More on Sea Levels

I've posted many times about sea levels.  Extreme weather is happening now but it will be sea levels rising that will convince people, and it right now, some serious problems are going to happen now even if we start now to do something about it.  Michael Segal interviewed climate scientist Ben Strauss:

It is that power of the local that Ben Strauss wants to capture. He is CEO of the non-profit organization Climate Central, which has produced a remarkable collection of flood maps that have captivated me ever since I came across them shortly after Sandy. They let you dial in some amount of sea level or global temperature rise, and then view the effect on most any city in the world.

We are unavoidably headed for a 1.5C temperature and Ben Strauss describes what will be happening:

At 1.5 degrees of global temperature rise, which Strauss figures is all but inevitable, downtown Jersey City is a five-block-square island in the middle of a sea. New York City is mostly OK, but Boston and Cambridge look like swimming pools. Miami is reduced to a skeletal-looking set of dry islands just inland from the Atlantic coast. 

Medium: Why build maps of predicted sea level rise? 

Ben Strauss: Climate change is often discussed in terms that make it distant in time and place, and abstract and statistical. And that makes it hard for people to engage or grasp the issue. My goal in developing our online maps and tools has been to share climate change as a local issue that matters for specific homes and families.

What’s been the most surprising or notable reaction to the maps? 

A lot of artists have used the maps for public art projects or modifying images in ways that are really interesting. We’ve also made presentations to a lot of local officials and coastal stakeholders. Many times, we saw the scales lift from their eyes. They can’t believe what the maps show. I’ve heard stories of diplomats who saw maps of their countries like this for the first time and were profoundly moved and understood the stakes of climate change for their countries in an entirely new way.

This what Miami is certainly going to look like:

Miami, with a long-term sea level rise corresponding to 1.5 degrees Celsius global temperature rise. Courtesy of Climate Central.

 There are diagrams for Boston and Jersey City at that site, and it doesn't look good. 

How do we know how much sea level rise to expect? 

One of the ways we know is by examining the deep geologic record. Over the last couple million years, the planet has cycled through ice ages and warm intervals between them. There are a variety of ways we can estimate how warm those past warm periods were, and how high the sea level got. And when we do that, we see that sea level is extremely sensitive to temperature. That science is continually under further development, so like with any true science there’s never a final word. But one paper two years ago found on the order of seven or eight feet of sea level rise per degree Celsius warming. Other research suggests much greater sensitivity, maybe 10, 15, or 20 feet of sea level rise per degree Celsius warming.

As I've pointed out in the past,

Do climate scientists tend to be conservative in their estimates? 

There is an academically established tendency for climate scientists to understate danger. The scientific community tends to be reluctant to be drawn into public argument, or be accused of alarmism. The tragedy of this field is that it’s become so politicized in the United States. I think climate scientists in general really want to share their information and want to be heard by the public, but sometimes the messenger gets shot.

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What is the most common misconception that you’ve encountered about climate change? 

I think the most common misconception about climate change is that scientists disagree whether it’s happening and if humans are causing it. There is extreme consensus on this issue. Like there is for gravity. Now we don’t know everything about gravity. We are still learning. And the same is true for climate change, but it really is not the subject of scientific debate around its fundamentals, or whether it’s happening, or whether it’s us, or whether it’s dangerous.

As I've stated in the past,  the Pacific Northwest is the best place to be as the planet warms.

Is there a U.S. city that will be especially resilient to climate change?

It’s hard to know. I think I would stay out of the Southwest because of water problems. In general, look north. I wouldn’t rule out the coast because there are some places, Seattle, for example, where the hills come down to the water. So the sea level rise will be a problem, but it won’t be an existential problem.

Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

 Pessimism is an occupational hazard for climate scientists today. There are things that give me optimism though. I feel that just as there are frightening climate impacts that could occur much more quickly than we expect, there are also climate solutions that can develop much more rapidly than we expect. Things like conversion to a renewable energy economy and the electrification of our transportation through electric vehicles, and other means. The way that the price of solar and wind power has come down recently is promising and I think we could be living with clean energy much more quickly than anyone would have anticipated.