From the hot and well above sea level University of Arizona, home of the world famous parking lot climate station, comes this zany press release:
Rising seas will affect major US coastal cities by 2100
Rising sea levels could threaten an average of 9 percent of the land within 180 U.S. coastal cities by 2100, according to new research led by University of Arizona scientists.
The Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts will be particularly hard hit. Miami, New Orleans, Tampa, Fla., and Virginia Beach, Va. could lose more than 10 percent of their land area by 2100.
The research is the first analysis of vulnerability to sea-level rise that includes every U.S. coastal city in the lower 48 with a population of 50,000 or more.
The latest scientific projections indicate that by 2100, the sea level will rise about 1 meter — or even more. One meter is about 3 feet.
At the current rate of global warming, sea level is projected to continue rising after 2100 by as much as 1 meter per century.
“According to the most recent sea-level-rise science, that’s where we’re heading,” said lead researcher Jeremy L. Weiss, a senior research specialist in the UA’s department of geosciences. “Impacts from sea-level rise could be erosion, temporary flooding and permanent inundation.”
The coastal municipalities the team identified had 40.5 million people living in them, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Twenty of those cities have more than 300,000 inhabitants.
Weiss and his colleagues examined how much land area from the 180 municipalities could be affected by 1 to 6 meters of sea-level rise.
“With the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, the projections are that the global average temperature will be 8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than present by 2100,” said Weiss, who is also a UA doctoral candidate in geosciences.
“That amount of warming will likely lock us into at least 4 to 6 meters of sea-level rise in subsequent centuries, because parts of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will slowly melt away like a block of ice on the sidewalk in the summertime.”
At 3 meters (almost 10 feet), on average more than 20 percent of land in those cities could be affected. Nine large cities, including Boston and New York, would have more than 10 percent of their current land area threatened. By 6 meters (about 20 feet), about one-third of the land area in U.S. coastal cities could be affected.
“Our work should help people plan with more certainty and to make decisions about what level of sea-level rise, and by implication, what level of global warming, is acceptable to their communities and neighbors,” said co-author Jonathan T. Overpeck, a UA professor of geosciences and of atmospheric sciences and co-director of UA’s Institute of the Environment.
Weiss, Overpeck and Ben Strauss of Climate Central in Princeton, N.J., will publish their paper, “Implications of Recent Sea Level Rise Science for Low-Elevation Areas in Coastal Cities of the Conterminous U.S.A.,” in Climatic Change Letters. The paper is scheduled to go online this week.
Weiss and Overpeck had previously developed maps of how increases in sea level could affect the U.S. coastline. Strauss suggested adding the boundaries of municipalities to focus on how rising seas would affect coastal towns and cities.
For the detailed maps needed for the new project, the researchers turned to the National Elevation Dataset produced by the U.S. Geological Survey. The NED provides a high-resolution digital database of elevations for the entire U.S.
The high resolution let Weiss and his colleagues identify the elevation of a piece of land as small as 30 meters (about 100 feet) on a side – about the size of an average house lot.
The researchers used the USGS database to create detailed digital maps of the U.S. coast that delineate what areas could be affected by 1 meter to 6 meters of sea-level rise. The researchers also added the boundaries for all municipalities with more than 50,000 people according to the 2000 U.S. Census.
To increase the accuracy of their maps, the team included all pieces of land that had a connection to the sea and excluded low-elevation areas that had no such connection. Rising seas do not just affect oceanfront property — water moves inland along channels, creeks, inlets and adjacent low-lying areas.
“Ours is the first national-scale data set that delineates these low-lying coastal areas for the entire lower 48 at this degree of spatial resolution,” Weiss said.
The NED data set has some uncertainty, particularly for estimating elevation changes of 1 meter or less. That means the researchers’ ability to identify the threat to any particular small piece of land is better for larger amounts of sea-level rise than for smaller amounts of sea-level rise, Weiss said.
“As better digital elevation models become available, we’ll be using those,” Weiss said. “The USGS is always improving the digital elevation models for the U.S.”
Overpeck said, “The main point of our work is to give people in our coastal towns and cities more information to work with as they decide how to deal with the growing problem of sea-level rise.”
Researcher contact information:
Jeremy Weiss
520-621-6144
Jonathan Overpeck
520-907-6480
Additional maps of the effects of sea-level rise — UA Department of Geosciences Environmental Studies Laboratory http://www.geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/
=========================================================
I’ve already debunked a similar story about sea level rise:
Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history
But let’s do the exercise again.
OK current rate of sea level rise from UC’s website is:
Rate: 3.0 mm per year
2100-2011= 89 years
89 years * 3.0 mm/year = 267 mm
267 mm = 0.267 meter, or 10.51 inches, or .87 foot
1 meters – 0.267 meter = 0.73 meters short by 2100 at the current rate of sea level rise.
Let’s say the rate of sea level rise doubles:
we get 534 mm by 2100, still 0.46 meters short
Maybe the rate of sea level rise triples:
we get 801 mm by 2100, still 0.19 meters short
So far, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of accelerating sea level rise in the sea level data for the past 120 years. It seems rather linear, at 18.5 cm for the last 100 years.
The IPCC AR4 doesn’t seem to support 1 meter of sea level rise by 2100 either. While computer projections based on supposed temperature increases project out to 1 meter or more, the IPCC AR4 projections are much more conservative, at 20-60 centimeters.
Sea level rise *has* accelerated over the course of the 20th century, as you alude to yourself:
(current) “Rate: 3.0 mm per year”
and
“So far, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of accelerating sea level rise in the sea level data for the past 120 years. It seems rather linear, at 18.5 cm for the last 100 years.”
3.0 mm/yr (1993-2010) being more than 1.85 mm/yr (last 100 years). The acceleration is also clear from the figure you show about “recent sea level rise”, and it becomes even clearer when relating the current rise of 3 mm/yr to the changes in sea level over the thousands of years before:
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/past-current-future-sea-level-rise-graphs/
or from 1700 until the present:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton-Myth-8-Rising-sea-levels.html (fig 2)
“With the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, the projections are that the global average temperature will be 8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than present by 2100,” said Weiss, who is also a UA doctoral candidate in geosciences.
A doctoral candidate and team says… likely, may, could, if… they are indoctorating the new “scientists” well at the “University” of Arizona. That’s what kind of upcoming “experts” taught by computers and the web brings. At least they knew that one meter is about 3 feet. And published just after a year when England was at the same rural temperature is was in 1659.
A °C a decade? Give me a break! Really sad. 🙁
Someone better tell Al Gore his sea front purchase was a waste of money.
But they already have and he still won’t budge, tells you what he really believes !!!
In the UK, whenever the media want to highlight sea level rise they show the South East coast and the erosion going on there. They always fail to point out though that most of the sea level change there is due to isostatic rebound from the melting of glacial ice. If they went to North West Scotland they would find the relative sea level there was actually falling.
Some twit got a government grant to follow lines on topographic maps and calculate the area between two lines.
This is “research”?
I think we’ve found another place to cut the federal budget.
And just to prove my point here is a map of the Ganges delta from 1908:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GangesValley%26Plain.jpg
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Sundarbans+National+Park,+West+Bengal,+India&aq=1&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=12.113693,39.418945&ie=UTF8&hq=Sundarbans+National+Park&hnear=Sundarbans+National+Park,+West+Bengal,+India&ll=21.973614,88.895874&spn=2.246346,4.927368&z=8
Even with these low res maps you will see that the delta has expanded significantly in the area due south of Dacca/Dhaka just to the West of Chittagong. Proper Navy maps from the period would show a lot more detail of course.
For the detailed maps needed for the new project, the researchers turned to the National Elevation Dataset produced by the U.S. Geological Survey.
. . . 8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than present by 2100,” said Weiss, who is also a UA doctoral candidate in geosciences.
U of Arizona is giving out PhD’s for coloring in USGS contour maps? I could do that with a crayola.
From the hot and well above sea level University of Arizona, home of the world famous parking lot climate station . . .
Anthony, you missed a bigger ‘home of.’
It’s a home of the (wait for it) Hockey Stick. Malcolm Hughes, the ‘H’ of MBH98, is a professor at UAz, and he was, as CA points out, an adviser to Linah Ababneh, who accidentally shot down the Graybill tree ring series so heavily weighted in the hockey stick.
There has to be some deep intelligence here somewhere.
These fairy stories start up and spread round the world very fast.
Is somebody or some orgainsation master minding them, I wonder.
Or are they just playing copycat, one from another?
About a month ago, the Australian government released a similar survey and distributed it to all coastal Councils and all other interested administrative bodies.
Nobody has taken any notice so far.
We Ausies (Aussies? But where came the extra S – never mind).
We Ausies are a complacent lot.
The government expects that a number of very valuable properties will be inundated and hence become valueless in Sydney Harbour.
The owners will not be pleased, particularly when the banks sit up and take notice.
Will the banks continue to be willing to lend millions and millions per block to fund these delightful homes, when they will soon be completley under water or swept away by the next tide?
But what’s that – senior politicans playing King Canut and buying up property soon to be flooded?
Surely not?
Then is this ocean rising stuff serious or just another fairy tale?
Is AGW our last warning of the end of life on earth, or just another recipe for a big new tax?
I really can’t decide – can you?
(Back to the TV for me, I think).
I predict -1 m by 2100.
One wonders how the world’s coastal dwellers dealt with sea level rise in the past centuries without the resort to current levels of hysteria.
Infrastructure only has a limited life, after all. It eventually has to be renewed. Nothing stands still. We will continue to accommodate to the almost imperceptible changes in sea level as we always have — little by little and gradually.
As has already been mentioned, in the modern era, thanks to our reclamation engineering skills, real estate is continually being built up from the waves rather than lost to them in the worlds coastal cities.
“So let’s scare the living daylights out of coastal property owners and “sink” their property values, it wont affect our real estate prices here in Arizona.” The unmitigated gall of these people!
For the last 30 years I’ve lived on the same island, anywhere from fifteen to one-hundred feet from saltwater. I HAVE NOT SEEN ANY SEA LEVEL RISE WHATSOEVER. But someone living hundreds of miles from the ocean is telling me I’m wrong? Pure, unadulterated poppycock. Are they experts in barrier island formation dynamics as well? I’ll bet good money they don’t even know what that is.
What a job Jeremy Weiss has got! Spending all day colouring in maps, and getting paid for it! There’s a lot of money to be made out of AGW advocacy.
Ralph says:
February 15, 2011 at 1:08 am
You make the point that sea levels haven’t changed much in the last 500+years. You’ll find that James Hansen (shudder, make sign of cross) agrees with you entirely. In his book, “Storms of my Grandchildren”, he points out that stable sea levels were an important factor in the growth of civilisation.
“According to the most recent sea-level-rise science, that’s where we’re heading,”
Have they got centimetres confused with inches?
3mm/year = 3″/year x 89 =267″ = 22.25 feet- Ah now we’re in Algore land!
Amazing predictions. For a 1 metre global sea level rise you need more than 400,000 cubic KILOmetres of ice to melt by 2100. That would show up as Amazon River size flows of water from the ice sheets on the land. The Amazon in spate produces 300,000 cubic metres of water PER SECOND! So if the flow of water is only 1 metre deep the width of the flow is 30 kilometres, banks will be over the horizon from each other. Anyone seen any signs of water flow from Antarctica or Greenland approaching anything near this magnitude? Just think of the MSM coverage if it did happen. 🙂
Hot news from the desert . It took the israelis 40 years to have reality sunken in with them , so there still is hope that before 2100 the miracle will happen and arizona will start to regreen . At this very moment the scientists there need some degreening . A simple application of a natural plant-chemical will do the trick , so greenhouse gassing may lead here to a cooling of the mind and more common sense . Mother nature is showing more checks and balances than a simple believer is willing to accept . For whom of these scientists is
‘There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.’
Mark Twain, who made some wonderful projections of the length of the Mississipi.
The bit about New Orleans is rather anticlimactic. The famous Ninth Ward that flooded during Katrina has always been four feet below sea-level. The old city, the Crescent City, is above sea-level.
If these kinds of predictions ever affect property values, I’m buying along the coast of Texas and Florida!
I hope no plans to allow their kids to go to U of Arizona if this is the drivel they teach.
and to the other aussies here, yeah funny that…all those pricey new marinas they are approving all over, while kicking the poor shak owners out of beach areas and rivers..
it isnt climate science -its money and politics.
flannerys crowd are doing their damndest to push agenda 21
I believe it was in November 2010 our chief meteorologist at the local Tampa Florida Fox channel predicted we would have a mild winter due to the jet stream staying north of the state. It didn’t happen, temperatures couldn’t be predicted one month into the future, but temperature can be predicted 89 years into the future? Right.
Is it me, or have the authors got the red/yellow colours the wrong way round on their group of six projections? The single one, of Florida, at the top of the article seems to be the right way round, but the others?
Silly me! When I look again, only New Orleans is strange – due to the levees?
Over the past three days, snow has been melting in my front yard at an alarming rate! If it continues at this pace, we’ll likely not see another snow for nine or ten months!