From our community:
More grim news for the country’s sea coasts as yet another faster then expected impact from climate change has been identified. NOAA released a report in March that is anything but comforting for those of us that reside on the Eastern Seaboard.
As you know, one of the most significant impacts of climate change will be sea level rise. The acceleration of rising seas over the past couple of decades will cause inundation of coastal areas and islands, shoreline erosion, and destruction of important ecosystems such as wetlands and mangroves. As temperatures increase, “sea level rises due to a thermal expansion of upper layers of the ocean and melting of glaciers and ice sheets”. Storm surge will inundate inland coastal areas that have not experienced such flooding before.
Alex Harris of the Miami Herald writes:
By 2070, most climate models show it could flood every single day, according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The remaining models show flooding ever other day.
In the report released this week, NOAA said the data reflects a prediction made by the late Margaret Davidson, founder of NOAA’s coastal services center — “Today’s flood will become tomorrow’s high tide.”
At this point, Miamians are familiar with the kind of floods that swamp their streets and leave them dashing across sidewalks with shoes in hand. But flooding at the frequency NOAA predicts would double, triple and eventually exponentially increase the amount of puddles residents must ford per year. Massive changes within a lifetime.
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That’s not even counting King Tides, the highest tides of the year. William Sweet, lead author on the NOAA study, said King Tide level floods could occur between 10 and 50 days a year by 2050 and every other day to every single day by 2100.
NOAA data show high tide floods are predicted to increase in the next 50 years, and could be as frequent as every single day by 2070.The loss of ice from Greenland’s ice sheet is one of the largest contributors to global sea level rise (though there are rising concerns that Antarctica will be a major near-term source as well). This is because the majority of ice loss to the sea in recent years is from increased surface melt and runoff from the world’s ice sheets due to a long-term warming trend caused by human greenhouse emissions.
The two major causes of global sea level rise are thermal expansion caused by warming of the ocean (since water expands as it warms) and increased melting of land-based ice, such as glaciers and ice sheets. The oceans are absorbing more than 90 percent of the increased atmospheric heat associated with emissions from human activity.
With continued ocean and atmospheric warming, sea levels will likely rise for many centuries at rates higher than that of the current century. In the United States, almost 40 percent of the population lives in relatively high-population-density coastal areas, where sea level plays a role in flooding, shoreline erosion, and hazards from storms. Globally, eight of the world's 10 largest cities are near a coast, according to the U.N. Atlas of the Oceans.
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