Climate Change (fair discussion)

[BinnZ]

Half of my country is living below sea level already. We seem to be kind of good in building dikes. However, much land that is to be flooded is very rich land. We will definitely miss that. It's not like there's going to be deserts flooded any time soon

[Art Blade]

you are always welcome to swim over to my place, Binn 

[fragger]

I do live right on the coast - well, about a kay back from it. I'm probably no more than about 20-30 feet above sea level at high tide, on a direct elevation. But I don't worry myself about rising sea levels - if they look like rising, I'll move. I love being near the beach, so I'll take my chances. If I get swamped or if there's a tsunami, I won't be blaming anyone but myself

When you think about it, there really is no truly safe place on Earth anyway. An asteroid can still land on you no matter where you live.

[Art Blade]

would be funny if you first noticed that the sea rose up to your chin and then, looking up because of the weird noise and changing colours of the sky, you noticed that massive asteroid come plummeting down on you..

[fragger]

A "gimme a break" comment would be justifiable under those circumstances

That would be a bit like Port Royal, Jamaica, which got hit with a major earthquake in 1692. That partially leveled the town, and many who survived the destruction subsequently got taken out by the tsunami that came later the same day. Those lucky enough to survive all that found themselves dropping dead during the following months from diseases issuing from all the rotting corpses that couldn't be gotten to for proper disposal. An asteroid strike would have given Port Royal a quadfecta of disasters

Some believed the place got its just desserts, or was even punished by God himself, because in the years immediately prior to the disaster, the town was notorious for being one of the most debauched pirate havens ever to have existed. They called it "the Sodom of the New World".

[Art Blade]

it was just a rather unlucky choice for settling down, I reckon

[Dweller_Benthos]

One thing that always mystified me about sea level was that people thought it never changed. When I was a kid, I was big into dinosaurs, enough that I went beyond the average kid stuff of toys and coloring books and actually read about how they lived and what the world was like. This lead me to read about the changes the world has gone through over time. This of course, also included what sea level was over the history of the planet. I knew that sea level changes drastically, sometimes over fairly short periods, even when measured by human standards and not over geological time. Then sometime in my teens I was reading something, I think from the Navy or the USGS, about "standard sea level" and was mystified. Looking into it, it seemed sea level is considered an absolute value that never changes, of course, an average of high and low tide, but that average was what sea level was set at, and many things depended on that absolute value. I thought to myself, do they not know the history of the planet and that sea level is one of the most variable things on Earth? I was a young teen or even younger and I knew sea level could wildly change, do these people just not know this, or are they blindly ignoring the facts?

[fragger]

Nice read D_B, I was the same way as a kid. I too was a huge dinosaur fan and did a lot of reading about them, they fascinated me then and they still do. And like you, my reading also turned up info about how the world, its climate and its sea levels change over time, and not always at a stately geological pace. It seems to me that many people who argue over climate change have an overly-idealized view of the world, like it's always been some benign idyll that never changed until we humans came along and mucked it all up. That's hardly the case. There have been periods in the past when the atmosphere would actually be toxic to modern animals, with CO2 levels around 200% higher than today's. Then there have been times when the oxygen content was so high (up to 40% higher than today) that a lightning strike could actually make the air around it explode. There have been periods when Earth was all but covered in blistering, barren deserts, and times when it has been almost completely frozen over. An awful lot of change can take place during the course of about 5 billion years. We tend to forget that we are a very young species on a very old planet. If the time line of Earth's age up until now were scaled down to just one year, we humans would have appeared at about four seconds before midnight on December 31st. This planet is OLD, and it has been through an incredible amount of change.

Speaking of change, we lost even more of our beach a couple of days ago in another storm/king tide event. I haven't been down to eyeball it yet, I only heard it on the local news. Damn. There will be no beach left at this rate. The thing is, after that first massive loss of beach 4 or 5 years ago, steps could have been taken to minimize or even eliminate the chances of it happening again by the relatively simple expedient of creating an artificial reef. It's been done before at other beaches in this country, and within a time frame of well under 4-5 years, so our local council has had plenty of time to implement such a scheme, but in their usual style they have done nothing but bicker and argue about it and spend money on more important things like prettying up the main street, re-turfing the local high school's hockey field and putting in a new skate park for the local brats to spray-paint into a graffiti-ridden eyesore. So now, thanks to those overpaid, procrastinating blabbermouths and their screwed-up priorities, we have next to no beach left, which will in turn negatively impact the local businesses' holiday-period revenues.

@#$%& politicians... No, I won't get myself started because I'm going out soon for a nice Chinese lunch and I don't want to leave the house all cranked up

[PZ]

@#$%& politicians...

Worthless assholes 

[Art Blade]

they're probably talking about how bad climate change is while they've forgot to do something about the beach. 

[BinnZ]

Sand and water, sand and water. You know what you get when you put these two together? It's called MUD!

[Art Blade]

 

[fragger]

 

I went and had a look at the beach and yeah, another foot or two of sand has gone. The additional flight of wooden steps they had to build to reach the beach from the car park after the last episode now ends about a foot and a half above the sand. The beach had just been starting to recover and the sand level had begun to rise, but now it's even lower than it was before. It's still a beach though and there's enough sand left to make it enjoyable, but a few more incidents like this and there's be nothing left but stones.

I'll bet if one or more of the local pollies lived there, something would have been well and truly done about it by now

[Art Blade]

I think they'd have said, "sod it," and moved to a part with exclusive private beaches instead.