Climate change is already here
July 6, 2016 11:21 AM Subscribe
Should the United States Save Tangier Island From Oblivion? (New York Times) "...she built the house in a place where the bay was steadily advancing on her backyard every year, usually by about a dozen feet."
I've been to Tangier, we should save it just for the accents of its residents.
Tangier's population has been declining for a while as the kids split for the mainland when they come of age. Very few desire to stick around to be Watermen. I'd hope we can come up with solutions that save Tangier and everybody else, but if we have to start picking and choosing it's hard to make an argument that Tangier should be a priority save.
There is no better place to get a soft shell crab sandwich though.
posted by COD at 11:45 AM on July 6, 2016 [5 favorites]
Tangier's population has been declining for a while as the kids split for the mainland when they come of age. Very few desire to stick around to be Watermen. I'd hope we can come up with solutions that save Tangier and everybody else, but if we have to start picking and choosing it's hard to make an argument that Tangier should be a priority save.
There is no better place to get a soft shell crab sandwich though.
posted by COD at 11:45 AM on July 6, 2016 [5 favorites]
This just struck me because while everyone knows it's going to happen, it's still a shock (to me anyway) to see it actually taking place. And quickly too.
posted by freakazoid at 11:46 AM on July 6, 2016
posted by freakazoid at 11:46 AM on July 6, 2016
Tangier — population 470 — is steadfastly working class, with a median household income of about $40,000.
Too few people, and not rich enough to matter to the powers that be. I predict they will be left to sink, and used as a precedent for similar future situations. Unless there are millionaires' summer homes involved, of course. In that case, saving them will be "the right thing to do."
posted by Thorzdad at 11:46 AM on July 6, 2016 [8 favorites]
Too few people, and not rich enough to matter to the powers that be. I predict they will be left to sink, and used as a precedent for similar future situations. Unless there are millionaires' summer homes involved, of course. In that case, saving them will be "the right thing to do."
posted by Thorzdad at 11:46 AM on July 6, 2016 [8 favorites]
Although it's not mentioned in the article, Tangier is only one of several inhabited islands in the Chesapeake facing a similar fate - Smith Island being the other one that gets a decent amount of press. The number of houses directly on the Bay and its tributaries on the mainland has to be in the thousands. It's just going to be a disaster for the entire region, and finish the job of destroying what little of its unique culture the Bay Bridge and tourism haven't already killed off.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:47 AM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by ryanshepard at 11:47 AM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
This question already has precedent...also from the times. The ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La
posted by Agent_X_ at 11:48 AM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Agent_X_ at 11:48 AM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Too few people, and not rich enough to matter to the powers that be.
Oh, I don't know, former Attorney General and failed gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli owns an oyster farm out there last I checked, that might count for something. Perhaps he can start up a side business in denying that his neighbors' land is disappearing.
posted by indubitable at 12:00 PM on July 6, 2016 [4 favorites]
Oh, I don't know, former Attorney General and failed gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli owns an oyster farm out there last I checked, that might count for something. Perhaps he can start up a side business in denying that his neighbors' land is disappearing.
posted by indubitable at 12:00 PM on July 6, 2016 [4 favorites]
If you converted the foundations of all buildings within 1m of sea level, all over the globe, into miniature tidal power generation plants, I wonder how much power you could be producing by 2100.
Too late even if it wasn't too little, but think of all the environmental permitting you could avoid by building tidal generation capacity on dry land and nearly-dry land ahead of time. Then you could also set up an irony options and futures market to monetize all of the resulting cognitive dissonance.
posted by XMLicious at 12:08 PM on July 6, 2016 [10 favorites]
Too late even if it wasn't too little, but think of all the environmental permitting you could avoid by building tidal generation capacity on dry land and nearly-dry land ahead of time. Then you could also set up an irony options and futures market to monetize all of the resulting cognitive dissonance.
posted by XMLicious at 12:08 PM on July 6, 2016 [10 favorites]
Well, if the sea takes Ken Cuccinelli, I'm willing to give up Tangier's unique cultural history and ecological diversity. Sacrifices must be made...
posted by Naberius at 12:09 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Naberius at 12:09 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
This Inspires me to look into the ramifications and requirements of resettling entire communities, because it sure seems like a losing battle to try to preserve tiny, disintegrating islands like Tangier with so little money or political will. I get the feeling that as this problem spreads and worsens, the moral/financial calculus is going to lean toward gifting every Tangier resident with a unit in a housing project in Wyoming or North Dakota.
posted by ejs at 12:14 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by ejs at 12:14 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
And a job working in the coal mines!
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 12:20 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 12:20 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Well, there is a relatively recent precedent for resettlement in North America -- Newfoundland had a massive resettlement of communities after confederation, when they shut down many of the outports. 300 communities, 30,000 people, centuries of history and tradition.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:20 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:20 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
We already have a precedent for relocating people from a no longer inhabitable town. Over the next century the coasts will be dotted with new Centralias.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:27 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:27 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
An old co-worker moved out to Florida to work in real estate and I had to restrain myself from saying "better make your money fast and get out." People are in complete denial about what rising seas mean.
posted by emjaybee at 12:29 PM on July 6, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by emjaybee at 12:29 PM on July 6, 2016 [9 favorites]
Over the next century the coasts will be dotted with new Centralias.
More likely the coasts will be dotted with signs pointing to where those towns used to be before the ocean claimed them.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:31 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
More likely the coasts will be dotted with signs pointing to where those towns used to be before the ocean claimed them.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:31 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
Well I suppose I will take my big sack of money and bid you farewell. Climate change is nonsense, it's all scare mongering. All these facts and evidence you cite is empty politics. I'm taking this cash down to Wall Street in my canoe.
posted by adept256 at 1:09 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by adept256 at 1:09 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Unfortunately, the US has already written off Miami. Tangier probably won't be a priority either.
posted by Cookiebastard at 1:10 PM on July 6, 2016
posted by Cookiebastard at 1:10 PM on July 6, 2016
We already have a precedent for relocating people from a no longer inhabitable town. Over the next century the coasts will be dotted with new Centralias.
Yeah, where they forcibly removed the last residents who wanted to stay, despite knowing the risks. Great.
posted by Melismata at 1:11 PM on July 6, 2016
Yeah, where they forcibly removed the last residents who wanted to stay, despite knowing the risks. Great.
posted by Melismata at 1:11 PM on July 6, 2016
I suspect there will be no money for appropriately abandoning Miami, South Florida, Southern Louisiana, or any of the hundreds of areas with toxic waste sites, buried gas tanks, impoundments of industrial waste and sludge, landfills, etc, all to be left - I predict - to be excavated by the surf and released into our increasingly toxic ocean. And, this prediction leaves aside the buildings and other structures which will undoubtedly be left as half-sunken monuments to human venality and stupidity.
posted by sudogeek at 1:18 PM on July 6, 2016 [15 favorites]
posted by sudogeek at 1:18 PM on July 6, 2016 [15 favorites]
To sum up from the article, Tangier's problem involves a confluence of factors that are all acting to raise the water or sink/erode the land:
1. Net thermal expansion of seawater, global effect
2. Melting of icecaps, global effect
3. Erosion from northern Chesapeake currents, local effect
4. Weakening of Gulf Stream, regional effect
5. Isostatic adjustment, a.k.a. 'forebulge collapse' (affects areas south of the former Laurentide ice sheet), regional effect
6. Erosion from intensifying precipitation patterns associated with greenhouse warming, regional effect
The district commander, Col. Jason Kelly, told me that some of the reflexive tendencies of the corps to build big dams and dikes — the old rallying cry, as he put it, of “Let’s get the concrete going!” — are now enhanced by holistic (and, often, cheaper) ways of managing floodwaters, by installing natural defenses like marshlands and dunes, say.
Good. No landscape is permanent, and hard defenses tend to be fools' errands. Admittedly, some landscapes -- say, parts of the Great Plains or Western Australia -- are not changing very quickly by human standards, though even topographic stasis does not by any means imply ecological or climatic stasis. But coastal landscapes are among the least permanent, and even among coastal regions, Tangier is probably one of the worst cases for all the reasons listed above. Mega engineering projects that provide hard defenses against water encroachment tend to be wildly expensive, and what's worse is that if (when) they do fail, the effects are worse than if they had never been built at all. We saw it with the levees in New Orleans, and we will probably see more of it downstream of dams and behind seawalls when the waters eventually breach them.
The corps exists within a larger government system that focuses more on storm repairs than on preparation and adaptation, and there seems to be no immediate prospect for creating a national organization that can proactively address the coastal problems caused by climate change.
This is similar to the 'fire borrowing' problem faced by the US Forest Service in fighting wildfires. In 2015, for instance, for the first time in the Forest Service's history, more than 50% of its budget went into putting out fires. The problem is that wildfires are getting so widespread that the Forest Service has to siphon money away from fire prevention measures just to put out the fires that are already burning.
“It’s just a sad fact that we can’t spend an infinite amount of money defending the coast,” Michael Oppenheimer, the Princeton professor, says. “And the concept of retreat, which is sort of un-American, has to be normalized. It has to become part of the culture. Because there are some places where we’re really going to have to retreat.”
Yup. Trying to manage nature almost always has unforeseen negative consequences, because for all our knowledge we still don't really know how changing one variable can tip lots of other variables. In today's New York Times, you can also read about Cape Cod's more reasonable approach to dealing with coastal dynamism: cutting its losses and retreating from the seashore. I know that it's very easy for me to blithely advise retreating, because I'm not personally invested in a place like Tangier; I don't have roots there, I don't live there, I am not bound to it culturally or socially or financially like its residents are. But nonetheless, the inescapable fact is that flood waters do not give a shit about your unique cultural heritage or how much you love your home. Even if that seawall gets built, how long will it last before that one catastrophic flood breaches it? Ten years, fifty years, a hundred years? When you consider that isostatic rebound happens on scales of thousands to tens of thousands of years -- when the oceans' mixing time dictates that climatic disequilibrium will continue to propagate for thousands of years, independently of further glacial melting -- how long are you prepared to delay the inevitable?
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 1:26 PM on July 6, 2016 [13 favorites]
1. Net thermal expansion of seawater, global effect
2. Melting of icecaps, global effect
3. Erosion from northern Chesapeake currents, local effect
4. Weakening of Gulf Stream, regional effect
5. Isostatic adjustment, a.k.a. 'forebulge collapse' (affects areas south of the former Laurentide ice sheet), regional effect
6. Erosion from intensifying precipitation patterns associated with greenhouse warming, regional effect
The district commander, Col. Jason Kelly, told me that some of the reflexive tendencies of the corps to build big dams and dikes — the old rallying cry, as he put it, of “Let’s get the concrete going!” — are now enhanced by holistic (and, often, cheaper) ways of managing floodwaters, by installing natural defenses like marshlands and dunes, say.
Good. No landscape is permanent, and hard defenses tend to be fools' errands. Admittedly, some landscapes -- say, parts of the Great Plains or Western Australia -- are not changing very quickly by human standards, though even topographic stasis does not by any means imply ecological or climatic stasis. But coastal landscapes are among the least permanent, and even among coastal regions, Tangier is probably one of the worst cases for all the reasons listed above. Mega engineering projects that provide hard defenses against water encroachment tend to be wildly expensive, and what's worse is that if (when) they do fail, the effects are worse than if they had never been built at all. We saw it with the levees in New Orleans, and we will probably see more of it downstream of dams and behind seawalls when the waters eventually breach them.
The corps exists within a larger government system that focuses more on storm repairs than on preparation and adaptation, and there seems to be no immediate prospect for creating a national organization that can proactively address the coastal problems caused by climate change.
This is similar to the 'fire borrowing' problem faced by the US Forest Service in fighting wildfires. In 2015, for instance, for the first time in the Forest Service's history, more than 50% of its budget went into putting out fires. The problem is that wildfires are getting so widespread that the Forest Service has to siphon money away from fire prevention measures just to put out the fires that are already burning.
“It’s just a sad fact that we can’t spend an infinite amount of money defending the coast,” Michael Oppenheimer, the Princeton professor, says. “And the concept of retreat, which is sort of un-American, has to be normalized. It has to become part of the culture. Because there are some places where we’re really going to have to retreat.”
Yup. Trying to manage nature almost always has unforeseen negative consequences, because for all our knowledge we still don't really know how changing one variable can tip lots of other variables. In today's New York Times, you can also read about Cape Cod's more reasonable approach to dealing with coastal dynamism: cutting its losses and retreating from the seashore. I know that it's very easy for me to blithely advise retreating, because I'm not personally invested in a place like Tangier; I don't have roots there, I don't live there, I am not bound to it culturally or socially or financially like its residents are. But nonetheless, the inescapable fact is that flood waters do not give a shit about your unique cultural heritage or how much you love your home. Even if that seawall gets built, how long will it last before that one catastrophic flood breaches it? Ten years, fifty years, a hundred years? When you consider that isostatic rebound happens on scales of thousands to tens of thousands of years -- when the oceans' mixing time dictates that climatic disequilibrium will continue to propagate for thousands of years, independently of further glacial melting -- how long are you prepared to delay the inevitable?
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 1:26 PM on July 6, 2016 [13 favorites]
Dryland is a myth.
posted by valkane at 1:39 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by valkane at 1:39 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
As a resident of New OrleansVenice, I'll be watching with interest. We have a 30-year mortgage and talk often about what we're going to do if things get any worse. We've got sinkholes, water and sewerage issues, and the river keeps wanting to cut through the Atchafalaya Basin.
posted by domo at 1:40 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by domo at 1:40 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
If you're asking, the answer is no. I've watched similar issues pop up over the years here in west coast central Florida and the same folks building on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico and in the swamps are the same ones who largely believe climate change is a hoax and vote Republican over and over again. I've literally met folks flooded out of their homes and complaining about FEMA not cutting them checks fast enough who have cypress trees in their yard. The mind just boggles.
posted by photoslob at 2:08 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by photoslob at 2:08 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
These changes to the shape of the land and sea do not necessarily have anything to do with so called climate change (but maybe to do with the natural cyclic climate changes that have occurred over time)
I know well a place called Happisburgh on the East coast of the UK.
Over my time of going there places that I have stayed in have regularly disappeared under the sea
posted by Burn_IT at 2:42 PM on July 6, 2016
I know well a place called Happisburgh on the East coast of the UK.
Over my time of going there places that I have stayed in have regularly disappeared under the sea
posted by Burn_IT at 2:42 PM on July 6, 2016
You all defended the 1927 Federal raid on Innsmouth. "What harm could it do?" you laughed. Well, now the sea is coming after you, and it's not so funny anymore, is it?
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:06 PM on July 6, 2016 [16 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:06 PM on July 6, 2016 [16 favorites]
Schulte outlined a rough engineering plan, costing around $30 million,
That's like $400K per resident. You could get a more permanent solution giving everyone $400K and telling them to buy somewhere else and leave.
posted by Talez at 3:38 PM on July 6, 2016 [14 favorites]
That's like $400K per resident. You could get a more permanent solution giving everyone $400K and telling them to buy somewhere else and leave.
posted by Talez at 3:38 PM on July 6, 2016 [14 favorites]
Climate change has been felt in the US for a while. Coastal Native Alaskan communities have been dealing with increased coastal erosion caused by reduced sea ice for over a decade, and villages there are currently even more threatened than Tangier Island. Some of the problems in coastal Louisiana are attributable to warming-related sea level rise as well, although subsidence from oil and gas extraction and sediment starvation from the channeling of the Mississippi probably bear more of the blame to date. We obviously need to have a good think about how we're going to deal with threatened coastal communities (which are only the most obviously affected communities, but by no means the only ones).
posted by mollweide at 4:22 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by mollweide at 4:22 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
In time, the rising sea level will engulf southern Manhattan. But before that (an estimated 20-30 years), Trump's Mir-A-Lago will be under water. I, for one, recommend we wait until then.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:03 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:03 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
There was a small town a few miles from where I grew up that was relocated a couple miles away after being flooded by the Grand River twice in a 3-week-period in 1993. It was big news at the time, and then the old town was used as a movie set. The only things left operational in the original town at this point are a couple of churches, though most of the main street is still there.
posted by jferg at 5:33 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by jferg at 5:33 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Anybody else remember the book Jacob Have I Loved? I think Rass Island was supposed to be based on Tangier. there was a part where the Captain loses his house because of a storm.Remember that one part where Call comes back from WWII and says the water is about to get Rass.
the town manager's pushback on seawalls and not being able to pay for it...yikes.
posted by discopolo at 5:37 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
the town manager's pushback on seawalls and not being able to pay for it...yikes.
posted by discopolo at 5:37 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
As frightening as this is—like freakazoid said, it's a bit shocking to realize that all of this is here and happening now, after thirty years of hearing about it—these kinds of articles are heartening to me because at least I know that there are people who are knowledgeable thinking about these issues. Not in a naive, "everything's going to be all right," way—I'm too much aware of all the political, ideological, and economic obstacles that prevented timely interventions, for instance—but in the sense that at least people are thinking about it, exploring options, doing what they can.
posted by not that girl at 6:22 PM on July 6, 2016
posted by not that girl at 6:22 PM on July 6, 2016
In time, the rising sea level will engulf southern Manhattan. But before that (an estimated 20-30 years), Trump's Mir-A-Lago will be under water. I, for one, recommend we wait until then.
Uh, we've passed that one some time ago. That submergence is already baked in. If we start now, though, maybe we can keep the Arabian peninsula from being completely uninhabitable due to unsurvivable heat waves. And even that I'm not sure of. The effects of climate change are a lagging indicator; if we drastically reduced emissions now we'd still be in for a very different world in the next several decades.
Climate shocks are going to make the current European refugee crisis look minor by comparison.
posted by Existential Dread at 6:24 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
Uh, we've passed that one some time ago. That submergence is already baked in. If we start now, though, maybe we can keep the Arabian peninsula from being completely uninhabitable due to unsurvivable heat waves. And even that I'm not sure of. The effects of climate change are a lagging indicator; if we drastically reduced emissions now we'd still be in for a very different world in the next several decades.
Climate shocks are going to make the current European refugee crisis look minor by comparison.
posted by Existential Dread at 6:24 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
Here in Florida salt water is slowly encroaching upon the fresh water aquifer. As the fresh water is drained, the sea water takes over. While it rains here a lot in certain seasons, it just isn't enough to stop the change. How should we fix that?
posted by Splunge at 6:29 PM on July 6, 2016
posted by Splunge at 6:29 PM on July 6, 2016
Climate shocks are going to make the current European refugee crisis look minor by comparison.Eponysteric...*sighs**cries*
posted by Existential Dread
posted by jferg at 6:31 PM on July 6, 2016 [9 favorites]
That's like $400K per resident. You could get a more permanent solution giving everyone $400K and telling them to buy somewhere else and leave.
Sounds lucrative. Time to start shopping for my Tangier dream home!
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 6:34 PM on July 6, 2016
Sounds lucrative. Time to start shopping for my Tangier dream home!
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 6:34 PM on July 6, 2016
Let it sink and put up one buoy shaped like a gravestone written with "Here lies the first habitable island lost to our own hubris, wasteful nature, greed and ignorance of our place on this planet."
Create a well known marker on Google Maps for that location and about what happened. Then make it a required history subject for every 2nd or 3rd grade in all public schools.
posted by Muncle at 6:44 PM on July 6, 2016
Create a well known marker on Google Maps for that location and about what happened. Then make it a required history subject for every 2nd or 3rd grade in all public schools.
posted by Muncle at 6:44 PM on July 6, 2016
“I’ve lived my whole life here, and I’m going to die here,” said Hilton Chaisson, who raised 10 sons on the island [ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La.] and wants his 26 grandchildren to know the same life of living off the land. He conceded that the flooding has worsened, but, he said, “we always find a way.”The government has budgeted 48 million to relocate the 60 residents of ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, LA; these people should be jumping all over that money. It's almost a given that the amounts spent per person is going to be less generous going forward and no amount of wishful thinking is going to stop the submerging of the community. Once Miami is being relocated I'd be surprised if the relocation amounts per person rise above gas money.
posted by Mitheral at 6:50 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
Once Miami is being relocated I'd be surprised if the relocation amounts per person rise above gas money.
I agree. Global warming is something where you would want to catch just the right moment for your town to go under. Too early and no one cares, too late and people will be tired of hearing about it.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:57 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
I agree. Global warming is something where you would want to catch just the right moment for your town to go under. Too early and no one cares, too late and people will be tired of hearing about it.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:57 PM on July 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
Here in Florida salt water is slowly encroaching upon the fresh water aquifer. As the fresh water is drained, the sea water takes over. While it rains here a lot in certain seasons, it just isn't enough to stop the change. How should we fix that?
Invest in municipal desalination, groundwater recharge with recycled water, and all municipal wells should be reaching down past superficial aquifers to deep aquifers to keep the superficial water table as high as possible.
All three of those are horrendously expensive and energy intensive.
Other countries that believe in taxing and spending on infrastructure have started one, two, or all three of these methods.
posted by Talez at 7:27 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Invest in municipal desalination, groundwater recharge with recycled water, and all municipal wells should be reaching down past superficial aquifers to deep aquifers to keep the superficial water table as high as possible.
All three of those are horrendously expensive and energy intensive.
Other countries that believe in taxing and spending on infrastructure have started one, two, or all three of these methods.
posted by Talez at 7:27 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Wait a second.
* From the article "They concluded that Tangier had lost two-thirds of its landmass since 1850."
(most modern views of anthropogenic global warming consider that any warming from 1850 through about 1950 was not anthropogenic, since humans hadn't made enough CO2 by then)
* From the article "What’s more, the land in and around the Chesapeake is sinking, because of lingering effects from geological events dating back 20,000 years". Subsidence is not due to climate.
* Worst (or) best case estimates of sea level rise are roughly 3mm/year.
The island is about 5 ft above sea level (roughly 1500 mm) so with a sea level rise of 3mm / year we should expect 500 years until it's submerged.
Yet the article claims "Schulte’s study of Tangier, published online in the journal Nature last year, concluded that the island might have 50 years left". 50x3 = 150mm = 6 inches.
So I'm confused: a 10x discrepancy in the "years left" based on my quick calcs. Am I dropping a zero here somewhere? Is there an aspect of clickbait here?
posted by soylent00FF00 at 7:56 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
* From the article "They concluded that Tangier had lost two-thirds of its landmass since 1850."
(most modern views of anthropogenic global warming consider that any warming from 1850 through about 1950 was not anthropogenic, since humans hadn't made enough CO2 by then)
* From the article "What’s more, the land in and around the Chesapeake is sinking, because of lingering effects from geological events dating back 20,000 years". Subsidence is not due to climate.
* Worst (or) best case estimates of sea level rise are roughly 3mm/year.
The island is about 5 ft above sea level (roughly 1500 mm) so with a sea level rise of 3mm / year we should expect 500 years until it's submerged.
Yet the article claims "Schulte’s study of Tangier, published online in the journal Nature last year, concluded that the island might have 50 years left". 50x3 = 150mm = 6 inches.
So I'm confused: a 10x discrepancy in the "years left" based on my quick calcs. Am I dropping a zero here somewhere? Is there an aspect of clickbait here?
posted by soylent00FF00 at 7:56 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
A friend of mine wrote a beautiful, long feature on Tangier Island 16 years ago, on the erosion of the land and of the way of life. I'd encourage you to buy his book, which collects that story and several more, but you can read a PDF version of the story, "The Tangierman's Lament," here . It's an amazing piece of reporting and writing.
posted by martin q blank at 7:59 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by martin q blank at 7:59 PM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]
So I'm confused: a 10x discrepancy in the "years left" based on my quick calcs. Am I dropping a zero here somewhere? Is there an aspect of clickbait here?
Erosion. Seas don't just rise. They go right past sand and head straight for soil and drag it right on out.
posted by Talez at 8:39 PM on July 6, 2016
Erosion. Seas don't just rise. They go right past sand and head straight for soil and drag it right on out.
posted by Talez at 8:39 PM on July 6, 2016
So I'm confused: a 10x discrepancy in the "years left" based on my quick calcs. Am I dropping a zero here somewhere?
By using averages since 1850 or 1870 to ten or twenty years ago what you are doing is tossing out all actual science and replacing it with the simplest possible model of linear increase since the 19th century. Doing the same thing you could probably conclude that global population is still just a bit more than 5 billion, the U.S. federal budget isn't enough to buy a single B2 bomber, and that the computing power of an iPhone is about twice that of an old-timey hand-cranked mechanical cash register.
posted by XMLicious at 8:43 PM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Also don't discount tides. If you are 2' above sea level and you have a 2' tide your land is being flooded twice a day.
Also wind will have a significant relative effect on sea level once you are only a few feet above.
Finally the island isn't bedrock. A mean water table 1' down on sand can't support any weight. So the island might be there but all the buildings sink.
posted by Mitheral at 10:01 PM on July 6, 2016
Also wind will have a significant relative effect on sea level once you are only a few feet above.
Finally the island isn't bedrock. A mean water table 1' down on sand can't support any weight. So the island might be there but all the buildings sink.
posted by Mitheral at 10:01 PM on July 6, 2016
* From the article "They concluded that Tangier had lost two-thirds of its landmass since 1850."
(most modern views of anthropogenic global warming consider that any warming from 1850 through about 1950 was not anthropogenic, since humans hadn't made enough CO2 by then)
1850 is just the year that the first accurate map of Tangier Island dates from. I think they're just using it as the earliest available benchmark . (see Schulte et al., Nature Climate Change, 2015). There was significant deforestation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that worsened erosion significantly.
The modern-day effects of CO2 emissions are not the only phenomena affecting Tangier Island. As noted above, you have all of these factors in play: (1) Global thermal expansion of seawater (2) Global sea level rise from glacier loss (3) weakening of the Gulf Stream, which is evidently causing very warm water to "pile up" off the US Eastern seaboard instead of traveling into the North Atlantic and sinking as it usually would. That very warm water has the localized effect of increasing sea level -- in addition to the global thermal expansion and the addition of meltwater. (4) Regional isostatic adjustment, which pulls the crust down; even if sea level were static, the crust would still be sinking. (5) Erosion from intensifying precipitation patterns associated with greenhouse warming. Big storms play a disproportionately large role in eroding sediment. More big storms in the Mid-Atlantic would mean more erosion in general. I haven't studied the meteorological effects of CO2 input in any great detail, but the current consensus seems to be that warmer average temperatures tend to cause more extreme climatic variations. (6) Erosion from northern Chesapeake currents. Don't know too much about this one, can't really speak much to its causes or effects, but it's in the article.
And, looking back, I think I missed one: (7) deforestation of Tangier Island in the late 19th century. As noted in the article, the local lumber industry took away all the trees. Tree root systems are often critically important to sediment stability; that's why you get landslides in logged areas and near roadcuts. If you ever go out to the Beartooth Pass in Montana, you'll see steep walls of rock and rubble seemingly held in place by one or two determined trees and their root systems. It's a little terrifying to drive right under those.
* From the article "What’s more, the land in and around the Chesapeake is sinking, because of lingering effects from geological events dating back 20,000 years". Subsidence is not due to climate.
Yes and no. The subsidence (isostatic rebound or isostatic adjustment) is a lingering effect of the tremendous weight exerted by the Laurentide ice sheet on most of northern North America. An ice sheet that size is so heavy that it squeezes out the material underlying the lithosphere -- in this case, pushing it to the south so that it bulges up beneath parts of the southern USA. Mantle rock would appear solid to our eyes, but over long enough time scales it behaves as a viscous liquid. So when the Laurentide ice sheet began to recede after the Last Glacial Maximum, that mantle material started to migrate slowly back northward, and the adjustment is still going on. So the southern USA is sinking at various rates, while formerly glaciated northern regions are rising; Hudson Bay is getting smaller, and the Baltic Sea will probably become a lake in a few thousand years.
The point being: this crustal subsidence is caused by climate change, but in this case not by anthropogenic climate change.
* Worst (or) best case estimates of sea level rise are roughly 3mm/year.
The island is about 5 ft above sea level (roughly 1500 mm) so with a sea level rise of 3mm / year we should expect 500 years until it's submerged.
Yet the article claims "Schulte’s study of Tangier, published online in the journal Nature last year, concluded that the island might have 50 years left". 50x3 = 150mm = 6 inches.
So I'm confused: a 10x discrepancy in the "years left" based on my quick calcs. Am I dropping a zero here somewhere? Is there an aspect of clickbait here?
All of the effects listed above are cumulative. So it's not just the 3mm per year of sea level rise from thermal expansion (1) and meltwater addition (2). There's also isostatic rebound, which is subtracting another 1 to 1.5 mm per year from the elevation of the southern Chesapeake region. So add that up, and you get about 4.4 mm per year. On top of that, you get the regional pileup of warm water off the eastern seaboard (3). And on top of that, you also have the effects of erosion -- caused in the past by deforestation and in the future by more intense precipitation -- which doesn't move things up or down but transports sediment laterally somewhere else.
The Schulte et al. paper, which these numbers are taken from, used model predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Cimate Change's 5th Assessment Report. That report predicted an acceleration of temperature rise and sea level rise, so the rate of 4.4 mm per year is expected to increase. The midrange estimate for global average sea level rise (that's only factors 1 and 2) is 600 to 1000 mm by 2100. So by 2055, you might expect, say, 200 to 400 mm of sea level rise. That's 0.7 to 1.3 feet right, not counting any of the other additive factors. If you add 1.5 mm per year of subsidence, that's 0.9 to 1.5 feet. Even if the whole island isn't completely submerged, it will be so low-lying that one bad storm could sweep the whole damn settlement into the Bay.
The Schulte et al. study notes (as seen in this figure) that there will still be a few scraps of island left in a hundred years, if IPCC's midrange sea level rise predictions hold true. But the study also notes that while the town of Tangier has an average elevation of about 1.5 meters (5 feet), much of the rest of the island lies lower. According to wikipedia (I know, I know) the average elevation of the island is about 3 feet. To quote from the study itself: "Regarding the future of the Town of Tangier, except small portions of each ridge (<10%), the remaining upland is at a mean of 1.2 m (3.9 feet) above present mean sea level. Based on projected rates of land loss and relative sea level rise, the town will be uninhabitable in less than 100 years (likely by 2063) and all current uplands, with the possible exception of the three small higher areas (<10% of current uplands), will be converted to a mix of intertidal and high estuarine marsh." So again, while Tangier won't be completely submerged, it will be reduced to a tiny scrap of marshland that gets totally inundated every time a storm blows over.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 10:10 PM on July 6, 2016 [10 favorites]
(most modern views of anthropogenic global warming consider that any warming from 1850 through about 1950 was not anthropogenic, since humans hadn't made enough CO2 by then)
1850 is just the year that the first accurate map of Tangier Island dates from. I think they're just using it as the earliest available benchmark . (see Schulte et al., Nature Climate Change, 2015). There was significant deforestation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that worsened erosion significantly.
The modern-day effects of CO2 emissions are not the only phenomena affecting Tangier Island. As noted above, you have all of these factors in play: (1) Global thermal expansion of seawater (2) Global sea level rise from glacier loss (3) weakening of the Gulf Stream, which is evidently causing very warm water to "pile up" off the US Eastern seaboard instead of traveling into the North Atlantic and sinking as it usually would. That very warm water has the localized effect of increasing sea level -- in addition to the global thermal expansion and the addition of meltwater. (4) Regional isostatic adjustment, which pulls the crust down; even if sea level were static, the crust would still be sinking. (5) Erosion from intensifying precipitation patterns associated with greenhouse warming. Big storms play a disproportionately large role in eroding sediment. More big storms in the Mid-Atlantic would mean more erosion in general. I haven't studied the meteorological effects of CO2 input in any great detail, but the current consensus seems to be that warmer average temperatures tend to cause more extreme climatic variations. (6) Erosion from northern Chesapeake currents. Don't know too much about this one, can't really speak much to its causes or effects, but it's in the article.
And, looking back, I think I missed one: (7) deforestation of Tangier Island in the late 19th century. As noted in the article, the local lumber industry took away all the trees. Tree root systems are often critically important to sediment stability; that's why you get landslides in logged areas and near roadcuts. If you ever go out to the Beartooth Pass in Montana, you'll see steep walls of rock and rubble seemingly held in place by one or two determined trees and their root systems. It's a little terrifying to drive right under those.
* From the article "What’s more, the land in and around the Chesapeake is sinking, because of lingering effects from geological events dating back 20,000 years". Subsidence is not due to climate.
Yes and no. The subsidence (isostatic rebound or isostatic adjustment) is a lingering effect of the tremendous weight exerted by the Laurentide ice sheet on most of northern North America. An ice sheet that size is so heavy that it squeezes out the material underlying the lithosphere -- in this case, pushing it to the south so that it bulges up beneath parts of the southern USA. Mantle rock would appear solid to our eyes, but over long enough time scales it behaves as a viscous liquid. So when the Laurentide ice sheet began to recede after the Last Glacial Maximum, that mantle material started to migrate slowly back northward, and the adjustment is still going on. So the southern USA is sinking at various rates, while formerly glaciated northern regions are rising; Hudson Bay is getting smaller, and the Baltic Sea will probably become a lake in a few thousand years.
The point being: this crustal subsidence is caused by climate change, but in this case not by anthropogenic climate change.
* Worst (or) best case estimates of sea level rise are roughly 3mm/year.
The island is about 5 ft above sea level (roughly 1500 mm) so with a sea level rise of 3mm / year we should expect 500 years until it's submerged.
Yet the article claims "Schulte’s study of Tangier, published online in the journal Nature last year, concluded that the island might have 50 years left". 50x3 = 150mm = 6 inches.
So I'm confused: a 10x discrepancy in the "years left" based on my quick calcs. Am I dropping a zero here somewhere? Is there an aspect of clickbait here?
All of the effects listed above are cumulative. So it's not just the 3mm per year of sea level rise from thermal expansion (1) and meltwater addition (2). There's also isostatic rebound, which is subtracting another 1 to 1.5 mm per year from the elevation of the southern Chesapeake region. So add that up, and you get about 4.4 mm per year. On top of that, you get the regional pileup of warm water off the eastern seaboard (3). And on top of that, you also have the effects of erosion -- caused in the past by deforestation and in the future by more intense precipitation -- which doesn't move things up or down but transports sediment laterally somewhere else.
The Schulte et al. paper, which these numbers are taken from, used model predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Cimate Change's 5th Assessment Report. That report predicted an acceleration of temperature rise and sea level rise, so the rate of 4.4 mm per year is expected to increase. The midrange estimate for global average sea level rise (that's only factors 1 and 2) is 600 to 1000 mm by 2100. So by 2055, you might expect, say, 200 to 400 mm of sea level rise. That's 0.7 to 1.3 feet right, not counting any of the other additive factors. If you add 1.5 mm per year of subsidence, that's 0.9 to 1.5 feet. Even if the whole island isn't completely submerged, it will be so low-lying that one bad storm could sweep the whole damn settlement into the Bay.
The Schulte et al. study notes (as seen in this figure) that there will still be a few scraps of island left in a hundred years, if IPCC's midrange sea level rise predictions hold true. But the study also notes that while the town of Tangier has an average elevation of about 1.5 meters (5 feet), much of the rest of the island lies lower. According to wikipedia (I know, I know) the average elevation of the island is about 3 feet. To quote from the study itself: "Regarding the future of the Town of Tangier, except small portions of each ridge (<10%), the remaining upland is at a mean of 1.2 m (3.9 feet) above present mean sea level. Based on projected rates of land loss and relative sea level rise, the town will be uninhabitable in less than 100 years (likely by 2063) and all current uplands, with the possible exception of the three small higher areas (<10% of current uplands), will be converted to a mix of intertidal and high estuarine marsh." So again, while Tangier won't be completely submerged, it will be reduced to a tiny scrap of marshland that gets totally inundated every time a storm blows over.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 10:10 PM on July 6, 2016 [10 favorites]
And quickly too.
Hold on to your hat, the orchestra is just tuning up.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:17 AM on July 7, 2016
Hold on to your hat, the orchestra is just tuning up.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:17 AM on July 7, 2016
Climate shocks are going to make the current European refugee crisis look minor by comparison.
You realize there's a strong argument to be made that the current European refugee crisis is a climate shock, albeit a small, early warning version.
posted by Naberius at 6:18 AM on July 7, 2016 [4 favorites]
You realize there's a strong argument to be made that the current European refugee crisis is a climate shock, albeit a small, early warning version.
posted by Naberius at 6:18 AM on July 7, 2016 [4 favorites]
Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam: thank you for unpacking the data. Even with these higher predictions, I still feel like this story is being over-egged a bit, putting the blame on "Climate Change" for things which many people would not thing of as having anything to do with anthropogenic global warming (e.g. 20,000 year isostatic rebound).
I have lived in an areas where tides are about 10 to 20 feet, so I must admit it's hard to imagine living less than 5 feet above sea level. It looks like tides around there are only 2 feet ish, so I guess one could do that, but...
Is that area subject to hurricanes? It seems to me that 6 inches (or 2 feet or whatever) of sea level rise in the next 50-100 years is small potatoes compared to a potential hurricane storm surge of 10+ feet.
Even if global warming were stopped (or reversed) tomorrow, wouldn't they still all be at risk of a catastrophic disaster from a hurricane?
posted by soylent00FF00 at 7:43 AM on July 7, 2016
I have lived in an areas where tides are about 10 to 20 feet, so I must admit it's hard to imagine living less than 5 feet above sea level. It looks like tides around there are only 2 feet ish, so I guess one could do that, but...
Is that area subject to hurricanes? It seems to me that 6 inches (or 2 feet or whatever) of sea level rise in the next 50-100 years is small potatoes compared to a potential hurricane storm surge of 10+ feet.
Even if global warming were stopped (or reversed) tomorrow, wouldn't they still all be at risk of a catastrophic disaster from a hurricane?
posted by soylent00FF00 at 7:43 AM on July 7, 2016
Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam literally just wrote,
posted by XMLicious at 8:35 AM on July 7, 2016
andEven if the whole island isn't completely submerged, it will be so low-lying that one bad storm could sweep the whole damn settlement into the Bay.
Maybe you don't even realize you're doing this, soylent00FF00, but you have translated the value "0.9 to 1.5 feet" by 2055 (39 years from now) as a midrange estimate with qualifications about factors not accounted for into "6 inches (or 2 feet or whatever) of sea level rise in the next 50-100 years".So again, while Tangier won't be completely submerged, it will be reduced to a tiny scrap of marshland that gets totally inundated every time a storm blows over.
posted by XMLicious at 8:35 AM on July 7, 2016
You realize there's a strong argument to be made that the current European refugee crisis is a climate shock, albeit a small, early warning version.
Yes, I was thinking about that when I made the statement, although I probably wasn't as clear as I could have been. Climate change will continue to exacerbate resource conflicts and social instability, leading to widespread unrest.
posted by Existential Dread at 11:53 AM on July 7, 2016
Yes, I was thinking about that when I made the statement, although I probably wasn't as clear as I could have been. Climate change will continue to exacerbate resource conflicts and social instability, leading to widespread unrest.
posted by Existential Dread at 11:53 AM on July 7, 2016
I am completely obsessed with the topic of climate refugees. Yes, completely. Just wait until they have to evacuate 6 million people from South Florida.
Forgive the self link, please. If someone tells me to stop, I'll stop. But this is what I work on every day, all day. Posts like this make me itch, literally.
posted by staggering termagant at 3:23 PM on July 7, 2016 [5 favorites]
Forgive the self link, please. If someone tells me to stop, I'll stop. But this is what I work on every day, all day. Posts like this make me itch, literally.
posted by staggering termagant at 3:23 PM on July 7, 2016 [5 favorites]
Maybe you don't even realize you're doing this, soylent00FF00, but you have translated the value "0.9 to 1.5 feet" by 2055 (39 years from now) as a midrange estimate with qualifications about factors not accounted for into "6 inches (or 2 feet or whatever) of sea level rise in the next 50-100 years".
Sorry, those were meant to be taken as different estimates...
"6 inches" was my back-o-the-napkin number discussed upthread multiplying the recent sea level trend x 50 years. Given the island is ~5 feet above sea level, I was surprised by the claims that it would be gone in 50 years.
"2 feet" is a restatement of what the paper is claiming (e.g. if the paper says 39 years = 1.5 feet then 50 years will be 1.92 feet).
"or whatever" leaves room for more in 100 years.
My point is that this sounds like a pretty risky place to live right now, sea level rise or not...
"You are definitely going to be dead in 100 years" is a great headline, but kind of buries the lede of "Or maybe next Tuesday when the storm hits" :-)
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:22 PM on July 7, 2016
Sorry, those were meant to be taken as different estimates...
"6 inches" was my back-o-the-napkin number discussed upthread multiplying the recent sea level trend x 50 years. Given the island is ~5 feet above sea level, I was surprised by the claims that it would be gone in 50 years.
"2 feet" is a restatement of what the paper is claiming (e.g. if the paper says 39 years = 1.5 feet then 50 years will be 1.92 feet).
"or whatever" leaves room for more in 100 years.
My point is that this sounds like a pretty risky place to live right now, sea level rise or not...
"You are definitely going to be dead in 100 years" is a great headline, but kind of buries the lede of "Or maybe next Tuesday when the storm hits" :-)
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:22 PM on July 7, 2016
It sort of seems like reverse-clickbait then, and whatever the opposite of over-egging would be, if your objection is that the NYT is making the danger seem more remote and mild than it actually is.
As observed by the article, the only reason this community might get seawalls and other mitigation efforts is because it's regarded as culturally important. As Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam pointed out, rising seas make all coastal areas more vulnerable to storm damage and amplify the severity of that damage, so specific storms are a significant danger too that is compounded by climate change, but coasts everywhere around the world will suffer the effects of rising sea levels regardless.
Here is a short film put out last month about the effects on Bangladesh of "whatever", a one-meter rise in sea level. They're accustomed to storms but the inundation of farm fields, rice paddies, and aquifers and wells with salt water, effects which are already happening, is far more of a catastrophe.
And of course, instead of the mid-range estimates which you're having to cut by three-quarters to fit your naïve linear-model guess (I only say "naïve" to mean "not based on thorough knowledge of the science involved"; if I came up with a back-of-the-napkin model that incorporated 19th century data it would be naïve too), there is also as mentioned in the NYT article of the OP the least-optimistic estimate of two meters of sea-level rise by 2100.
posted by XMLicious at 9:55 PM on July 7, 2016 [2 favorites]
As observed by the article, the only reason this community might get seawalls and other mitigation efforts is because it's regarded as culturally important. As Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam pointed out, rising seas make all coastal areas more vulnerable to storm damage and amplify the severity of that damage, so specific storms are a significant danger too that is compounded by climate change, but coasts everywhere around the world will suffer the effects of rising sea levels regardless.
Here is a short film put out last month about the effects on Bangladesh of "whatever", a one-meter rise in sea level. They're accustomed to storms but the inundation of farm fields, rice paddies, and aquifers and wells with salt water, effects which are already happening, is far more of a catastrophe.
And of course, instead of the mid-range estimates which you're having to cut by three-quarters to fit your naïve linear-model guess (I only say "naïve" to mean "not based on thorough knowledge of the science involved"; if I came up with a back-of-the-napkin model that incorporated 19th century data it would be naïve too), there is also as mentioned in the NYT article of the OP the least-optimistic estimate of two meters of sea-level rise by 2100.
posted by XMLicious at 9:55 PM on July 7, 2016 [2 favorites]
We probably shouldn't get into an extended back & forth about global warming issues, so I will make one last post here then let others have the last word.
The IPCC 5th assessment report has a range of predictions for sea level rise:
The report had also concluded that if emissions continue to keep up with the worst case IPCC scenarios, global average sea level could rise by nearly 1m by 2100 (0.52−0.98 m from a 1986-2005 baseline). If emissions follow the lowest emissions scenario, then global average sea level is projected to rise by between 0.28−0.6 m by 2100 (compared to a 1986−2005 baseline).[40]
That's roughly a 4-fold difference depending on modeled parameters.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 6:23 PM on July 8, 2016
The IPCC 5th assessment report has a range of predictions for sea level rise:
The report had also concluded that if emissions continue to keep up with the worst case IPCC scenarios, global average sea level could rise by nearly 1m by 2100 (0.52−0.98 m from a 1986-2005 baseline). If emissions follow the lowest emissions scenario, then global average sea level is projected to rise by between 0.28−0.6 m by 2100 (compared to a 1986−2005 baseline).[40]
That's roughly a 4-fold difference depending on modeled parameters.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 6:23 PM on July 8, 2016
No, we definitely should get into this—you are misinterpreting or mischaracterizing so many things, so consistently, while describing yourself as confused, that it's extremely important to go over every claim and implication you're making. (Especially in a thread entitled "Climate change is already here".)
Not only did you choose to respond to what I said with factoids related to a "lowest emissions scenario" (NOT different modeling parameters; I'm not sure where those numbers came from, but the IPCC report mentions returning to pre-industrial levels of GHG emissions, and we know that ridiculously far from that, basically nothing happened in Paris this year following the 2014 release of the report the numbers would actually be relevant to) but your Wikipedia quote is simply completely wrong about what the worst scenario mentioned in its supposed citation, Chapter 13 of the IPCC 5th report. To quote the actual report (page 1185)
posted by XMLicious at 11:26 PM on July 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
Not only did you choose to respond to what I said with factoids related to a "lowest emissions scenario" (NOT different modeling parameters; I'm not sure where those numbers came from, but the IPCC report mentions returning to pre-industrial levels of GHG emissions, and we know that ridiculously far from that, basically nothing happened in Paris this year following the 2014 release of the report the numbers would actually be relevant to) but your Wikipedia quote is simply completely wrong about what the worst scenario mentioned in its supposed citation, Chapter 13 of the IPCC 5th report. To quote the actual report (page 1185)
And given the following paragraph, it sounds like only one research group was willing to definitively rule out sea level increases beyond the two meters I described above as "least-optimistic":Since the publication of the AR4, [4th report] upper bounds of up to 2.4 m for GMSL rise by 2100 have been estimated by other approaches, namely SEMs (Section 13.5.2), evidence from past climates (Section 13.2.1) and physical constraints on ice-sheet dynamics (Sections 13.4.3.2 and 13.4.4.2). The broad range of values reflects the different methodologies for obtaining the upper bound, involving different constraining factors and sources of evidence. In particular, the upper bound is strongly affected by the choice of probability level, which in some approaches is unknown because the probability of the underlying assumptions is not quantified (Little et al., 2013b).
Just to reiterate to be perfectly clear, the worst-case scenario mentioned in the latter above paragraph (as a mere example of high estimates) from the IPCC 5th report for GMSL / global mean sea-level rise is five meters by 2100, more than 16 feet, a value I found by simply skimming through the chapter concerning GMSL rise. The "0.52 to 0.98 m" in your Wikipedia quote is a value from a "median" "likely (medium confidence)" range within the specific category of "process-based models", which is mentioned in the first couple of pages of that chapter.The fourth approach is concerned particularly with the contribution from ice-sheet dynamical change, for which it considers kinematic limits. Pfeffer et al. (2008) argued that scenarios of GMSL rise exceeding 2 m by 2100 are physically untenable, ruling out, for example, the heuristic argument of Hansen et al. (2007) giving 5 m by 2100. Pfeffer et al. (2008) constructed scenarios of 0.8 m and 2.0 m, and Katsman et al. (2011) of 1.15 m, for GMSL rise by 2100, including ice-sheet rapid dynamical acceleration. Although these authors considered their scenarios to be physically possible, they are unable to quantify their likelihood, because the probability of the assumptions on which they depend cannot be estimated from observations of the response of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to climate change or variability on century time scales. These scenarios involve contributions of ~0.5 m from Antarctica. This is much greater than any process-based projections of dynamical ice-sheet change (Section 13.4.4.2), and would require either a sustained high increase in outflow in all marine-based sectors or the localized collapse of the ice sheet in the Amundsen Sea sector (Little et al., 2013a).
posted by XMLicious at 11:26 PM on July 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
Okay, I've just realized that the 5m-by-2100 estimate by Hansen et al. in the passage I quoted from the IPCC AR5 report is actually right there in the Wikipedia article, only a few sentences above what you quoted soylent00FF00, with both also being right next to a range including 2m by 2100 at its upper end:
So you appear to have gone to Wikipedia, thrown out all of the numbers on the page which you didn't like, used what you cherry-picked to construct a trimmed-way-down-even-from-there estimate of a 6 inch sea-level rise over 50 years, and then come here to present your cherry-picked Wikipedia sentences and personal guess as a reason to dismiss the OP article as "clickbaity" and "over-egged".
Which transitively would also appear to make any overview of climate science that mentions the results of studies, such as the IPCC Report itself, clickbait as well, btw.
Whether it's is malice or carelessness in this case (and my credulity is severely strained at this point, that it's just the result of a series of accidents), this kind of denialism and reinforcement of complacency is something that will get many (more) people killed.
posted by XMLicious at 4:54 AM on July 9, 2016 [3 favorites]
This is the same Wikipedia article which in your first comment you linked to while claiming that "Worst (or) best case estimates of sea level rise are roughly 3mm/year."Projections assessed by the US National Research Council (2010)[37] suggest possible sea level rise over the 21st century of between 56 and 200 cm (22 and 79 in).
So you appear to have gone to Wikipedia, thrown out all of the numbers on the page which you didn't like, used what you cherry-picked to construct a trimmed-way-down-even-from-there estimate of a 6 inch sea-level rise over 50 years, and then come here to present your cherry-picked Wikipedia sentences and personal guess as a reason to dismiss the OP article as "clickbaity" and "over-egged".
Which transitively would also appear to make any overview of climate science that mentions the results of studies, such as the IPCC Report itself, clickbait as well, btw.
Whether it's is malice or carelessness in this case (and my credulity is severely strained at this point, that it's just the result of a series of accidents), this kind of denialism and reinforcement of complacency is something that will get many (more) people killed.
posted by XMLicious at 4:54 AM on July 9, 2016 [3 favorites]
For those intersted in this discussion, I suggest reading the Schulte (2015) article, something I should have done as a first step. See Schulte (2015) and especially focus on figure 4 (page 4) and the result summary (page 5).
The paper is quite readable, and lays out a pretty sound argument. It uses 3 scenarios of low, medium, and high sea level rise (SLR).
Sea Level Rise:
The low estimate (the blue line in Figure 2) is pretty straight, and eyeballing the graph I get 500mm in 120 years or 4.2mm/year linear trend.
The mid estimate (the aqua line in Figure 2) shows about 100mm in 120 years or 8.3 mm/year linear trend.
The high estimate (red line in Fig 2) is decidedly non-linear, but shows 2400mm in 120 years or 20mm/year over the entire period. But for the first 50 years it's more like 750mm/50 years or 15mm/year.
Note that these are "relative sea level rise" (RSLR) trends and all includes the "2.101 mm" per year (page 1) land subsidence due to issues such as isostatic rebound, groundwater pumping and even a 35 million year ago meteor strike.
So, their low-end "pure" SLR is about 2.1mm/year, which is actually lower than my original estimate of 3mm/year.
Inundation Predictions:
Based on these curves and other factors the authors predict the % of landmass remaining across the time period for the low, medium and high scenarios: See Figure 4 B,C and D respectively.
In the "low-range RSLR scenario". Figure 4 B - the green line with open circles) the island won't be inundated until about 2125 (110 years ish).
The mid-range scenario (Fig 4C) the inundation is complete around 2115 (e.g. 100 years ish).
The high-range scenario (Fig 4D) the inundation is complete around 2070 (e.g. 50 years ish).
Qualitatively, these three graphs are interesting, as they visually depict the entire time period from 1850 throu 2150. If you look at the low end prediction (Fig 4b, Green line) it's apparent that the island has been loosing landmass long before human-caused global warming, and in fact the inflection point (at which land mass loss accelerates due to AGW) is not dramatic, if it can be seen at all.
To summarize:
Under the low-end prediction, human-caused global warming has only a trivial effect on the historical loss of land. From the start of record keeping (1850) the island had 275 years left.
Under the medium-end prediction, human-caused global warming has some effect - from the start of record keeping, the island has only 265 years left.
Under the high-end prediction, human-caused global warming has a moderate effect - from the start of record keeping, the island has only 220 years left.
Framing:
Which of these predictions is most likely? How do you present the results so that they are easy to understand?
Here is one way:
"Tangiers island has long been shrinking due to a number of processes, most of which pre-date human caused-climate change. Using data starting in 1850 the island has been predicted to be completely submerged by 2125. Using a mid-range prediction of sea level rise due to global warming, the island's lifespan over the time period may be shortened by about 1% to 2%, disappearing by 2115"
Notice how this version intentionally leaves off the high end predictions, and focuses on the natural long-term history of the island.
Another version might instead emphasize the worst-case scenarios:
"Tangiers island is shrinking due to human caused-climate change. A paper published today estimates that the island has only 50 years until it is submerged, and may need to be abandoned in as little as 25 years."
Notice how this version glosses over the non-human-related causes and ignores the longer term context.
Both are true scientifically, but leave the reader with a very different rhetorical impression.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 11:58 AM on July 11, 2016
The paper is quite readable, and lays out a pretty sound argument. It uses 3 scenarios of low, medium, and high sea level rise (SLR).
Sea Level Rise:
The low estimate (the blue line in Figure 2) is pretty straight, and eyeballing the graph I get 500mm in 120 years or 4.2mm/year linear trend.
The mid estimate (the aqua line in Figure 2) shows about 100mm in 120 years or 8.3 mm/year linear trend.
The high estimate (red line in Fig 2) is decidedly non-linear, but shows 2400mm in 120 years or 20mm/year over the entire period. But for the first 50 years it's more like 750mm/50 years or 15mm/year.
Note that these are "relative sea level rise" (RSLR) trends and all includes the "2.101 mm" per year (page 1) land subsidence due to issues such as isostatic rebound, groundwater pumping and even a 35 million year ago meteor strike.
So, their low-end "pure" SLR is about 2.1mm/year, which is actually lower than my original estimate of 3mm/year.
Inundation Predictions:
Based on these curves and other factors the authors predict the % of landmass remaining across the time period for the low, medium and high scenarios: See Figure 4 B,C and D respectively.
In the "low-range RSLR scenario". Figure 4 B - the green line with open circles) the island won't be inundated until about 2125 (110 years ish).
The mid-range scenario (Fig 4C) the inundation is complete around 2115 (e.g. 100 years ish).
The high-range scenario (Fig 4D) the inundation is complete around 2070 (e.g. 50 years ish).
Qualitatively, these three graphs are interesting, as they visually depict the entire time period from 1850 throu 2150. If you look at the low end prediction (Fig 4b, Green line) it's apparent that the island has been loosing landmass long before human-caused global warming, and in fact the inflection point (at which land mass loss accelerates due to AGW) is not dramatic, if it can be seen at all.
To summarize:
Under the low-end prediction, human-caused global warming has only a trivial effect on the historical loss of land. From the start of record keeping (1850) the island had 275 years left.
Under the medium-end prediction, human-caused global warming has some effect - from the start of record keeping, the island has only 265 years left.
Under the high-end prediction, human-caused global warming has a moderate effect - from the start of record keeping, the island has only 220 years left.
Framing:
Which of these predictions is most likely? How do you present the results so that they are easy to understand?
Here is one way:
"Tangiers island has long been shrinking due to a number of processes, most of which pre-date human caused-climate change. Using data starting in 1850 the island has been predicted to be completely submerged by 2125. Using a mid-range prediction of sea level rise due to global warming, the island's lifespan over the time period may be shortened by about 1% to 2%, disappearing by 2115"
Notice how this version intentionally leaves off the high end predictions, and focuses on the natural long-term history of the island.
Another version might instead emphasize the worst-case scenarios:
"Tangiers island is shrinking due to human caused-climate change. A paper published today estimates that the island has only 50 years until it is submerged, and may need to be abandoned in as little as 25 years."
Notice how this version glosses over the non-human-related causes and ignores the longer term context.
Both are true scientifically, but leave the reader with a very different rhetorical impression.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 11:58 AM on July 11, 2016
I'm not sure why you keep working from 1850 and then trying to draw a straight line. That's around the beginning of the industrial revolution, and anthropogenic greenhouse gas inputs have been far from linear. Based on really good proxies from things like glacial ice and tree rings, we have estimates of greenhouse gas concentrations back 400,000 years. The IPCC predictions that you keep deriding are based on different management scenarios that are clearly outlined in the IPCC reports.
If you simply think Tangier Island is doomed no matter what and are thus uninterested in the conversation being had here about that location, the same questions will be asked about Miami and NYC and Houston and Boston and most of The Netherlands and Belgium, and pretty much all of Bangladesh, not to mention every marine island, but especially the non-volcanic ones, from the Bahamas to Malaysia.
Then, are we allowed to talk about what might happen and how we are going to choose between saving a place or relocating a people?
posted by hydropsyche at 3:15 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
If you simply think Tangier Island is doomed no matter what and are thus uninterested in the conversation being had here about that location, the same questions will be asked about Miami and NYC and Houston and Boston and most of The Netherlands and Belgium, and pretty much all of Bangladesh, not to mention every marine island, but especially the non-volcanic ones, from the Bahamas to Malaysia.
Then, are we allowed to talk about what might happen and how we are going to choose between saving a place or relocating a people?
posted by hydropsyche at 3:15 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
(Note: the latter two passages above enclosed in quotation marks are not quotes from any of the sources under discussion, but appear to be soylent00FF00's own rendering of the supposed content of the Schulte et al. paper.)
The abstract of the paper clearly says:
The discussion section of the paper flatly states:
Even if this is somehow, unbelievably, just another in a series of accidental mistakes, you should have at least first attempted to explain how it came to be that you completely misrepresented a Wikipedia article (or, hey, just fucking acknowledge it even happened) before moving on to trying your hand at crafting an "easy to understand" exegesis of a paper published in Nature. And really, you probably should just stop trying to helpfully interpret climate science for others if you find yourself so consistently making the same egregious errors strenuously trying to pick something that sounds the most amenable to you to call the "worst possible" future, and doing things like substituting your own judgment for the conclusions of a scientific paper's authors.
The more I try to figure out what you've written above... you're not just substituting in your own conclusions, you actually appear to be creating an entire alternate-reality fan-fiction version of data that would have been used in the study by squinting at graphs and holding a ruler up to your monitor or something. The reason why inflection points corresponding to the
The exact functions are available in Supplementary Table 1, but it's kind of like resizing a photo down to one pixel and peering at it to figure out what it's a picture of. You might possibly be able to confirm what most of the colors in the picture were, but not much else.
The word "worst" does not appear anywhere in the paper. They aren't trying to analyze what the worst possible outcome would be among all possible models of climate science; they're trying to provide a scientific basis that the town can and should be saved.
(And it shouldn't need to be said but there is no possible way to spin the NYT article as some sort of exaggeration of this paper for the purposes of clickbait. I didn't even notice the single sentence in which the NYT authors briefly mentioned that one analysis from the paper only gives the town 25 years, because it was so low-key about that.)
posted by XMLicious at 4:24 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
The abstract of the paper clearly says:
Abandonment of the town in 50 years is the mid-range scenario. Abandonment of the town in 25 years is the high sea-level rise scenario.Under the mid-range SLR scenario, much of the remaining landmass is expected to be lost in the next 50 years and the Town will likely need to be abandoned. The high SLR scenario will accelerate the land loss and subsidence, such that the Town may need to be abandoned in as few as 25 years.
The discussion section of the paper flatly states:
And in the conclusions of the paper, as reported almost verbatim in the OP article:The Tangier Islands have less than 100 years before they are lost to a combination of RSLR and storm surge-induced erosion.
You are not "presenting the results so that they are easy to understand". You are simply lying by identifying the authors' mid-range and high-range estimates as part of a "worst case scenario", just as you lied about the contents of the Wikipedia page, and are trying to confuse the distinction between when the "three small higher areas" of land mentioned by VMPV above will finally disappear beneath the waves and when the papers' authors think the town will have to be abandoned and the town's residents will become climate change refugees; by posing those separate events as though they are different "versions" of what the paper is saying, containing different predictions.The Tangier Islands and the Town are running out of time, and if no action is taken, the citizens of Tangier may become among the first climate change refugees in the continental USA.
Even if this is somehow, unbelievably, just another in a series of accidental mistakes, you should have at least first attempted to explain how it came to be that you completely misrepresented a Wikipedia article (or, hey, just fucking acknowledge it even happened) before moving on to trying your hand at crafting an "easy to understand" exegesis of a paper published in Nature. And really, you probably should just stop trying to helpfully interpret climate science for others if you find yourself so consistently making the same egregious errors strenuously trying to pick something that sounds the most amenable to you to call the "worst possible" future, and doing things like substituting your own judgment for the conclusions of a scientific paper's authors.
The more I try to figure out what you've written above... you're not just substituting in your own conclusions, you actually appear to be creating an entire alternate-reality fan-fiction version of data that would have been used in the study by squinting at graphs and holding a ruler up to your monitor or something. The reason why inflection points corresponding to the
accelerating rates of global mean SLR: 1.7 mm yr−1 (1901–2010), 2.0 mm yr−1 (1971–2010), and 3.2 mm yr−1 (1993–2010)mentioned at the top of the paper can't "be seen at all" in the best-fit regression plots is because they're best-fit regression plots, extremely crude approximations facilitating specific types of analysis rather than the infinitely-long polynomial equations or combinations of trigonometric functions that would be necessary to show detail like that.
The exact functions are available in Supplementary Table 1, but it's kind of like resizing a photo down to one pixel and peering at it to figure out what it's a picture of. You might possibly be able to confirm what most of the colors in the picture were, but not much else.
The word "worst" does not appear anywhere in the paper. They aren't trying to analyze what the worst possible outcome would be among all possible models of climate science; they're trying to provide a scientific basis that the town can and should be saved.
(And it shouldn't need to be said but there is no possible way to spin the NYT article as some sort of exaggeration of this paper for the purposes of clickbait. I didn't even notice the single sentence in which the NYT authors briefly mentioned that one analysis from the paper only gives the town 25 years, because it was so low-key about that.)
posted by XMLicious at 4:24 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
XMLicious: Please stop with the personal attacks.
I wrote those two quoted paragraphs. I wrote one to sound bad, and one to sound good. They both accurately state data from the paper, but in very different ways. The "good" one is misleading because, as you note, it's not talking about abandonment but inundation and ignores the high end scenario.
But the "bad" one is also misleading because it only mentions the high end scenario, and fails to mention that the islands have a naturally occurring process leading to doom.
That was kind of my point.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:50 PM on July 11, 2016
I wrote those two quoted paragraphs. I wrote one to sound bad, and one to sound good. They both accurately state data from the paper, but in very different ways. The "good" one is misleading because, as you note, it's not talking about abandonment but inundation and ignores the high end scenario.
But the "bad" one is also misleading because it only mentions the high end scenario, and fails to mention that the islands have a naturally occurring process leading to doom.
That was kind of my point.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:50 PM on July 11, 2016
hydropsyche:
I'm not sure why you keep working from 1850 and then trying to draw a straight line.
That's in the paper - the entire thing is set up as analysis from 1850 to 2150. Fig 4 has the linear regressions fitting the data.
The IPCC predictions that you keep deriding are based on different management scenarios that are clearly outlined in the IPCC reports.
??? I'm not deriding the IPCC predictions, in fact I was using them (and so are the authors).
If you simply think Tangier Island is doomed no matter what
Again, that's directly from the paper.
(I'm thinking you should read the paper)
and are thus uninterested in the conversation being had here about that location, the same questions will be asked about Miami and NYC and Houston and Boston and most of The Netherlands and Belgium, and pretty much all of Bangladesh, not to mention every marine island, but especially the non-volcanic ones, from the Bahamas to Malaysia. Then, are we allowed to talk about what might happen and how we are going to choose between saving a place or relocating a people?
I think such discussions are terribly important and we need good predictions that accurately convey the confidence intervals and uncertainties. The scientific papers themselves are usually pretty good about this. The portrayals in the popular press often less so.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:59 PM on July 11, 2016
I'm not sure why you keep working from 1850 and then trying to draw a straight line.
That's in the paper - the entire thing is set up as analysis from 1850 to 2150. Fig 4 has the linear regressions fitting the data.
The IPCC predictions that you keep deriding are based on different management scenarios that are clearly outlined in the IPCC reports.
??? I'm not deriding the IPCC predictions, in fact I was using them (and so are the authors).
If you simply think Tangier Island is doomed no matter what
Again, that's directly from the paper.
(I'm thinking you should read the paper)
and are thus uninterested in the conversation being had here about that location, the same questions will be asked about Miami and NYC and Houston and Boston and most of The Netherlands and Belgium, and pretty much all of Bangladesh, not to mention every marine island, but especially the non-volcanic ones, from the Bahamas to Malaysia. Then, are we allowed to talk about what might happen and how we are going to choose between saving a place or relocating a people?
I think such discussions are terribly important and we need good predictions that accurately convey the confidence intervals and uncertainties. The scientific papers themselves are usually pretty good about this. The portrayals in the popular press often less so.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:59 PM on July 11, 2016
In the "low-range RSLR scenario". Figure 4 B - the green line with open circles) the island won't be inundated until about 2125 (110 years ish).
The mid-range scenario (Fig 4C) the inundation is complete around 2115 (e.g. 100 years ish).
The high-range scenario (Fig 4D) the inundation is complete around 2070 (e.g. 50 years ish).
Correction: whereas I wrote that I was looking at the green lines (open circles, Uppards Island) I should have been looking at the Red lines (closed circles, Tangier Island). For figures B and C I don't think it makes any difference, but for Figure D it might - on that one it depends if you follow the regression line for the whole period or just the most recent few decades.
Probably not an important point, as from Figure 4 A the 95% CI looks like it gives a +/- 40 years on either side of the regression line, so fussing over these numbers as if they are precise is not warranted.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 5:51 PM on July 11, 2016
The mid-range scenario (Fig 4C) the inundation is complete around 2115 (e.g. 100 years ish).
The high-range scenario (Fig 4D) the inundation is complete around 2070 (e.g. 50 years ish).
Correction: whereas I wrote that I was looking at the green lines (open circles, Uppards Island) I should have been looking at the Red lines (closed circles, Tangier Island). For figures B and C I don't think it makes any difference, but for Figure D it might - on that one it depends if you follow the regression line for the whole period or just the most recent few decades.
Probably not an important point, as from Figure 4 A the 95% CI looks like it gives a +/- 40 years on either side of the regression line, so fussing over these numbers as if they are precise is not warranted.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 5:51 PM on July 11, 2016
The "good" one is misleading [...] But the "bad" one is also misleading [...] That was kind of my point.
So "easy to understand" and intentionally written to be misleading are synonyms to you, huh? Is this bit where you've again repeated that the passage which contains the 50-year-abandonment mid-range prediction "only mentions the high end scenario" yet another demonstration of how something could theoretically be written "misleadingly"? (I would call it lying, of course.)
Those being synonyms for you certainly explains why drastic departures between what your sources actually say and what you say they contain—even when that source is your own writing—don't even need to be acknowledged, or how you can extrapolate all sorts of very definite statements about "human-caused global warming" or what the worst-case SLR scenario is by looking at a couple of figures in a paper that doesn't actually mention either of those things.
I think you're carrying out personal attacks on yourself at this point.
posted by XMLicious at 6:05 PM on July 11, 2016
You are absolutely correct - where I said: "But the "bad" one is also misleading because it only mentions the high end scenario" -- I should have said "high and medium" - or perhaps it would have been more clear to say "ignores the low end."
In any case, I believe it is nap time for me.
MetaFilter: stop carrying out personal attacks on yourself.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 8:20 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
In any case, I believe it is nap time for me.
MetaFilter: stop carrying out personal attacks on yourself.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 8:20 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Radio New Zealand's Insight yesterday: Fighting the Pacific's Rising Seas
The senior pastor of the village church, [in the village of Eita on Tarawa, the main island of Kiribati] Eria Maerere, says when the community first arrived there in 1980, the king tides were never a problem, but now they regularly inundate their homes.posted by XMLicious at 3:04 AM on July 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
"When we first heard about the rise of the sea-level, we thought that somebody made up a story, but at the beginning of the year 2000, that's when we begin to realise that it is not a fiction, it is a true story."
"Sometime around the year 2000 we had the first big king tide, where the water swept in and all the floors of the houses were breached with the water."
"All the families had to get up early in the morning because all the water had washed their mats, their pillows and all that."
...
Professor James Renwick from Victoria University of Wellington says sea levels in the western tropical Pacific have risen faster than just about anywhere on Earth.
'The best solution? Move the Mauritanian capital': water on the rise in Nouakchott
posted by XMLicious at 9:07 AM on July 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by XMLicious at 9:07 AM on July 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
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These Chesapeake islands (Smith, Tangier etc) are special, culturally and ecologically. Its only in the last generation or two that many people moved off or on these islands. They will be a serious loss.
The watermen on Smith preserve an accent that half contains the old west country english of the original settlers.
First in a long line of losses I suppose.
posted by C.A.S. at 11:45 AM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]