Video by Miami based Dan Kipnis, a charter captain who has followed the steady rise of sea level and its effects in his home town.
Description:
Sea Level Rise will inundate Miami Beach by 2075. The effects are here right now. Look at what Miami Beach and every coastal city in the world faces. The land is not sinking, the oceans are rising due to Global Warming. There is no way back from this!!
Joe Romm floats a suggestion: prepare your bucket list of places to visit before they are lost forever beneath rising waves.
Have you assembled a list of places you would like to take your family before climate change and sea level rise destroys them or at least eviscerates their very essence?
I started to think about that after interviewing Nicole Hernandez Hammer, the Latina climate scientist who was invited to watch the State of the Union address in the first lady’s box.
Hammer, who has mapped the lowest-lying areas in Southeast Florida, takes political leaders, scientists, and the media to visit some of the most at-risk areas during high tide, which flood even on clear days. She and her colleagues have bucket lists. As she wrote in December:
On these tours, I drive by the beaches where I hung out as teenager, my family’s favorite Cuban restaurant, the church where I was married and the building where I was sworn in as a citizen and promised my allegiance to this country. They matter to me because they are a part of who I am and I am saddened and angry that they will be lost.
For me, these tours have become a kind of long goodbye. I know that for many of these places we can’t stop the impacts but I have hope that maybe we can find ways to adapt to them. Because of my work, I face these issues on a more frequent and personal level than most, but this will also change. It will soon be a reality for us all in one way or another.
Some places appear to be unsavable given the much faster than expected response of the great ice sheets to global warming and the much slower than needed response to global warming by the world. Many leading climatologists now believe we are headed toward the high end of sea level rise projections this century — 4, 5 or 6 feet.
“In fact, some of my colleagues are writing up their ‘climate change bucket lists,’” Hammer explained. “These are spots that we know are very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and may not be around by the next turn of the century. I keep a copy of my list on my desk at home, it is my motivation to keep doing the work I do.”
Here, an educational EPA on South Florida impacts in coming years.
Well fortunately I visited Florida in the mid 1970’s, and thought I had found paradise when I made my way to Key West.
Wonder if all the hippies are still down there ? and the heady smell of herbal smoke is in the air at sundown. Paradise found, Paradise lost.
So drive down there? Another unnecessary journey contributing to the problem?
The real message isn’t getting through is it? Our lifestyles have to change, really, really change….. assuming the horse hasn’t bolted already….. I gather the rising Arctic methane levels are not looking good at all!!
An interesting comment on methane, I like to track indicators. I can get weekly/monthly CO2 concentration data easily from NOAA, monthly temperature data from NASA, but cannot find a good reporting source for methane.
Although I have read from some scientists that there are no firm red lines in climate science, as a retired business person, I know a lot of people can understand simple targets and red lines. Having researched CO2, I personally think the red line should be drawn around the 425 ppm mark , as an international body of scientists decided 450 ppm had a fair chance of bringing the temperature increase over the 2°C. Methane has caused temperature spikes in past eras and I would like to see what is happening monthly, but can’t find a regular and reliable source. If any reader knows of a reliable source for regular methane concentration data, please advise the link.
Historical methane peaks coincide with increase in temperature.
Throughout Earth´s history there have been several short periods of significant increase in temperature. And these periods often coincide with peaks of methane in the atmosphere , as recorded by ice cores. Scientists such as Plaza Faverola are still debating about the cause of this methane release in the past.
https://cage.uit.no/news/methane-seepage-arctic-seabed-occurring-millions-years/
A good site for monitoring Arctic CH4 levels is NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab (www.esrl.noaa.gov) where you can click on the Barrow, AK, observatory and look at the CH4 data at resolutions from monthly down to hourly. I find hourly to be useful for seeing transient plumes of CH4 (from Siberia, presumably). You will see that both the background CH4 leve (around 1920 ppb) and the transient events (up to 2200 ppb) are increasing. I don’t know if it crosses the threshold from ‘concerning’ to ‘alarming’ but it is certainly worth following.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=BRW&program=ccgg&type=ts
Just what we need: another complex loop of infinite regression to confound the less intelligent:
Just what we need: tens of millions of rich entitled assholes jetting all over the world trying to get a last look at the places they’re helping to destroy by jetting around the world trying to get a last look at the places they’re helping to destroy by jetting around the world trying to get a last look at the places they’re helping to destroy by jetting around the world…
Here’s a suggestion: Stay the hell home and work for climate justice and try to help us avoid the worst of the climate catastrophe that’s already upon us!
PS. My apologies to the actual anatomical sphincters of the world, necessary aspects of digestion and elimination that they are. Interesting, isn’t it, that there are no serious words of deprecation in English that don’t project onto and denigrate sex, the body, animals or that process of digestion?
I share your feelings about “rich entitled assholes”, but one “…jetting all over the world trying to get a last look at the places they’re helping to destroy…” would have sufficed.
And do pejorative terms like “stupid” and “moronic” project onto and deprecate the body? They have no physical being, and when one dies, the “thinking” (or lack thereof) that evoked them can’t be found at autopsy.
Pardon me, I lost my head. I should have specified “nouns”. I also should have said that there are of course many words referring to specific qualities–lack of intelligence, lack of etc. excess of ego, etc. There are also lots of adjectives and adverbs, but all the worst general insulting names for people I can think of, short of Shakespearian insults hardly anyone understands and absolutely no one takes seriously (flirt-gill? joithead?), fall into the mentioned categories which should be compliments, not insults. I’d be quite happy to be proved wrong, as the next time I argue with someone on the internet I could use something that didn’t force me to apologize to organs, animals and acts of love.