Posted on 03/29/2005 12:53:45 PM PST by rface
Over the last hundred years, the sea level in Boston has risen one foot due to global warming, which expands the volume of the ocean and melts ice which land has been resting on, Kirshen said. Based on the CLIMB project projections, over the next fifty years the sea level in Boston will rise at least another foot.
In an effort to explain the impending climate changes that will affect the Boston area as well as the world, Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Paul Kirshen presented an array of possible consequences and warnings to a small audience last night.
Kirshen also serves as the Climate's Long-term Impacts on Metro Boston (CLIMB) project director and co-chair of Tufts' Water: Systems, Science, and Society graduate school program.
Over the next 100 years, the February CLIMB report said that New England will experience a three to five degree Celsius change in average temperature, a 25 percent increase in precipitation, a 0.6 to one meter increase in sea level, and an uncertain degree of increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and Nor'easters.
"We are already starting to see these changes," Kirshen said. Researchers looked at a global map of precipitation increases over the past century, which showed some areas have had as much as a 50 percent increase.
A degree of uncertainty is always present in climatic change predictions, Kirshen said, using a projected change in the Mid-Atlantic region as an example.
By 2100, the stream flow - which is the difference between precipitation and evaporation - in different areas of this region could decrease by as much 12.5 percent and increase by as much as 37.5 percent.
According to Kirshen, this difficulty in predicting exactly what will happen as a result of climate change makes it very difficult to achieve policy change in the area of environmental conservation.
This is demonstrated by the fact that neither the city of Boston or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) responded to the results of the CLIMB Project that projected very severe possible consequences for the Boston area.
There is "nothing really we can do to stop climatic change in the next centuries, even if we stop [greenhouse emissions] now," Kirshen said. Therefore, Kirshen advocates preparing for the consequences of climate change now, before it is too late.
Over the last hundred years, the sea level in Boston has risen one foot due to global warming, which expands the volume of the ocean and melts ice which land has been resting on, Kirshen said. Based on the CLIMB project projections, over the next fifty years the sea level in Boston will rise at least another foot.
This will lead to greater risks of flooding in the Boston area, Kirshen said. Extreme storms like the Blizzard of 1978, which flooded portions of Boston, occur on average every 100 years. If the sea level rises another 0.3 meters, however, this type of damage "could occur on average every 10 years," Kirshen said.
By the year 2100, if no changes are made, an extreme storm could overflow the Charles River Dam and flood all of the Back Bay area. By that time, with no changes to flood proofing or sea walls, an estimated $20 billion dollars worth of damage would have been caused if the sea level rose at the moderate estimate of 0.6 meters.
According to Kirshen, climate change is caused mainly by the Greenhouse Effect - the build-up of various gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrous dioxide, and methane in the Earth's atmosphere.
These gases prevent a portion of the sun's energy from escaping back into space, trapping it in the Earth's atmosphere and raising the average temperature around the globe.
Energy from the sun is what drives the hydrologic cycle of evaporation, precipitation, and run off of water that is constantly occurring everywhere on the planet.
This is important, Kirshen said, because increasing amounts of the sun's energy being trapped in the atmosphere causes an increase in the rate of the hydrologic cycle, which will affect humans in a variety of ways Kirshen demonstrated will be difficult to predict.
Kirshen's presentation was held in the Crane Room of Paige Hall.
I suppose this is the point where I'm supposed to fire up the SUV, with images of liberals drowning in the streets of Boston filling me with glee.
Ah..so THIS explains why the tunnel under Boston Harbor leaks....
Gonna ruin the real estate market there......
We can fix this...lets nuke some volcanoes...then everyone will moan and whine about having no summer and frost in July...
One foot huh? Even at the height of global warming, I thought the most dire predictions where a couple/few inches?
I'm glad this is localized. It would be terrible to have ocean levels rise one foot everywhere, but as long as the ocean is changing just within metropolitan Boston, I guess it's no big deal.
one foot already and another foot to come.....but the ocean is only rising in Boston
and YOU really expect that that precise scientific explanation would bother liberals?
If that's going to happen to Boston I see no incentive to hold back!
Boston's been sinking in more ways than one.
The water rises more than a foot everytime Teddy K takes a dip.
Hooray! Now I can switch from Early Girl hybrid tomatoes to Super Beefstake tomatoes!
Really, now? Couldn't be that climate change has little to nothing to do with greenhouse gasses, now could it?
Sure glad I got may beach front property, in Colorado, before the rush sets in.
If my mom holds on to her house in Newton a little longer, it will be oceanfront property.
And Cohasset will be Atlantis.
This has a simple explanation: The success of the Boston sports teams, has led to much more beer drinking and thus more flusing-ocean rises a foot-end of story.
Then I think we should do some irrigation projects to divert surplus water to places like Las Vegas and Darfur. Or do they want a separate and unrelated water crisis?
So what! The Back Bay USED to be tidewater flats - hence its name. It was filled in during the 1800's. Think of it like the lowlands of Holland... From Wikipedia: "It is frequently observed that this would have been impossible under modern environmental regulations." So why are the enviros so upset now? You'd think they'd want it to revert to its natural state!
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