Posted on 11/01/2013 6:05:55 AM PDT by Phillyred
New Jersey may have been stronger than the storm, but the sea will prove stronger in the long run, scientists fear.
Dozens of its towns – including such familiar places as Atlantic City, Hoboken, Beach Haven and Wildwood -- may already be doomed to partly flooded futures.
Some neighborhoods are already precariously close to sea level, as evidenced by projects that have committed more than a billion dollars to replenish Jersey beaches and protect them over several decades. Even climate-change skeptics acknowledge that sea levels have been slowly rising.
"It's rare that you'll find someone to say that sea level isn't rising," said Jon Miller, a professor of coastal engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. "That's hard to refute."
"If I had a house at the Jersey Shore I would want it to be built as high as it could possibly be," he added.
The rise this century could be dramatic – as much as 6.6 feet -- depending on how much global warming melts ice in Greenland and Antarctica, according to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
If this century mimics the last one, NOAA says, seas would rise just another eight inches. If the oceans warm and expand, the rise could double that. Add melting from ice sheets and glaciers and a four-foot rise is the expectation by 2100.
Four feet would be disastrous. It's enough for high tide to overrun half of the populated areas of 25 New Jersey towns – including half of Margate, Strathmere and Brigantine – and five in Delaware, displacing as many as a quarter-million people, according to “Cities Below Future Seas,” an interactive tool from Climate Central, a Princeton-based research group.
See list: "39 N.J. Towns Most at Risk to Rising Seas"
These are not all towns with narrow beaches. Indeed, the tool's simulations of coming flooding shows that bayside streets may be hardest hit, so even Wildwood, with its broad beach, is in jeopardy. And some low-lying towns aren't even at the Shore, including Hoboken and Secaucus in North Jersey, Pennsville in Salem County, and Gibbstown in Gloucester County.
Such a rise has already become inevitable, says ecologist Ben Strauss, a Climate Central vice president.
“It appears that the amount of carbon pollution to date has already locked in more than 4 feet of sea level rise past today’s levels,” he said. “That is enough, at high tide, to submerge more than half of today’s population in 316 coastal cities and towns (home to 3.6 million) in the lower 48 states,” including Miami, Virginia Beach, Sacramento and Jacksonville.
Lower the "threat threshold" to 25 percent, and New York and Boston join the list, according to Strauss.
The timetable may be uncertain, Strauss said, but he’s convinced the end result is as clear as the fate of a bag of ice left out at room temperature.
The idea of such long-term impact is supported by a recently released draft of a report by the UN-appointed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Four feet might even be an underestimate. "Most scientists tell me that number is too low," Strauss said.
Some scientists suspect global warming could generate more hurricanes in the Atlantic, and former Vice President Al Gore even speculated about monstrous Category 6 hurricanes spawned by global warming.
But sea level changes are looking like the more real worry, said Philip Klotzbach, part of the hurricane prediction team at Colorado State University.
"If you look at global tropical cyclone activity around the globe, right now we’re at a 30-year low,” and several dozen earlier Atlantic storms were more powerful than Sandy, he said.
Raise sea levels, though, and coastlines everywhere become more vulnerable to storms of all sizes, suggesting that in coming decades, policymakers may face increasing pressure to shift from rebuilding after hurricanes and major nor'easters to beginning a strategic retreat.
Hurricanes can seem like Mother Nature's mood swings. Regularly flooded streets might drive home the message that the answer's in the air.
Miller hopes there's still time to stave off disaster, by engineering buildings and beaches that can better survive the wind, rainfall and storm surges of major storms, while cutbacks in greenhouse-gas emissions help the atmosphere heal.
"I think you do have to attack the problem from both ends," Miller said.
Perhaps new technologies will scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. That's the goal of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Earth Challenge, a contest with a $25 million prize.
Other alarming scientific reports assert that the heat in coming decades will make recent record years seem cool, and that severe spring thunderstorms will be more frequent in the Eastern United States, all because of global warming. Last year, a geophysicist even argued that climate change could trigger more volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.
Although 97 percent of top climate scientists agree that the planet is in the midst of human-accelerated climate change, skeptics persist, who argue that you can’t prove a drastic future before it arrives.
“It's all very speculative,” says H. Sterling Burnett, an analyst with the National Center for Policy Analysis. Barrier islands may eventually disappear unless there’s another ice age, he said, but he has doubts that computer models can accurately predict what lies ahead.
Evidence will become increasingly ominous, then undeniable, Strauss predicts. Sandy's storm surge set a record for Atlantic City that might not be broken soon. But by mid-century, the odds start stacking up, Strauss said. A 2 percent annual chance of topping Sandy in the 2040s will grow to 13 percent in the 2060s, jump to 33 percent in the 2070s, then rocket to 100 percent in the 2080s, projections suggest.
“Places are going to have that sharp transition from never getting flooded or rarely getting flooded to always getting flooded," he said. "... That’s the heart of it. That’s how people are going to experience this.”
At current greenhouse-gas production rates, by late this century even some Pennsylvania towns start showing as destined to have sections submerge. The most vulnerable are Bristol, Croydon and Tullytown in Bucks County, and Eddystone and Marcus Hook in Delaware County. At that level - an inevitable rise in sea level of 20 feet - more than 1.5 million people in New Jersey would be affected, including in Camden and Gloucester City.
Miller's more hopeful.
"I don't think it's a losing battle yet," he said. "But we may get to a point that it does become a losing battle."
Much of the eastern seaboard is sinking due to tectonic forces that have nothing to do with weather.
There is warming all right. Some of those temperature measuring stations are showing warmer temperatures. Of course it isn’t mentioned a 5 acre asphalt parking lot built next to it.
Like erosion never happened in the past. Idiots. They claim people are the bane of the planet, and then they run sob stories about how awful it is that geology affects humans who chose to perch on a shoreline.
Which is it? Do we love Gaia as she is, or not?
If we took all of the Scientists and people who they have fooled into believing their BS we could stack them up against the sea and form a barrier.
He is correct. At the upper west side wine and cheese parties it is rare to find someone that isn't parroting the lie.
Actually this may happen but not because of AGW sea rise. The east coast has been sinking from North Carolina up to New York for thousand upon thousands of years.
This sinking process partially aided or caused the strong earthquake two years ago in Mineral Springs.
However it certainly won’t happen this decade....lol
Carbon pollution. Don’t you love it. How about some gold pollution.
Aw, jeez...
This is a nice example of how they just make shit up. Check their math - first they state that we're looking at a 6.6 feet rise. To get there, they explain it could be eight inches if it's like last century (remember that? me neither, but anyway) they then state that a puffy ocean could double that, so there's a sixteen inch rise. Add melting glaciers and what not, and they say the total could be four feet, which could spell the end of civilization AWKI.
But that 6.6 foot number is still floating out there like unflushed turd. Can we revisit that number? Where did it come from? Where did it go? Oh, it was just a made up number. Like every other made up number in this dopey article.
Such a rise has already become inevitable, says ecologist Ben Strauss, a Climate Central vice president.
That's good news Ben! What's the sense of worrying. To quote the country song, "If you would, Lord, send a boat."
We learned conclusively in an old thread that the sea level change is the result of tectonic movement and not climate change.
The Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast has been sinking for years. In the 70’s part of Baytown finally succumbed to the Gulf.
At the same time, ocean levels have been rising for 20,000 years, since the last ice age. The Egyptian coast line of Cleopatra’s time is under 30-40’ of water due to rising oceans, and there is no evidence this was due to “man-made global warming”.
“There’s only one way left to save New Jersey, Frank.”
“What is it, Doctor?”
“Depends absorbent underwear. We issue them to everyone in New Jersey. Then, we have them charge into the ocean. This will soak up at least half of the Atlantic Ocean.”
“But, what do we do with all that wet underwear?”
“We send them to Mexico and tell them they’re pinatas.”
I could just as easily write a story about the coming glaciation and how the new growing ice sheets in Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia are going to lower ocean levels so badly that Atlantic City will be hundreds of miles from the coast and suffer gravely due to the ocean-front economy disappearing.
Then, there will be the rise of Beringia land bridge to Asia which will flood Alaska with Russian illegal aliens and OH! what will we do???!
What about the massive Canadian wheat crop failures due to farmers not able to plant in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba because the fields are under 1 mile of ice?
Oh the horrors!
Proof? Well, we’ve had ice ages in the past... Who says they’re over? They don’t even know why they begin, nor why they end!
It’s all speculation.
In Great Britain entire voting districts have fallen into the sea but that was before global warming.
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