More On Damage From Sea Level Increasing

A new study has come out showing that there's more to worry about than just the sea level rising.
The authors of this study note that if you are concerned about societal and economic costs, the rate of sea rise isn’t the entire story. Much of the damage is caused by extreme events that are superimposed on a rising ocean. Damage is highly nonlinear with sea rise. 
[A]s we warm the planet we are raising the baseline level of water from which extremes happen. Second, we are making some extreme weather events more likely. To measure the changes to extreme events in the future, the authors use a statistical method to estimate economic losses from coastal flooding. Using Copenhagen and other locations as test cases, they found that economic losses double when water rises only 11 cm. They also find that the costs rise faster than sea level rise itself. So, if we expect a linear increase in sea level over the next century, we should anticipate costs that increase more rapidly. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alaska Crushes Record For Hottest December

Image
Alaska crushes record for hottest December as Arctic sea ice hits record low In its hottest December ever recorded, Alaska was a stunning 15.7°F above the 20th century average. And the year ended with Arctic sea ice hitting an all-time record low. While the East Coast had a cool December and New Year’s week, Alaska baked. Last Tuesday, Anchorage hit 48°F , warmer than southern cities from Atlanta and Jacksonville to Houston and New Orleans. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported this week that Alaska averaged 19.4°F for the month, topping the previous record (1985) by a whopping 2.1°F. “That’s really quite astonishing,” said Rick Thoman, the National Weather Service’s climate sciences and services manager for the Alaska region. As he explained to the Anchorage Daily News , “Usually you’re breaking those by a tenth of a degree or two-tenths of a degree.” The Arctic as a whole was so warm in December that Arctic sea ice set a new end-of-year record lo
Read more

The World My Grandchildren Will Inherit

Image
I went to a presentation at the University of Washington by Professor Raftery of the Statistics and Sociology Departments of a recent paper of his and colleagues (Alec Zimmer, Dargan M.W. Frierson, Richard Startz, and Peiran Liu) in the Journal Nature, entitled Less than 2 °C warming by 2100 unlikely   (link behind a paywall) . Their paper is a response to a need to provide a statistical forecast for global temperatures.  What the IPCC has previously provided are "scenarios" based on "expert" thinking.  Raftery has previously developed statistical methods for estimating world-wide migration patterns that has been adopted by the United Nations.  At the presentation he presented a statistical model for forecasting global temperatures. Their result is a 90% interval forecast of 2 to 4.9 degrees Centigrade with a median of 3.2 degrees. Their backtesting strongly supported the median.  He also  said " that the data suggested that future improvements in ca
Read more