The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.
The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.
“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”
Now the wingnuts can pivot from “it’s not happening” to “nothing we can do now.”
negative 1
You forgot a step. Educated wingnuts went from ‘it’s not happening’ to ‘it’s not from man-made causes’. Somehow their credibility remained untouched.
srv
Well, we’re not even talking Friedman Units here, so wingnut nothingburgers.
Punchy
From this, this:
I’m not sure what’s worse: only 24% of the GOP believe in science, or that 34% of Dems dont. We’re waaaaaaaaay more screwed than I thought if only 24% of the party of the House and soon-could-be Senate and not-sure-how-many-but-alotta state gubbnahs believe this to be a problem.
The Usual Suspect
But, but, Breibart.com told me today that all the Global warming alarmist experts are now turning into skeptics!
He said it, I believe it, and that settles it…..
dmsilev
From the original paper (PDF, subscription required):
There’s a hell of a lot of momentum in things like this; it takes a lot to get them started, but once they start, stopping them is not trivial.
Eric U.
@Punchy: well, at least we know there is a 3% error in that polling.
republican response to stuff like this is fairly predictable. I recall when Gore was making a big fuss over the internet back in the early ’90s, the Republicans made fun of him over it. Then it became a big thing and they claimed he didn’t have anything to do with it. Probably happen with Obamacare too, that will be amusing
Comrade Dread
I like that this news comes right after Marco Rubio representing the soon to be underwater state of Florida denies that Climate Change exists.
dmsilev
And one other thing:
Bobby Thomson
I’m ignoring this because you said nothing about Ben
GazzaraGhazi.The Pale Scot
I’m comfortable predicting that this will happen five times faster than currently estimated, in 1998 the Arctic was going to be ice free during the summer in 2050. All the predictions of climate change so far have been too optimistic time wise.
Ten years ago I thought that my generation would the last to die a natural death, I’m not thinking that anymore. The thought of fighting off cannibals while impeded by arthritis and macular degeneration is not the way I expected to go out.
Edit: Damn, And I’m not even a veterinarian with a gravelly voice.
Bill Arnold
The next pivot will rapidly (next couple of decades) be to geoengineering, which will be a huge profit opportunity for lucky enterprising corporations, massively egotistical nation governments (the US may end up leading on this front), geoengineering approaches with winners and losers (poor countries being for-sure losers if there are tradeoffs between rich and poor), probably eventually wars over the tradeoffs.
(Even approaches which look superficially neutral, like space sunscreens, might offer extreme temptations to the controllers, e.g. hurricane control might become possible, or even hurricane steering.)
I’m not seeing an obvious path forward that doesn’t involve geoengineering….
Belafon
But most of us will be dead so we shouldn’t burden our children and grandchildren with debt by trying to stop it.
// Trying for logic more than tone.
Chickamin Slam
The state transportation agency WSDOT is replacing a bridge that 60 years ago was fine and dandy. Now they say it is too low and subject to flooding during high tide storm surges. As they are keeping the number of lanes the same but having the new bridge be nine feet higher, what changed in 60 years? Hmm … Oh yeah Benghazi … that’s the ticket …
And gravity is a liberal hoax.
Comrade Mary
This is why John Oliver is an international treasure.
Alex S.
@Comrade Dread:
Volcano monitoring, part II
jl
The reactionaries are very good at digging furiously at the bottom of a hole. So, they will surely try it. Too bad that, on this disaster, we will be right there with them. Oh happy day!
shelley
The Five Stages of Climate Change Rebuttal:
Denial: ‘It’s not happening”
Anger: “It’s all a conspiracy!”
Bargaining: “But the climate is always changing” (Rubio’s latest)
Depression: “All those scientists are such bullies!”
Acceptance: “Oh well, there’s nothing we can do about it now anyway.”
Morzer
@shelley:
Stage Six: “Help! I am drowning! Send me my personal government helicopter.But no black men piloting it!”
deep
You think people have memory that long?
It won’t be “nothing we can do now,” it’ll be “The ocean was always this high.”
FlyingToaster
So the world will lose Bangladesh and the US will lose half of Florida and Louisiana. Yeesh.
I think we need to get cracking on orbital habitats; having all our eggs in one (planetary) basket seems dumber than ever.
dmsilev
@shelley: Seen elsewhere this morning: “The five stages of ACA grief were Repeal, Replace, Defund, Benghazi and then Acceptance”.
Morzer
@deep:
“Noth Cahlina has always been an archipelago!”
Mustang Bobby
@Comrade Dread: Yes, he said passing laws to correct climate change “will destroy our economy.” That’s not going to mean a whole lot when Miami Beach is under three feet of water and cruise ships are docking at the Port of Albuquerque.
Mustang Bobby
@Chickamin Slam:
No, it’s “intelligent falling.”
The Dangerman
Let’s face it, Big Oil has the country by the short hairs; about the only way to move forward is to discover that continued Climate Change means that you lose your guns (and let Big Oil and the NRA have a grudge match to the end).
Morzer
@Mustang Bobby:
That apple was a librul apple!
kindness
A sea rise of 10′ makes John look good for having the foresight to live in the hills of West Virginia.
What is going to make the shit hit the fan? My parents old neighborhood. Waterfront homes on the shores of Connecticut. What was swampland when my father bought it in 1958 was close to million dollar lots by the time it was sold 2 years ago. Those million dollar lucky duckies are going to bitch far and wide when they find out they bought under water lots & houses. Snorkel front properties. Right from their previously second story.
cleek
they’re way ahead of you.
not only have they already gone to “nothing we can do”, they’re onto it’s gonna be super awesome!
Belafon
@The Dangerman: Most guns won’t work under water. Maybe that’s our pitch.
Morzer
@kindness:
Hmm.. drowning or a life spent in West Virginia. Gonna have to think seriously about that one.
Quaker in a Basement
I live in Colorado, so I got mine, mofo.
lukeallen1
90% cut/paste Cole phones one it.
shelley
That’s the ticket. Tell ’em they’re in danger of their gun racks being flooded. How can they shoot suspected robbers if they can’t keep their powder dry?
JPL
John, Just in case you didn’t see this, commenter RSA wrote a piece for the NY Times. Your mother being the kind soul she is my enjoy reading it also.
Morzer
@shelley:
Tell them that climate change will destroy the white skin gene and that all their putative descendants will be a fine coffee color.
shelley
@cleek:
Heard somewhere that if global warming continues, Great Britain could get into the champagne business. Huzzah!
hilts
Jonathan Chait’s takedown of George Will and Charles Krauthammer on climate change is a good read
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/krauthammer-george-will-attack-climate-science.html
Mike G
No problem! Jeebus will return and Rapture all us Good People by then! (/wingnut)
Morzer
@shelley:
Imagine the French importing their wine from England!
Older
@Comrade Dread: “the soon to be underwater state of Florida” — So then, it’s not all bad.
SatanicPanic
@shelley:
Shit this is going to be everyone’s position at the rate we’re going.
catclub
@Punchy: “I’m not sure what’s worse:”
What is worse is that those numbers have gotten worse over the past ten years or so. It is learned ignorance (if there is such a term.)
Mustang Bobby
@Older: Seeing as how I live in Miami and about a quarter of a mile from the Atlantic, I’d really rather it didn’t go underwater. I’m funny that way….
Hank
I knew having my kids on a swim team would pay off! Though perhaps water polo would have been a better idea; they’d be better prepared to fight their way onto a boat.
So if in any population you can find 27% of people who will believe anything, does that mean the poll missed 3% of republicans that are crazy enough to believe that climate change is a fact?
JPL
@hilts: Interesting. Today I had a discussion with someone whose views on climate are developed by Fox and Company. I mentioned that I found it frustrating that you see very few climatologists on TV but instead you see opinionators. Since I was at it, I also mentioned that most don’t understand the difference between climate and weather.
Schlemizel
Bumped into an asshole on reddit this weekend, apparently Rush Lambrain had some scientist on his radio program who claims he was a “warmist” (sic) but now has seen the light had says the whole thing is a fraud. dead ‘ol Dimbart’s web site had the whole story, I refused to click it.
Gravenstone
Haven’t read the replies yet, but I do hope someone has pointed out the sad irony that Rubio represents one of the states destined to be the most adversely impacted by sea level rise. Not that he’ll care, as he and his have the resources to relocate to higher ground, as needed.
catclub
@cleek: “they’re onto: it’s gonna be super awesome!”
Which, for some relatively small group, will be true. We do not know who will be in that group, but we suspect it will not be Bangladeshis. We also suspect it will not be those who depend on the ocean for the bulk of their protein.
Redshift
We seem to have picked a bad time in our civilization’s history for an anti-science movement to take over a large portion of a superpower.
Schlemizel
Those of us old enough to have lived through the tobacco bullshit have seen this movie before.
First you work to hide the science
Then you produce fake science
Then you deny the science
Then you deny the cause
They you claim there is nothing you can do
The difference this time is that instead of killing a few million smokers & their families we are going to kill billions. Given that every negative event cataloged so far has been sooner and/or worse than predicted I don’t think we need to wait till 2200 to see the results predicted.
Mustang Bobby
@Gravenstone: Yeah, got it covered…. so to speak.
SatanicPanic
You take your car to work, I’ll take my board…
I don’t think Weezer was trying to predict the future with that one
FlipYrWhig
@deep:
“I love being in Michigan. The sea is just the right height.”
JustRuss
@FlyingToaster:
Screw that. We’d only be able to put a tiny fraction of humanity in orbit, maybe one percent, and you you know darn well which one percent that would be. If we’re all drowning, those fuckers are drowning with us.
Redshift
@Schlemizel: The world would be a better place if people were capable of understanding that argument from authority is a logical fallacy. Unfortunately, ape brains don’t seem to be wired to think that way without training and constant effort.
Morzer
@FlipYrWhig:
“Visit the superb beaches of Nebraska!”
Schlemizel
@catclub:
How do you expect those folks who are going to be the first to feel the impact are going to react? I do not expect them to take their imminent death with the grace and dignity of the French royalty awaiting the blade. The damage done by climate change is going to be amplified by the damage done by the wars, exodus and displacements that follow. This big f’ing military we have built is going to get a lot of use soon.
Suffern ACE
@catclub: @Redshift: Back in the early 1990s, they were already on the “that’ll be awesome. Bananas in Wales! Oranges in Boston”.
I figured we’d get to “well, oops. Nothing we can do anyway.” Anyone who says “I told you so” will be run out of town. Its how we roll.
Comrade Dread
@Mustang Bobby: I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed, but no more than 10 million, 20 million, dead tops.
Also, could you imagine living in a world where we forced companies to be environmentally responsible? Where children grew up without asthma and the scent of car exhaust in the air? Where folks who commuted for 40 years didn’t suffer from elevated blood pressure, exacerbated heart disease, and higher rates of lung cancer? Where power is generated without the need to ruin landscapes? Where there isn’t an oil spill every now and again to generate local economic benefits? Where sea life can swim freely without ingesting mutagenic chemicals thereby robbing us of the chance to have real life teenage mutant ninja turtles? Where people run freely in the environment taking their role as conservators and caretakers seriously and live in harmony with nature?
My God, who would want to live in that kind of hellish dystopia?
Schlemizel
@Hank:
I’m pretty sure a substantial number of them believe that a warmer world will be a good thing. They are smart enough to know the world has been warmer than it is about to be – just not smart enough to recognize it was incompatible with mader human life during those periods.
catclub
@Schlemizel: ” I don’t think we need to wait till 2200 to see the results predicted. ”
Agreed. But if the impacts were going to take that long, I would relax. I think there will be massive effects around the time I turn 100 – 2060. And Andrew Tobias says I will probably live forever.
[For a while, life expectancy was going up about 1 year/yr.]
Mustang Bobby
@Comrade Dread:Certainly not Marco Rubio, and for that I would be more than willing to give him a refund.
Francis
@Schlemizel: Keep in mind that India is a nuclear power and the likely new Prime Minister has already told Bangladesh to keep its population on its side.
srv
Why, exactly, should I care about the 1% losing their beach property? Surely they can afford to learn how to swim.
Schlemizel
@Schlemizel: that was supposed to be “modern” human life
Roger Moore
@srv:
Because it might convince them to treat AGW seriously.
srv
@Roger Moore:
Which means the 99% paying for it.
ranchandsyrup
Maynard James Keenan is right about this.
Learn to swim.
Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.
Learn to swim, I’ll see you down in Arizona bay.
scav
Think or Sink — guess which they went for.
Roger Moore
@srv:
We’re going to pay for it anyway. The question is whether we’re going to be spending cash or lives, and I’d rather it be the former.
catclub
I should have put this here:
http://prospect.org/article/tracing-republican-evolution-climate-change
Cassidy
Nothing in history has been more destructive than the death cult these knuckleheads belong to.
Redshift
@Mustang Bobby: Isn’t it amazing how climatology is extremely uncertain, but economic forecasts for decades in the future are rock-solid?
Mike G
Rubio is projecting. He thinks scientists just take random gut feelings and bigotries and repackage them as theories, because that’s what Republicans do.
catclub
Did anyone else read the article and still have no idea of what or how it is happening?
Some bits of the video made sense, but none of the article described what the video was showing.
catclub
@Redshift: and must be acted on by lowering taxes.
Bubblegum Tate
@cleek:
Oh yeah, my pet wingnuts have been screaming, “Why doesn’t anybody talk about all the wonderful things global warming–which is totally not at all caused by humans–will bring?” for a while now. What’s funny is most of them live in places that will become inhospitable due to that exact same global warming.
Roger Moore
@ranchandsyrup:
Actually, LA is better situated to deal with sea level rise than most places. 10 feet of sea level rise destroys the beaches and messes up the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but it leaves the majority of the city alone. We’re a hell of a lot better off than the Central Valley or Miami, or any of those really flat places.
nellcote
perhaps the cost/availability of flood insurance will focus their attention.
Citizen Alan
I hate to be a conspiracy theorist myself, but a lot of the policy decisions this country has made over the last 40 years kinda start to make sense if you start with the assumption that the 1% actively wants to kill off the majority of the human population. If the worst case scenario happens, the ones who will survive will be the ones with the financial means to build self-sufficient arcologies. That takes money. Imagine Galt’s Gulch but with 3D printers, solar power and a small force of slave labor to run the hydroponics gardens.
Mustang Bobby
@Redshift: Not only that, but evolution is only a “theory” but a talking snake is real.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Yep — Santa Monica would lose its beach and pier, but the cliffs are high enough that a 10-foot rise wouldn’t flood the rest of the city. LA is not like other cities where the beach goes right up to the base of the buildings.
Weirdly, Chicago would probably be in more trouble than LA (even though they’re on a great lake, not an ocean) because they’re right on the lake and have the river flowing through the middle of the city. A 10-foot rise would be a big problem.
grape_crush
I currently live in Michigan. Wife wants to move to Florida for the sun and surf; doesn’t pay attention when I say that’s not good in the longer term. (map showing sea level rise)
Me, I’d rather travel and see Venice, London, and New Orleans before they go.
@Roger Moore: I think $2 trillion a year is a bargain, too.
SatanicPanic
@Citizen Alan: yeaaaa that strikes me as unlikely.
Mnemosyne
@Citizen Alan:
Sadly for the people who (may have) thought they would be fine, there really is only one way that Galt’s Gulch ends in the real world. There’s a reason libertarian utopias haven’t even been tried.
srv
@Citizen Alan:
You mean the 1% and Michael Moore and all those progressives pushing abortion and population limits have secretly been in cahoots?
Linda Featheringill
When the ice sheet breaks up, it will no longer slow down the rate of travel of the glaciers. If this happens, and if those glaciers start to travel at Greenland speeds, then we’re all in trouble.
I’ve previously noted predictions of speed of Antarctic glaciers but these numbers were all over the place so I don’t know what to expect.
On the other hand, I can’t afford beachfront property anyway.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@srv:
No way. They will demand that government at every level do whatever it takes to keep them in place, warm, safe and dry. And government will do exactly that at a cost of untold millions of dollars. In the aftermath, the 1% will see no irony whatsoever in their reluctance to pay their fair share of taxes.
D58826
At my nieces college graduation had to listen to the family wingnuts (actually mostly everyone since this was Texas) complaining that global warming isn’t happening because trees need CO2 and there are more trees in the eastern part of the country than during the colonial era. Now my sister has a masters in nursing and her hubby was a marine major so these are NOT stupid people but I felt like I was on the set with Fox and Friends.
On the other hand they were happy the God was mentioned in the graduation ceremony. Again in Texas where 25% of the population doesn’t have access to medical care and all they were worried about is that God was mentioned. Is it just me or does it seem like the folks who worry and complain the most about God in the schools are also the ones who care the least about the ‘what you do to the least of my children you do to me’? They seem to be reading from a different Bible than the one I learned from in sunday school
Chyron HR
@Citizen Alan:
It’s called, “Alternative Tea”.
J R in WV
I live in the mountains at around 700 feet above mean old sea level, so I don’t have much to worry about from a gradual rise in mean sea level.
But the high percentage of the population living on the east coast, when they all decide to head inland, they may be a problem. I’m thinking we will need to drop bridges into the rivers, and drop road cuts into the valleys.
If we’re lucky there will be a mega-hurricane while the surge of people heading uphill are on the road, which should cut the refugee problem down to a manageable level.
I’m also 63 with joint issues, and probably won’t be around to meet the zombie hordes.
I guess this is gallows humour, mixed with snark. Don’t hate me for my warped sense of humour, please!
Also, too, Obama is still a mis-spelled word to whatever spellcheck dictionary FYWP uses, along with neighbor, humor, and every other American English word that is diff in English American, or something like that.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Mnemosyne:
Weirdly, Chicago would probably be in more trouble than LA (even though they’re on a great lake, not an ocean) because they’re right on the lake and have the river flowing through the middle of the city. A 10-foot rise would be a big problem.
Chicago is almost 600 ft above sea level, so no…
JGabriel
NY Times:
Damn.
My city’s gonna drown.
scav
Hadn’t really actively considered the interactions of sea level rise and salt-water intrusion into coastal aquifers until now. Ouch again, even if technically not flooded.
Amir Khalid
@J R in WV:
Just ignore the red squiggle. Ever since I switched to using British spelling and punctuation when commenting here, it has had no power over me whatsoever.
srv
@JGabriel:
All those coastal elite liberal enclaves can suck it.
Comrade Dread
@Roger Moore: Los Angeles will probably be a desert with insufficient water resources to support the current 10 million or so residents.
Fortunately, the water wars with Arizona and Colorado will probably reduce the demand for fresh water.
Bill Arnold
@J R in WV:
Interesting interactive map here.
Set it on 3 (or 4) meters and pan around.
Or set it on 60 meters if you want to plan ahead 1000 years.
srv
@Comrade Dread: A few nukes will handle the desalination needs.
D58826
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: My brother-in-law started the weekend complaining about high taxes in the US. By the end of the day he was complaining about the unreasonable cuts to the defense budget. By Sunday he was complaining that the US doesn’t have a great passenger rail system like those in Europe (never mind that they are heavily subsidized). Both my sister and her hubby as retired military get full pensions, Tricare, and Medicare. Two of their three girls work for the federal government but we should still cut taxes. One was able to use that evil socialist Obamacare to stay on my sister’s employer health plan. The poors came in for plenty of criticism in how they don’t live like the better people. The fact that my niece graduated from the Bush school of intl affairs, whose dean is a former US ambassador and family friend of Bush 41 was just accepted as their due. The fact that we have spent 400 years keeping African Americans out of the social and economic network is totally lost in the bastion of white (with a few non-whites sprinkled in) privilege.
I just listen to keep peace in the family and make visitsa few and far between. Very depressing
Mike in NC
If Florida goes underwater, will they have to repeal the Stand Your Ground laws?
David in NY
@Certified Mutant Enemy: Shoot, I wanted to be the one to point that out — Google says Lake Michigan is 577 feet above sea level.
scav
@Mike in NC: Canute Zimmerman is already headed to the beaches to fire away at the rising tide of tide.
EriktheRed
I’ve always thought I’d like to live in Colorado like my brother someday. Maybe that day will come sooner rather than later…
Bill Arnold
@srv:
No no no, nukes are precious; they should be reserved for budget geoengineering. (Those of us old enough to remember Sagan’s “Nuclear Winter” will know what that means.)
Gatchaman
“Next century or so” is not enough to inspire action. Shit, most people are worried about the “next paycheck or so”.
MomSense
@Mike in NC:
Yeah if FL is underwater, you know all those small gubmint people are going to have a ‘come to Gore moment’ and want some big, bad gubmint to rescue them and relocate them to safer ground. At that point, maybe I will want Stand Your Ground Laws to protect my ground.
I might also want some voter ID laws as in if you voted for climate science and evolution deniers–you are voted off the island!
FlyingToaster
@JustRuss: Noblemen didn’t settle the Americas. It’s going to be a dangerous, tedious, iffy proposition for the first hundred years or so, just getting things working. And those pioneers won’t be in the 1%, because the 1%ers are waiting for the “Vegas in Orbit” to open. I’d be thinking Allen Steele’s “Orbital Decay” rather than some orbiting glibertarian Galthome.
Well, except for Elon Musk. He probably would move to orbit.
John O
Can anyone think of a time in the entirety of human history when the human race responded to a slow-moving disaster rationally and on a world scale, which would be necessary in the case of climate change? Because I can’t. But I’m not a historian.
Count me in as a strong climate change believer (since we can see it with, you know, our eyes, plus the overwhelming scientific consensus), but also quite skeptical that anything will be done about it, can be done about it, except relocation and adaptation. Which is what I expect will eventually happen, and that won’t be pretty, either.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@D58826:
Well, the difference is they deserve all of that stuff because they earned it. Right?
MomSense
@kindness:
Growing up in a coastal resort area I can tell you that the same assholes who consistently voted against property tax increases to fund the schools wanted the damned sea walls fixed in front of their houses. The sea walls washed away at least once a year with a big storm–still do.
SatanicPanic
@John O: We’ve ended small pox. Literacy is way up. Violence way down. There are still whales in the ocean. But yeah, this is a big challenge.
burnspbesq
OT: If this is legit, I may not stop laughing for days.
Anonymous Targets Greenwald
Bill Arnold
@Bill Arnold:
Oh, misread your comment. You mean nuclear powered desalinization plants, not reducing the population with nuclear weapons. (Sorry about that, got carried away.)
FlyingToaster
@John O: The inundation of the Black Sea (as memorialized in the epics of Noah, Deucalion, Atrahasis, and Ziusudra). Though it’s probably best classified as prehistoric.
Chris
@shelley:
Final stage: “It’s God’s justice upon us for tolerating the gays and feminists” (see Falwell and Robertson right after 9/11).
FlyingToaster
@MomSense: That is happening less and less, at least up here in the People’s Republic. Chatham and Plum Island are losing houses to the sea every year, now, and they will NOT be getting any seawalls. Unless they build them themselves.
The warmer states need to take this approach, “hey, if ure in the Fed’s flood plain, we cain’t do nuthin’ fer ya.”
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Scientists crying about melting ice shelf are just a bunch of Ice-Baiters like Al Gore, who’s fat and lives in a big house.
scav
@FlyingToaster: A) Was the Black Sea slow moving? B) Pls remind me of the rational part of the response. C) There seem to be large numbers of Mesomericans, Asians, Australasians, et al here to see you.
Frankensteinbeck
Like everything else in American politics right now, this is not about science. Liberals are on the side of the blacks. Liberals want better environmental protections. Therefor everything about environmental protection must be wrong, and it will be fought against tooth and claw. Even the Republicans who don’t have a personal grudge against blacks know that blacks are on the Other Side, and with Obama as president they’re so desperate they are going 100% Cleek’s Law.
danimal
The best argument to give honest conservatives (yeah, I know, insert joke about vanishing species here) is the old Fram oil filter commercial. “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.” When they think about it, that type of economic analysis works for them. Then they listen to Rush and they get stupider. But for a moment, they get it.
If Florida is stupid enough to hire a troglodyte like Rubio (and Rick Scott, fer crissakes), they deserve all the misery their ilk will unleash.
mai naem mobile
But Bbbbenggghhhaaaaz33eeeeeeee!!!!!!!. Also too you’re just a liberal blogger trying to cover up Bbbbeennnggghhhaaazeeee for your master Blackity black black Obama. Also also too Al Gore is fat and getting fatter off his climate change investments.
JustRuss
@FlyingToaster:
If the alternative were to watch Europe turn into a dystopian hell while it slowly drowned, they would have.
MomSense
@burnspbesq:
I was hoping you would post the link. Thanks.
Did you see Jeffrey Lewis’ (arms control wonk) take on Snowden?
http://lewis.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/7258/a-few-words-on-ed-snowden
Chris
@D58826:
IMHO, the sine qua non condition of being smart is knowing what you don’t know. You can be scarily competent at nursing or soldiering, but that doesn’t qualify you to comment on climate science, any more than my degrees in international relations qualify me to correct, say, surgeons, accountants, auto mechanics, or [insert other field that I don’t know the first thing about] when it comes to their work. If people think they know better than – what is it? 95% of climate scientists? More? – because Jesus and shut-up-that’s-why, they’re not as smart as they think.
MomSense
@FlyingToaster:
Unfortunately the local economy is heavily dependent on tourism–so those beaches must be preserved even though at high tide they are about as wide as a Brazilian wax.
MomSense
@Chris:
I think there is also the ability to process complexity. Have you ever read the book In Over Our Heads: the Mental Demands of Modern Life by Robert Kegan?
Fair Economist
@FlyingToaster:
I don’t know the others, but Noah is definitely describing a Mesopotamian flood. It “covers the mountains” to something like 20 meters deep – which makes sense only if the “mountain” are hillocks on very flat land. And, afterwards, the waters recede. In the Black Sea inundation, you wouldn’t ‘cover the mountains” – there would always be land, you’d just be seeing the coastline move. And, the waters never went down afterwards.
FlyingToaster
@scav:
It wasn’t instantaneous. The final collapse seems to have been over the course of months (from what can be reconstructed archeologically).
Loading up livestock and family and food and feed onto a boat. In the face of a sealevel rise, seems pretty sensible.
Different flood myths — specifically, none of them are about the inundation of the Black Sea.
There’s a lovely Hawaiian myth too. But it’s not relevant to this discussion.
Everyone didn’t die when the Black Sea and the Mediterranean came together. The populace did move along, except for the deniers and the “trusters in their gods” to save them. Well, except for Noah, who seems to have done it all alone, not even bringing his clan along.
Morzer
@FlyingToaster:
Actually, they’ve found early versions of what became the Noah story – and it’s pretty clear that the “boat” in question was some sort of coracle. Also that the story has a Mesopotamian origin.
Morzer
@FlyingToaster:
In some sense, noblemen did settle North America, in that they funded expeditions and claimed land rights over discovered areas.
Roger Moore
@J R in WV:
FYWP isn’t the thing providing your spell checking; your web browser is. I don’t know how it works in other browsers, but in Firefox you can right click in the text entry box, go to languages, and select the dictionary it uses. It sounds suspiciously as if your system is using the dictionary for British, Canadian, or some other non-American dialect of English.
Roger Moore
@Mike in NC:
They’ll just rename it “Tread Your Water”, and make sure it applies to spear guns.
Comrade Dread
What were you folks saying about how step 5 or 6 in the Republican acceptance of climate change would be to blame it all on abortion and teh gay?
Premillenial dispensationalism is one of the worst heresies to ever afflict Christendom. The entire mindset of ‘well, the world’s gonna end within my lifetime, so why worry about the future’ is literally going to bring about the end of the world.
Chris
@MomSense:
No, haven’t heard of it. To me, a lot of the complexity of the modern world just becomes simpler if you’re willing to listen to the people who understand the parts of it that you don’t.
@Morzer:
Wasn’t there also a niche in the Americas for European elites who weren’t first-tier? Sons of noble families who weren’t the firstborn and therefore weren’t going to inherit; minor nobles whose families had become ruined or otherwise fallen in importance; bourgeois who found their upward ascent blocked by the aristocracy; etc, all with reasons to go to the Americas and find their own fortune.
Morzer
@Chris:
Yes, the US did serve as something of a second chance for failed elites. A lot of it seems to have been people looking to repair or enhance their fortunes.
FlipYrWhig
@D58826:
Those ideas seem to be contradictory, but they’re not really in the conservative mind: I guaran-damn-tee you that your in-laws believe that there would be plenty of money for the government to do all kinds of great things, like badass armies and cool trains, if not for how much Uncle Sam wastes on handouts to poor people. The missing category that explains all conservative ideas on government spending is “waste.” They think there’s so much waste that they’re being fleeced to pay for all the waste, and if the government just cut the waste, they could have lower taxes AND better services. If you think what the government does is roughly 50+% waste, you demand “solutions” that would make no sense if you thought what the government does was like 5% waste. That’s why Fox News is dedicated to poor-shaming and race-baiting, because that’s the proof that The Government Is Wasting Our Money. And without that sense of grievance, there’s no Republican Party.
raven
@FlipYrWhig: Lifer fucks.
pluege
@Punchy:
its not that idiots don’t believe in science, its that they only believe in the science that confirms their preconceived notions of how things should be.
Mike G
The Stupid is strong with this one —
Christian Post blogger Michael Bresciani writes this week that changes in the climate are indeed taking place, but not due to human activities such as fossil fuel emissions. Instead, he says extreme weather is the result of “homosexuality, abortion [and] general sexual preoccupation,” which according to Bresciani is bringing about the End Times and the coming of the Antichrist.
scav
@FlyingToaster: If at least some people packing and moving uphill is all that is needed for rational responses, than it looks like even this event might might meet the criteria for rational. Is that the point you’re trying to make? Non-rational actors and responses to events of this sort are far less likely to write stories, although they certainly give it a go (dumb luck happens). John O asked for a global-scale response, I’m just not sure a local event (admittedly repeated in many places) is quite apt to the question as posed.
Schlemizel
@Mike G: Just try to prove him wrong!
Cermet
I have to (in a sick fashion) laugh about this project that Antarctic will give a sea level rise of 10 – 12 ft! Really!? Last I checked, Greenland is going far faster and when that goes, this will drive the Antarctic flow into hyper drive. Far, far more ice will melt far faster. Worse, the higher sea level (remember Greenland?) and Antarctic levels will combine to undermine more Antarctic ice and the cycle does on and far faster than these models give.
So, as the 0.001% make bank off the $40 trillion dollars of carbon in the ground (that they own/control) and sell it at steeper and steeper profits, the oceans rise and that is where the vast, vast majority of the world’s poor live. The rest of the world isn’t fucking untied ass holes of amerika where the wealthy have some beach front property but will control all habitable land/areas as the shit hits the fan. It starts to get ugly now (see Greenland’s faster ice lost, hotter temps, droughts, world’s people even now going hungry, and wars increasing – these events will slowly accelerate but like a train, reach wrecking speed long before 2100. And far worse, the Antarctic melting will be getting faster than these models/scientist are predicting.
Oh, by the way, we are currently near the edge where agi crops start losing efficiency as temps past 94 F for more typical summers … .
Have a nice day ;)
ulee
Clay Aiken won his primary in NC because his opponent…died.
danielx
@kindness:
You can bet that some how, some way, there will be some sort of billionaire disaster relief effort for those poor hedge fund managers with estates in Greenwich. After all, the poor dears can’t possible be expected to swallow the losses from an event nobody could have predicted. Ditto for casino operators in Mississippi, among other people…all those bizarro types in Key West, though? They can just suck it.
J R in WV
@Roger Moore:
Roger, thanks for the tip about FF versus FYWP. But shouldn’t the Queen’s English also know how to spell President Obama’s name?
After all, he is still the President of the US, even in jollly olde Englande… And it is getting on towards the middle of his second term!
Putin isn’t marked as misspelled! I detect racist discriminatory spell checking!!!
Amir, I ignore it most of the time, but every few months I take another swing against the wrongness of it all! Hang in there, brother!
ETA: The wonderful geology map, which I have used before for Manhatten Island and for FL Keys, seems to be totally running out of resources right now. Maybe I’ll swing back by later tonight…
wvng
@The Pale Scot: “I’m comfortable predicting that this will happen five times faster than currently estimated” because every single estimate of glacial ice melt has been proven too conservative before the ink is dry on the paper.
Trollhattan
@Chris:
Does that ever sound familiar. Spending the past two decades in engineering organizations, I’ve come to dread talking about this sort of thing (climate, medicine, nutrition) with engineers who think they’re scientists and medical professionals. (NB: some engineers are, indeed, scientists too.) Then too there are those geologists who think of everything in, well-duh, geologic time and are fond of saying “the planet will be fine, no matter what the climate does.”
I’d rather argue with an end-timer.
Denali
Great headliner! It would be nice to have waterfront property here in upstate New York.
Denali
Great headliner! It would be nice to have waterfront property here in upstate New York.
joel hanes
@Bill Arnold: \
I’m not seeing an obvious path forward that doesn’t involve geoengineering…
Desertification
Crop failure (monoculture is a enormous mistake)
Famine
Water shortages
War, caused by all the above
Epidemic disease ( the end of the age of effective antibiotics )
= reduction of the global human population to under 2 billion
This will tend to slow the rate of carbon emissions
(as will the difficulty of exploiting low-grade carbon resources in an unstable world)
Too bad we’ll drive over half the world’s species into extinction in the process.
Davis X. Machina
@Frankensteinbeck: I don’t care if I have to tread water if it’s the price I have to pay to stick my fingers in the hippies’ eyes. And to keep from having to admit Al Gore was right.
PS I am not a crank.
PPS. Jesus will be back before it’s calf-deep in lower Manhattan.
PPPS. OK. Thigh-deep. Tops.
Arclite
@FlyingToaster:
You say that like it’s bad or something…
Older
@Mustang Bobby: Aw gee, Bobby, I’m sorry! Do you hafta live in Florida? There’s still time to move inland.
Howard Beale IV
@FlyingToaster: First we need to get an orbital elevator working, It’s asinine to keep using fucking rockets to throw shit into orbit.
Botsplainer
@Cermet:
The new American veldt will run nonstop from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, punctuated with catastrophic flash floods and massive crop failure. Meanwhile, the former Plains granaries will more closely resemble dried out areas of Sub Saharan Africa, useless for all but subsistence farming once the Oglalla Aquifer has run dry.
On the good side, there won’t be enough water to support the suburbs and exurbs of DFW or Oklahoma City, so that’s a mass of All Murkan Wingnuts, gone.
Howard Beale IV
@Botsplainer:
I think we all can live with that-especially with the spawn of Copeland being an anti-vaxxer.
Roger Moore
@Howard Beale IV:
Which means a hell of a lot of work on improved material science, since we don’t currently have materials strong enough to make a practical orbital elevator. Then we have to figure out a way of getting the thing into orbit. Apart from those nitpicky details, we’re good to go.
Howard Beale IV
@Roger Moore: Actually, we probably do have the material strong enough to do it, what we lack is the engineering and the funds to do it.
The Other Chuck
@Trollhattan:
Oh, it will be. We won’t.
PIGL
@Francis: If I had been running the Bagladseshi, Indian, Chinese, or Brazilian Secret Service for the past 20 years, Wills and Krauthammer would be dead, the billionaires pulling their strings would be dead, their children, wives, nieces and mistresses would be dead, and the tragic car accidents, poisonings and plane crashes would not have abated until they surrendered. Seriously, none of the people should be able to set foot outside the USA without being killed, and they should be trembling in fear to so much as step out of their bunkers in the USA.
The other powers would be more than within their rights, fuck, their duties, to start taking these people out, and not stopping until the US and western obstructionist powers were ready to talk reason.
SiubhanDuinne
@Redshift:
Just to clarify.
Howard Beale IV
@PIGL: Two things:
(1) They may be that aware not to step outside of the US, and
(2) Why waste a perfectly good bullet on such in-duh-viduals?
Notice how little those in Shrub’s administration have strayed outside the Five Eye’s borders. Then again, when compared to Phil Graham, they’re pikers when it comes to destruction.
burnt
@Roger Moore: Yes, this is one of the terrifying things for the good ol’ US o’ A. A 3-meter rise in sea level is really going to foul up the Central Valley, and the Central Valley isn’t so important for food production or anything like that. There are a number of sea-level rise visualization web sites out there. I’m partial to this one:
http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/
It’s not too scary. Slide that bar and have fun.
Roger Moore
@PIGL:
What you’re missing is that those other countries’ governments are also ruled by powerful elites who definitely don’t want to set the precedent that ruling elites can be targeted to force their countries to behave rationally.
SiubhanDuinne
@Bill Arnold:
What will happen to the Mediterranean? Might this be the answer to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis we’ve all worried about for so long?
/”What’s a ‘cubit’?”
Mnemosyne
Seriously, though, is anyone here qualified to answer a question about what happens to the Great Lakes in the event of massive global warming? As I understand it, they are not completely cut off from the ocean, and one would think that massive flooding of the rivers and streams that feed those lakes might cause a problem. Anyone have any idea?
SiubhanDuinne
@EriktheRed:
My sister lives just outside Denver (Aurora), and keeps urging me to consider relocating near her.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike G:
Talk about your hot sex!
SiubhanDuinne
@ulee:
Just heard that on either NPR or BBC. That’s pretty much all they said, too; no details.
Weird.
The Pale Scot
@PIGL:
I have an idea for a novel in which the other nuclear powers coordinate a surprise attack on the USA
SiubhanDuinne
@John Cole, this is way off-topic, but did you see/hear that Wiley Cash’s novel* has been optioned for a movie? Very exciting!
*He didn’t say which one, but I assume it’s A Land More Kind Than Home.
PIGL
@Roger Moore: Not missing it. I would have thought that in cases like India, where national security is clearly at hazard, this meta-consideration would lose some force.
PIGL
@Roger Moore: Not missing it. I would have thought that in cases like India, where national security is clearly at hazard, this meta-consideration would lose some force.
PIGL
@The Pale Scot: I hope they don’t forget Alberta while they are at it.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
The Great Lakes drain into the Atlantic through the St. Lawrence River. The amount of sea level rise we’re talking about here- about 10 feet- wouldn’t make much difference, since the St. Lawrence drops well over 200 feet between Lake Ontario and the Atlantic. That sea level rise would widen the Gulf of St. Lawrence (essentially the river’s estuary) and push the boundary between fresh and salt water further upstream, but it wouldn’t back up the river and keep it from draining the Great Lakes.
The major effect of global warming on the Great Lakes would be what it does to precipitation and evaporation in their basins. A quick search says the current belief is that evaporation will rise faster than precipitation, so the water level in the lakes will drop somewhat. Lower water levels would then reduce outflow, resulting in a new equilibrium level that’s a bit lower than where they are today.
Ben
@Chyron HR:
Heh, good reference.