Sea Level Rise

see floods

no category for glaciers? see -gate

see bak 819

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an 11 25

Seven states are one flood away from a toxic sludge site spilling into the community.

Mother Jones reported Friday, "Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for 80 percent" of the sites. "Most of this risk is already locked in."

More than 5,500 toxic sites across the U.S. could face coastal flooding by 2100, threatening to spill contaminants into surrounding neighborhoods within the lifetimes of Generations Alpha and Beta, new research warns.

Scientists at the University of California found that a wide range of hazardous facilities are vulnerable, including sites handling sewage, toxic waste, oil, gas and other pollutants that are not fully protected from sea level rise and severe flooding.

"After examining 23 coastal states and Puerto Rico, scientists found that flood risk is far from evenly distributed. Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for nearly 80 percent of the hazardous sites expected to be at risk by 2100," the report said.

The project examined 47,600 coastal facilities in the U.S., finding that about 5,500 are at risk of frequent flooding that could send toxic materials into nearby communities.

Current environmental safeguards do little more than delay the danger. Future generations will be forced either to build stronger containment systems that can withstand flooding or face the consequences.

“Restricting greenhouse gas emissions to the low emissions scenario makes little difference in terms of the number of projected sites at risk in the near term (2050) but would reduce the number of at-risk sites from 5,500 to 5,138 (a reduction of 362 or 7 percent of sites) in the long term," the scientists found.

Read the full study at Nature Communications.

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ew 920

Antarctica and Greenland's ice sheets are currently melting at a pace consistent with worst-case-scenario predictions for sea level rise, with serious consequences for coastal communities and the reliability of climate models.

ew 920

recent Science Magazine feature blamed an underwater heat blob for exacerbating sea ice loss as it proclaimed what many Arctic scientists already know: Arctic sea ice is racing toward its demise.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse-could-add-3-metres-sea-level-rise

Antarctic ice sheet collapse could add 3 meters to sea-level rise

By Charlotte HartleyJul. 23, 2020 , 11:30 AM

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet could be in more danger of collapsing than previously thought, National Geographic reports. The ice sheet is the world’s largest, holding 80% of the planet’s ice. But some 400,000 years ago, a large chunk about the size of Arizona collapsed into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise by more than 3 meters. The worrying thing is that this happened during a period of relatively mild warmth, according to a study published yesterday in Nature. And it could happen again.

At the time of the previous collapse, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached about 300 parts per million (ppm). It now stands at 400 ppm. The researchers say this has caused them to re-evaluate the perceived “invincibility” of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and seriously consider the possibility of it shrinking. These findings are consistent with estimates of sea-level rise caused by glacial melting elsewhere on the continent and around the world.

720 ew

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Tuesday that a trend of increased coastal flooding will continue to worsen as the climate crisis escalates.

ew 420 record?!

https://www.ecowatch.com/greenland-ice-melt-2645742998.html

===

ew 320

Greenland experienced an unusually warm summer in 2019, which caused the world's largest island to lose 600 billion tons of ice and raised sea levels by 0.2 of an inch, according to a NASA study released yesterday. That amount of ice loss more than doubled Greenland's 2002-2019 annual average.

https://www.ecowatch.com/sea-level-rise-nuclear-plants-2645160125.html

ew 220

NYC Sea Wall Halted After Trump Says it's 'Costly, Foolish'

New York City Spends Billions on Flood Protection

FLOODING

New York City Spends Billions on Flood Protection

FLOODING

Trump claims oceans will rise less than an inch

President Trump dismissed the possibility of sea-level rise this week by suggesting that ocean water might climb imperceptibly over the next two centuries, a claim that's contradicted by government measurements.

By Scott Waldman in Climatewire 6:16 AM EST

guk

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/sea-level-rise-centuries-climate-crisis

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/horrifying-new-research-shows-rising-sea-levels-could-wipe-out-major-cities-and-displace-150-million-people-by-2050/

no lnx

‘Horrifying’ new research shows rising sea levels could wipe out major cities and displace 150 million people by 2050

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams October 30, 2019

Ho Chi Minh City, along with the rest of southern Vietnam, “could all but disappear” by 2050.

Bangkok, Thailand, currently home to over eight million people, is under severe threat.

Basra, Iraq, the nation’s second-largest city, “could be mostly underwater” by mid-century.

Those are just some of the alarming conclusions of a new research paper on the dire global consequences of rising sea levels driven by the climate crisis.

According to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, “chronic coastal flooding or permanent inundation” due to rising seas could threaten three times more people than scientists previously believed if urgent action is not taken to establish protections and confront the underlying crisis.

The authors of the paper “developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic,” the New York Times reported. “The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by mid-century.”

Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for Migration told the Times that nations must begin preparing for massive internal relocations of citizens.

“We’ve been trying to ring the alarm bells,” Ionesco said. “We know that it’s coming.”

The Times published striking graphics that contrasted the amount of land that could be underwater by 2050 under the old projections with the “horrifying” new projections.

Bangkok, Thailand

The @nytclimate folks have horrifying visuals they’ve put together. Here’s Bangkok. The term the Times used was “erase,” which is pretty much right. https://t.co/EH67OMspcN pic.twitter.com/84DafEvuBn

— Jacob Ward (@byjacobward) October 29, 2019

Alexandria, Egypt

The effects of rising seas will be far worse than previously thought, wiping out entire cities by 2050, new data shows.

This is Alexandria, Egypt, under the old and new projections.https://t.co/f2iAOari5D @DeniseDSLu pic.twitter.com/U2PzLs6D2f

— Christopher Flavelle (@cflav) October 29, 2019

Vietnam

Image shows new predictions for sea level rise by 2050. The blue shows the land underwater at high tide. Southern Vietnam almost completely under water. https://t.co/QZ66OhP92Y pic.twitter.com/6unr6AWEG2

— Joel Tozer (@jttozer) October 29, 2019

Shanghai, China

Big wow! Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows https://t.co/RlAAjCkEIN. see example of #Shanghai pic.twitter.com/U3pB6hGbdH

— Cornie Huizenga (@CornieHuizenga) October 29, 2019

“Climate change is shrinking the planet, in the scariest possible way,” Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, tweeted in response to the new research.

Climate scientist Peter Kalmus noted that he was concerned about “being labeled ‘alarmist'” when he first started speaking out about the climate crisis.

“Now I embrace the term,” said Kalmus, linking to the Times graphics. “I’m here to sound the alarm. For good reason.”

https://www.ecowatch.com/southern-california-coast-sea-level-rise-2640731572.html

919

Jacob Margolis

The stretch of coast from Santa Monica to Malibu is iconic and quintessentially Californian. It's also ridiculously beautiful — and it's clear, based on the latest science, it could be unrecognizable by the end of the century.

As the planet warms, sea levels will continue to rise, threatening some of our most beloved stretches of coastline.

I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time on those beaches. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, I used to head over the hill in my friend's baby blue VW bus, or my mom's minivan, to surf Topanga or Malibu on my 9'8 Kennedy longboard. It was and still is an amazing escape from the traffic, heat and urban sprawl of the Valley.

I wanted to know exactly what climate change could mean for our beach-going experience through the end of the century, so I reached out to scientists and stakeholders to find out what they know.

Here are the challenges — and some solutions.

Seas Will Rise

First, some context.

A few feet of sea level rise might not sound very alarming, but every vertical foot could mean roughly 20 feet farther that the ocean encroaches inland (depending on a lot of factors, like the slope of the coastline), according to Patrick Barnard, a research scientist at the US Geological Survey.

The state's 2018 sea level rise guidance laid out different scenarios based on how much we curb our greenhouse gas emissions.

Low emissions: 66% chance of between 0.9 and 2.3 feet of rise in Santa Monica by 2100, and similar rise in other parts of Southern California.

High emissions: 66% chance of between 1.5 and 3.3 feet of rise, with a .5% probability we'll see 6.8 feet.

As a precaution, the report recommends that state officials anticipate 10 feet of rise when building crucial infrastructure along the coast.

Keep in mind some researchers think we've been underestimating just how bad things could get.

Beaches Will Disappear

According to a paper co-authored by Barnard, SoCal could lose between 31% - 67% of its beaches by 2100.

And areas like Malibu could be threatened in the coming decades.

"I mean these are very, very narrow beaches. They're already having lots of issues, and just a bit of sea level rise and they're going to be completely gone," said Barnard, adding that Malibu could see a major loss of its beaches in the coming decades.

...

Indonesia Announces Plan to Move Capital to Borneo as Jakarta Sinks into Sea

https://kpfa.org/episode/radio-ecoshock-show-august-15-2019/

2016 john englander high tide on main str

Donations like yours enable us to provide free legal support to scientists like Maria Caffrey, a CSLDF client who filed a whistleblower complaint against the Trump administration on July 22. Caffrey was forced out of her job at the National Park Service after refusing to delete references to human-caused climate change from a report she authored about how sea level rise impacts coastal parks.

Sadly, attempts to muzzle scientists are increasingly common under the Trump administration. As Lauren Kurtz, our director, recently told The Guardian, this kind of censorship is “part of a larger trend of disputing scientific realities for political reasons” and it extends beyond climate to pesticide safety, reproductive health, and other issues.

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/26/war-on-science-trump-administration-muzzles-climate-experts-critics-say

Maria Caffrey,

no lnx

War on science: Trump administration muzzles climate experts, critics say

Whistleblowers and groups tracking agency decisions say administration is ignoring science and censoring expertise

Emily Holden in Washington

Fri 26 Jul 2019 12.49 BST

The Trump administration is disregarding science and expertise across a wide range of government work, as documented by whistleblowers and groups tracking agency decisions.

Trump officials are censoring warnings about the climate crisis, moving critical agencies out of Washington and enacting far-reaching changes in what facts regulators can consider when they choose between industry and the public good.

[ I'm a scientist. Under Trump I lost my job for refusing to hide climate crisis facts

Maria Caffrey

Indonesia Will Move its Capital from Fast-Sinking Jakarta

https://www.ecowatch.com/indonesia-to-move-capital-jakarta-2636197365.html

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-april-10-2019/

mapping pjt UCB

kristina sp hill resilient by design challenge WS

use sys waste prouct to make ponton 3 story bldg // Steiger Island dutch? heavy salt water will lift freshwater that will flood cities (1 mi inland?!)

affects infrastructre /adaptation

baynature.org

icn series:

https://insideclimatenews.org/content/danger-without-borders

Droughts, extreme heat, wildfires, rising seas, flooding have started to threaten military bases and infrastructure. Destabilizing weather worsens tensions abroad that could draw in U.S. forces.

In this ongoing series InsideClimate News examines how threats to national security are being multiplied by climate change.

The Pentagon has pointed to the Syrian civil war as an example of how global warming can aggravate the fragility of a nation riddled with tensions and poor governance. But where is the next Syria? And will the U.S. military, if called upon, be able to respond to international crises if climate change has hammered its ships, planes and training grounds?

U.S. Nuclear Fleet’s Dry Docks Threatened by Storms and Rising Seas

Hawaiian Island Important for Seals and Turtles Washed Away By Hurricane

kosla lost in ct on pvt bech, but

A Never-Ending Commitment”: The High Cost of Preserving Vulnerable Beaches

In the wake of hurricanes like Florence, the U.S. government pays to dump truckloads of sand onto eroding beaches, in a cycle that is said to harm ecosystems and disproportionately benefit the rich.

by Lisa Song and Al Shaw

Sept. 27, 5 a.m. EDT

1,400 Dead, 70,000 Homeless After Earthquake and Tsunami in Indonesia

Indonesia's devastating earthquake-tsunami combo last week has left 70,000 people homeless in the city of Palu, CBS News reported Thursday.

The death toll has climbed to more than 1,420 people since Friday, when the 7.5 magnitude earthquake and the 18-foot tsunami it triggered struck the island of Sulawesi.

N carolina

pig, 1.x million dead chickens, coal ash

socialize cost, pvtize profit

https://www.alternet.org/hurricane-florences-surge-expected-hit-homes-already-cost-government-millions

Though the flooding from Hurricane Florence is predicted to be unprecedented, residents of the coastal North Carolina towns threatened by the storm surge know what it’s like to take on water. Some homes in these areas have been repeatedly flooded — and repeatedly bailed out by federal flood insurance.

ProPublica examined storm surge predictions by the National Hurricane Center, layering a map of areas expected to be affected by Florence over a map of the most flood-prone properties tracked by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides most of the flood insurance for U.S. homeowners.

Critics have long argued that the program subsidizes risky development, but efforts at reform inevitably stall because raising premiums would make flood insurance unaffordable for lower-income residents. The insurance is required for federally backed mortgages of homes in flood-prone areas. The program is more than $20 billion in debt.

Looking at some of the towns, it’s easy to see why.

High-risk areas include communities along the Pamlico River and North Topsail Beach, which is on a barrier island near Wilmington. Homes there have gotten multiple flood payouts from FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program going back as far as 1978. One property in North Topsail Beach has received nine separate payments, totaling $77,000, though the building is worth just $37,125. Another in nearby Topsail Beach has received 10 payments worth $467,000. That building is worth $300,000.

FEMA places buildings like these — including 1,132 across North Carolina — on a special list called “severe repetitive loss” structures because they’ve been flooded and rebuilt again and again with FEMA flood insurance. Properties that qualify for the list have made at least four claims of more than $5,000 each since 1978, or two claims with a combined value that’s worth more than the building itself. There are more than 35,000 such properties nationwide.

Collectively, the buildings in North Carolina are worth at least $280 million, and they’ve received $164 million in payments, according to FEMA data provided by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. The list undoubtedly will grow after Hurricane Florence, placing additional strain on a debt-ridden program that experts say is in desperate need of reform.

The areas facing the worst impact from Hurricane Florence are among the most vulnerable in the country when it comes to sea-level rise; parts of North Topsail Beach, for instance, are eroding at 5 feet per year. And a team of scientists concluded on Wednesday that climate change had supercharged the storm — increasing its projected rainfall by roughly 50 percent and its size by 50 miles.

Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said these homes are “perfect examples of what we’ll see as sea levels continue to rise.”

North Carolina has a rocky history of confronting sea-level rise. In 2012, after scientific advisers for the state predicted up to 39 inches of rising sea levels over the next century, state legislators passed a law saying North Carolina would only base policies on studies that exclusively used historical data, effectively outlawing climate science. The current governor has backtracked, and North Carolina has joined a multistate effort to tackle climate change.

Moore said the government should fund more property buyouts to permanently remove homes from risky areas. Nationwide, a majority of the homes on the list belong to low-income and middle-class residents, he said, and since buyouts often take years to process, most homeowners can’t afford to wait and are forced to use insurance claims to rebuild in the same place.

The slow-moving hurricane will linger over the Carolinas through the weekend.

hurricane storm surge makes a sort of dam, so when Florence dumps water in mtns, the runoff will be stopped by ocean water.

https://www.ecowatch.com/hurricane-florence-climate-denial-2604542741.html

no many lnx

Climate-Denying Law Could Make Hurricane Florence More Dangerous

A 2012 law could make North Carolina more vulnerable to hurricanes like Florence, which is expected to approach the state later Thursday, CBS reported.

The law banned policy makers from using up-to-date climate science to plan for sea level rise, which is expected to make flooding from storms like Florence worse.

"Currently the unspoken plan is to wait until the situation is catastrophic and then respond. We must begin the retreat now," retired Duke University coastal geologist Orrin H. Pilkey wrote in a recent op-ed for Raleigh's News & Observer.

The law came as a response to a 2010 Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) report that predicted sea levels on the Carolina coast would rise 39 inches by 2100, putting 2,000 square miles of property at risk, The Charlotte Observer explained.

Real estate interests and some politicians worried the report could chill coastal development and increase insurance, so thestate legislature passed a law banning agencies from making sea level rise policies until 2016.

"By putting our heads in the sand, literally, for four years, we are not helping property owners. We are hurting them because we are not giving them information they may need to protect their property," Democratic Representative Deborah Ross said in 2012, according to The Charlotte Observer.

The bill, which became law when Democratic Governor Bev Perdue neither signed nor vetoed it, instructed the CRC to write a new sea-level-rise report that restricted its scope to the next 30 years, took into account scientific studies refuting sea level rise and assessed the economic cost of limiting coastal development.

It was sponsored by Republican Representative Pat McElraft, a former real-estate agent whose top contributors included the North Carolina Association of Realtors and the North Carolina Home Builders Association.

"You can believe whatever you want about global warming, but when you go to make planning policies here for our residents and protecting their property values and insurance rates ... it's a very serious thing to us on the coast," McElraft said in 2012, according to The Charlotte Observer.

However, others warned that the bill itself would be a "very serious thing" for coastal dwellers.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation warned at the time that the bill undermined years of work by emergency agencies "to help prepare the state for hurricanes," according to CBS.

This week, the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that the increased average sea level along the Carolina coast could make the storm surge from Hurricane Florence more dangerous.

Since the bill was passed, studies have continued to show that the Carolina coast is already being impacted by sea level rise.

One, published in August, found that five Southeast states including North Carolina had already lost $7.4 billion in home values to sea level rise.

High tides are already causing flooding on non-windy days on streets like Front Street in Beaufort, Bay Street in Morehead City and Memorial Street in Nags Head, Pilkey wrote in his op-ed.

He advised that, going forward, the state increase setback lines to limit coastal development, raise the height of buildings, move back threatened buildings, prohibit rebuilding of storm-destroyed buildings and initiate a planned retreat from the rising water line.

"The time has come for action on our shoreline," Pilkey wrote. "There is no question that the climate will change drastically. It already has. And with that changing climate will come big changes at the shoreline. We used to believe that we could hold the shoreline in place but clearly that is an economic and engineering impossibility."

happer tweet agw "cult"

Climate Change Is Creating an Affordable Housing Crisis in Miami

By Jeremy Deaton

Miami ranks among the most valuable real estate markets in the country. Palatial homes astride warm, teal waters sell for millions. But it's not Miami's ocean-front neighborhoods where property values are rising fastest. Housing costs are climbing more rapidly in neighborhoods that lie a little higher up along a ridge that runs parallel to the shore.

These neighborhoods are best protected against climate change.

"That's the ridge where we put the railroad. And that's the ridge where we sent the black and brown people to live. And all of a sudden — because we've got people on the Atlantic low-line getting tidal flooding and people near the Everglades low-line getting flooding — guess where everybody wants to live? On the ridge. So guess who's being displaced? The brown and black people," said Caroline Lewis, executive director of the CLEO Institute, at a town hall on climate change and gentrification in Miami on Monday.

...EW

omg

https://www.ecowatch.com/oil-companies-climate-change-protection-2598447515.html

see disaster cap'l

"yeah, no"

Texas Oil Companies Want Federal Dollars to Protect Them From Climate Change

The burning of fossil fuels is the driving force behind climate change, and now the companies responsible want the government to help pay to protect them from the consequences.

Texas is seeking at least $12 billion to build a network of seawalls, levees, gates and earthen structures that would protect a stretch of the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the area south of Houston that houses 30 percent of U.S. oil refining capacity, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

The Army Corps of Engineers approved $3.9 billion for smaller projects that would protect oil facilities in Port Arthur and Freeport in July, The Associated Press and The Houston Chronicle reported.

"The oil and gas industry is getting a free ride," Sierra Club Houston executive committee member Brandt Mannchen told The Associated Press. "You don't hear the industry making a peep about paying for any of this and why should they? There's all this push like, 'Please Senator Cornyn, Please Senator Cruz, we need money for this and that.'"

Texas Republican politicians like Senators John Cormyn and Ted Cruz, who signed a letter urging President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris agreement and are generally hostile to public spending, support federal funding for the project. Many see it as a priority after Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston and took out 25 percent of the area's refining capacity for a time.

"Our overall economy, not only in Texas but in the entire country, is so much at risk from a high storm surge," Gulf Coast-area Republican Judge Matt Sebesta told The Associated Press.

The idea for the "Ike Dike," as the 60-mile network of barriers is called, took off after Hurricane Ike battered Texas in 2008 and caused half-a-million gallons of crude oil to be released into Texas waters, Climate Liability News reported.

Most local environmental groups supported the general need to protect the coast from storm surges, and prevent storm-caused oil spills, but were worried a plan would be rushed through after Harvey that would bypass environmental reviews assessing its potential impact on wildlife and the salinity of Galveston Bay.

"You may prevent the bay from being ruined by a release of petrochemicals, but you may ruin it by changing the hydrology," Galveston Bay Foundation spokesperson Scott Jones told Climate Liability News.

Some of those concerns were mitigated when the federal government approved insufficient funding to fast track the project last year.

In July, the Army Corps of Engineers approved $1.9 million to study the best design for the Ike Dike, and the study draft and environmental impact statement should be released in September, The Houston Chronicle reported.

The limited project that has been approved is the Sabine Pass-to-Galveston Bay Coastal Storm Risk Management and Ecosystem Restoration. The initial funding proposal protected larger parts of the coast, but as the project has been refined it has focused more specifically on refineries, The Associated Press reported.

Part of the project will raise dirt levees and build or expand flood walls around Port Arthur, where refineries owned by Saudi-owned Motiva, Valero Energy Corp. and Total S.A. are located.

"You're looking at a lot of people, a lot of homes, but really a lot of industry," Army Corps of Engineers resident engineer in Port Arthur Steve Sherrill told The Associated Press.

Another part of the project will build 25 miles of new seawalls and levees in Orange County, where facilities belonging to Chevron and DuPont are located. A third will increase and heighten seawalls protecting Freeport, as well as a Phillips 66 export terminal for natural gas and many chemical plants.

Sea Level Rise Has Already Cost 8 East Coast States More Than $14 Billion in Home Values

Sea level rise caused by climate change has already cost the U.S. $14.1 billion dollars in home values across eight East Coast states, according to new data released Thursday by the First Street Foundation, a Brooklyn-based non-profit whose stated mission is "to educate citizens and elected officials on the risks, causes and solutions to sea level rise and flooding."

In two separate data summaries released July 25 and Aug. 23, scientists affiliated with the organization looked at how coastal flooding had influenced home values in five Southern coastal states and the tri-states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut between 2005 and 2017.

Keep reading...

IB sues

... last year, facing a problem it sees as too expensive to bear, the city filed a lawsuit seeking compensation from major oil, gas and coal companies. It accuses them of knowingly contributing to sea-level rise and coastal flooding by producing fossil fuels and ignoring warnings about the consequences.

For Dedina, the math was simple. There's no way Imperial Beach, with its slim city budget of $19 million, can pay for all the damage to roads and city property that experts say is coming—and mounting research pinpoints burning of fossil fuels as a key driver of that sea level rise.

A 2016 study noted that beach erosion here has been accelerating—today the pace is just over a foot a year—and is expected to reach 6 feet per year by 2100. Nor can the city afford remedies like sea walls, which one study said would cost at least $50 million.

"I've been watching the coast and ocean since I was a kid," said Dedina, a surfer and veteran of local environmental fights over the last four decades. "It became clear there was a different feel to what I was seeing, that there was a different scale to the ocean."

"Something bad was going to happen," he said, "we had to try to stop it.'

here's another statistic that makes climate change a public safety issue here: There are dozens of sites in and around Imperial Beach where handling of hazardous material is permitted. A recent study on sea level rise shows that some of these locations, including military sites that handle hazardous material and underground storage tanks, are vulnerable to flooding.

"We are literally learning every day what will need to be done to address these issues," said Andy Hall, Imperial Beach's city manager.

The Imperial Beach lawsuit sweeps up 37 companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips and Peabody Energy. Since Imperial Beach and the counties of Marin and San Mateo chose a courtroom showdown, five other cities and counties in California have also sued. Around the country, others have done the same, including New York City and municipalities in Colorado and Washington State. Some of the suits expand the harms of climate change beyond sea level rise to include wildfires, drought and pestilence.

...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27062018/coastal-cities-lawsuit-fossil-fuel-oil-climate-change-sea-level-rise-damage-imperial-beach-california

100K houses ca

2045

marin san mateo, OC 3700

https://www.ucsusa.org/press/2018/25-million-homes-businesses-totaling-1-trillion-threatened-high-tide-flooding

2.5 Million Homes, Businesses Totaling $1 Trillion Threatened by High Tide Flooding

Study Finds Coastal Municipalities May Lose Huge Sums in Property Tax Revenue

WASHINGTON (June 18, 2018)—Accelerating sea level rise in the lower 48 states, primarily driven by climate change, is projected to worsen tidal flooding, putting as many as 311,000 coastal homes with a collective market value of about $117.5 billion today at risk of chronic flooding within the next 30 years—the lifespan of a typical mortgage—according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released today. Roughly 14,000 coastal commercial properties assessed at a value of roughly $18.5 billion also are at risk during that timeframe. By the end of the century, homes and businesses currently worth more than $1 trillion could be at risk: as many as 2.4 million homes—roughly the equivalent of all the homes in Los Angeles and Houston combined—valued at approximately $912 billion and 107,000 commercial properties assessed at $152 billion.

The analysis uses property data from the online real estate company Zillow combined with a peer-reviewed methodology developed by UCS for assessing areas at risk of frequent flooding. Using three sea level rise scenarios developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), UCS determined how many residential and commercial properties along the entire lower 48 coastline are at risk of becoming chronically inundated from high tides, flooding an average of 26 times per year or more, in the coming decades even in the absence of major storms. The core results in the report are from the high sea level rise scenario—an appropriately conservative projection to use when estimating risk to homes, which are often the owner’s single biggest asset.

“What’s striking as we look along our coasts is that the significant risks of sea level rise to properties identified in our study often aren’t reflected in current home values in coastal real estate markets,” said Rachel Cleetus, an economist and policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at UCS, as well as a report co-author. “Unfortunately, in the years ahead many coastal communities will face declining property values as risk perceptions catch up with reality. In contrast with previous housing market crashes, values of properties chronically inundated due to sea level rise are unlikely to recover and will only continue to go further underwater, literally and figuratively.”

The consequences of chronic flooding of properties in specific communities could translate not just into eroding property values, but also into unlivable houses and falling tax revenues that fund schools, roads and emergency services in those places. The properties at risk by 2045 currently house roughly 550,000 people and contribute nearly $1.5 billion toward today’s property tax base. These numbers jump to about 4.7 million people and $12 billion by 2100. Municipalities are looking at even deeper revenue declines when commercial property, sales, and other business tax losses are factored in.

“For some communities, the potential hit to the local tax base could be staggering,” said Kristy Dahl, senior climate scientist at UCS and report co-author. “Some smaller, more rural communities may see 30, 50, or even 70 percent of their property tax revenue at risk due to the number of chronically inundated homes. Tax base erosion could create particular challenges for communities already struggling with high poverty rates.”

According to the analysis, states with the most homes at risk by the end of the century are Florida, with about 1 million homes or more than 10 percent of the state’s current residential properties, New Jersey with 250,000 homes, and New York with 143,000 homes. States that could lose the most in home property values by 2100 are Florida at $351 billion, New Jersey at $108 billion, and New York at nearly $100 billion. Decreases in property values also mean a lower property tax base. Florida, New York and New Jersey will see the biggest hits to their annual property tax revenue with municipalities losing about $5 billion, $1.9 billion and $1.7 billion total respectively.

“Not all affected communities will share the same experience,” said Erika Spanger-Siegfried, senior analyst in the Climate and Energy Program at UCS and report co-author. “Some may see sharp adjustments to their housing market in the not-too-distant future; some could see a slow, steady decline in home values; and others could potentially invest in protective measures to keep impacts at bay for a few more decades. In any case, by knowing how much time they have before a significant number of properties will be regularly flooded, communities can start planning and implementing responses now, while they still have a range of options from which to choose.”

Economic consequences could also hit some communities harder than others. Nearly 175 communities would expect to see 10 percent or more of their homes at risk of chronic flooding by 2045, with nearly 60 of those communities experiencing poverty levels above the national average. Additionally, of the roughly 75 communities with 30 percent or more of their property tax base at risk, about one-third of these have poverty rates above the national average. The places that could be hit hardest in this way include communities in: Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, and North Carolina. Similarly, communities with large African American or Hispanic populations—many located in California, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina and Texas—could also be at an inherent disadvantage in taking steps to prevent or recover from chronic flooding, due to longstanding social and economic inequities.

“While wealthier homeowners may risk losing more of their net wealth cumulatively, less-wealthy ones are in jeopardy of losing a greater percentage of what they own,” said Cleetus. “Homes often represent a larger share of total assets for elderly or low-income residents. Renters too might find themselves in a tight market or having to put up with decaying buildings and increased nuisance flooding. Hits to the property tax base in low-income communities, which already experience significant underinvestment in critical services and infrastructure, could prove especially challenging.”

Meanwhile, the loss of coastal property values will have reverberations throughout the economy—affecting banks, insurers, investors, and developers—potentially triggering regional housing market crises or a more widespread economic crisis. Homeowners whose properties become chronically inundated could find themselves with mortgages that exceed the value of their homes, face steeply rising flood insurance premiums, or even default on their loans. Lenders carrying large numbers of these risky mortgages could lose money or eventually become insolvent, with smaller banks concentrated in regions with high flood risk being especially exposed. Coastal real estate investors and developers may similarly experience financial losses in some coastal areas.

“Actions today, especially the amount of global warming emissions we release, will help determine what our coasts will look like at the end of the century,” said Astrid Caldas, senior climate scientist at UCS and report co-author. “If we manage to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement by keeping warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius and if ice loss is limited, 85 percent of all affected residential properties—valued at $782 billion today and currently accounting for more than $10.4 billion in annual property tax revenue to municipal governments—could avoid chronic flooding this century. The longer we wait to drastically reduce emissions, the less likely it is that we will achieve this outcome.”

There are currently many well-intentioned federal, state and local policies that mask risk and create incentives that reinforce the status quo or even expose more people and property to risk. The market’s bias toward short-term decision-making and profits can also perpetuate risky investment choices. These flawed policies and incentives include inaccurate flood risk information, subsidized insurance, lax zoning and building codes, incentives for business-as-usual building and re-building, and incomplete credit ratings.

“Targeting improvements to the policies and market drivers of risky coastal development is essential to better protect communities and move the nation toward greater resilience,” said Shana Udvardy, climate resilience analyst at UCS and report co-author. “Short-sighted policies and market drivers will need to be phased-out to discourage risky behavior and to ensure changes won’t be too jarring on homeowners and the real estate market.”

To view the report PDF, click here.

Spreadsheets with data about the chronically inundated properties are available and can be sorted by state, by community (delineated by the Census Bureau as county subdivisions), and by ZIP code.

To use the interactive mapping tool, click here. The map allows you to learn more about the impact of chronic inundation on properties, people, home values and the tax base in specific states, communities or ZIP codes. When you zoom in, the maps become more detailed. You can also click on a specific state or community for more details about it.

For all other materials, including our methodology document, a compilation of interviews with additional experts on this topic, and Spanish-language materials, click here.

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-june-27-2018/

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-june-18-2018/

suggest glaciergate made sci gunshy, softened #?!

cf extreme cities ashley

Cities and Climate Change

How vulnerable are cities to the weather extremes unleashed by climate change? To what extent do rising sea levels and the “heat-island effect” threaten urban areas? Ashley Dawson contends that while contemporary urban life is increasingly fragile and risky, grassroots efforts to protect communities while addressing social inequities deserve our attention. Ashley Dawson, Extreme Cities:

3x speed

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/14/headlines/antarctic_ice_melt_speeding_up_threatening_coastal_cities_worldwide

===

beat gillespie

https://pilotonline.com/news/government/politics/virginia/article_9dd026f2-39af-557b-bbe6-8cbc980fe32b.html

e cover of Republican gubernatorial hopeful Ed Gillespie’s plan to combat sea level rise features a familiar scene: flooding around the Hague in Norfolk.

The Hague routinely floods during high tide and strong storms, and it is frequently featured in national news stories that demonstrate the real-world effects of climate change as sea levels rise and roads more frequently become impassable. Scientists say Hampton Roads is the community most vulnerable to sea level rise on the East Coast, and second in the nation only to New Orleans.

“This area flooded last October, and it’ll flood again this October and every October after that until we take action,” Gillespie says in a campaign video shot in front of the Hague with the Chrysler Museum of Art in the background.

But while Gillespie’s seven-page proposal seeks to address problems associated with sea level rise, it doesn’t mention what the scientific community has long considered the underlying cause: climate change.

The absence of the words “climate change,” “global warming” and “carbon emissions” from Gillespie’s plans to address flooding provides one of the starkest contrasts yet between him and his Democratic rival, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam.

Northam, a doctor who lives in Norfolk, says his plan to combat sea level rise starts with addressing global warming by reducing carbon emissions that scientists say are responsible for trapping heat in the atmosphere. Gillespie’s proposal primarily seeks to prevent flooding by providing low-interest loans to local governments to improve their infrastructure.

“This is like a doctor acknowledging a patient may have lung cancer, recognizing cigarette smoking may have caused it, but refusing to suggest that the patient quit smoking. When Ed finally acknowledges what scientists, including Dr. Northam, agree almost universally on the reality of climate change, perhaps he can come up with a plan that’s not just lip service,” Northam spokeswoman Ofirah Yheskel said in a statemen

bogus bs

jrnls

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/18/climate-denial-co2-coalition-trump-morner-funding-sea-level-research-dodgy-journals

A climate science denial group with links to President Trump’s administration has been funding work to sow doubt that low-lying islands in the Pacific are at risk from rising sea levels.

The two researchers being funded — one of which is a well-known climate science denier — have targeted little known “open access” journals with dubious quality controls to get their work published, DeSmog has found.

The CO2 Coalition funded the work and in March 2017 sent well-known climate science denier Nils-Axel Mörner to Fiji with Pamela Matlack-Klein, who has described herselfas having a degree from the “Oceanographic Center of Nova Southeastern University, Dania, Florida, in 1983” and writes a weekly newspaper column.

Trump Admin Links to the CO2 Coalition

Among the CO2 Coalition’s members is Kathleen Hartnett White — an energy and environment fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation who is Trump’s nominee to chair the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House group that helps coordinate environmental policy across the administration.

Trump has renominated Hartnett White, who also rejects any risk of human-caused climate change, after Senate hearings failed to confirm her for the post. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has said she is “wildly unqualified” for the role because she “outright rejects basic science.”

Retired Princeton physics professor William Happer, a director of the CO2 Coalition, was touted as a possible chief science advisor to the Trump White House. Happer also denies that increased levels of CO2 will be a problem for the planet. The CO2Coalition was caught in a sting by Greenpeace, in which Happer offered to route money from work for a ficticious fossil fuel company through the organization.

Telling Fiji Not to Worry

Mörner has produced at least six journal articles on the back of the Fiji trip, several co-written with Virginia-based researcher Matlack-Klein, and acknowledged the funding of the CO2 Coalition on several occasions. Matlack-Klein’s affiliation is given as the “Portuguese Sea Level Project, Appomattox, Virginia” but DeSmog could find no public record of the project. Klein did not respond to emails.

Mörner used his research to claim that concerns that Fijians had about rising sea levels were misplaced, and used the then-approaching United Nations climate talks hosted by Fiji (but held in Germany) last fall to publicize his work, writing an open letter to the country’s Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama.

DeSmog sent emails to Mörner, Klein, and Happer, who signs the CO2 Coalition’s tax forms, with questions about the research, but received no responses.

One leading Australian scientist, the geophysicist Professor Kurt Lambeck, reviewed several of the papers and said in his view, none would have been accepted to a recognized scientific journal with solid peer-review procedures.

Little Academic Standing

Mörner has been targeting fringe journals with official-sounding names but highly questionable quality controls, in order to publish the papers.

All the journals are “open access,” which means the scientists pay for their work to be published and the results are available to the public for free.

In October 2017, Mörner presented his findings alongside Matlack-Klein, at a climate meeting in Rome which, as DeSmog revealed, was hijacked by Mörner, who was on the organizing committee, and who listed several climate science deniers as speakers.

Kurt Lambeck, Professor of Geophysics at the Australian National University, said all of the papers had appeared in journals “of little academic standing” and that “none would have passed the reviewing process for more reputable journals.”

He said that two papers which appeared in journals published by a company called “Scientific Research Publishing” were “trivial” and added “no insight into either the evidence for sea-level change nor on coastal erosion processes” beyond what was already well known.

He said: “It is well understood that human influences are one of the most important contributors to changes in coastal erosion and does not need restatement in a scientific paper.”

A third paper was published in a little-known online journal with the title International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences. Lambeck said this paper should have been “rejected out of hand” because Mörner had presented no evidence to back up his claim.

In the paper Mörner argued that ocean levels were being driven by changes in solar winds that changed the rotation of the earth, causing ocean masses to shift towards or away from the poles depending on conditions on the sun. This, Mörner claimed, was the likely explanation for ocean levels around Fiji for 500 years.

Lambeck says he first heard Mörner make this general argument in 1979 during a symposium presentation where it was pointed out to him that the impacts of his proposed mechanisms were “improbable” but, even if they were present, were “orders of magnitude too small” to be effective on sea levels.

Lambeck says that significantly, in order for Mörner to make his arguments about changing sea levels, he had ignored other well-known research in respected journals. In particular, Mörner overlooks the findings that major changes in sea level had historically been driven by melting ice sheets and glaciers and also, in more recent times, by thermal expansion of the oceans.

Academic Paper or Angry Email?

A fourth paper reads more like an angry email to a colleague than a scientific journal article. It starts with a reference to a story in “The Mail” that Mörner claimed had shown that global temperature records held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were being manipulated to show global temperatures were rising.

Mörner is referring to claims supposedly made by a former NOAA employee, John Bates, and reported in the Daily Mail. Mörner does not refer to the many scientists who dismissed the claims of fraud — including Bates himself. He also ignores how the Independent Press Standards Organization ruled that the Daily Mail had “failed to take care over the accuracy of the article” and “had then failed to correct these significantly misleading statements,” a ruling which resulted in a 659-word correction to the article.

In this paper Mörner goes on to claim that sea level records derived from satellite measurement are also being nefariously and unethically manipulated, but offers no evidence.

Lambeck says that in this paper, Mörner quotes mainly from his own writings and ignores other multiple technical analyses that have carefully considered how issues with satellite and tide gauge measurements have been identified and checked. He also ignores the specific rebuttals by recognized experts in the field, refuting the very conclusions he had made.

“To simply compare the globaly average trend with a few short tide gauge records is something that no reasonable person would consider,” Lambeck said.

Lambeck concluded that Mörner was “not handicapped by knowledge of physical processes, not interested in testing his hypotheses even by simple order of magnitude calculations, nor in trying to understand what others may have written.”

'Predatory' Publishers?

So-called “open access” publishing brands have boomed in recent years, with hundreds of new titles appearing.

Many journals are based in either China or India and have names that resemble other, more legitimate journals.

Some people have characterized these journals as “predatory” due to the fees involved, in return for copy-editing services that are of questionable quality and, judging from the quality of some of the work which appears, a peer-review system that exists in name only.

Academics submitting research to these journals have to pay a fee for them to appear, creating a potential conflict where the publisher earns more cash when they encourage more researchers to publish.

This has seen journals spamming researchers around the world, encouraging them to submit articles, join editorial boards, or speak and attend conferences.

To avoid academics being caught out, many organizations have issued guidelines to members, such as the Council of Science Editors, The Royal Society of New Zealand, the World Association of Medical Editors, and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

In addition, academics have reported being named on editorial boards without their knowledge. One major publisher, OMICS International, based in Hyderabad, India, claims to run more than 700 peer-reviewed journals.

Open Access Publishers Caught in Stings

Mörner targeted five publishers for his work on the “Fiji New Sea Level Project,” which he wrote was “supported by a kind grant from the CO2 Coalition.”

The International Journal of Engineering Science and Invention offers to publish papers for just $75. The journal has no contact address, but is published by “Invention Journals” and has a Gmail address as a contact. The journal’s website and the publisher’s website were registered by a “Chetan Sharma” in Uttar Pradesh, India.

One Mörner paper, repeating identical arguments and observations from other papers, appeared in the Journal of Aquaculture & Marine Biology, published by MedCrave Group.

MedCrave Group’s published mailing address in Edmond, Oklahoma, matches that of a parcel service.

One MedCrave journal — Urology & Nephrology Open Access Journal — was exposed in a sting operation in April 2017, when an editor wrote a fake case report based on an episode of Seinfeld using the name of a character that appeared in the TV show. The paper was accepted and published by the journal, but was later removed.

Scientific Research Publishing, where two of Mörner’s articles appeared, was one of five publishers reviewed by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall, whose blog used to document and list suspected predatory journals until it was taken down in 2017. Scientific Research Publishing now discloses its origins as being in China.

Juniper Publishing Group, which published another of Mörner’s Fiji papers, lists a residential property in Simi Valley, California, as its contact address. The website was registered using a privacy service, concealing the name of the website creator. Beall has described Juniper as “rotten to the core” and a publisher “to be avoided by all researchers.”

Juniper was caught in another hoax, this time from Australian public health professor Mike Daube who created a fake academic profile based on the credentials of his pet dog and an affiliation with a fake veterinary school. Juniper’s “Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine” was one journal to accept “Dr. Olivia Doll” as a member of its editorial board.

Daube provided a picture of “Dr. Doll” to the journals — an image of Australian pop star Kylie Minogue. On its website, Juniper says the publisher “have been established with the aim of spreading quality scientific information to the research community throughout the universe.”

Another journal targeted by Mörner was the International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences, published by Graphy Publications, which gives an address in Bangalore, India, as a contact.

A barely legible webpage describing the journal’s aims says: “We encourage authors, who always have shown more interest to publish his work in the prestigious journals, and avail them the freely to the scientific community.”

Both Mörner and Matlack-Klein gave presentations to a conference for climate science deniers held in London in 2016 which was organized by the so-called Independent Committee on Geoethics (a group apparently set up to investigate climate scientists for fraud).

Mörner was a founder of that group, which includes as members two other Australia-based climate science deniers who reject the evidence of rising sea levels and have similarly targeted obscure journals with their work.

===

3/18 icn

Boston’s sea level rose about 9 inches last century, but it is on track to rise another 1.5 feet in just the first half of this century alone.

With every powerful storm that hits (and tomorrow will bring the fourth to the Atlantic Coast in a month), damages rise. And these events may be coming more often in the future: A warming Arctic is having the perverse effect of increasing extreme winter weather in the Northeast.

Meanwhile, San Francisco is facing a double whammy of sinking land and sea level rise.

All this, even as ICN reports that the Federal Emergency Management Agency dropped the words "sea level rise" and "climate change" from its new strategic plan. When billions of investment dollars are washed away in the next storm, what will be left?

===

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/18/climate-denial-co2-coalition-trump-morner-funding-sea-level-research-dodgy-journals

A climate science denial group with links to President Trump’s administration has been funding work to sow doubt that low-lying islands in the Pacific are at risk from rising sea levels.

Trump Admin Links to the CO2 Coalition

Telling Fiji Not to Worry

DeSmog sent emails to Mörner, Klein, and Happer, who signs the CO2 Coalition’s tax forms, with questions about the research, but received no responses.

Little Academic Standing

Mörner has been targeting fringe journals with official-sounding names but highly questionable quality controls, in order to publish the papers.

All the journals are “open access,” which means the scientists pay for their work to be published and the results are available to the public for free.

He said: “It is well understood that human influences are one of the most important contributors to changes in coastal erosion and does not need restatement in a scientific paper.”

Academic Paper or Angry Email?

A fourth paper reads more like an angry email to a colleague than a scientific journal article. It starts with a reference to a story in “The Mail” that Mörner claimed had shown that global temperature records held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were being manipulated to show global temperatures were rising.

Mörner is referring to claims supposedly made by a former NOAA employee, John Bates, and reported in the Daily Mail. Mörner does not refer to the many scientists who dismissed the claims of fraud — including Bates himself. He also ignores how the Independent Press Standards Organization ruled that the Daily Mail had “failed to take care over the accuracy of the article” and “had then failed to correct these significantly misleading statements,” a ruling which resulted in a 659-word correction to the article.

In this paper Mörner goes on to claim that sea level records derived from satellite measurement are also being nefariously and unethically manipulated, but offers no evidence.

Lambeck says that in this paper, Mörner quotes mainly from his own writings and ignores other multiple technical analyses that have carefully considered how issues with satellite and tide gauge measurements have been identified and checked. He also ignores the specific rebuttals by recognized experts in the field, refuting the very conclusions he had made.

“To simply compare the globaly average trend with a few short tide gauge records is something that no reasonable person would consider,” Lambeck said.

'Predatory' Publishers?

So-called “open access” publishing brands have boomed in recent years, with hundreds of new titles appearing.

Many journals are based in either China or India and have names that resemble other, more legitimate journals.

This has seen journals spamming researchers around the world, encouraging them to submit articles, join editorial boards, or speak and attend conferences.

To avoid academics being caught out, many organizations have issued guidelines to members, such as the Council of Science Editors, The Royal Society of New Zealand, the World Association of Medical Editors, and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

Open Access Publishers Caught in Stings

Mörner targeted five publishers for his work on the “Fiji New Sea Level Project,” which he wrote was “supported by a kind grant from the CO2 Coalition.”

The International Journal of Engineering Science and Invention offers to publish papers for just $75. The journal has no contact address, but is published by “Invention Journals” and has a Gmail address as a contact. The journal’s website and the publisher’s website were registered by a “Chetan Sharma” in Uttar Pradesh, India.

One Mörner paper, repeating identical arguments and observations from other papers, appeared in the Journal of Aquaculture & Marine Biology, published by MedCrave Group.

MedCrave Group’s published mailing address in Edmond, Oklahoma, matches that of a parcel service.

One MedCrave journal — Urology & Nephrology Open Access Journal — was exposed in a sting operation in April 2017, when an editor wrote a fake case report based on an episode of Seinfeld using the name of a character that appeared in the TV show. The paper was accepted and published by the journal, but was later removed.

Scientific Research Publishing, where two of Mörner’s articles appeared, was one of five publishers reviewed by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall, whose blog used to document and list suspected predatory journals until it was taken down in 2017. Scientific Research Publishing now discloses its origins as being in China.

Juniper Publishing Group, which published another of Mörner’s Fiji papers, lists a residential property in Simi Valley, California, as its contact address. The website was registered using a privacy service, concealing the name of the website creator. Beall has described Juniper as “rotten to the core” and a publisher “to be avoided by all researchers.”

Juniper was caught in another hoax, this time from Australian public health professor Mike Daube who created a fake academic profile based on the credentials of his pet dog and an affiliation with a fake veterinary school. Juniper’s “Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine” was one journal to accept “Dr. Olivia Doll” as a member of its editorial board.

Another journal targeted by Mörner was the International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences, published by Graphy Publications, which gives an address in Bangalore, India, as a contact.

Both Mörner and Matlack-Klein gave presentations to a conference for climate science deniers held in London in 2016 which was organized by the so-called Independent Committee on Geoethics (a group apparently set up to investigate climate scientists for fraud).

Mörner was a founder of that group, which includes as members two other Australia-based climate science deniers who reject the evidence of rising sea levels and have similarly targeted obscure journals with their work.

==

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21022018/sea-level-rise-coastal-wetlands-global-warming-mitigation-wildlife-habitat-storm-surge-usgs

audio interview:https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-20-2017/

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-water-will-come-jeff-goodell-sea-level-rise-2017-10

...Miami, New York, Tokyo, Mumbai, Lagos, Los Angeles — look anywhere in the world and humanity has decided that the places we want to congregate look out to sea. Close to 40% of the US population lives in coastal counties. Many of the most expensive and desirable locations in coastal cities are the ones with the best access to the ocean.

But these oceanside places are becoming more and more vulnerable to rising seas, as journalist Jeff Goodell details in his new book, "The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World."

Goodell's book is a journey to the cities and towns around the globe that are trying to figure out how to adapt to sea levels that are continuing to rise. He travels to small Alaskan villages, to the megacity of Lagos on the coast of West Africa, and returns throughout the book to Miami, one of the urban areas that best demonstrates the many challenges of trying to keep the ocean at bay.

...

https://www.alternet.org/environment/game-thrones-youll-love-game-floods

Like Game of Thrones? You'll Love Game of Floods

California, 2050. Doomed island dwellers face imminent climate disaster. What would Daenerys do?

Rising Seas Are Flooding Virginia’s Naval Base, and There’s No Plan to Fix It 10/17.

icn

5 Years After Sandy: Vulnerable Red Hook Is Booming, Right at the Water's Edge

also https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23102017/nyc-sea-level-storm-surge-climate-change-building-codes-sandy**

https://ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Sea_Level_Rise#Stories.2FReports

===

climate disruption parenti tropic of chaos author 9/17 harney irma

https://kpfa.org/episode/behind-the-news-september-7-2017/

===

https://www.ecowatch.com/california-sue-big-oil-2461364159.html

California Counties Sue Big Oil for Sea Level Rise Damages

Three California municipalities filed lawsuits Monday against 37 of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies, including Chevron, Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell. The legal challenges, brought by Marin and San Mateo counties and the city of Imperial Beach, allege that the companies knew about the harm of burning fossil fuels and therefore should pay for current and future damages to the municipalities due to climate change.

The suit also alleges the fossil fuel companies launched a "coordinated, multi-front effort" to discredit climate science and spread doubt.

"Sea level rise is here and we're experiencing it first hand in Marin, as roadways continually flood with king tides and storms," Marin County Supervisor Kate Sears said in a statement.

As reported by the Marin Independent Journal, Sears was asked if the lawsuits were inspired by litigation against the tobacco industry that state attorneys general initiated in the 1990s:

"You could certainly think of it that way, because a lot of what these fossil fuel companies did was modeled after what the tobacco companies did."

"Instead of taking steps to actually do something about the impact of their product," Sears said, "they launched this multimillion dollar lobbying campaign to discredit scientific evidence about climate change."

For a deeper dive:

AP, Marin Independent Journal, SF Gate, CBS SF, SF Weekly, San Diego Union Tribune. Commentary: Sabin Center, Michael Burger analysis

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24012017/sea-level-rise-global-warming-federal-report-donald-trump

New federal estimates say global sea levels could rise faster than previously thought, and the rise may be even worse in many coastal regions of the United States.

A new report, written by scientists with several federal agencies and universities, says that under a worst-case scenario, climate change couldraise the oceans an average of more than 8 feet by 2100, about 20 inches more than aprevious federal estimate published in 2012. The best case now projected would be an average of about a foot.

The report was delivered just as President Donald Trump took office, immediately working to undo President Barack Obama's climate policies. On his inauguration day, pages mentioning climate change on whitehouse.gov were removed. Trump has promised policies to increase fossil fuel development in the U.S., and to undo Obama's major emissions-cutting initiative, the Clean Power Plan.

Sea level rise will likely be worse in some regions of the U.S. because of ocean currents, wind patterns and settling sediments. The authors examined six scenarios with a range of probabilities in an effort to help state and local governments plan for sea level rise. Under all of them, theNortheast should expect higher waters than much of the rest of the globe. The Pacific Northwest and Alaska would likely experience lower-than-average increases under the best-case scenarios.

"The ocean's not flat," said William V. Sweet, one of the authors and a scientist at NOAA. "It's not going to rise like water in a bathtub."

The six scenarios are based on United Nations models of future greenhouse gas emissions, depending on whether countries rapidly slash pollution or continue burning fossil fuels as usual. The authors determined that the worst-case rise of more than 8 feet has only a 0.1 percent chance of occurring by 2100, even under a business-as-usual emissions scenario, but a rise of more than 1.5 feet is near certain with high emissions.

The increase in the estimates for global sea rise was partly due to new research on the Antarctic ice sheet, which is melting faster and appears to be more fragile than previously estimated, suggesting that some of the more pessimistic scenarios are increasingly likely.

The report also warned that moderate coastal flooding will become 25 times more likely with a 14-inch rise in the seas. That level could come anytime from 2030 to 2080 for most coastal cities, depending on their location and the world's emissions. It would mean that a flood that now comes once every five years would be expected five times a year.

Sea levels have already risen by more than 8 inches globally since 1880, with 3 inches coming since 1993. Tidal flooding "has increased by an order of magnitude over the past several decades," the report says, "turning it from a rare event into a recurrent and disruptive problem."

The authors note that 2 million Americans would likely see their homes permanently flooded if sea levels rise 3 feet. Twice that increase would inundate the homes of 6 million. Only the rosiest scenarios would avoid a 3-foot rise by 2100. The effects of global warming, of course, will continue long beyond that year.

"Even if society sharply reduces emissions in the coming decades," the authors write, "sea level will most likely continue to rise for centuries."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

http://www.ecowatch.com/louisiana-sea-level-rise-2178631264.html

http://www.alternet.org/environment/heres-how-rising-sea-will-remake-coastlines-endangered-us-states-and-drown-much-world

Here's How the Rising Sea Will Remake the Coastlines of Endangered U.S. States and Drown Much of the World We Know :The rising seas are caused by the additional water coming from melting land ice, as well as the expansion of seawater, which happens when it warms. Since reliable record keeping began in 1880, the global sea level has risen by approximately 8 inches. Scientists project that by 2100, the ocean may rise an additional 1 to 4 feet. And it won't stop there, says NASA, "because the oceans take a very long time to respond to warmer conditions at the Earth’s surface."

Making matters worse, storm surges from an increase in extreme weather—again, a product of manmade climate change—will likely increase flooding in regions already impacted by sea level rise. In many areas, these surges could push sea levels to at least 4 feet above high tide by 2030. By 2050, threatened areas hit by serious storms could experience surges up to 5 feet higher than high tide.

And that’s not all. Almost unbelievably, the Greenland and Arctic ice sheets are so massive that they actually exert a gravitational pull on the ocean, causing even higher sea levels for nearby coastlines to deal with.

According to Climate Central, an independent environment nonprofit, "Carbon emissions causing 4°C of warming—what business-as-usual points toward today—could lock in enough sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people, with unstoppable rise unfolding over centuries.

===

http://www.ecowatch.com/exxon-lawsuit-mystic-river-2024418598.html

ExxonMobil is facing a first-of-its-kind lawsuit for failing to account for the risks from climate change to its fuel storage terminal outside Boston. The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) claims that sea level rise and accompanying storm surges could damage the facility and lead to further pollution of the Mystic River.

....

zillow cf trexler 900b$ worth of houses at risk 2100 6 ft

http://climatographer.com/whats-new-video/

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/15032016/native-americans-federal-funds-isle-de-jean-charles-relocation-climate-change-sea-level-rise

Native American Tribe Gets Federal Funds to Flee Rising Seas

In a disappearing section of Louisiana coastline, the people who call Isle De Jean Charles home are moving to save their community and culture.

BY DAVID HASEMYER, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS

MAR 16, 2016

Isle De Jean Charles has been slowly disappearing under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico since the 1950s. Credit: Karen Apricot

The sacred land in coastal Louisiana that a small community of Native Americans has called home for more than a century has been all but swallowed by the rising sea, leaving residents with little dry ground and a fear they will lose their heritage.

Now a $48 million federal grant will allow the band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians of Isle de Jean Charles to move away from their vanishing home. The funding for the relocation will make the tribe one of the first—and so far the largest—populations in the United States to be resettled because of climate change.

The money, from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is part of a program designed to make communities more disaster-resistant. For the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians, that means moving their whole community north to higher ground when a suitable site is identified in the next several years.

The slice of land that has supported the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians through trapping fishing, and agriculture for 170 years is rapidly being swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico.

Since the 1950s, the tribe has lost 98 percent of its land to rising sea levels, coastal erosion and flooding. The island, about 50 miles south of New Orleans, once covered 15,000 acres, but the land has eroded to a tiny strip measuring a quarter-mile wide by a half-mile long, according to a report by Northern Arizona University.

3/16 fla primary pundit sez reg ppl know, vs base and gov

13 Million Americans at Risk From Rising Sea Levels

http://ecowatch.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=214ab5fbb3f6015d74ffab4ec&id=905c91d121&e=c2e8fdabfa

More than 13 millions Americans could be at risk from sea level rise and...

exec order but gop congr did not fight?

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/11012016/congress-climate-change-omnibus-budget-bill-flood-standard-obama

President Obama's plan to safeguard the nation from increasing flood risk due to climate change was quietly green-lighted by Congress last month in the 2016 omnibus budget bill.

It marks one of the only actions Congress took on global warming in all of 2015, and it came as a surprise considering the longstanding opposition from Republicans. And it is a critical one, several policy experts said. It will impact billions of dollars of federally funded construction projects across the country, from highways and bridges to hospitals and housing complexes, at a time when flooding in the U.S. is getting worse every year because of climate change.

"The policy illustrates the awareness that we should not build things that are vulnerable to flooding now or in the future," said Rob Moore, a policy analyst and director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Water and Climate Team. "That may not seem like a revolutionary idea, but unfortunately it is. We have a long history of building things that easily get soggy."

Obama's plan, executive order No. 13690, mandates that all federally funded projects located in a floodplain be built higher and stronger than previously required. It is the first update to the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard since the policy was created 38 years ago. It applies to both new construction and rebuilding following a disaster.

Under the old standards, enacted by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, buildings in the floodplain had to be elevated to the 100-year flood level. Under Obama's executive order, buildings must now be elevated 2 or 3 feet above the 100-year flood level (the higher standard is for "critical" infrastructure, like hospitals), or at the 500-year flood level. A third option is for federal agencies to analyze future climate change scenarios and build according to those projections, such as for sea level rise or expected heavier rain events....

al was right?

Anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) has progressed to a point where it is, literally, changing one of the most important ocean circulatory currents in the world.

In a paper recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, NASA researchers confirmed that the circulation of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is slowing down. In 2009 and 2010 that shifting had already been linked to a sudden and extreme five-inch sea level rise on the East Coast.

While most people have likely never heard of the AMOC, it plays a critical role in both global climate patterns and sea level rise along the Eastern Seaboard of the US – and it is being changed for the worse due to our carbon dioxide emissions.

Before we can fully comprehend the ramifications of what is happening with this ocean current system, a basic understanding of the AMOC is in order.

“When the AMOC is changed, it has significant impacts on the weather in Europe, along with other places.”

The AMOC is a flow of warm, salty water that starts in the tropics and runs northward into the high latitudes, where the air is much colder and extracts heat from it. The water releases its heat to warm Europe. The water then cools, which causes it to become denser and sink. The cold water then cycles back southward, and the circulation continues. The AMOC keeps the United Kingdom warmer than it typically would be, given the relatively high latitude of the country. It also plays a role in determining sea level along the eastern United States.

But the AMOC is receiving massive influxes of cold water from the Greenland ice sheet, which is now melting in dramatic fashion, according to NASA.

Dr. Thomas Delworth, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, notes the direct effect of changes in ocean circulation on weather.

“When the AMOC is changed, it has significant impacts on the weather in Europe, along with other places,” Delworth told Truthout.

One of those impacts that we are already seeing play out dramatically is sea level rise along the United States’ East Coast....

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/climate-disruption-amplifies-atlantic-currents-contribution-to-sea-level-rise/

Pacsific Islands Make Last-Ditch Plea to World Before

http://www.alternet.org/environment/pacific-islands-make-last-ditch-plea-world-paris-climate-change-talkParis Climate Change Talks

http://www.alternet.org/environment/slow-motion-disaster-new-york-prepares-six-feet-sea-level-rise

http://www.alternet.org/environment/rising-sea-levels-will-overtake-hundreds-american-cities

http://ecowatch.com/2015/08/27/sea-level-rise-nasa/

Sea Level Rising Faster Than Expected, NASA Warns

http://ecowatch.com/2015/06/19/alaska-fires-glaciers-melting

Climate change has caused Alaska’s glaciers to melt so quickly that a one-foot thick layer ofwater could completely cover the entire state of Alaska every seven years, according to a newstudy.[nice animation)

Alaskan glaciers have lost 75 billion metric tons of ice every year from 1994 through 2013, *The Washington Post*′s Chris Mooney reported from the study, which was recently accepted for publication in the peer-reviewedGeophysical Research Letters,a journal of the American Geophysical Union. Mooney also reported that the Columbia Glacier (see GIF above) alone has been sending 4 billion metric tons of water into the oceans every year.

Alaska’s melting glaciers are “punching far above their weight” when it comes to contributing to sea level rise, CBS News‘s Michael Casey pointed out, referring to how Alaska only holds one percent of the Earth’s glacial ice volume, with most of the Earth’s ice found in Antarctica and Greenland’s ice sheets.

But as the authors of the new study explained, “Despite Greenland’s ice covered area being 20 times greater than that of Alaska, losses in Alaska were fully one third of the total loss from the ice sheet during 2005-2010.”

For the study, a University of Alaska Fairbanks and U.S. Geological Survey research team analyzed surveys of 116 glaciers in the Alaska region across 19 years to estimate ice loss from melting and iceberg calving, according to a news release.

“Thinking about the future, it means that rates of loss from Alaska are unlikely to decline, since surface melt is the predominant driver, and summer temperatures are expected to continue to increase,” said Chris Larsen, a research associate professor with the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and lead author of the study.

“There is a lot of momentum in the system, and Alaska will continue to be a major driver of global sea level change in upcoming decades,” he added....

http://www.alternet.org/environment/sorry-deniers-sea-level-rise-accelerating-just-climate-science-predicts

SPECIAL REPORT - Louisiana tribe renews fight for federal recognition in the face of sinking lands, environmental disasters

By Allie Yee

On the fifth anniversary of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the United Houma Nation (UHN) of southern Louisiana is taking yet another stand in its 30-year campaign to win recognition, launching a petition this week calling on the Obama administration to support the tribe's fight for federal recognition.

The UHN is an indigenous tribe with 17,000 members residing in a six-parish area along the Gulf Coast where the land is literally slipping away from under them. Due to coastal erosion, southern Louisiana is losing over 16 square miles of land per year, or the equivalent of one football field every hour.

"The United Houma Nation is severely affected by coastal erosion, sea-level rise, and the lack of corporate and government accountability around the pollution of their traditional lands and waters," the petition states. "A lack of federal recognition limits how the Houma people can protect the delicate marsh, swamp and bayou ecosystems to sustain their food subsistence, cultural practices and economic livelihood."

The Gulf Coast has been eroding for decades due to levee building, oil pipelines that cut through coastal marshland and sea-level rise, but the BP oil disaster of 2010 exacerbated the situation, tribal members say. When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and released over 3 million barrels of crude into the Gulf, the oil flowed into coastal wetlands, hurting fisheries critical to the local economy and culture and further contributing to erosion.

"The Gulf drilling disaster is an absolute threat to who we are as Houma people and our way of life," Principal Chief Thomas Dardar said in a statement. "Our homeland and the health of our people are at risk as we deal with the long-term effects of this catastrophe."...

http://org2.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=QTsdtwKUQJ3eKyDlFB%2FWbRkCmveYE8TI

overpeck u az foia'd

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21461.full

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/lousiana-has-a-crazy-plan-to-save-its-sinking-coastline/

http://www.propublica.org/article/as-need-for-new-flood-maps-rises-congress-and-obama-cut-funding

As the United States grows warmer and extreme weather more common, the federal government’s flood insurance maps are becoming increasingly important.

The maps, drawn by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, dictate the monthly premiums millions of American households pay for flood insurance. They are also designed to give homeowners and buyers the latest understanding of how likely their communities are to flood.

The government’s response to the rising need for accurate maps? It’s slashed funding for them.

Congress has cut funding for updating flood maps by more than half since 2010, from $221 million down to $100 million this year. And the president’s latest budget request would slash funding for mapping even further to $84 million — a drop of 62 percent over the last four years.