This week’s disturbing Mark Weaver Show (2/28) features University of Miami Geological Sciences Professor Hal Wanless, also co-chair of the Miami-Dade Task Force on Climate Change. Listening to Dr. Wanless, and virtually the entire scientific community, you can’t help but conclude that the Florida Legislature needs to ban all new construction in low lying coastal areas this session. If we allow continued building in areas that are almost certain to be under water within one hundred years, and perhaps much sooner if some disturbing trends are accelerating (about which, below), we are setting ourselves up for a coastal real estate financial and insurance meltdown similar to the current financial collapse. The Big Question is, who’s going to pay for rising flood insurance claims and worthless coastal property as it begins to flood more often and slowly goes under water? Answer: insurance customers and the mortgage holders and banks as coastal owners walk away from their mortgages and file for bankruptcy. This could be the banking/insurance crisis of 2030.
Rising water will first be experienced during tropical storms and hurricanes and northeasters that will drive water farther inland and more deeply than previously. It will also be experienced on extremely windy rip current days at high tide. Soon.
According to Wanless, and the scientific consensus, sea levels are likely to rise a minimum of one and a half feet by 2059, but probably more. Possibly much more, sooner. Just last week a British group reported that Antarctic glaciers are melting at a much faster rate across a much broader area than known. Previous research, exaggerated and repeated by conservative pundits, indicated that most of Antarctica was thermally stable or even cooling. This could add 3-5 feet to global sea levels in 91 years, ON TOP of the already forecast 3-5 foot ocean rise occurring from the Arctic melt and thermal expansion of the oceans. Worse, Antarctic ice shelves that support the glaciers are weakening and according to Dr. Wanless, if glaciers begin to break off or slide into the ocean in swarms, that would INSTANTLY raise ocean levels as the ice blocks displace the oceans.
Dr. Wanless expects that as the Arctic Sea becomes ice free in summers, possibly as soon as 2013, the loss of white reflective surface means the Arctic ocean is absorbing more solar energy, contributing to its warming, which then accelerates the Arctic ice melt. In addition, as Arctic temperatures rise, increasing levels of carbon dioxide will be released from the thawing tundra organic matter.
Dr. Wanless believes it is plausible for there to be a rapid sea rise over a ten year plus period if all of these events occur and are mutually reinforcing. The head of the United Nations IPCC told a Congressional committee last week that there are only six or so years left before Earth gets locked into severe global warming at current rates of carbon dioxide. Wanless agreed, but said several lesser tipping points have already occurred.
Dr. Wanless comes on at 9:30, so first you will have to listen to Mark Weaver reporting the new GDP numbers and talk of a Depression and breaking down crying before denouncing Obama’s Nixon Vietnamization policy for Iraq which is a rehash of the sorry history of 1969-75. Realize this: Obama and the Pentagon are fully committed to maintaining control of the Iraqi government, which is in direct conflict with an end to the occupation. The only way we’re getting out is if we get lucky and Iraq is pacified. Otherwise McCain was right. We may be there for 100 years. We’re still in Korea after 59.
Wanless says there are ways of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but it’s going to be expensive. And if there is another mega volcanic explosion, it would cool Earth, but only for a few years. Otherwise, he sees nothing stopping rising sea levels.
