Our Inevitable Doom

The forecasters of doom are at it again, this time offering detailed predictions of the coming disaster - but with a bit of a heretical twist.

Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

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Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians — the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.

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Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

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And it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes an even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms and regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher and more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.

All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states would put about 25,000 square miles under water, according to Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. That's an area the size of West Virginia.

The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.

The Environmental Protection Agency's calculation projects a land loss of about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland areas like Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers of at-risk land, according to the EPA.

That's a lot of doom for one short global warming story. I mean it's enough to make one start riding a bicycle to work. But then I told you there was a twist.

It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

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"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what — the question is when."

This is so against the doctrine of the Church of Global Warming that those involved are probably going to be excommunicated from The Consensus. This denies the central tenant of the Church that all must obey and live their lives not as many environmentalists do but as they say. If the disaster cannot be stopped - there is no reason for the people to obey.

So the next time someone starts to lecture you about how you should change your life to help fight global warming, just shrug your shoulders and in your most fatalist tone ask "Why bother?"

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 02:00 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment