Wall Street Gets Climate Savvy

It's the money, Honey.

It has finally dawned on Wall Street that climate change comes with a price tag.

From IBM and AccuWeather Inc. to outfits like Riskpulse, Jupiter and DTN, companies that track weather have created an intensely competitive new industry in just the last five years. Their client lists have grown to include insurers, banks and commodity traders, engineers and architects, shippers, retailers and the travel industry. And little is done without their input. 

As global warming makes extreme weather more common, meteorologists have become the high priests of finance, mitigating uncertainty and boosting risk-related profits. “There’s kind of a wave building," said Tory Grieves, membership manager at The Collider, a North Carolina nonprofit that helps climate entrepreneurs train and network.

Wall Street has arrived late to the party.  The global insurance industry has been alive to the climate factor for years. It's a costly threat.  In March, the giant German re-insurer, Munich Re, warned that climate change losses could drive the price of insurance premiums beyond the reach of many homeowners.

Ernst Rauch, Munich Re's chief climatologist put it this way: “If the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue,” he said after Munich Re published a report into climate change’s impact on wildfires. 

“Affordability is so critical [because] some people on low and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy insurance.”
Nicolas Jeanmart, the head of personal insurance, general insurance and macroeconomics at Insurance Europe, which speaks for 34 national insurance associations, said the knock-on effects from rising premiums could pose a threat to social order. 

“The sector is concerned that continuing global increases in temperature could make it increasingly difficult to offer the affordable financial protection that people deserve, and that modern society requires to function properly,” he said.

The smart money, or the experts who advise the smart money, also know that climate change is not a linear process. It can and will see major seismic impacts. For example, attention is now focusing on "ice cliffs" of Greenland and the Antarctic that are slumping and will possibly lead to abrupt (a decade or two) sea level rise of up to three metres. No one is prepared for that, certainly not "sea to sea to sea" Canada.  An event such as that could be devastating to the global economy. It would overwhelm many coastal cities and ports and cause massive displacement of coastal populations.

It doesn't help that many important countries are now run on the "never, never" of perpetual borrowing. The Pharaohs knew to keep the Nile granaries full for those years that the river didn't flood the farmland, triggering crop failures. I guess we're smarter than those ancient Pharaohs. Their granaries were kept full. Our treasuries are empty. Oh dear.

Dammit, Do Something. America's Sea Level Rise Whinge.

It's hard to feel too much sympathy for people whose main concern is their multi-million dollar beachfront home. Yet, all along the American coastline, you can hear them grumble and grouse.

News reports tend to focus on America's southeast, especially Florida, mainly from Miami and points south. This one is a story of the beach colony at Del Mar, California. It concerns Herb and Janet Montgomery and their $3+million beach house.

The Montgomerys and their neighbours are upset that their municipality's sea level rise plan includes an option - retreat from the sea.

But considering a strategy that allows for the eventual removal of threatened structures, even as a last resort, would be tantamount to financial ruin for him and other property owners in the small, wealthy coastal city. 

“It won’t work for Del Mar,” Montgomery said.

The mere mention of the strategy known as “planned retreat” in the city’s planning documents will “put a cloud of doubt over the future” and cause property values to plummet, he said last week. Beachfont homes in Del Mar typically list for more than $5 million, and a new blufftop mansion on Stratford Court sold for $21.5 million last year. 

Current owners would be reluctant to invest in improving and maintaining their homes, Mongomery said, and banks would be unlikely to loan money to buy or improve homes that the city has acknowledged could be removed or destroyed.

Many of the city’s residents have fought long and hard against including planned retreat as part of their strategy. They say seawalls, sand retention and beach replenishment are better ways to preserve their coastal homes, and that their property values would plummet if they acknowledge that someday their property could be inundated by the sea. 

However, the California Coastal Commission requires all coastal cities to have a sea-rise adaptation plan, and to include planned retreat as part of their strategy. 

Failure to comply could result in the Coastal Commission refusing to certify the city’s plan, thus robbing Del Mar of the authority to approve permits for developments such as seawalls, homes, businesses, roads and other structures. Instead, that authority would fall to the Coastal Commission.

Socialism - For the Rich.

“We may see five feet of sea-level rise earlier than previously thought,” states a letter dated April 16 to Del Mar Mayor Dwight Worden from Coastal Commission program manager Garbriel Buhr. 

The California Ocean Protection Council adopted statewide guidance in March that recommends planning for a 7.1-foot sea-level rise by 2100 for the Del Mar area, the letter states. Seas could rise as much as 10 feet by 2100 if the polar ice sheets melt significantly. And by most accounts, the water will continue to rise for centuries. 

Typically, the retreat strategy is used with other planning techniques such as identifying high-risk areas, regulating types of structures, and instituting buy-back programs or financial aid for relocation.

The State as Indemnitor

Montgomery said cities around the world have found ways to hold back the sea. 

“Look at Holland,” he said. “They have been below sea level almost forever, and they are dealing with it.” 

Montgomery said if the state forces the city to include a retreat policy, “They better come along with a big heavy bucket of money. People should be remunerated for the investments they made.”

This is going to become one of the great challenges of climate change and not just in swank coastal communities. Sea level rise, sustained and cyclical floods and droughts, severe storm events of increasing frequency, duration and severity. the broken hydrologic cycle and disruptions to fresh water supply. That's a pretty tall shopping list for governments in this era of "everyday low taxes." State and municipal governments are often tapped out from decades of catering to miserly residents. Those governments will have to struggle just to replace and maintain essential public infrastructure.

There is going to be no free lunch. The money to do that doesn't exist. Ordinary folks, living well back from the sea, probably aren't going to be okay with the idea of picking up this sort of tab.

And somebody needs to tell Herb Montgomery that Holland has faced reality and is retreating from the rising sea.

Whether it's Del Mar, California, or the Florida Keys or the Jersey Shore or beachfront homes in the Maritimes or Vancouver's toney West Point Grey there are a lot of affluent people who are going to have to realize not all investments pay off.

"There Was No Rain"

Climate change refugees are on the march and they're coming not just from Africa or the Middle East or some low-lying atoll in the South Pacific, they're migrating poleward in the Americas too.

Todd Miller went to southern Mexico to interview climate migrants. Where are they from? Where are they headed? Given the dangers, why?



When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate-change refugees. We were 20 miles from the border with Guatemala at a rail yard where Central American refugees often congregated to try to board La Bestia (“the Beast”), the nickname given to the infamous train that has proven so deadly for those traveling north toward the United States.

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 When I asked why they were heading for the United States, one responded simply, “No hubo lluvia.” (“There was no rain.”) In their community, without rain, there had been neither crops, nor a harvest, nor food for their families, an increasingly common phenomenon in Central America. In 2015, for instance, 400,000 people living in what has become Honduras’s “dry corridor” planted their seeds and waited for rain that never came. As in a number of other places on this planet in this century, what came instead was an extreme drought that stole their livelihoods.

For Central America, this was not an anomaly. Not only had the region been experiencing increasing mid-summer droughts, but also, as the best climate forecasting models predict, a “much greater occurrence of very dry seasons” lies in its future. Central America is, in fact, “ground zero” for climate change in the Americas, as University of Arizona hydrology and atmospheric sciences professor Chris Castro told me. And on that isthmus, the scrambling of the seasons, an increasingly deadly combination of drenching hurricanes and parching droughts, will hit people already living in the most precarious economic and political situations. Across Honduras, for example, more than76% of the population lives in conditions of acute poverty. The coming climate breakdowns will only worsen that or will, as Castro put it, be part of a global situation in which “the wet gets wetter, the dry gets drier, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Everything gets more extreme.”

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“Although the exact number of people that will be on the move by mid-century is uncertain,” wrote the authors of the report In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, “the scope and scale could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before.” And here’s the sad reality of our moment: for such developments, the world is remarkably unprepared. There isn’t even a legal framework for dealing with climate refugees, either in international law or the laws of specific countries. The only possible exception: New Zealand’s “special refugee visas” for small numbers of Pacific Islanders displaced by rising seas.

The only real preparations for such a world are grim ones: walls and the surveillance technology that goes with them. Most climate-displaced people travelling internationally without authorization will sooner or later run up against those walls and the armed border guards meant to turn them back. And if the United States or the European Union is their destination, any possible doors such migrants might enter will be slammed shut by countries that, historically, are the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluters and so most implicated in climate change. (Between 1850 and 2011, the United States was responsible for 27% of the world’s emissions and the countries of the European Union, 25%.)

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I was just east of Agua Prieta in the Mexican state of Sonora, a mere 25 feet from the U.S.-Mexican border. I could clearly see the barrier there and a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a green-striped truck looking back at me from the other side of the divide. Perhaps a quarter mile from where I stood, I could also spot an Integrated Fixed Tower, one of 52 new high-tech surveillance platforms built in the last two years in southern Arizona by the Israeli company Elbit Systems. Since that tower’s cameras are capable of spotting objects and people seven miles away, I had little doubt that agents in a nearby command and control center were watching me as well. There, they would also have had access to the video feeds from Predator B drones, once used on the battlefields of the Greater Middle East, but now flying surveillance missions in the skies above the border. There, too, the beeping alarms of thousands of motion sensors implanted throughout the U.S. border zone would ring if you dared cross the international divide.

Only 15 years ago, very little of this existed. Now, the whole region -- and most of this preceded Donald Trump’s election victory -- has become a de facto war zone. Climate refugees, having made their way through the checkpoints and perils of Mexico, will now enter a land where people without papers are tracked in complex, high-tech electronic ways, hunted, arrested, incarcerated, and expelled, sometimes with unfathomable cruelty. To a border agent, the circumstances behind the flight of those three Honduran farmers would not matter. Only one thing would -- not how or why you had come, but if you were in the United States without the proper documentation.

Climate change, increased global migration, and expanding border enforcement are three linked phenomena guaranteed to come to an explosive head in this century. In the United States, the annual budgets for border and immigration policing regimes have already skyrocketed from about $1.5 billion in the early 1990s to $20 billion in 2017, a number that represents the combined budgets of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During that period, the number of Border Patrol agents quintupled, 700 miles of walls and barriers were constructed (long before Donald Trump began talking about his “big, fat, beautiful wall”), and billions of dollars of technology were deployed in the border region.

Such massive border fortification isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. In 1988, when the Berlin Wall fell, there were 15 border walls in the world. Now, according to border scholar Elisabeth Vallet, there are 70. These walls generally have risen between the richer countries and the poorer ones, between those that have the heavier carbon footprints and those plunged into Parenti’s “catastrophic convergence” of political, economic, and ecological crises. This is true whether you’re talking about the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, or Asia.

As Paul Currion points out, even some countries that are only comparatively wealthy are building such “walls,” often under pressure and with considerable financial help. Take Turkey. Its new “smart border” with drought-stricken and conflict-embroiled Syria is one of many examples globally. It now has a new tower every 1,000 feet, a three-language alarm system, and “automated firing zones” supported by hovering zeppelin drones. “It appears that we’ve entered a new arms race,” writes Currion, “one appropriate for an age of asymmetric warfare, with border walls replacing ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles].”

India is typical in constructing a steel wall along its lengthy border with Bangladesh, a country expected to have millions of displaced people in the decades to come, thanks to sea level rise and storm surges. In these years, with so many people on the move from the embattled Greater Middle East and Africa, the countries of the European Union have also been doubling down on border protection, with enforcement budgets soaring to 50 times what they were in 2005.

The trends are already clear: the world will be increasingly carved up into highly monitored border surveillance zones. Market projections show that global border and homeland security industries are already booming across the planet. The broader global security market is poised to nearly double between 2011 and 2022 (from $305 billion to $546 billion). And, not so surprisingly, a market geared to climate-related catastrophes is already on the verge of surpassing $150 billion.

This is the world that Gwynne Dyer described a decade ago in his book, "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival As the World Overheats." In it, the author describes how the Pentagon plans to militarize America's coasts and land borders (to the south anyway). He also notes that American military planners are looking at ideas such as robotic, free fire killing zones where, out of sight and out of mind, would be migrants will be slaughtered.

It's fair to say that many Americans, perhaps most, are already conditioned, pre-disposed to see the brown peoples to their south as a peril. Trump tells them these illegals are rapists and worse. The time-honoured steps to dehumanize a targeted group are well underway and they're finding a receptive audience.

Also bear in mind what is happening in American society. The nation is being fractured, left (or what passes for left down there) and right. Some claim the American people haven't been so deeply divided since the Civil War. Social cohesion is being undermined and, to some extent, deliberately. The US has the highest rates of inequality - of wealth, income and opportunity - among the developed nations. There is a gaping divide between the plutocracy on one side and the precariat on the other. Some see in this the emergence of a true aristocracy and the evolution of a state of neo-feudalism. White supremacists and fascists now march freely through America's streets. These shifts do not a welcoming society engender.

Another powerful factor that will come into play will be the climate change plight that will be experienced by the American people across the southern states. Climatically everything is worsening. Severe storm events, hurricanes and tornadoes of worsening intensity. Severe weather events, floods and droughts, of increasing frequency, duration and intensity. The depletion of once abundant groundwater resources. Worsening heat events and fires. Sea level rise, storm surges and saltwater inundation. America is facing the real prospect of dealing with an internally displaced population, IDPs. In a country with America's standard of living that can be a hugely costly burden on the state, especially one that is now in the process of being defunded through tax "reform" and other bleed off mechanisms. If the society has to struggle to resettle its own IDPs, how likely is it to be welcoming to climate migrants from other lands?

Farewell to Nova Scotia?

Nova Scotia could become Canada's second island province thanks to climate change and sea level rise.

Mayor David Kogon of Amherst, N.S., said sea levels are projected to rise in the Bay of Fundy over 15 to 20 years to the point where the Isthmus of Chignecto will flood, even without a storm surge.

The isthmus is a narrow, low-lying strip of land that is about 20 kilometres at its narrowest point.

"If the Isthmus of Chignecto, which is all that connects Nova Scotia to New Brunswick, is flooded out, then Nova Scotia will be surrounded by water," said Kogon in an interview Thursday, adding that with the right storm the isthmus could flood sooner.

"If the highway and rail line are under water, you've completely cut Nova Scotia off from the rest of mainland Canada."

I know, I know, Newfoundland is also an island only it's Newfoundland and Labrador, right? Not the same thing.

Three Million Years, Are You Kidding? Another Record for Mankind.

Atmospheric CO2 levels got a bump last year to 403.3 ppm, up from 400.0 ppm in 2015. This is all getting into ancient records territory. The last time our planet's atmosphere logged 403.3 ppm CO2 was about 3 million years ago.



“Globally averaged concentrations of CO2 reached 403.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2016, up from 400.00 ppm in 2015 because of a combination of human activities and a strong El Niño event,” according to The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, the UN weather agency’s annual flagship report.
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The last time Earth experienced similar CO2 concentration rates was during the Pliocene era (three to five million years ago), when the sea level was up to 20m higher than now.

“Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, we will be heading for dangerous temperature increases by the end of this century, well above the target set by the Paris climate change agreement,” World Meteorological Organisation chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

The momentum from the Paris accord in 2015 is faltering due to the failure of national governments to live up to their promises. In a report to be released on Tuesday, UN Environment will show the gap between international goals and domestic commitments leaves the world on course for warming well beyond the 2C target and probably beyond 3C. International efforts to act have also been weakened by US president Donald Trump’s decision to quit the accord.

Prof Dave Reay, professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, said: “This should set alarm bells ringing in the corridors of power. We know that, as climate change intensifies, the ability of the land and oceans to mop up our carbon emissions will weaken. There’s still time to steer these emissions down and so keep some control, but if we wait too long humankind will become a passenger on a one-way street to dangerous climate change.”

Just to refresh, let's unpack those warnings. We need "rapid cuts" in atmospheric greenhouse gas loadings. That's rapid as in R.F.N. Not some $20 a tonne carbon tax. Rapid, big, cuts - now. One part of that challenge is to rapidly decarbonize our societies and our economies. Another part is to find some damn way to capture massive quantities of atmospheric greenhouse gases. And this is no longer a matter of just man-made CO2 emissions either. We've awakened that sleeping giant, Earth, and it's now in the game of releasing massive amounts of once safely sequestered greenhouse gases - CO2 from overheated forests and soil as well as wildfires in our temperate forests and tundra plus mega-methane releases from thawing permafrost and melting seabed methane clathrates. So, kids, we have to wipe our own bottoms and Mother Nature's and those bottoms aren't getting any nicer with the passage of time.

Meanwhile, In the Delusional States of America

I suppose if you locked your doors, disconnected the power and drew your shutters you might manage to get through a day without being exposed to some head-shaking example of lunacy from the Delusional States of America.

How about this one. FEMA, America's Federal Emergency Management Agency, charged with keeping Americans secure in their own homes, has weighed in on the National Flood Insurance Program.

This is a tough one for Congress. America is getting hammered by a lot of severe flooding. Some of the worst occurs during severe storm events, hurricanes and such. Some of it is flash flooding inland caused by severe rain storms of protracted duration. A lot of that happening now.

The problem is that, since the private insurers bid adieu to flood insurance, the government stepped in. That problem is made all the worse when the government is afraid to raise premiums to make the programme self-sustaining. They wanted to do that but it raised a furor, especially in the flood-prone south and the heartland states - places that keep the Republicans in power. The proposed rate increases would not only cost a lot - a lot - but they would also sink housing prices. That gets voters pissed off and Donald Trump is a fiery object lesson of what can happen when voters are pissed off.

And so FEMA's latest proposals to the flood insurance programme raised eyebrows when it turned out that it completely omitted any reference to sea level rise.

“This climate-change denying insurance proposal will encourage people to continue building in areas likely to be flooded by hurricane surges and sea-level rise,” said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Hurricanes Harvey, Maria and Irma should be the wake-up call to all Americans that we can’t ignore climate change anymore and must take immediate, common sense steps to protect our future.”

FEMA is responsible for developing comprehensive criteria for land use and management that restricts development of land exposed to flood risk. Communities can voluntarily participate in the National Flood Insurance Program, adopting land use and control measures to obtain lower-cost flood insurance.

“The overarching purpose of this program is to keep development out of flood prone areas but this continues to be ignored putting people and wildlife at increased risk,” said Lopez.

Good one, FEMA.

Welcome to WaterWorld. No, Not the One With Costner.

Even Americans pay attention to this facet of climate change - sea level rise. And the news is bad and getting worse.

You probably remember the early 1990s well enough. Not that long ago really. Well, over the past 25 years, the rate of sea level rise has increased threefold. And it's still speeding up.

A study published in scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests the threat of rising sea levels has been drastically underestimated.

"The acceleration in global mean sea-level rise is much larger than previously thought," Sönke Dangendorf, the paper's lead author, told DW.

"It underlines that sea-level rise is a serious threat," he added.

Dangendorf, from the University of Siegen in Germany, worked with an international team of scientists from Spain, France, Norway and the Netherlands. They discovered that sea levels had risen relatively slowly - by about 1.1 millimeters, or 0.04 inches, annually - for much of the 20th century. But that changed in the early 1990s

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This study isn't the first to highlight that the rate of sea-level rise is speeding up. But its findings suggest a significantly faster rate of increase than past research. One of the reasons for the recent acceleration, Dangendorf told DW, is the melting of ice sheets over recent decades.

"We have always had a great uncertainty over the contribution of the large ice sheets, which store 100 times more sea-level equivalents than glaciers," Dangendorf said.

The new research shows the impact of Greenland and Antarctica's ice sheets melting rapidly over the last 20 or 30 years has been greater than expected, and is likely to result in a larger future sea-level rise than previously predicted.

That spells trouble for coastal areas.

Over to you, America. Yes, we mean you, Louisiana. Brace yourselves.

The small floods that submerge roads and sometimes enter homes along Louisiana's coast could become more than an occasional headache. A new study suggests that the frequency of "nuisance flooding" around the Gulf of Mexico will double every decade thanks to small rises in sea level.

In lower latitudes, the flooding will be worse. The tropics, including South America and Africa, will experience a doubling of extreme flooding due to sea level rise, said Sean Vitousek, lead author of the study published in the Scientific Reports journal this week.

On the Louisiana coast, hurricanes, rather than sea level rise, will continue to pose the biggest flood danger. The same is true for the Caribbean Sea and the East Coast. "But the smaller floods are something to worry about, especially as they happen with more frequency," said Vitousek, a coastal hazards researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Nuisance flooding can degrade drainage and sewer systems, contaminate drinking water supplies, damage buildings and disrupt transportation and commerce. Decades ago, it was powerful storms that caused such problems.

"But due to sea level rise, more common (storm) events are now more impactful," wrote National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists in a 2015 report on nuisance flooding. The agency said small coastal floods have been happening two or three times more frequently than just 20 years ago.

"The takeaway is that it doesn't take much sea level rise - just 5 to 10 centimeters - to double the frequency of floods," Vitousek said. 

The latest reports indicate sea level rise is about 4 mm. per year, nearly 1.6 inches per decade.  To add a little perspective here's a handy chart showing sea level rise back to the start of the Christian era.

IPCC - "Criminally Complacent"

Arctic expert, professor Peter Wadhams, doesn't think much of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the Cambridge professor of ocean physics and head of the university's Polar Oceans Physics Group, denounces the IPCC as a dangerous sellout.

He highlighted that the IPCC has failed to quantify and properly assess the risk of a methane outbreak from melting permafrost and undersea methane hydrates.

"Because that is scarcely mentioned by the IPCC in it's assessment because I think it is being criminally complacent in not wanting to stress or talk about the possibility of some major catastrophes.

"They were once a body that warned the world about climate change, but now they are a body that is trying to say 'Well, it's bad, but not that bad. Just reduce your carbon emssions and everything will be okay.' But it won't. These things have come along, there is enormous evidence that this is happening, and we should be really worried about it."

Wadhams warned of the knock-on effects of loss of Arctic sea ice including a massive discharge of now frozen Arctic methane deposits, sea level rise and, ultimately, catastrophic global warming.

"Instead of getting less than a metre of sea level rise this century, which is what is predicted by the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the accelerated melt of the Greenland ice sheet could give us a couple of metres or more this century.

"In fact some glaciologists are talking about four or five metres. That might be extreme, but it is very likely to be more sea level rise than so far has been predicted. That means we have been very complacent about sea level rise and we ought to be realizing that many coastal regions, for instance the coast of Bangladesh which is very vulnerable, Eastern China, and a lot of cities like Miami, will have to be abandoned and that will have an enormous impact on the global economy and the lives of people."

He then adds that the reduction in sea-ice will cause the albedo of the Arctic to reduce, absorbing more warmth and further accelerating global warming. "This attempt to pretend that we can keep global warming below 2 degrees, which was already a pretence, is even more ridiculous. It is certainly going to get to 4 or 5 degrees by the end of this century, which will then have quite catastrophic impacts on agricultural production, for instance, and being able to support the population we have now, let alone an increase in population."

"To slow the release of methane and prevent a methane bomb we need to bring back Arctic sea-ice, and to do that we need to cool the planet."

Australian climate scientist Andrew Glikson has also written at The Conversation on Methane and the risk of runaway global warming. But other scientists have also indicated the strong risks of Arctic Methane Feedback amplifying warming

Wadhams also denounced the complacency of the world's political leadership.

"There is a conspiracy of complacency throughout the world in which they [politicians] still imagine that if we do a few minor things, a few minor adjustments and reduce our carbon emissions then all will be well. But it won't. Because we have already got too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are already going to have more than 2 degrees warming even if we don't emit anymore because of the existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." said Wadhams.

"We have to not only stop emitting [CO2] or reduce our emissions, but find ways to take it out of the atmosphere. That is a technology that hasn't been developed. It would be a massive research program to develop, but we should be doing it. A bit like the Manhattan Project. We should be doing it from the point of view of our own survival. That is the sort of thing the present generation should be concentrating all our attention on.

"If we can do that, then all our children have got a future."

"When you put together all the changes that are going on you see how they are ramping up to become a major change. As they go on, they tend to accelerate. Everything is increasing exponentially.

"My fear is that no-one will do anything because of cowardice and inertia and all the normal human attributes. They say 'Well let's wait until it hits us and then we'll act', but by the time it really hits us, by the time weather changes have made it impossible to feed everybody in the world, for instance, and we have worldwide famine, those sort of changes at that scale have happened then it's too late to do anything. We will by then have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to prevent a runaway global climate catastrophe. My fear is that our own inertia will lead us to not take action until it is actually too late to save ourselves."

I so wish Wadhams was just some wild-eyed radical on a rant - only he's not.  In fact he's just another voice in the choir of Arctic experts who have been trying in vain to warn us of what is happening in the far north and what that holds in store for our children and theirs. Their research, their analyses and their warnings are simply falling on deaf ears.  Everything is flushed down the memory hole.

A lot of the science types believe it quite likely we're heading for between 4C and 6C of warming by the end of this century.  In April I took an online course presented by top experts, including Schellnhuber, from the Potsdam Institute examining what awaited mankind and all other life on Earth should we allow the planet to warm by 4C. It's the sort of information we wouldn't dare teach even at a highschool level.  

Our politicians haven't got the guts to address it, to even hint at it, and neither do we. They know it's a Pandora's Box. Once opened they would stand exposed, incapable of justifying their complacency, borderline perfidy.

By the way, Wadhams believes the only hope left requires geo-engineering to cool the planet and restore the Arctic sea ice and polar atmosphere.

Update:  Meanwhile, the very sort of politician Wadham denounces, in this case the NDP's Tommy Angry Beard, has pulled a rabbit out of his ass to declare that Canada can expand Tar Sands production, just in a "sustainable" way.

The Deadly Delusion of 2C

It sounded like a plan back when they came up with it.  World governments would do whatever necessary, mainly slashing carbon emissions, so that we might limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100.  That, we were told, would give us a reasonable chance of avoiding catastrophic, runaway global warming.  It wouldn't guarantee us anything.  It would just give us a reasonable chance that life as we know it on Earth would survive - somehow.

Science marches on, always discovering new things, correcting old assumptions and such.  The Kyoto Protocol came in 1997 but in the nearly two decades since a good many scientists have come to new conclusions about the 2C target.  They think that we're screwed if we get to 2C.


The aim to limit global warming to two degrees of pre-industrial levels is "crazy" and "a prescription for disaster", according to a long-time NASA climate scientist.

The paleo-climate record shows sea-levels were six to eight metres higher than current levels when global temperatures were less than two degrees warmer than they are now, Professor James Hansen, formerly head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and now at Columbia University in New York, said.

"It's crazy to think that 2 degrees celsius is a safe limit," Professor Hansentold RN Breakfast on ABC Radio on Tuesday, adding that this would lock in several metres of sea-level rise by the middle of the century.

New satellite data over the past decade indicate that the ice sheets are disintegrating faster than had been modelled by climate scientists.

"The ice sheets are losing mass faster and faster, with a doubling time of about 10 years," Professor Hansen said. "If that continues, we would get sea-level rises of several metres by 40-50 years."

"The consequences are almost unthinkable. It would mean that all coastal cities would become dysfunctional," he told ABC Radio.

The good news is that is what may lie in store for us in 40 to 50 years by which time a good many of us will be in dirt nap mode.  The bad news is what we can expect over the next ten or twenty years.  It's a question of resilience, the flip side of vulnerability.  You don't need metres of sea level rise to send an economic and social tsunami through our civilization.  A lot of cities are just inches above sea level at high tide.  Some - New Orleans and London (Richmond, BC) - are already well below sea level.  America's eastern seaboard is full of places that already flood or nearly flood on the high tide.  The oceans are warming causing sea water expansion.  The ice caps are melting.  Compound that with more severe storms, storm surges, and seawater inundation of coastal freshwater resources and you've got a serious problem on your hands.

In many places we'll have to retreat from the sea and then we'll have to deal with the economic dislocation and the enormous challenge of resettling our very own internally displaced populations.  At least we'll have plenty of high ground to retreat to while other, less fortunate and more vulnerable places - think Bangladesh, Tuvalu etc. - will simply disappear.  

Reminds me of a TV show I stumbled across recently.  I think it's called "bargain beachfront property."  As I looked at some of the properties shown I couldn't help but notice how many of them are just inches above sea level.  Oh well, oh dear.

The Face of Sea Level Rise

We read a lot about how sea level rise is ravaging small island nations in the South Pacific but it's all very abstract, out of sight/out of mind.  That's why you should check out this interactive photo-essay from The Guardian.

As you scroll through the before and after photos, bear in mind that these images depict what is merely the 'early onset' impacts of sea level rise on these communities and their residents.

Sea Levels Rising Faster Than We Had Imagined

If there's one aspect of climate change that even diehard denialists are having trouble writing off, it's sea level rise.  That's especially noticeable in states along America's eastern seaboard and Gulf coast.  There's some grand real estate along America's waterfront up to an including gorgeous ante-bellum mansions that dominate the barrier islands off the Carolinas shores that must eventually succumb to the sea.

There's over a trillion dollars worth of real estate at risk and a lot of that is Romney-esque money.  Sure, being rich, they can afford to relocate to higher ground but their waterfront wealth stays put.

A new study from Harvard, published today in the journal Nature, concludes that sea level rise is quickening more than thought.

The report, reassessing records from more than 600 tidal gauges, found that readings from 1901-90 had over-estimated the rise in sea levels. Based on revised figures for those years, the acceleration since then was greater than so far assumed.

The report said the earlier readings were incomplete or skewed by local factors such as subsidence.

The new analysis "suggests that the acceleration in the past two decades is 25 per cent higher than previously thought," Carling Hay, a Canadian scientist at Harvard University and lead author of the study in the journalNature, told Reuters.

While the report is unwelcome news to the "old money" Deep South, it's devastating on a life and death scale to subsistence farmers in places like Bangladesh or the islanders of the South Pacific.

We Just Keep Getting it Wrong

It's a guessing game and we're not very good at it.  The "game" is trying to work out how quickly the planet's ice fields are melting.  In essence, we're guessing how much time we have before the meltwater hits our shores.

The latest guesstimate to fall is the Greenland ice sheet.  It's melting faster than we anticipated.  What is it this time?  It's these things:

See those dark spots on the surface of the ice sheet?  They're called "supraglacial lakes."  They're surface meltwater and, as the Arctic continues to warm, they're expected to grow both in numbers and in size.  They would be a lot bigger already except that many of them manage to drain down through the ice sheet where the rivers of meltwater lubricate the ice above and speed its flow to the sea.

As those lakes grow and spread they also absorb more solar energy than the ice, accelerating the melt.  Here are some images to show how the Greenland ice sheet is decomposing:

No one has an accurate estimate of what this will mean in terms of sea level rise. What is known is that the estimate of 8 inches of rise by 2100 caused by the Greenland ice sheet is way off the mark.

What Madness Looks Like

It's said to be a done deal, just the matter of a few centuries at the outside.  That's how long it's expected to take to melt all the great ice fields of the Earth.  The Arctic sea ice will disappear first, followed by the world's glaciers and then the Greenland ice sheet.  All the while the Antarctic ice sheet will continue to melt into the sea.

So, what's that going to look like say to the average Vancouverite?  Maybe something a lot like this:

As we lose those ice sheets and glaciers we can expect sea level rise of about 80 metres, maybe more.  That would leave the Lower Mainland looking something like this.  The waterfront cities of North and West Vancouver, gone.  Stanley Park, ditto.  The superprime downtown area and the toney communities along what once was English Bay, Jericho and the north shore of the Fraser, completely submerged.   No need to dwell on already low-lying municipalities like Richmond, Delta and White Rock.  They would have been among the first to succumb, their populations evacuated presumably to high ground in the interior.

It's madness yet this is the path we are taking.  Madness.

Climate Science Goofs - Again

The climate scientists got it wrong, badly wrong.  You could say they were out by a country mile (if anyone still remembers what that is).

This time it's ocean temperatures or, to be more accurate, ocean warming.  And, as usual, the scientists underestimated the amount of heat absorbed in the top half-mile of our oceans since 1970 by as much as 58 per cent.

The study, by Paul J. Durack of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and others, found that the underestimation was the result of decades of spotty sampling of water temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere, home to three-fifths of the world’s oceans. Until 2004, when a worldwide system of autonomous floats, called Argo, became operational, there were relatively few temperature measurements south of the Equator.

“We potentially may have missed a fair amount of heat that the ocean has been taking up,” Dr. Durack said.

Sea-level rise linked to climate change is related in part to increased melting of ice sheets and in part to the fact that water expands as it warms. So the finding that more heat has been taken up by the oceans may lead to revisions in estimates of the rate of sea-level rise. The finding also may affect assessments of how sensitive the climate is to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the researchers said.

Municipal and state officials are tossing around ideas to get Boston ready for up to seven feet of sea level rise by 2100.  One idea is to begin preparing parts of the city to become the Venice of the U.S.  In these areas roads would be transformed into canals.

October 9. Miami's Day of Reckoning.

On October 9, the Earth, sun and moon will align just so to create a King Tide, the highest tides of the year.   In Miami, all eyes will be on the rising seas.

On high tides or in the event of storm surge, Miami streets are awash in sea water.  Storm sewers back up or the ocean can simply rise up through the porous limestone bedrock. 

There's something of an epiphany under way in south Florida.  For years sea level rise was ignored.  In Miami, the construction industry is still buzzing building condos and shopping malls.  Now the obvious can no longer be ignored.  What will come of it is unclear.  No one has any ideas yet how to hold back the sea, particularly when it rises beneath your feet.

For more of the soggy future in store for Miami, check out this article from Rolling Stone.

In North Carolina, meanwhile, science is girding for a battle with the state's political caste to get the truth out about what sea level rise means for coastal residents.  The state boasts a string of low-lying barrier islands, many of them featuring grand southern mansions and high-end resorts.  There's a lot of wealth tied up in the state's coastal properties and the rightwing legislature is loathe to put property values at risk by loose talk about storm surges and sea level rise.

North Carolina legislators tried to limit state scientists from forecasting anything more than 8 inches of sea level rise this century but the scientific community dug in its heels.  The legislators then fell back on a compromise, a new report limited to a 30-year time frame.

The report will anticipate a foot of sea level rise by 2045 and, while the rate is expected to increase significantly in the second half of this century, the legislature doesn't want to hear about that.

This Is Going to Trash Real Estate Prices

Starting this year, buyers shopping for a nice coastal dream home in the U.S. will be able to consult 'storm surge maps' produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  That is, unless Congress kills this idea before it came come to pass.

Starting this 2014 hurricane season, NOAA’s National Hurricane Center will begin issuing an experimental graphic, Potential Storm Surge Flooding, whenever a hurricane or tropical storm creates a threat of rising water from wind. It will be found on their website. You’ll see a similar version on WKRG-TV News 5 when a storm threatens our area. Using a color scale of blue on the low end and red on the high end, the graphic shows potential, not guaranteed, height of water above ground level in areas and neighborhoods in storm surge zones. This potential is different for every storm that comes near us.

Like many new products from NOAA, this one may be later modified to improve how it is received and interpreted by the public and other government agencies. The experimental period is two years.

 

Here's a sample storm surge map for Cape Coral-Fort Meyers, Florida.  If you're in the market, you might want to pass on those red and yellow areas.

 

 

From New Jersey to Louisiana this is bound to send state legislators and governors howling.  There's a lot of very affluent folks who own property in those waterfront areas.  They're already looking at major property value losses from massive increases in U.S. government flood insurance premiums and maps like these can only make that worse. 

 

I expect New Jersey governor Chris Christie will burst straight out of his double-wides over this.  After all he just defied every sea level rise/storm surge warning to spend massively to restore the Jersey shore. 

Always Wanted to Visit "The Big Easy"?

Many of us have at one time or another wanted to visit New Orleans, The Big Easy.  If you still want to go, you might want to go sooner rather than later.

Louisiana, you see, is experiencing a major problem with sea-level rise, far more than state officials expected.

Stunning new data not yet publicly released shows Louisiana losing its battle with rising seas much more quickly than even the most pessimistic studies have predicted to date.

While state officials continue to argue over restoration projects to save the state’s sinking, crumbling coast, top researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that Louisiana is in line for the highest rate of sea-level rise “on the planet.”

Indeed, the water is rising so fast that some coastal restoration projects could be obsolete before they are completed, the officials said.

When new data on the rate of coastal subsidence is married with updated projections of sea-level rise, the southeast corner of Louisiana looks likely to be under at least 4.3 feet of Gulf water by the end of the century.

That rate could swamp projects in the state’s current coastal Master Plan, which incorporated worst-case scenarios for relative sea-level rise calculated two years ago — which the new figures now make out-of-date.

Even heavily populated areas, such as New Orleans, appear to be sinking faster than expected, in fact even faster than some areas along the coast.

Southeast Louisiana — with an average elevation just 3 feet above sea level — has long been considered one of the landscapes most threatened by global warming. That’s because the delta it’s built on — starved of river sediment and sliced by canals — is sinking at the same time that oceans are rising. The combination of those two forces is called relative sea-level rise, and its impact can be dramatic.

It's a Trifecta - subsidence, coupled with sea level rise and then hit with hurricanes and storm surge.   After Hurricane Katrina some experts recommended that New Orleans simply be abandoned, surrendered to the sea and storms.   It's starting to look like they were right.  This guy probably still won't agree.

Is Florida Finis?

It's going to be a tough century for places like the state of Florida.  For all its many challenges, the greatest one facing this retirement Mecca is climate change.

Low-lying Florida has water problems, too much and too little.   The too much is seawater.   The too little is freshwater.   Heavy demand for freshwater by Florida and its neighbour states of Georgia and Alabama.  In October, 2007, all three states sued the Army Corps of Engineers, claiming it played favourites with the others in allocating water supplies.

In June, 2011, the Miami Herald put Florida's water crisis this way:

"At the north end of the sprawling Everglades system, endangered snail kites are abandoning nests from the Kissimmee River basin down to Lake Okeechobee. Marshes in the heart of the Everglades are burning or shriveling into cracked mud.

"On the east coast, oysters are dying as sea water pushes deeper into the brackish St. Lucie River estuary. On the west, explosions of toxic algae are killing fish and triggering public health warnings in the Caloosahatchee River. At the south end of the Glades, stretches of coastal Florida Bay mangroves have dipped into unhealthy hyper-salinity.

"The ecological damage from one of South Florida’s worst droughts is deepening, water managers said Thursday, and rain is going to have to arrive soon —and in big buckets — to heal it.

“This has essentially overwhelmed and taken a toll on the entire natural system from top to bottom,’’ said Linda Lindstrom, director of restoration sciences for the South Florida Water Management District.

"The drought is just one challenge confronting the district, which also began the process Thursday of meeting demands from the Legislature and Gov. Rick Scott to reduce property tax rates and slash $128 million from the budget of an agency that oversees the water supply and flood control for 16 counties."

That's right.  In response to the state's water crisis, its governor slashed the budget of the sole agency overseeing the state's water supply for 16-counties.

But it's seawater that will cause Florida's greatest problems.   A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Research Letters,  warns that, by 2030, the risk of a "once in a century" flood will double or even triple for the five million Americans living along the country's coasts.   Low-lying areas, just like Florida, will be particularly susceptible.  Co-author of the reports, Ben Strauss, notes that south Florida is essentially indefensible.


Global warming will more than double the odds of once-a-century floods by 2030 for more than two-thirds of the 55 coastal locations considered in the analysis, the Climate Central report said. For a majority of the locations, warming triples the odds of century floods.

By 2030, storm surges combined with rising seas could raise waters to 4 feet or more above high tide lines at many locations, the reports said, noting that 4.9 million people live in 2.6 million homes in this vulnerable zone between the observed high tide and the top of expected flood waters.

Cities are likely to be hit hardest, Strauss said, with 90 percent of the impact projected to come in areas with extremely dense population.

In 285 coastal cities and towns, more than half the population lives below the 4-foot mark, the Climate Central report found. Florida has 106 of these at-risk municipalities; Louisiana has 65, New Jersey and North Carolina have 22 each, Maryland has 14, New York has 13 and Virginia has 10.

Florida is a special case because in addition to rising seas and storm surges, its geology and system of drainage canals pose complex problems. "Basically, south Florida in the long term is indefensible," Strauss said.

"A lot of the state is built on porous bedrock, bedrock that's like Swiss cheese," he said. "You can't practically build a wall to keep the sea out. The water will come up through the ground."



And Florida's porous bedrock poses another, potentially greater problem - seawater inundation of the already stressed freshwater resources.   The freshwater Everglades are already suffering the onset of salination which poses a threat to plants and wildlife alike and a risk of contamination to essential agricultural irrigation.

In Louisiana with its heavily developed Mississippi estuary, the study finds 666,000 residents, representing almost 15% of the state's population and homes, are at a 1 in 6 risk of storm surge inundation by 2020, a risk that is expected to increase substantially thereafter.

Fortunately the Deep South knows better than a bunch of dumb-ass scientists peddling their global warming hoax.  Why Rush tells them as much just about every day.

There's a tipping point to storm surge inundations.   Once particularly vulnerable areas become no longer viable for habitation (i.e. insurers simply refuse coverage), it is expected to create a visible "internally displaced population" problem.  IDPs have, until now, been more commonly associated with sectarian war zones like Iraq.   A lot of those not initially displaced will also be rethinking the viability of their coastal living, adding to the numbers seeking to relocate inland.   This comes with terrific costs and impacts, especially for debt-ridden state governments with populations demanding ever greater tax cuts or in the midst of water crises.

What Georgia, Florida and Alabama have shown is that, while the "good neighbour" policy still exists for standard natural disasters, when it comes to water, it's every man for himself.

What Sea Level Rise Will Look Like

A lot of the world's population is concentrated in low-lying coastal regions.  These are areas vulnerable to the sea level rise of up to 1.6 meters now predicted by the turn of the century.

The Japanese are living with a preview of those very conditions.   The recent earthquakes pulled the country out and down into the sea.   Some areas, according to The Japan Times, sank 1.2 meters.

When water begins to trickle down the streets of her coastal neighborhood, Yoshiko Takahashi knows it is time to hurry home.
 

Twice a day, the flow steadily increases until it is knee-deep, carrying fish and debris by her front door and trapping people in their homes. Those still on the streets slosh through the seawater in rubber boots or on a bicycle.

"I look out the window, and it's like our houses are in the middle of the ocean," says Takahashi, who moved in three years ago.

...In port cities such as Onagawa and Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, the tide flows in and out among crumpled homes and warehouses along now uninhabited streets.

A cluster of neighborhoods in the city of Ishinomaki is rare in that it escaped tsunami damage through fortuitous geography. So, many residents still live in their homes, and they now face a daily trial: The area floods at high tide, and the normally sleepy streets turn frantic as residents rush home before the water rises too high.

...Most houses sit above the water's reach, but travel by car becomes impossible and the sewage system swamps, rendering toilets unusable.

Scientists say the new conditions are permanent.

This is the impact of tides on areas of subsidence.   It doesn't begin to reflect what these areas will endure from future storm surges.   These areas are essentially uninhabitable.   Their value has dropped to zero leaving homeowners with no assets and enormous debts yet having to relocate.

What are we doing in Canada to prepare for this coming reality?   An awful lot of precious little.