...America and the world are getting more frequent and bigger multibillion dollar tropical catastrophes like Hurricane Laura, which is menacing the U.S. Gulf Coast, because of a combination of increased coastal development, natural climate cycles, reductions in air pollution and man-made climate change, experts say.
nytimes.com - by Christopher Flavelle - June 19, 2019
As disaster costs keep rising nationwide, a troubling new debate has become urgent: If there’s not enough money to protect every coastal community from the effects of human-caused global warming, how should we decide which ones to save first?
After three years of brutal flooding and hurricanes in the United States, there is growing consensus among policymakers and scientists that coastal areas will require significant spending to ride out future storms and rising sea levels — not in decades, but now and in the very near future. There is also a growing realization that some communities, even sizable ones, will be left behind.
Sea levels are rising. Tides are inching higher. High-tide floods are becoming more frequent and reaching farther inland. And hundreds of US coastal communities will soon face chronic, disruptive flooding that directly affects people's homes, lives, and properties.
Yet property values in most coastal real estate markets do not currently reflect this risk. And most homeowners, communities, and investors are not aware of the financial losses they may soon face.
This analysis looks at what's at risk for US coastal real estate from sea level rise—and the challenges and choices we face now and in the decades to come.
thinkprogress.org - by Joe Romm - January 15, 2019
A stunning new study on Antarctic sea ice collapse greatly raises the risk of a 10-foot sea level rise this century if President Donald Trump’s climate policies aren’t quickly reversed.
Warming ocean waters drove a 6-fold increase in annual ice mass loss from the Antarctic ice sheet between 1979 and 2017, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It’s been known for a while that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) was unstable and collapsing at an accelerating rate due to global warming. But the new study finds that parts of the vastly larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) are also disintegrating.
Sea level rise contributions from ice melt in different areas, including Greenland (a), West Antarctica (b), East Antarctica (c) and median of global glaciers (d). Values are ratios of regional sea level change to global mean sea level change. Adapted from Kopp et al. 2015.
axios.com - by Andrew Freedman - June 14, 2018
News of Antarctica's accelerating ice melt garnered worldwide headlines yesterday, as scientists revealed that 3 trillion tons of ice has been lost to the sea since 1992 — mostly from the thawing West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Antarctic Peninsula.
Why it matters: The location of the ice melt is important for determining the future of coastal communities, according to climate scientists. And, due to West Antarctica melting, it turns out that the U.S. coastline will be hit extra hard . . .
This satellite photograph depicts the wildfire raging in Greenland, as seen from space last week. - NASA Earth Observatory
phys.org - August 14, 2017
Police in Greenland warned people to stay away from western areas of the island as wildfires scorched swathes of scrubland . . .
. . . Denmark's meteorological service BMI said the island registered its hottest-ever temperature of 24.8 degrees (77 Fahrenheit) on August 10.
Last year was Greenland's hottest on record.
The Danish territory has lost about 4,000 gigatons of ice since 1995, British researchers said in June, making ice melt on the huge island the biggest single contributor to rising sea levels.
The records highlighted in the "State of the Climate in 2016" report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sound ominous.
• Global land surface temperatures last year were highest in 137 years of record keeping.
• Sea surface temperatures were also at their highest.
• Sea levels were at record highs in the 24 years that satellite record keeping has been used.
• Greenhouse gas marks rose faster than any year and carbon dioxide readings were above a 400 parts per million average for the year for the first time.
For the past several years, scientists have been trying to get people to wake up to the dangers that lie ahead in rising seas due to climate change. A comprehensive list now names hundreds of US cities, large and small, that may not make it through the next 20, 50 or 80 years due to sea level rise . . .
. . . If you live along the coast, your city could be one of them -- meaning you could be part of the last generation to call it home.
"This research hones in on exactly how sea level rise is hitting us first. The number of people experiencing chronic floods will grow much more quickly than sea level itself," Benjamin Strauss, Vice President for Sea Level and Climate Impacts at Climate Central said in reaction to this study.
An estimated 2 billion people will be displaced from their homes by 2100 due to climate-driven rising seas, a new study says.
Roughly one-fifth of the world's population may become climate change refugees, according to Cornell University. The majority of those will be people who live on coastlines around the world, including about 2 million in Florida alone.
