Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A study published by Computer Science Professor Paul Barford claims that critical parts of the Internet will be submerged under rising seas in the next 15 years.
Study suggests buried internet infrastructure at risk as sea levels rise
July 16, 2018 By Terry Devitt
For news mediaThousands of miles of buried fiber optic cable in densely populated coastal regions of the United States may soon be inundated by rising seas, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon.
The study, presented here today (July 16, 2018) at a meeting of internet network researchers, portrays critical communications infrastructure that could be submerged by rising seas in as soon as 15 years, according to the study’s senior author, Paul Barford, a UW–Madison professor of computer science.
“Most of the damage that’s going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later,” says Barford, an authority on the “physical internet” — the buried fiber optic cables, data centers, traffic exchanges and termination points that are the nerve centers, arteries and hubs of the vast global information network. “That surprised us. The expectation was that we’d have 50 years to plan for it. We don’t have 50 years.”
…
The peer-reviewed study combined data from the Internet Atlas, a comprehensive global map of the internet’s physical structure, and projections of sea level incursion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The study, which only evaluated risk to infrastructure in the United States, was shared today with academic and industry researchers at the Applied Networking Research Workshop, a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Internet Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
…
Read more: https://news.wisc.edu/study-suggests-buried-internet-infrastructure-at-risk-as-sea-levels-rise/
The abstract of the study;
Lights Out: Climate Change Risk to Internet Infrastructure
Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Carol Barford, Paul Barford University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin – Madison
In this paper we consider the risks to Internet infrastructure in the US due to sea level rise. Our study is based on sea level incursion projections from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) [12] and Internet in- frastructure deployment data from Internet Atlas [24]. We align the data formats and assess risks in terms of the amount and type of infrastructure that will be under water in dif- ferent time intervals over the next 100 years. We find that 4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water and 1,101 nodes (e.g., points of presence and colocation centers) will be surrounded by water in the next 15 years. We further quantify the risks of sea level rise by defining a metric that considers the combination of geographic scope and Internet infrastructure density. We use this metric to examine differ- ent regions and find that the New York, Miami, and Seattle metropolitan areas are at highest risk. We also quantify the risks to individual service provider infrastructures and find that CenturyLink, Inteliquent, and AT&T are at highest risk. While it is difficult to project the impact of countermeasures such as sea walls, our results suggest the urgency of devel- oping mitigation strategies and alternative infrastructure deployments.
Read more: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~pb/anrw18_final.pdf
The following table of absurd sea level rise estimates from the full paper (same link as above) shows where it all went wrong for Professor Barford and his team.
Table 1: Timeline of projected Global Mean Sea Level Rise. Data is based off of “Highest” (i.e., most extreme) projections.
| Year | 2030 | 2045 | 2060 | 2075 | 2090 | 2100 |
| Projected rise (ft) | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
A one foot per 15 year sea level rise starting in the next few years should be an implausibly rapid acceleration to the current long term observed rate of around 3.2mm / year, or around one foot four six inches per century.
But Professor Barford claims this absurd estimate of 1ft every 15 years is an official NOAA scenario.
What next? The potential for harm from this nonsensical sea level estimate is not yet exhausted. The next step could easily be some politician or government bureaucrat seizing on Professor Barford’s warning, and authorizing the waste of vast sums of public money on unnecessary remedial works.
Update (EW): 1’6″ per century, not 1’4″ per century. (h/t David S)
Update (EW): 3.2mm = 0.01049869ft. 0.01049869ft x 100 = 1.049ft. 0.049 x 12 = just 0.58 inches – so 1’0.6”, just over 1ft. (h/t Randle Dewees, Climatebeagle and Retired_Engineer_Jim)
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No problem. If the seas rise, the salt water will short out the underground electricity transmission cables and transformers. Bzzzzt. Darkness. No need for Internet if your computer doesn’t work.
“Paul Barford received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked in industry for eight years before completing his Ph.D. in computer science from Boston University. He was a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge and an EPSRC Visiting Fellow in 2011. He was the founder and CEO of Nemean Networks, a network security startup company that was acquired by Qualys, Inc. He is the co-founder and chief scientist of MdotLabs, a fraud detection company based in Madison. ”
Its hard to know where to begin. One could not go to any more perfect training grounds to be a warmista believer. I love the fraud detection bit at the end. The irony drips off his final resting place.
If they get you young enough, a mind is but putty in a leftist profs hands.
Lots of snow in Madison every winter. I wonder if they have noticed.
The whole thing is plausible when you consider that the good Professor’s brain is shorting out already.
Yeah, this latest claim is so ridiculous, it’s not even funny. Many of these “academics” are seriously disturbed — I’m not joking.
It does seem that those inexperienced in the ways of the world, and fresh out of a theoretical liberal education. are most inclined to interpret a falling acorn as the sky falling.
Especially when that’s the easiest way to get noticed by the current “good old boys’ club” and receive milking rights to the current science cash cow.
Fraud detection.
That’s ironic.
More like fraud training? Evil detectives make elusive perpetrators, I’ve heard.
Putting the BS in B.S.
There will be plenty of power for the Internet using floating solar cells over the then submerged land areas. These will be so powerful as to generate plenty of energy using starlight and moonlight. They will be mounted on the blades of tiny 3 foot tall wind turbines and attached to the sea floor so that they can also capture wave action for energy. Because they will absorb heat at a quantum level, they will actually convert heat into electricity as well, and thus cool down the air.
All that is needed is a few $250,000,000 grants to get this research over the hurdle of production ready, and we are all saved.
Meanwhile, Internet will go 100% WiFi so we can get rid of all those buried cables in the first place. All this in the next 15 years – sames odds of happening as the 1 foot sea rise so they balance out nicely in a standard BS equivalency notation (BSEN).
So there might be more care taken before making such outrageous predictions, I propose this man put up his pension as collateral and lose it should he be found wrong in 15 years. Put up or STFU.
Right on Don, some people need to be held accountable for these outrageous lies.
This has been going on for 30-40 years now, with a string of well documented perdictions and alarmist drivel that has not occurred. Nobody is ever held accountable, its as if past lies dont count.
Lies don’t count if they are world-saver lies. This is the age of world-savers.
Hugs,
That does seem to cut to the core of the problem: For zealots, the end justifies any means.
…It is even better.
When the climate hype predictions go wrong. And they all go wrong.
The climate alarmists blame the skeptics, or claim the skeptics are crazy, or part of a plot.
“… its as if past lies dont count”
But that is why alarmist drivel is ignored. They probably never read the story about the boy who cried “Wolf”.
Innumerable “experts” have no ‘skin in the game’. Dr. Nassim Taleb’s book “Skin in the Game” goes into some depth on this aspect of modern life. These experts suffer no losses, experience no negative feedback, from making policy prescriptions or investment advice that are wrong. The lack of negative feedback allows bad ideas to continue. Taleb coined the term “Intellectual Yet Idiot” [IYI] to encapsulate the concept.
A plumber that can’t fix a leaking sink eventually goes out of business. A surgeon that fails to successfully repair medical issues eventually looses their license. A hedge fund manager risking their own money along with clients making poor choices will be wiped out. But a national politician’s pollster gets paid even when they can’t forecast any better than a dart throw…
They forecast as well as a “dart throw”? That’s more accuracy than I’ve ever noticed. Even a five year old will likely come closer to the bullseye with a dart than their predictions.
A dart thrower will occasionally hit a bulls eye regardless of skill level.
But warmista predictions have literally never ever been right yet.
It is uncanny, but random guesses would have a track record of correctitude infinitely better than these half-witted dunces.
Don’t these people ever get tired of being wrong?
They have no concept of being wrong.
Their view is that things are what people believe they are, and that by making people believe their rubbish, it becomes true.
Why are they wrong? They have taken a previously published estimate for sea level rise
and worked out the consequences. It is a case of “if A then B” which automatically true
if A is wrong and can only be proved false is A is right (i.e. sea level rises of 6 feet in a century) and B is wrong (internet infrastructure is not damaged).
Seriously, you think it’s a valid argument to say that as long as somebody references a published prediction, then it’s reasonable to hype a story that depends on a long-term trend suddenly increasing by a factor of a hundred?
3.2 mm/yr x 15 yr = 4.8 mm Percy, not 304.8mm
That’s how they’re wrong, duh!
Ok, pay attention. I am about to publish a prediction and somebody else can then use it to extrapolate what “could happen”. Then you tell us why their “study” is not wrong.
(Note that exactly like the climate alarmists, I am just making this up out of thin air, but with extreme precision):
Mainstream media in 1958 published 0.03045% lies, in 2018, it’s 30.06328% lies. We predict the trend MAY accelerate as the last of the rational thinkers retire out of the journalistic workforce over the next 15 years.
Ok folks, have at it. Work out the consequences for Percy. If my published prediction A is true (could be conservative, it may be much worse!), then what is the logically-certain outcome B? In what year will 100% of MSM stories be lies? (HINT: the trend may be accelerating).
48 mm
1.5 x 15 = 22.5 mm (based on tide gauge measurements)
3.2 mm/year is a warmist swindle
3.2×15=48, not 4.8. Still way less than 304 but not a hundred times less. When correcting someone’s maths it is particularly important not to make your own mistakes, or else you end up looking stupid.
It wasn’t me. It was Russian hackers who changed my math!
When I said I didn’t think it would be the Russians, I meant I didn’t not think it wouldn’t be the Russians.
“3.2 mm/yr x 15 yr = 4.8 mm”
I think you meant 4.8cm. = 1,89 inches
SLR is More like 2.8 mm/yr BTW. 3.2mm/yr is a number juiced by an arbitrary 12% isostasy correction. You need to multiply it by 0.88 to get eustatic sea level rise which is what an observer would actually see. … if the number were valid — which is perhaps possible … but far from certain.
yes, I was thinking centimeters and it was early in the morning, so the Russians were able to hack my brain.
Not to go all Clintonian on you, but it depends upon what your definition of lies is. Just because some fact is demonstrably untrue does not make it a lie, or even not true. If it advances my agenda, then its truth or non-truth is not a reliable indicator to whether it is true or non-true.
Additionally, my opinion on a subject determines its level of truthfullness. Someone who has a differing opinion can be automatically determined to be a liar or worse yet, a corporate toady or government lackey, willing to sell themselves and the future of humanity just to have a differing opinion.
I don’t know why you are getting hit with negative votes Ira, your implied sarc must be a bit too subtle.
You hit the nail on the head. Objective truth doesn’t exist in a lot of people’s estimation and the ends justify the means. When a politician either misspeaks or sincerely states something that is inaccurate, their enemies scream that it was a LIE.
But you do misinterpret my data. My model proves that those MSM reports were lies. This past month the model says 32.54823% lies. Next month will be 38.847923%
This is something that has bugged me for years. People, especially about their enemies, conflate untruth with lies. Untruth does not equal lies. A lie is speaking an untruth knowing it is an untruth. If the speaker believes what he says is true, is it is not a lie, it is an untruth. I would agree that possibly up to 30% of what the MSM tells us is untrue, but I wouldn’t put the lies that high. Now I think there should be a special word for when someone says something untrue that they believe to be true and want to be true and don’t want to hear any evidence that it may not be true.
That term is “truthy”. The rise of the sea level to engulf New York is obviously non-true, but the truthiness of the author’s statements leave no room for disagreement.
“Now I think there should be a special word for when someone says something untrue that they believe to be true and want to be true and don’t want to hear any evidence that it may not be true.”
The word you are after is bullshit. See: On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt, Princeton University Press 2005
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html
I dunno Rich, your data seems similar to mine.
Well, yeah, ‘could be’ is an out-of-jail card. They can’t be wrong. Right.
It could be the sealevels rise less than a feet before 2070. Equally right. Or actually more right.
Percy Jackson
After 40 years of ‘A’ always being wrong, they should know better. That’s why they are wrong.
Apart from anything else, the author of this drivel is not qualified even to speculate on sea level rise beyond his own expertise: “Barford, an authority on the “physical internet”.
He’s doubtless eminently qualified to describe what would happen IF sea level rises. He is not qualified to determine that sea level will do anything over a period of time.
“Table 1: Timeline of projected Global Mean Sea Level Rise. Data is based off of “Highest” (i.e., most extreme) projections.”
Using a single source (the most extreme prediction of sea level rise) is patently ridiculous. Particularly as even the IPCC had to reduce it’s predictions of temperature rise, which still isn’t even close to observed temperatures.
How in goodness name this paper made it past peer review demonstrates there is a real problem with the process.
The garbage content of the public discourse has grown to such a level that there is no asinine speculative prediction that doesn’t have some amount of faux-rational support from some number of previously published garbage “research” papers.
HotScot –
“Apart from anything else, the author of this drivel is not qualified even to speculate on sea level rise beyond his own expertise”
Do you apply the same criteria to those here who claim to know enough about climate science, ecology, plant physiology, etc. to assess research in those areas?
As usual, Kristi either misses, or chooses to ignore the point.
HotScot is not stating that the author is not qualified to comment on this topic because he doesn’t have the proper degrees. That’s your shtick.
What he’s saying is that the author has missed reality by such a wide margin that ridicule is the only proper response.
Kristi Silber
Many people here are entirely qualified to comment on many subjects on WUWT.
Which so far, doesn’t include you, as I have yet to see a constructive comment from you. Forgive me if you have made some, but I haven’t seen one.
Nor do many people on WUWT, other than a select few, publish papers. Most make comment on a blog site, some credible, some not so much. But they are not holding themselves up for examination by a scientific community, they are, however, subject to peer examination here.
Fewer still have the audacity to publish papers so far beyond their area of expertise that it begs ridicule and demeans the peer review process.
And as I understand, you may be a scientist, and what should be worrying you more than anything else is that this paper was clearly waved through the peer review process.
So kindly don’t start pointing the finger at contributors on this site who visit out of genuine concern for what’s going on before sorting out your own professional backyard.
People don’t get paid to do what they do here. Dave Middleton, Willis, Paul, Tim Ball etc. and, of course, Anthony are not compelled to write articles which, I note, your name is not amongst.
Perhaps you ought to muster your God-given intellectual ability to write something that’s compelling, persuasive, scientifically sound and interesting, and test it here.
Kristi, you would be surprised the percentage of highly qualified scientists and mathematicians who post and analyze here. It is really the reason this much decorated site is the world’s most highly regarded science blog. You are judging based on your visits to Dem Kumbaya blogs funded by the Rockerfeller Foundation and the like. Real (before its marxbrothers corruption) Nobel Prize winners have commented here.
I believe if you are honest with yourself you will admit to getting a quality education here. Yes, there are non scientific sceptics and contrarians here because it is one of the precious few sites that isnt censored except for multiple violations of unseemly behavior. You and other alarmist visitors generally choose soft targets here which is a “tell”.
Having said this, you are welcomed here. WUWT has offered to accept articles from any of the warmer proponent scientists, but it seems they fear to take the challenge. You and a number of others who disagree with sceptics at least put your case on the line. Kudos to you.
She’s at least got a brain, and probably good intentions. There might be hope.
They are neither right or wrong at this point then. But are they likely to be right? and thus should we worry or spend money to stop it happening? No, because their forecasts of sea level rise are absurdly high.
So fine, they are not wrong, just not worth bothering with.
That’s really the crux of it – there is absolutely no value to be had with any of these predictions other than the scare value. They can’t even tell us where we might want to build a dam (in a hundred years or so). No, instead, they push the idea that we can regulate the climate itself – and while doing so, push policies that genuinely cripple the ability to practically deal with any weather event that actually happens.
Ohhh, there was an estimate, so he can’t be wrong.
If I make an estimate that sea levels are going to drop 10 feet tomorrow, would you defend anyone who puts out a warning too all ports that they must increase dredging yesterday based on my “estimate”?
The “estimate” that seas are going to rise 6 feet in a century is laughable, only someone with no functioning brain cells would make it, or believe it. (Which explains why you defend it.)
MarkW
I have demonstrated on many occasions, on this very site, that I have no functioning brain cells. Are you, therefore, suggesting I would make, or believe, a comment that seas are going to rise 6 feet in a century?
How dare you, sir!
My brain cells are merely……well…..resting, awaiting the right moment to strike.
Perhaps ‘dysfunctional brain cells’ is the term you seek.
I thought it was the result of a too liberal policy regarding libations? ;*)
MarkW
Ah!……Now, perhaps should have dialled that into my equation.
Brain cell failure once again. Or is it brain cells floating?
🙂
Cheers!
MODS
Any idea why all my comments are going directly to moderation?
I have changed my browser, I assume that’s why. But why should that matter?
(Akismet doesn’t like you today, plus you have ZERO approved comments which is another reason why you fell into the Mod bin) MOD
MODS
Without wanting to appear smart, I’m one of the most prolific posters on here, using Opera as a browser. I changed to another browser and I’m persona non grata despite my username and email remaining the same.
No problem though, it seems to be sorted, I suspect thanks to you.
(You went from ZERO comments to 756 comments in the last few hours, hmmm….., internet remembers……) MOD
Cue Twilight Zone music.
Percy, they are wrong because they haven’t taken into account the limitations of the data, made clear by NOAA.
https://coast.noaa.gov/data/digitalcoast/pdf/slr-faq.pdf
Rich and others, the 3.2 mm/yr avg global rise isn’t relevant here – it’s about coastal inundation in particular areas, which includes vertical land motion, tides, etc. That doesn’t make the paper less sloppy, but there’s no point in making sloppy criticisms, either.
What coastal inundation?
The lunacy is first off taking the worst case projection and then declaring that you are being conservative.
The second is assuming that nothing can be done in the meantime.
Kristi, the vertical land movements are indeed real. Stated in another way, you would be criticizing the study for a clear shortcoming.
I confess that my criticism was sloppy. In fact, it is kind of marginally interesting if it is true that critical Internet infrastructure is underground in areas prone to storm surges. (Not the brightest decision even though the ocean isn’t really rising at a significant rate).
It’s just that I’m allergic to catastrophic predictions that have 15 years to quietly expire. Somebody should create a web site where we can register claims made with dates when they can be checked. It would be really fun to have a running list of expired claims that didn’t pan out. I seriously doubt any of us will be reconsidering this on 7/20/2033. It serves its alarmist purpose today and will soon be in the memory hole.
Rich
There is a website that does just that, record all the lunatic, failed claims of catastrophe made by people like Kristi. It is long, but for the life of me, I can’t remember its name. It’s also been largely abandoned because it’s so long the author gave up.
On WUWT somewhere in the past few days though.
something along the line of global warming causes….. The last time I checked there were hundreds of things. many of them contradictory.
You should ask them if they ever get tired of being wrong while they sleep on their bed of money earned by publishing these absurd studies.
Specifically who is paying them this money?
Unfortunately, we the tax payers are paying them this money.
It’s isn’t a question of being wrong, it’s about stirring up the beehive.
Who are “these people”? Taking one or a few or even a couple dozen stupid papers and extrapolating to a vague group like “these people” is meaningless. I would caution those who read WUWT against believing all the articles that ridicule or dismiss research, especially those that are about paywalled publications and apparently haven’t been read by the WUWT article writer. It’s very easy to say a scientist is wrong based on a press release and abstract, especially without a good understanding of the system in question or the statistics upon which conclusions are based. For true skeptics, this goes without saying; those who don’t apply equal skepticism no matter what the conclusions are cannot be accurately described as skeptics.
The thing is, that’s what becomes the Yahoo headline.
“those who don’t apply equal skepticism no matter what the conclusions are cannot be accurately described as skeptics”
Self awareness and all that.
Kristi the legitimate criticism is choosing a catastrophic sea level rise for which there is not the least bit of evidence in the data and stupidly pronouncing the end of the internet. And you are defending him because he is a scientist? He’s only a computer scientist – basically a technician with a PhD. How do his studies, experience and specialized knowlege equip him to forecast rhe end of the internet in 15 years. Would you bet 10 grand on his prognosis proving to be correct?
See Kristi, if your premise is stupid enough, even if you have a PhD everyone is your peer or even your superior. Example: if an agronomist with a PhD predicted that the moon was made of green cheese. Qualified as he is in dairy science, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker are qualified to call BS on this prediction. Forgetting that there would be no problem in mitigation of such a danger to the internet (doesnt a PhD in this stuff know that?), do you really believe we will soon be gearing up for this mitigation- hey there is only 15 years. No you believe its stupid, too. An honest person picks fights worth having. This isnt one of them.
Kristi……..and JUST as I was beginning to feel some compassion for you.
……aaargh !….you write this : “For true skeptics, this goes without saying;
those who don’t apply equal skepticism no matter what the conclusions are
cannot be accurately described as skeptics.”
WHEREAS , IT IS DEFINED AS : ” sceptic ( alt.spelling: skeptic )
a person inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions.
synonyms: cynic, doubter, questioner, scoffer”
THERE ARE NOT degrees of scepticism ( skepticism)….
…..it’s a bit like pregnancy ! Either you are or you aren’t……….unless
you are a MALE ……then you are not a sceptic , you are simply deluded !!
[ .and as we say in Oz.there ARE a lot of deluded septics (sic.) in the USA ! ]
Someone needed some grant money.
Strange you should say that.
From page seven of the paper in question:-
We thank the reviewers for their insightful comments. This
work is supported by NSF grants CNS-1703592, DHS BAA
11-01, AFRL FA8750-12-2-0328.
There should be a fraud report procedure for crap studies like this.
https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1703592&HistoricalAwards=false
Grant money indeed. From the grant abstract linked above…
“Malicious actors such as hackers, terrorists or nation-states can disrupt, intercept or manipulate the Internet traffic of entire countries or regions by targeting structural weaknesses of the Internet.
… develops methods to identify components that represent potential topological weaknesses, i.e., compromising a few such components would allow an attacker to disrupt, manipulate, or eavesdrop on a large fraction of Internet traffic of that country.”
I think hunter (below) is correct. From all appearances it would seem that Paul, his lovely wife Carol and their good friend and former student Ram have fraudulently used public money to enrich themselves and produce a crap piece of propaganda for the big green machine.
Like I keep saying, it’s WAY past time to drop the levels of grant money substantially.
Is the economic effect of tax-paid funds that are paid out for this kind of garbage so-called “research” any different than the economic effect of guaranteed minimum income payments that are being proposed as a supposed antidote for poverty? I mean, payment for nothing, regardless of what the payment is called is still payment for nothing and such payments degrade the value of the currency that is used to make the payments.
Sara, once upon a time I ran a government scientific grants program. Wasn’t near the magnitude of the federal system, either in total size or amount per grant but I did learn how nasty and dishonorable many of the scientists from prominent institutions could be. I fully support cutting federal grants programs to science and the arts by more than half. If scientists suddenly became dependent on corporate or private funding, how different their attitude would be.
I previously suggested that all grant awards be in duplicate so that ‘double blind’ studies could be conducted, with the results of both published simultaneously. Take the same pot of money, and fund half as many research topics.
Sigh, another prediction targeted for the dustbin of failure that no one will remember in 15 years but some will believe today. Propaganda by any level of definition.
The timeline for this bs study to be in the dustbin is more like 15 days.
BTW the person who coined the term Propaganda, after it got a bad reputation by Hitler and Stalin (Who used his research), changed the name to Public Relations. (That might explain a whole lot)
I looked at the NOAA website regarding sea level rise and ground stations have reported an average of no rise at all for the last 6 years. Forget 3.2mm
Whoa, there you go actually looking at the data.
I would be more concerned if my 2033 internet isn’t at least 6G wireless.
Right. Every 15 years sees at least one major turnover in technology.
I’ve got the Bieber 6g fever.
https://youtu.be/pS9sUm5Y0sg
Minor correction; 3.2 mm per year = 12.6 inches per century, not 1 foot 4 inches.
Fixed, thanks – too used to metric… 🙂
Still wrong 🙂
12.6 inches (decimal) is 1 foot 7.2 inches.
No, 3.2mm = 0.01049869ft.
0.01049869 x 100 years = 1.049ft / century = 1’6”. The decimal fraction has to be multiplied by 12 to convert it to inches.
3.2mm/yr X 100yr = 320mm. That is 12.6″. Not 1′ 7″, not 1′ 6″. It’s 12 and 6/10 inches. That’s just a pinky width more that a foot.
Both wrong 🙂
3.2 * 100 /25.4 = 12.59 inches which is 1foot and 0.59 of an inch.
1.049 ft = 1 foot and 12 x 0.049 inches = 1 foot and 0.588 of an inch
Not quite right yet – 1 foot 6 inches is 1 – 1/2 feet, or 1.5 feet, not 1.05 feet.
Yuck, must change my coffee brand. Thanks Jim and Climatebeagle and Randle 🙂
Convert all imperial measurements to inches and then divide by 2.54cm (= 1″). Damn! What’s with you guys ?
Why don’t you Americans just adopt the metric system?
Because it is a hell with billion km³ of water, aka billion billion m³, aka Em³, aka Gkm³ (oh horror, don’t do that), aka billion billion metric tons, aka thousand billion billion kg, aka million billion billion g, aka Zg, aka Mm³, aka a few more fathom Manhattans.
(some of these are wrong)
And a billion can be 1e12 or 1e9.
Besides, acre-foots are cute.
Why should they? Metric is a purely arbitary system set up by the French during their revolution, where there were 10 days to the week and 10 months to the year. Imperial however is based on human measurements.
An inch is the width of your thumb. A foot is self-explanatory, a yard is from the centre of the chest to the tips of your outstretched fingers.
Do you reckon that the fact that a free-falling massive object falls EXACTLY 16 feet in the first second after it is released may provide something of a hint about how the length of inches and feet were actually determined?
Especially when you consider that Sir Isaac Newton was involved in the determination of the lengths?
We were waiting for the Brits to change their driving habits.
Yeah, they’ll do, one by one.
Why don’t you Americans just adopt the metric system?
Because then we’d be more like you.
No one should want that…
🙂
I live in both systems. I own imperial manual machine tools but I program CNC in millimeters. I think in microinches when diamond turning, microns when 5 axis grinding. Nanometers when measuring wavefronts, angstroms when looking at super smooth surfaces. Miles in my car or motorcycles, kilometers in my ultrarunning. Pounds, kilos, ozs or grams depending on just what it is I’m weighing and what it is for. Body weights should be pounds (or stones!), technical things grams or kilos. Densities of wood – pounds per cubic foot! Rock, either way. Force, energy, torque, etc – whatever floats your boat. And then there are fringes…
Similar here. I like to use F for temps around living conditions as it is more precise than degrees C.
Wallaby, why can’t you guys drive on the correct side of the road?
Correct side? You mean the right side?
We are paying homage to our British ancestors who we so admired, despite not caring for their tea. 🙂
I can sort of live with linear metric measurements (especially since in the course of my work I deal with people all over the world and measurements they provide for custom work orders are almost always in metric) as I’ve gotten somewhat used to them. Also weights and volumes in metric I’m getting more used to as well. Those kinds of measurements at least do make some sense in the repetition of units of ten.
But there is one metric unit I simply can’t get used to, nor does it seem to make sense in the way linear, volume and weight units do. Sorry, but when someone says it is 22 degrees outside, I’ll grab a nice heavy coat! That isn’t room temperature to me and never will be.
IMO Celsius makes little sense for every day temperature measurements. I’ll keep my Fahrenheit, thank you.
Seriously, you’re ok with cm, but think Celsius isn’t fit to purpose?
In Celsius, below freezing is a negative number. Freezing at 0, cold at 5, chilly at 10, bit cool at 15, room temp at 20, comfy at 25, summery at 30, body temp 37, 50s are as high as it gets, boiling water at 100.
In Fahrenheit, below freezing is below 32. Freezing at 32, cold at 40, chilly at 50, bit cool at 60, room temp at 70, comfy at 75, summery at 85, body temp at 98.6*, 120s are as high as it gets, boiling water at 212.
How, other than years of familiarity, can Fahrenheit seem more intuitive?
* Somebody will challenge my math, so let me be clear through example. “Body temperature” is not actually 98.6F as any US school child was taught. Average body temp is about 37C (which of course is not 37.000000 and can range quite normally a degree or so). Small minds make a conversion between an imprecise Celsius value and a precise Fahrenheit value. It would have been more reasonable to teach us that body temperature is 99F. Similarly, I didn’t try to make Fahrenheit seem more unreasonable by using 59, 68, 77, 86, when the round numbers 60, 70, 75, and 85 are perfectly reasonable approximations of the Celsius numbers. The main point is that Celsius is better because it’s easier to know if it’s below or above freezing. We don’t need more precision in temperature than we get from 5C increments.
Americans can’t get used to Celsius because we try to translate to Fahrenheit instead of just thinking in Celsius. Same story with learning other languages. English is ridiculously irregular but familiar to us.
dang those Rooskies, they are hacking everybody’s numbers today.
Minor further correction. 0.5 of those 3.2 mm is a fictitious “Global Isostatic Correction” due to the (supposed) increase in ocean basin volume, so it is actually 270 mm/century = 10 5/8 inches.
No it is even less. If the seabed sinks 0.5mm/year (actually they say 0.3mm) then the land must rise 1mm/year, because land is less that 1/3 of seabed.
No, it doesn’t work like that because that GIA correction is due to isostatic correction from the last glaciation, so it only affects formerly ice-covered areas and adjacent areas.
But it is almost pure guesswork as far as Antarctica is concerned.
Antarctica has lost very little ice since the last glaciation – maybe a little around the coastal fringes. The Vostok Ice Cores are complete going back for 100,000s of years. They don’t have huge gaps where the ice ‘suddenly got thinner at the end of the last glaciation’.
All that happened at the end of the last glaciation, was that the snowline moved to higher latitudes and to higher elevations. Antarctica, being already at high latitude and high elevation, was largely unaffected by the end of the last glaciation.
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Minor correction; 3.2 mm per year = 12.6 inches per century . . . .
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This is one of the problems with converting between unit systems–how many significant figures do you keep? The value "3.2 mm per year" has two significant figures. The value "12.6 inches per century" has three. To really be correct, you need to round to two significant figures or argue for three. In this case, I'd round up and say 13 inches per century. The value "12.6 inches per century" implies too much precision.
Jim
What about all that infrastructure that’s already under water – submarine cables?
Presumably they will be crushed by the increase in pressure from the extra few millimetres of water above them
I chuckled.
NOAA tide gauge data for Seattle, New York and Miami shows coastal sea level rise at these locations steady with no sea level rise acceleration indicated in these measured records. Further based on these NOAA coastal sea level rise tide gauge data with data going back more than 100 years at two of these locations in the next 15 years these cities should expect to see between 1.2 to 1.7 inches in sea level rise. This study is climate alarmist garbage.
I think it ‘could be’ peer-reviewed climate alarmist garbage.
Response from the time machine 16 years hence: WTF is cable?
Wasn’t that depiction in the photo shopped pic above supposed to have happened by now?
Shhhh!!!
Only denialust scum Trump supporters in the pay the fossil fuel conspiracy point out that climate alarmists make failed predictions.
In numerous on-line debates with climate change alarmists, I sometimes ask the question….”Why, if the UN IPCC believes so strongly in their own hubris in regard to climate change and rising seas, would the UN pour BILLIONS of dollars into renovating their headquarters in Manhattan when it is only 100 feet or so from the bank of the East River and barely above sea level? You would think they would have just moved to higher ground.” They never answer.
When is the anthropogenically caused sea level rise going to start? I am bored sick with the waiting.
Yes, watching a tide gauge average is worse than watching grass grow.
“The peer-reviewed study combined data from the Internet Atlas, a comprehensive global map of the internet’s physical structure, and projections of sea level incursion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”
Trump should disband NOAA and start a new agency whose specific mandate would be BE NOT to collect or disseminate any information related to climate change nor collect or disseminate any information related to global warming.
This is a brilliant new strategy! Scare the public, at least half of it, that their porn will be ruined by climate change.
They might actually gain some traction that way! I can see the headlines now! Wet ones coming….
“4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water and 1,101 nodes (e.g., points of presence and colocation centers) will be surrounded by water in the next 15 years.”
So that’s saying that all that fiber is currently between sea-level and one feet above sea-level.
To me, one of those times that the numbers seem completely out of whack, time to see how they got that much infrastructure located in such low lying land.
Use the Global Climate Fund money to raise all the low-lying cables and “points of presence and colocation centers”. Money well-spent.
Really can’t see how they get that many cable miles under 1 foot of sea-level rise.
New York city & San Francisco seem to have almost no land under water at 1 foot SLR, using this tool:
https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/slr.html
Even at six foot New York city doesn’t seem to have much land under water, yet they claim 426 miles of cable under water (Table 3). Figure 4 is claiming to show New York but the major area of SLR (blue) is in New Jersey.
To provide some scale 4,067 miles seems to be around 3.5% of the US internet cables according to the same Paul Barford. I guess it’s lucky the internet was designed to cope with link failures.
https://www.internethalloffame.org/blog/2016/04/27/113000-miles-cable-power-us-internet
Yes, the original DARPA design of the Internet was to make it resilient even to nuclear attack. However this capability has been diminished as the network evolved. The main problem is the interconnects provided by the main carriers are vulnerable to single point of failure. Comcast had a major outage (cable cut) on the East coast last week, which broke connections to West coast Comcast hubs for more than 12 hours.
I haven’t read read the paper, so what follows is pure speculation:
Maybe the authors are taking their cue from the Fukushima malfunction where infrastructure placed in a basement got flooded. Perhaps they are thinking the fiber-optic cables in coastal cities are routed through subway tunnels. As the name “subway” reveals, these tunnels are below the surface, often even below sea level. So height of the surface above sea level is irrelevant. What matters are safeguards designed to keep subways from flooding.
Perhaps they assume that within 15 years sea level rise in the interim will enable a storm surge (driven by a predicted-to-be-extra-powerful hurricane) to flood a city’s subway system and for some reason (perhaps an outage due to over reliance on unreliable renewable power) the sump pumps will fail.
Of course, we know that people in the affected city will not know that the internet outage they are experiencing on their smart phone is a systemic failure because they will not be able to text each other due to cell towers having no power.
SR
I also wonder if the paper means metropolitan area rather than city, e.g. San Francisco city is meant to be the San Francisco Bay area.
Yes, Professor Barford confirmed that the areas were the metropolitan areas rather than the cities. That potentially makes more sense.
Sloppy mistake to make though, describe the area investigated as the “city” when you mean the metropolitan area, something I would have expected competent peer-reviewers to find.
“Our analysis is conservative since it does not consider the threat of severe storms that would cause temporary sea level incursions beyond the predicted average”
So they are talking about the average SLR.
And “conservative” even though they are using the “Highest (most extreme) projection” !!!
The entire paper is either a farce or a fraud.
Nothing precludes it from being both, hunter.
The preferred spot to lay cable is on the beach.
Depends on whether it’s bikini season.
So what’s the solution? Dig up the cables and put them back on tall poles like they used to do?
Climate porn like this is entertaining, but as a scientist, reading it leaves me feeling dirty and shameful. If we were to actually have rapid sea level rises so fast that humanity and technology couldn’t possibly escape, I get a secret feeling that would be really fun to watch! In reality, relocating internet resources takes only a matter of days, not years. I was once a System Administrator responsible for maintaining a “hot spot” server for an Emergency Operation Center. That in the ancient days of complex, difficult logistics. It would have taken me about 4 hours to relocate the entire EOC to another part of town. Today we can move virtualized servers anywhere in the world in mere seconds. The authors forgot one small thing about the internet: it was designed to re-route itself around any large, gaping holes it might sustain by minor catastrophes such as, say, a nuclear war. Watery basements in Seattle aren’t going to exactly wipe it out. But man, I secretly love reading this stuff! Keep it coming!
That’s wrong. The Internet is stored in a box at the top of Big Ben. The Elders of the Internet will never let it be submerged.
One has to wonder who would be stupid enough to leave infrastructure in place as the sea levels rose.
Then one considers the target market for such journalism…
Leo Smith
I was one of that target demographic, until I asked myself one simple question: how much CO2 is in the atmosphere?
Man, was that an eye opener!
Then I asked myself: what gases make up the atmosphere?
That was even more of an eye opener because finding water vapour included in almost any expression of the atmosphere, on any web site, is well nigh impossible.
So I ended up here, where I have since been thoroughly educated in many subjects, including Tyndall who “concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall
And whilst I don’t trust Wikipedia, the Royal Institution links directly to this page, from their page on Tyndall.
And that’s another thing I learned here, don’t trust Wikipedia without credible references.
Thanks guys.
And quite frankly, Mother Nature can take care of herself. Do something to piss her off and she’ll destroy you. Or, more likely, she’ll just correct the imbalance and merrily carry on.
Check out my The Stupidity of Modern Man post above.
No Internet? .. no electrickery? .. no shopping-bags?
When the A-bomb went off in Hiroshima, 6th Aug 1945, the power company strung power lines in from the suburbs the very next day, and got the power back on.
But in New York the IT industry can’t do similar, with 15 years of warning? Gonna take 50 years huh?
Kinda not buying this half-witted limp-lettuce pet greenie sob-story ‘o doom.
The Stupidity of Modern Man
So, as we find more and more ancient cities buried under the world’s oceans, we argue that instead of being proactive and MOVING our cities AWAY from the rising floodwaters, we should continue building in areas prone to flooding and instead spend TRILLIONS on technology, that will likely fail, to TRY and hold the floodwaters back.
And, instead of upgrading our crumbling infrastructure with current technology that we know will be viable for 50 years, we waste our resources on TRYING to invent technology that MIGHT work in 20 years. Our decades-old electrical, water, sewage, gas and transportation infrastructure is crumbling, but instead of eliminating the KNOWN risk of it failing NOW, we continue to try to prevent the “wind” from blowing and damaging it decades in the future.
For every city that has been drowned, I can find another that used to be a port, but is now miles inland.
My point is that the LESS intelligent ancients MOVED long BEFORE their homes were inundated by the sea and river flooding.
Us smart, moderns seem to think that we can KEEP the water out with our brilliance.
Where did you get the idea that they moved before their homes were inundated?
PS: Every inundated city that I’m aware of was inundated when the ground subsided during an earthquake.
PPS: If you think the ancients didn’t have trouble with flooding, you have never studied any history.
The ones that didn’t move and were drowned came to their evolutionary dead end.
On the other hand, the Dutch have used their ingenuity to reclaim land from the North Sea for hundreds of years, not without some tragedies along the way mind you. But now, I have to question the sanity of their immigration policies.
We really should pass a Law to ban geodynamics.
…and here I thought most Internet traffic went over fiber. I didn’t know seawater ate fiber optic cable.
Oddly enough sharks do.
I didn’t know they were light eaters. 🙂
The cables don’t mind, however boosters and interconnects do.
However there aren’t that many of them, and if they can’t be raised a few inches, they can be sealed fairly cheaply.
No, no Eric, you clearly have not understood. Professor Barford is an ‘authority’, for goodness sake, AND he’s a perfesser AND his paper has been peer-reviewed. Typically, all you have is hard data and actual facts – come on, man, get a grip!
I know, its wrong to question climate papers…
“…his paper has been peer-reviewed”. Peer-review. The last refuge of liars, scoundrels and fools. Oh, and those calling themselves Climate Scientists…
Here’s a proper pier review
https://www.piers.org.uk/
Why did you repeat yourself?
Are you sure the author is not just a nom de plume for old Flannelpants?
If he’s a computer geek, he should stick to his day job.