Earth’s history isn’t on our side with new sea-level rise study

History isn’t on our side when it comes to climate change or sea-level rise, a new study found. Research conducted by a group of climate scientists from multiple U.S. universities found that the level of sea-level rise seen due to climate change in recent years is mild compared to what we could be experiencing in the coming years. The study indicated that historically speaking, this massive change or shift in the climate, which would leave oceans rising as much as 20 or 30 feet in a matter of just a couple decades – is anything but a dooms day scenario.

While it might seem like the stuff of fiction, the study found that there is legitimate historical context to this theory. The theory suggests that in a period of slow climate change – sea-level rise was as much as 25 feet. However, the study found that the acceleration rate of the sea-level rise was something that happened in a relatively short period of time. That is something that could seriously challenge waterways and could completely change the layout of coastlines around the world.

Oceans

The research team believes that the water will come from the melting of ice at both of the poles, and while it will have significant impact on wildlife in the north and south – the biggest impacts now will likely be people who live in massive metropolitan spaces along the coastline of the U.S. Specifically, key East and West Coast cities, which thrive on water – and are home to millions and millions of people.

Anders Carlson, a co-author on the study pointed out that, “Studies have shown that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contributed significantly to this sea level rise above modern levels.” He went on to point out that, “Modern atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are today equivalent to those about three million years ago, when sea level was at least six meters higher because the ice sheets were greatly reduced.”

http://www.thehoopsnews.com/2015/07/11/6663/the-lake-erie-algae-bloom-this-year-will-be-severe-study-says/

Another co-author of the study pointed out that this is a sign that we’re entering “uncharted territory,” and a space that no climate scientist wants to enter. The problem with going here by this route is that we’re taking out the ability for humans to prepare or stop what is happening – and are essentially putting ourselves at risk in the long-term for short-term outlooks.

Scientists hope though that this information, or this study, can help spur real change. The type of change that is needed at this point is the kind that doesn’t look at things 20 or 30 years from now, and say, “We’ll start doing this by then.” But rather, focuses on the problems and addresses them without any hesitation today. If we cope with these things today, there is still a chance that we can turn them around and correct them. If not though, it would appear as though we’re starting a chain reaction that we might not be able to undo.

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  • Don’t care about what life will be like in decades cause we won’t be here and with the earth flooding and all god promised he would never again flood the earth

    • God isn’t flooding the Earth. The weather is flooding the low-lying areas. Florida will go. Louisiana’s south (NOLA) will go. We have no sea-level territory in Tennessee. However, if you read the story closely, you’ll find:

      “Modern atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are today equivalent to those about three million years ago, when sea level was at least six meters higher because the ice sheets were greatly reduced.”

      We are not, then, making a difference with our fossil fuel use that is unusual even in past times when there weren’t any people. Sea levels 3 million years ago were where the doom-sayers predict they will be unless we spend all available wealth on carbon credits. Al Gore’s getting rich and the EPA is gaining power. I wonder if there were prehistoric versions of Al Gore and the liberal EPA.

      • WRONG.

        WE MADE THIS CHANGE HAPPEN IN THE SPACE OF DECADES. IN THE PAST IT TOOK THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

        AS A RESULT, SPECIES THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO MIGRATE AND ADAPT TO THIS SLOW CHANGE ARE NOT ABLE TO KEEP UP. THIS IS WHY THE BUMBLEBEES ARE DIEING OUT.

        I KNOW, YOU’RE A FOOL, SO YOU THINK THAT DOESN’T MATTER. BUMBLEBEES, IT TURNS OUT, POLLINATE A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THE WILDFLOWERS AND TREES IN TEMPERATE ZONES. WITHOUT THEM, MANY SPECIES OF PLANTS AND TREES WILL DIE. AGAIN, YOU THINK THAT’S UNIMPORTANT, BECAUSE YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

      • Yes, Earth doesn’t find this level of CO2 “unusual” — but at these levels it does find humans unusual. I don’t think EPA will be the problem if your grandkids have nothing to eat but soylent green. But hey, we’ll probably not be around to find out.

    • It is going to be difficult. First, low-lying countries like Bangladesh, the Philippines and many countries in Southeast Asia will flood … and then the people is those countries are going to migrate somewhere / everywhere. THAT will cause considerable tension and strife in the countries that are being inundated with ‘climate refugees’. Like the article says, cities on coastlines will become uninhabitable (look at Google Maps: EVERY country with a coast have large cities there).
      Many people, at least a billion or two, will make it … but it isn’t going to be pretty.

      And if THAT isn’t enough, some in Science are saying that we are at the very beginning of a
      Great Extinction.

      We have had a good run by ‘our’ standards, … 200,000 years +. Although it pales in comparison to the Dinosaurs, which lasted 150 million years, a mere 750 times longer than humans.

    • Don’t worry Dreamr I have some very nice koolaide for you.. Its a Jim Jones blend that his follower’s loved. its just like what you have been drinking for years from Al’s blend.

        • Love it, your utter wit and fantastic powers of deduction amaze me. I’ll make a bigger batch of that koolade so you can have some too. Hope Al doesn’t mind you sharing with Dreamr. I am sure that you two will enjoy it while watching the moving stones of Death Valley skate across the surface.

          • The Death Valley Stones don’t Skate.
            As a simple law abiding citizen, why would you be wanting to give anyone anywhere your special koolade? Do you really need to kill everyone who isn’t as ignorant as you?

          • Who STATED that my koolade kills? Must be another one of your insightful deductions.. Your sucking up Al’s flavor so I thought you might like the one Jimmy used to entice his friends.. seems as though you think everyone will end up in the same place… surely as a pagan 1 you would believe that no belief is unbelievable.

            And you are so right, they don’t skate but slide.. but the patterns are so much more appropriate to that of a skater, don’t you think? After all if one were to slide something would you not think it would be in one constant direction? Mother just briskly doing her thing with her toys.

          • Your association to JimJones is your hook to the deadly koolade.Are you really that stupid you didn’t know when you referenced it?
            The level of ignorance of some folks is truly mind boggling.

          • and you assume that everyone who drank Jimmie’s koolade KNEW it was poisoned???? whoopee!!! betcha every kid under 12 knew it… your brilliance is underwhelming… it just emphasizes your orginal statements

  • ” If not though, it would appear as though we’re starting a chain reaction that we might not be able to undo.”

    IT IS ALREADY A RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECT WITH MASSIVE MOMENTUM AND THERE IS NOTHING THAT ANYBODY CAN DO TO STOP IT!

    • I got some real nice koolaide for you so you can take your mind off it….

  • The tipping point has been passed. Even if we turn out all the lights and shut off all the pollutuion sources the damage we have done so far will continue and the earth will be a different place really quickly.
    We aren’t doing anything but talking about it so as a race we will be punished. You don’t fool with mother nature

    • Well, just look at it this way. If we are really causing our own extinction, then maybe the Earth will recover when we’re gone. You know – like it did 3 million years ago when the CO2 was at levels like today’s and there weren’t any people. Think maybe aliens came and generated all that nasty gas back then? The dinosaurs were already dead for 62 million years. Couldn’t have been them. Time travelers? Natural climate variations? I vote for the last one.

    • And man was the blame for the CO2 levels 3 million years ago??? you ARE funny.. mother nature has ruled this planet for millions of years and you think your wimpy hominid ass is more powerful than nature — that is really funny – go stand on Mt St Helen the next time its ready to blow and tell it to stop…..

      • NO, IDIOT. MAN WAS NOT TO BLAME FOR THAT. THAT OCCURRED 3 MILLION YEARS AGO, AND THERE WERE NO HUMANS. IT TOOK 1000’S OF YEARS, AND RESULTED IN 6 METERS OF SEA-LEVEL RISE. WE HAVE DONE THE SAME CO2 RISE IN JUST A FEW DECADES. THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

        • And you were there 3 million yrs ago to know just how fast the CO2 change occurred.. Great so you have a time machine that can transport you anywhere your little heart desires. So you can go back 100 yrs and put up signs telling people to change their lifestyle or they will kill millions of people.. Said it before –YOU ARE funny,, OH and you call me an idiot, well have another big glass of that koolade go tell Mt St Helen not to erupt again,

      • Where did I say that man caused global warming 3 million years ago?
        It was reported years ago that two extinction events on this planet were caused by runaway co2 or methane releases to the atmoshpere. One was caused by a massive volcanic eruption that happened in Siberia. It was also reported that the atmosphere may have been completely destroyed in one of them and had to start from scratch.
        You are funny too because you aren’t too well informed.

        • You stated the “tipping point has been passed” which must be from your excellent observation of the world over the last 3-4 million years. And are you absolutely positive about where and how those possible events occurred or is that actually a supposition by some grant seeking “scientist” so they really do not have to work for a living? You know the same guys that stated that the Northern Spotted Owl could only live in old growth forests and when was found living in KMart signs.. or the ones that stated that the pesticide Aladar was bad but didn’t bother to say that you would have to eat 3 bushels of apples a day for it to have any real effect… those guys, your real friends.. I admit I like staying dumb and listening to the ruler of this planet as she does what she wants without regard to any life form she may create.

  • Well just what can we do ? Now don’t say by driving a electric car is going to make a difference. With all the hot volcanoes now erupting and the ash and carbon being spewed into the atmosphere. You tell me how we can stop them ? Just one of those erupting volcanoes is equivalent to a hundred years of todays cars and power plants. If this sea rise is true, maybe we better learn to live a little different. Start to de salt ochins find a way to to capture all that fresh water that is manting. Move away from cost lines. I don’t think we can stop it ever. Tell we can control the weather. Just be prepared, that is up to our leaders.

    • Driving an electric car simply shifts the point of generation of waste gases from the car to the generating plant for the electricity. If you use the equivalent of one horsepower from a battery, you had to create that horsepower somewhere else and put it INTO the battery first. When you factor in the efficiency losses of transmission lines and AC to DC conversion stations, I’ll bet the distributed carbon footprint of an electric car is larger than that of one with an internal combustion engine.

    • Typical conservative shite. Funny how you claim to be conservative and yet you conserve nothing, including the hot air you spit out, spewing meaningless, twisted ‘facts’.

      Human car activity produces far more than a volcano or two. Volcanoes have been doing what they do since the beginning of geological time. What is _new_ is what HUMANS have been doing since the 1800s when we discovered how to make combustion engines.

      But hey, fish fart, so why should we do anything right?

      • Actually Dreamr the DOE just released a report that alternative vehicles did MORE damage than petrol powered. Sorry but again the wackos loose with their own studies and data..

      • I guess you like to shot off your mouth before you look. If I were to show your post to any person that thinks I am a conservative they would have a very good laugh. I am as left wing as a person can get. Here in Minnesota last week many people could not even go out side the air was so bad. Oh no not from cars or power plants, we had a record of 174 in the air qulity. Never in the 71 years i have been around has this happened in Minnesota. It was from thousands and thousands of forest fires in northern Washington and and dan near all Saskatchewan Canada. Again it would years of driving cars to equal that amount of polluting. Yes we all could do better to clean up the air. We have did in the big steel cities. Pittsburgh once back in 50s you could not even see the city when flying into it. Now it is one of the cleanest cities in America but understand this, MAN is NOT going to stop what is happening now. If it changes it is because that is just what weather does.
        Now lets talk about a much bigger thing that we can do. Stop the run off of poisonous chemicals into our lakes and rivers. Stop poisoning our food we eat. Stop wasting fresh water to keep our lawns green. Stop trying to make the Desert Green. Those we can do, but not global weather change. It can not be done.

  • The UN has all this covered. Countries like Switzerland that had the good sense to build their
    cities in the mountains will pay to relocate folks that live at the beach now.

  • Unless I am mistaken, sea levels rose between 300 and 400 feet over the past 20,000 years, so the appropriateness of noting a relatively small rise 3 million years ago (before the current Ice Age which buried the continent of Antarctica) seems a rather desperate attempt to find something to say about the 2 degrees of warming that has occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age, as some have called the period from about 1300 to 1870.

    The ignorance that leads people to focus only on the last 140 years is quite difficult to fathom.