLAYER69

CranialSponge
100 trillion/year is feasible.

All they have to do is run the printing presses overtime...*cough*


LOL

Ok that made me spit up my coffee through my nose laughing.

too true and sad...


And in doing so devalues the dollar which means it will take more of it to buy something.

That also drives up the cost.



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 03:25 PM
link   
Maybe I need to throw some numbers up (provided to us all by those printing presses).

On that 90% I keep tossing in, here’s a fact from Forbes:




From refrigerated freighters and container ships to car carriers and supertankers, the world’s shipping industry has played an incredibly key role in transporting 90% of the world’s food, products and energy while helping to transform the global economy along the way. Each year, some 86,000 ships move more than 9 billion tons of cargo – more than a ton for each person on the planet – across our seas each year.

www.forbes.com...


And, on the cost of using aircraft in comparison:



Typically the cost of transporting a TEU containing more than 20 tonnes of freight from Asia to Europe is roughly the same as a one-way Economy Class flight along the same route. This weight in everyday goods such as electrical appliances in most cases represents a transportation cost of less than 1 per cent of the selling price.
worldoceanreview.com...


This is why we need to get smart on preparing for a rising sea level. It’s important to get ahead of it rather than sticking our collective heads into beach sand.

Some aren’t taking chances:



Los Angeles, a metropolis perched on the edge of a coast, can expect to experience sea level rise of as much as two feet due by 2050 due to climate change, according to current projections.

In anticipation, a team from USC partnered with the City of Los Angeles to gauge the impact of the rising tides on local communities and infrastructure. The results, according to a report that was released today, are a mixed bag -- but at-risk assets can be protected by proactive planning and early identification of adaptation measures, according to the report's authors.
"Some low-lying areas within the City's jurisdiction, such as Venice Beach and some areas of Wilmington and San Pedro, are already vulnerable to flooding," said Phyllis Grifman, lead author of the report and associate director of the USC Sea Grant Program. "Identifying where flooding is already observed during periods of storms and high tides, and analyzing other areas where flooding is projected are key elements in beginning effective planning for the future."


www.sciencedaily.com...



edit on 21/2/14 by masqua because: (no reason given)



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 03:34 PM
link   
reply to post by Britguy
 





Problem is, as we have already seen with the floods here in the UK, successive governments keep cutting funding for the programmes that are needed, preferring to spend £Billions in propping up the criminal bankers and other hair brained schemes to maintain the elites in their ivory towers.


One of the main reasons for the flooding here in the UK, wasn't global warming / global cooling / global just right..it was mostly down to the UK government.

They had a phase of flogging off loads of our bloody water reservoirs to developers to turn them into something other than a big lake sized hole that used to hold millions and millions (and millions) of gallons of water...and low and behold, everyone seems to wonders why, when we get a few large rain storms in a row, everywhere built on low level areas and traditional flood plains (the land was cheap for some reason!) suddenly is swamped with unsurprisingly, millions and millions (and millions) of gallons of water that has nowhere to go.

So yeah, i agree the UK floods are not exactly a good indicator of global warming / cooling / just right, but more about the greed and short sightedness (and out and out bloody stupidity) of our politicians.



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 03:38 PM
link   
reply to post by MysterX
 


Same thing with the drought out in California, government helped create it. The government drained massive amounts of water back into the ocean in order to protect a certain type of fish, and it has caused the drought to be exacerbated. Environmentalism has it's place, but those on the left use it to push their god-government agenda, and in the process hurt millions of people.



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 03:38 PM
link   

masqua
What everyone is forgetting when they speak negatively about people living on the seashore is that there's a livelihood to be made there. It's called fishing and nothing historically has ensured survival better than that. Just ask the Haida peoples on the west coast of Canada.

Are we also forgetting about the past millennia when sail meant commerce, wealth and contact with other land masses? There was that British Empire which existed solely because Britain 'ruled the waves'. They didn't amass all that power and wealth by sitting far inland. Neither did the Vikings.

We're on the oceans today because 90% of all the goods we use come to us by ships, so, I doubt the masses of humanity that live on the coasts is a sign of stupidity. Rather, it's a requirement if we want to keep on enjoying the way we live. If anyone is thinking of using air travel instead, I suggest looking into grocery stores up in the arctic regions where it all gets flown in. I already know what that's like because I lived there.

edit on 21/2/14 by masqua because: (no reason given)



Ports, harbours, and fishing villages, sure.

Either of which could be easily adapted to ocean level variations.

But what about the needless mega cities all along the coastlines that inhabit millions upon millions of people ? What purpose are they serving in terms of economic waterway logistics ?

The point is: they don't serve a purpose. I think it's safe to say that 3/4 of the populace that live on the coastlines are only living there because it's "pretty".

Buiding mega cities along one of mother nature's well understood beasts of unpredictability makes about as much sense as building a nuclear reactor on an earthquake prone fault line....um.... "oops" ?



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 03:54 PM
link   
reply to post by OMsk3ptic
 


Oh If we ran the world, things would be different eh OMsk3ptic?



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 04:33 PM
link   
reply to post by CranialSponge
 





Buiding mega cities along one of mother nature's well understood beasts of unpredictability makes about as much sense as building a nuclear reactor on an earthquake prone fault line....um.... "oops" ?


Sure enough.

What people fail to realize that mother nature is top of the food chain on the third rock from the sun.

Giver, and taker of life, and she does her thing without emotion, no anger,no remorse, no propaganda.

And mankind in it's infinite 'wisdom' has always just been along for the ride.
edit on 21-2-2014 by neo96 because: (no reason given)



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 06:02 PM
link   
reply to post by SLAYER69
 



Howdy Slayer,

My apologies in advance for the info-dump, but i think it's necessary.

Here is a link to the gobal tide gauge network. The 'Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level' collects and analyses tide gauge (relative sea level change) records from all over the world. It's the largest joint database and it contains most long-term time series.


The link brings you directly to the data-viewer/map. It's very easy to use, just click a marker at a location of interest. The colorcode-tab on the right has two options: 'latest data' shows all records with data updated after 2012 (white), 'series length' shows the longest records.

Clicking a marker opens a small window, select the 'plot' tab to view the graphed time series.

Alternative link to data table/tide gauge list

tide gauges - overview




Santa Cruz is an island off the coast of Ecuador (tropical East Pacific). Mean sea level (y-axis) is displayed in millimeters. The upticks in the monthly graph are the two strong El Niños of 82/83 & 97/98. Apart from that, sea levels haven't changed there in last 30 years.



San Luis (West Coast). You can also see both El Niños and that mean sea level has risen by about 5cm in the last 60 years.

These are just two random stations a couple of thousand miles apart in the same ocean basin. This is whole thing in a microcosm really. Relative sea level change is literally relative. Below is a brief list of factors on which local sea level change depends.

Climatic

-Ocean Mass Change - Ice Sheet/Glacier-melt, river runoff, large-scale changes in the hydrological cycle (increased ocean precipitation/evaporation)

- Ocean Volume Change - thermo & halo-steric variations
- thermo - expansion or contraction due to ocean heat content change
- halo- salinity changes in seawater (negligible)

link
link

A note of caution. The two links above are only meant to provide a basic overview, both contain information that is not up-to-date. It's virtually impossible to find 'casual' sources that also reflect the current state of knowledge. More below.

Non-climatic

- GIA - glacial isostatic adjustment or post-glacial rebound



During the last glacial period, much of northern Europe, Asia, North America, Greenland and Antarctica were covered by ice sheets. The ice was as thick as three kilometres during the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago. The enormous weight of this ice caused the surface of the Earth's crust to deform and warp downward, forcing the viscoelastic mantle material to flow away from the loaded region.

At the end of each glacial period when the glaciers retreated, the removal of the weight from the depressed land led to slow (and still ongoing) uplift or rebound of the land and the return flow of mantle material back under the deglaciated area. Due to the extreme viscosity of the mantle, it will take many thousands of years for the land to reach an equilibrium level.



- Land Subsidence/tectonic uplift - link

Generally refers to subsidence from groundwater extraction/crustal movements not related to isostatic adjustments.

-Seafloor spreading - link

- Long-term Tidal Range Variations - link


I can't see any other way for people (us) to get a clear and solid understanding of all things related to climate change than to actually wade through the humungous amount of information.



The excerpts quoted below are taken from two recently pulished studies*.





Confidence in projections of global-mean sea level rise (GMSLR) depends on an ability to account for GMSLR during the twentieth century. There are contributions from ocean thermal expansion, mass loss from glaciers and ice sheets, groundwater extraction, and reservoir impoundment.

Progress has been made toward solving the ‘‘enigma’’ of twentieth-century GMSLR, which is that the observed GMSLR has previously been found to exceed the sum of estimated contributions, especially for the earlier decades.

The authors propose the following: thermal expansion simulated by climate models may previously have been underestimated because of their not including volcanic forcing in their control state; the rate of glacier mass loss was larger than previously estimated and was not smaller in the first half than in the second half of the century; the Greenland ice sheet could have made a positive contribution throughout the century; and groundwater depletion and reservoir impoundment, which are of opposite sign, may have been approximately equal in magnitude.

It is possible to reconstruct the time series of GMSLR from the quantified contributions, apart from a constant residual term, which is small enough to be explained as a long-term contribution from the Antarctic ice sheet. The reconstructions account for the observation that the rate of GMSLR was not much larger during the last 50 years than during the twentieth century as a whole, despite the increasing anthropogenic forcing.


Semiempirical methods for projecting GMSLR depend on the existence of a relationship between global climate change and the rate of GMSLR, but the implication of the authors’ closure of the budget is that such a relationship is weak or absent during the twentieth century.

www.marzeion.info...





TIDE GAUGE LOCATION AND THE MEASUREMENT OF GLOBAL SEA LEVEL RISE

We therefore study individual tide gauge data on sea levels from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) during 1807 – 2010 without recourse to data reconstruction. Although mean sea levels are rising by 1mm/year, sea level rise is local rather than global, and is concentrated in the Baltic and Adriatic seas, South East Asia and the Atlantic coast of the United States. In these locations, covering 35 percent of tide gauges, sea levels rose on average by 3.8mm/year.

Sea levels were stable in locations covered by 61 percent of tide gauges, and sea levels fell in locations covered by 4 percent of tide gauges. In these locations sea levels fell on average by almost 6mm/year.

pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il...



*I believe both papers are among the most important current studies on sea level research. The first study is co-authored by three IPCC lead authors. It doesn't get any more 'consensus' than that. The second is the first and most comprehensive meta-analysis of global tide gauge data, but definitely not the last word.




NOAA - sea level budget (2012)



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 06:06 PM
link   
reply to post by talklikeapirat
 


Awesome reply. Very well written, sourced and presented. Now it will take me some time to digest.




posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 06:14 PM
link   

CranialSponge

Ports, harbours, and fishing villages, sure.

Either of which could be easily adapted to ocean level variations.


Here is a map of major port cities: www.mapsofworld.com...
How could they adapt with ease? A complete reworking of the port facilities themselves so that they are able to respond to elevating sea levels and the threat of storms is what will be needed, as is the case with most. This will not be without exceedingly high costs. Then there is the surrounding city itself with populations of billions, property and business. Think about the cost of entirely moving a place like New York City, London, Hong Kong or DeHague and leaving behind a port facility alone.



But what about the needless mega cities all along the coastlines that inhabit millions upon millions of people ? What purpose are they serving in terms of economic waterway logistics ?


In terms of waterways, not much at all, except as consumers of the goods shipping provides. Maybe all those coastal populations need to move inland to places like Paris, Mexico City or Denver and dock workers will have to commute to work. I dunno... but I don't think there's going to be any simple fixes and America alone would have to spend a few trillions on a coordinated effort relocating all those businesses and people to higher ground.

Good thing the sea level rise is so slow. At least there's still time to think it through, make plans and somehow recoup the losses of so much real estate and infrastructure.


The point is: they don't serve a purpose. I think it's safe to say that 3/4 of the populace that live on the coastlines are only living there because it's "pretty".


I don't know about that, really, because those cities are there because our present modern civilization came about through international trade, even the kind that had sailing ships, Viking longboats and Roman trimeres.


Buiding mega cities along one of mother nature's well understood beasts of unpredictability makes about as much sense as building a nuclear reactor on an earthquake prone fault line....um.... "oops" ?


Tell that to the British, Dutch, Spanish and everyone living in the Americas who isn't aboriginal. We didn't fly here until the 20th century.
edit on 21/2/14 by masqua because: (no reason given)



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 08:11 PM
link   
I have said it before, time to spend a few trillion and build a pipeline into space and pump off 5 feet of ocean at a time and see what happens.

My understanding is there is more water on this planet than should be, like hundreds of feet higher , and this has affected the overall conditions of earth more than anything.

I have felt since a small child that the amount of water on this earth is almost 1/5th too much, and this could use rectifying.

It is clear that many things here are affected by too much water, the earth is not supposed to carry that much !



posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 08:26 PM
link   

deadcalm
reply to post by SLAYER69
 


This reminds me of a speech that Al Gore gave 6 years ago when he stated that




[T]he entire North Polarized cap will disappear in 5 years


So now I look at the ice pack figures for the Arctic and it would seem that the ice is still there....and growing.

Artic ice pack up a whopping 50% percent this year...

Given that so very many of these gloom amd doom climate predictions have not come to pass, makes me extremely sceptical about claims like this. The UN climate commission's predictions have been wildly off for the last 20 years.



Well something doesn't add up with what you claim.

The North Pole region is an ocean that mostly is crusted at the top with ice that shrinks in the summer and grows back in the fall. At its peak melt in September, the ice has shrunk on average by nearly 35,000 square miles — about the size of Maine — per year since 1979.




posted on Feb, 21 2014 @ 11:44 PM
link   
reply to post by SLAYER69
 


IF they were rising.



posted on Feb, 22 2014 @ 05:37 AM
link   
reply to post by MadMax9
 


Well... that's the big question, isn't it?

Here's some cherry-picked links for you to look at:

ocean.nationalgeographic.com...

www.livescience.com...



Business as usual + sea level rise = losses of up to 9% of global GDP
But losses should be less if we're not dumb enough to keep building on coasts.

by John Timmer - Feb 10 2014, 2:55pm EST
EARTH SCIENCE PHYSICAL SCIENCES
179

Although New York City would have flooded due to Sandy no matter what, the extent of the flooding was exacerbated by the sea level rise of the last century.
Climate.gov
Things like extreme weather and droughts are the high-profile impacts of climate change—they are easy to see and understand. Sea level rise is much more subtle and slow-moving, but it's inexorable. Even if we stabilize our climate at a new, higher average temperature, the seas will continue to rise for centuries as the added warmth slowly melts ice and causes the water in the oceans to expand in volume.

However, since so much of human infrastructure is built right on the coasts, the rising ocean levels have the potential to cause more disruption than any other factor. Recently, some researchers attempted to quantify just how damaging sea level rise will be. At its high end, the costs are staggering: a touch over nine percent of the global GDP by the end of this century. However, that number assumes we'll keep building right on the coasts—and we're not really that shortsighted, right?

Projecting the costs involved with sea level rise by the end of the century is a difficult challenge. To begin with, the height of the seas will depend on the rate of warming, which will depend on the trajectory that emissions (and thus temperatures) take. So there are both cultural uncertainties—will we get our carbon emissions under control or not?—and scientific uncertainties about the rate of warming and how that rate will be reflected in ocean levels.

Once you have scenarios for the change in coastline, you have to start thinking about what that actually means. And that analysis depends on measurements of the current status, such as how much infrastructure we already have that will be at risk in the future. It also depends on models of the future: how much will we build near the coastline in the near term, and how much will we be willing to spend on protecting it in the longer term?

To give one practical example of the issues confronting the authors, it's instructive to consider one of the relatively simple factors involved in their study: the elevation of land near the coasts. One of the data sets available on land elevation was generated using the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle measured elevation with a technology that overestimated the true elevation because it registered the height of the tops of foliage and any ground cover. The authors generated estimates with both the Shuttle data and a separate measure derived from satellite sensing, and they included the difference as part of their uncertainty estimates.

(One of their data sets, used to measure the amount of infrastructure already in place at the coasts, comes from the delightfully acronymed Global Rural–Urban Mapping Project, or GRUMP.)

Based on these estimates alone, the value of assets within the reach of a 100-year flood event will range between $17 trillion and $180 trillion by the end of the century—and that's under an emissions scenario that's unrealistically low. Under business-as-usual emissions (the IPCC's RCP 8.5), the figures will range from $21 trillion to $210 trillion. We'll naturally lose some of that infrastructure to flooding each year. Even under the unrealistically low emissions scenario, the losses could reach up to five percent of the global GDP annually. For the business-as-usual, it ranges from a low of 1.2 percent to a high of over 9.5 percent.
arstechnica.com...


www.epa.gov...

Now, you can ignore the above and build that 1.5 million dollar summer home near the beach or decide to build it inland at 100 feet above current sea level.

edit on 22/2/14 by masqua because: (no reason given)

edit on 22/2/14 by masqua because: (no reason given)



posted on Feb, 22 2014 @ 07:22 AM
link   
It is happening. Anyone who gardens or farms, can see it, the change in patterns. We humans are very good at adapting, the reason we have survived so far.

There are some great ideas here and wish some of you were the power players who cared and can help the world prepare.

Instead of tunneling oil why aren't we tunneling water to drought stricken regions, etc.

But, the people who have the money own the governments, then we have the conservatives who will not spend a dime to help our nation much less the world.

So ideas are just ideas with no energy.

I have prepared my kids their whole life with survival and critical thinking skills, because I will be gone when it hits the fan. I just don't know how to prepare them for how savage the human nature can be become in desparate times.



posted on Feb, 22 2014 @ 09:55 AM
link   
reply to post by SLAYER69
 


The global re-insurance industry nailed this years ago - they pulled the plug on the coverage and all the insurance companies modified their terms of coverage. Why do you think everyone's dumping their "prime" beachfront properties and private islands?


PS. F&S&









edit on 22/2/14 by soficrow because: (no reason given)



posted on Feb, 22 2014 @ 10:20 AM
link   
reply to post by SLAYER69
 


No specifics in that article at all.....I lean toward more Doom Porn.

I am not saying that our Globe overall isn't warming and with it a rise of oceans. It's most certainly happened many times in our past. When you live on the Coast it's a dual edged sword. IPCC projects with no lowering of emissions that sea levels would rise 20.5 to 38 inches over the next Century and even with drastic reductions of Human emissions the level will still be 14 to 21 inches. Low lying places will have to make adjustments as ocean rise is inevitable as we continue to geologically speaking, leave an ice age.



posted on Feb, 22 2014 @ 10:26 AM
link   
I guess they failed to mention the ice in Antarctica is getting bigger, 25% above average.



posted on Feb, 22 2014 @ 11:07 AM
link   
reply to post by amfirst1
 

That's sea ice. Sea ice does not change water levels.

Sea ice is already in the water. It already displaces what it would if it were water.

We are experiencing across the globe glacial retreat from land - that's the problem. It melts and goes into the ocean.



posted on Feb, 23 2014 @ 09:31 PM
link   
The sea levels have been rising for the past 30,000 years. This isn't news. Attributing to man cause climate change is a very convenient argument though...isn't it?




top topics



 
25
<< 1  2    4 >>

log in

join