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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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You can't hold back the tide. Or sea level rise. There’s melting ice, of course. But H2O that’s already liquid expands as it warms—and the oceans are warming from climate change.
That sea level rise isn't the same everywhere. The moon's pull, oceanic currents, the Earth's rotation—these all play a role in what ocean water is where. Turns out the U.S. East Coast is experiencing sea level rise three to four times higher than the global average, according to a study from the U.S. Geological Survey in the journal Nature Climate Change. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
That's bad news for the highly populated region and suggests storm surges are going to prove ever more problematic from New York City to Cape Hatteras.
By the end of this century, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could produce sea level rise of as much as 80 centimeters along the East Coast. Further into the future, even a low emissions scenario sees the seas rise by a meter and a half and if we continue emitting at our present pace sea level rise might be close to three meters—and still rising. No matter what some folks choose to believe.
—David Biello
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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39 Comments
Add CommentRelieved! For who would, who could, enforce the Laws of Physics, should the Earth's oceans decide to break them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately there is no one on the East Coast who understands this phrase: "as much as 80 centimeters along the East Coast" - is that like a device to count pennies?
The production of hydrogen using Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) addresses sea level rise by converting ocean heat to mechanical and electrical energy to reduce thermal expansion and by converting liquid volume to gas that is used on land to produce power and water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOcean cooling by the conversion of heat to work also lessens icecap melting which is the greatest long term threat to sea levels.
OTEC was identified as early as 1881 as a potential source to meet human needs but cost and environmental problems associated with massive movements of water have prevented this potential from being met.
One way to overcome the cost and environmental hazards associated with massive water movements in an ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) system is to move instead small volumes of vaporized working fluid to a deep water condenser and then pumping the condensed fluid back to the surface.
OTEC implemented this way limits the thermal damage currently impacting the oceans by eliminating carbon emissions, increasing carbon dioxide absorption (cooler water absorbs more CO2) and cools the oceans to alleviate thermal expansion, icecap melting and potential marine extinction events. It also can diminish the thermal stratification that is detrimental to phytoplankton that are the base of the ocean food chain and the lungs of the planet.
"Turns out the U.S. East Coast is experiencing sea level rise three to four times higher than the global average, according to a study from the U.S. Geological Survey in the journal Nature Climate Change. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcept in North Carolina!
Nice try Scientific American! The AGW fanatics warned us in 2005 that there would be 50 million refugees from rising sea level by 2010. It didn’t happen, did it? Of course, how could the ocean expand by heating when the earth has been cooling since 1998 and the ocean since 2003? But maybe thermal shrinkage explains why sea level has dropped since then. (If there is an apparent change in sea level on the southeast coast, it is from subsidence, not from rising sea level – just as in other parts of the world!)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTemperature has declined.
Sea surface temperature has dropped.
Sea level has dropped.
Besides you are out of date. The meme has change from Global Warming to Climate Change to “sustainability”. The goals remain the same – redistribution of wealth, social justice, global government and population control. Didn’t you get the memo from RIO+20?
Were you also involved in promoting these frauds?
9. By 1980 all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.
10. By 1985 pollution will reduce sunlight one half.
11. By 1995 the greenhouse effect will cause drought in the heartland and Eurasia and a continent wide blizzard of prairie dust.
12. By 2000 the world will be 11 degrees cooler
13. By 2000 the Arctic will be ice free.
14. By 2000 the UK will be reduced to a small group of impoverished islands.
15. By 2010 US temperatures will be 2 degrees warmer.
16. By 2010 there will be no more snow
Did you attribute those 756 bad things to Climate Change. (hot, cold, wet dry, etc.)
I’D GIVE YOU LINKS IF YOU PERMITTED THEM..
Oh dear, you've uncovered our conspiracy! I must report to our overlords in the Illuminati that we've been exposed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy don't we have congress outlaw the laws of physics they would be happy to do so!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, the amount of thermal energy that you'd have to pump out of the ocean to make any difference would be like 8 orders magnitude more than the entire current human energy generation capacity. All the sunlight falling on the oceans is a HUGE amount of power, and even increasing that by a tiny bit, as CO2 will do, is still a very very large amount of power.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBesides, all that heat has to go somewhere, it would just end up dumped right back in the atmosphere.
ROFLMAO! http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php read... follow the links, read the actual studies. Wherever you get your 'data' from is full of something that doesn't smell nice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn a hurricane, a bubble of water forms at the center due to pressure, this proves an unequal distribution of water of the entire surface of the ocean. The waterline of the ocean doesn't just rise like it would in a bathtub. The moon could be on the opposite side of the Earth pulling water to make it appear higher or lower, and the wind can push water around, making it even more deceptive. Sea level rise was a bad argument to begin with. We don't even know if the added weight to ocean water could increase osmotic pressure inside rocks that form aquifers and essentially squeeze out the excess. Anything more than "I don't know" is conjecture; that shouldn't be the basis for writing bad, punitive laws that aren't even effective.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLOL. Please do the math and come up with how much energy we can extract from the oceans and how much it will mitigate sea level rise. I'd be interested to know. It could actually be a few microns.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRight, if you add water to the ocean (or the existing water expands) it won't get deeper...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry, we live in the world of common sense here. The truth is, yes, 'sea level' is complex concept, but we already MEASURE it going up, we know it happens. This is not all conjecture, and your wishful thinking that it might all miraculously not happen is what is ridiculous and dangerous. You expect me to help pay the insurance and disaster recovery bills for all the stuff people will build that they shouldn't if we ignore this. Nope, sorry Charlie. Ain't happening. Be stupid on your own dime.
Ralf123 and tharter
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Nature article, “Robust warming of the global upper ocean” points out that the average amount of energy the ocean has absorbed over the period 1993 to 2008 is enough to power nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs for each of the roughly 6.7 billion people on the planet. This amounts to 330 TW.
Currently we consume about 16 TW and Richard Smalley projected as much as 60 TW would be needed by 2050.
Nuclear and fusion would produce 2 times as much entropy as power.
Would you rather convert 60TW (or 30) of ocean heat to energy or add an additional 120TWh to the global system to fulfill the need.
A recent study - http://www.ucalgary.ca/news/utoday/january10-2011/climatechange - by scientists from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis and the University of Calgary pointed out that even if we stopped putting CO2 into the atmosphere today, the West Antarctic ice sheet is likely to collapse by the year 3000 and causing a rise in the global sea level of at least four metres.
Over the same span OTEC would lessen this impact and replace CO2 emitting sources thus allowing atmospheric levels to decrease.
Ralf 123 - how much energy
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA major hurricane can release between 50 and 200 Terawatts of heat energy and there are as many as 21 major storms a year and many smaller storms. The oceans are therefore capable of producing all of the renewable energy the world needs provided the bulk of the heat used to produce the power is recycled back to the oceans surface in the same matter as a hurricane returns heat to the earth’s surface as falling rain.
This is how a counter-current heat transfer system using a heat pipe would operate. Effectively it replicates the atmospheric heat pipe operating in a hurricane, which is Nature's response to an overheating ocean.
Ideally 60 TWe could be produce with such a system by extracting 120TWh from the surface and dumping 60TWh to the depths.
Ah, I see the anti-science clown car arrived long before me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot one of the clowns has ever been able to directly answer a simple question: 122 national academies of science, universities and research organizations have all come to the same conclusion when evaluating the evidence.
So are they all completely stupid? Or are they all colluding with each other in an iron-clad, leak proof global conspiracy that goes back more than 70 years?
I can't think of any other reason why they would *all* get it wrong. They're must either be conspiring or they must all have suddenly become incompetent in every field, paleoclimate, climate, paleobotany, everyone doing everything from ice cores to studies of the stratosphere, all coming to the same conclusion and all either colluding or completely (not just a little, *completely*) wrong.
None of the clowns will stop jumping in and out of the little car long enough to provide a rational answer that simple little question. They've never offered an alternative answer, and all I can see is either global conspiracy or global incompetence.
Well, I suppose there's a third potential reason. Maybe the clowns aren't serious.
Why do you need links? All you have to do is cite the title of the published, peer reviewed scientific paper you're referring to.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPretty lame excuse there.
You don't have to cite the sources anyway, it's obvious that you're lying or distorting whatever was said.
How to tell? Scientist don't make predictions, they make projections. All the ridiculous cherry picked bits you posted are predictions, because of course, you've left out the "...if" parts of all of them. That's why you don't cite your sources, isn't it?
Vapur needs to have his voter I.D. card revoked.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe U.S.G.S. research report published in the pay-per-view journal, "Nature Climate Change", "Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America", http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE1597
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisis described a little more clearly in the freely available Nature News report, "US northeast coast is hotspot for rising sea levels",
http://www.nature.com/news/us-northeast-coast-is-hotspot-for-rising-sea-levels-1.10880
Quote your source. I must have missed a few predictions. Don't need links.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHa ha !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article confuses by summarizing:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"By the end of this century, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could produce sea level rise of as much as 80 centimeters along the East Coast. Further into the future, even a low emissions scenario sees the seas rise by a meter and a half and if we continue emitting at our present pace sea level rise might be close to three meters—and still rising."
The Nature News article summarizes much more clearly:
"The researchers predicted that by 2100, sea levels in the hotspot would rise by between 20 and 29 centimetres above the global increase, which most oceanographers predict will be about one metre."
For us old Americans, that's a projected sea level rise of around 3 feet globally - for a total of about 4 feet in the New England hotspot, by the end of this century.
Trying to predict sea levels decades from now is meaningless. Putting values on variables is arbitary at best.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgreed. Unless of course those values have been assigned reasonable ranges and then run through a probablistic analysis, which they have not.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat this study and each and every climate model produces are deterministic results that do not have uncertainty accounted for approporaitely. The reason for the missing accounting, in my opinion, is that it is impossible because we do not know enough about the system to accurately model it much less perform reasonable uncertainty analyses.
evosburgh..good analysis.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis articlke has a strange headline for 'Scientific american'....as if anything doesn't reflect the laws of the principles of matter ands energy.
Unfortunately, the author then takes a 'leap' out of physics and into speculation. Physics is precise...not 'mays', 'coulds', etc. It isn't fuzzy linkage of speculation and guestimates.
Nice try but this is a hoax. I simply refuse to believe you. I live in the Philippines. My wife and I have a large (20 acre) piece of land overlooking the Sulu Sea. As part of this we have more that 600 yards (1/3 mile) of beachfront. We have lived here, more or less, every day since 1992. There is no physical evidence whatsoever that sea levels are rising. And the wild claim that these are rising rapidly is unhinged. This is all about left wing partisan politics. Science has nothing to do with it. So do I believe my own eyes and experience, or you? Not a tough choice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are many factors that affect local sea level changes, many of them are specific to each locality. What you don't seem to understand is that your local conditions do not represent all other locations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know very little about the Philippines, but I find in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines#Geography
"Most of the mountainous islands are.. volcanic in origin." It also seems that the entire archipelago sits over an enormous subduction zone of the Pacific Plate.
I'm sure you won't find anything you don't already know very well, but please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ring_of_Fire#Philippines
It seems quite likely to me that the sea level of your property is _not_ rising. Not all other seashores lay over a subduction zone - conditions elsewhere may vary.
I discovered the problem yesterday. This site rejects comments with more than two links. So I posted 6 messages with 12 links with no problem. Today they are gone! Is there a limit on the number of posts by one person or a limit of 25 posts?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suggest you click on 'Contact us' at the bottom of the page, then pose your questions to 'webmaster'. They should be best able to help.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisas this reaport said;we should do something to make melting ices stop .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisone of the ways to do that is using poplic tranceportation to make less greenhouse gases .
But the bad news is that , sea-level rising can be slower by taking much time if you DO NOT do whatever can make it rise .
there are many ways to make this problem solved for example using less energy or etc.
In my opinion, our world will face a big problem in the early future. Warming oceans isn't an unimportant problem that you think, you can just keep it away. As it mentioned in the text, greenhouse gasses must be the dangerous thing. I think that more than 80 percent of warming of Earth must have caused by them. Warming of Earth made the ice bergs melting and it made raising of sea level. With this increasing of population, warming and human's routine (that made this warming), in early future many cities near the coasts will go under the water and see storms will hurt us more than now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI opine that, the executives and leaders of countries should have done something for it before that it become worse.
hi.well,i think greenhouse gases is important and it and it good for nature but if those are too much it could be dangerous for people and nature.it's not good for ozone layer and if ozone layer damage people and nature get damage and bad for people skin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes my friend your right.These days skin is so important and if it get hurt it is too bad .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for your comment.
Aoteiwolog (M.H.M)
As far as this passage is concerned, oceans have been impacted by industries since 19th century. Even though we need industry nowadays, we are not allowed to make water (ocean, lakes, etc) warmer and warmer. Because rising temperature in oceans effect water life and rising sea level also (as all of us know for a fact)for example the huge amount of polar ice melting (which is the result of rising temperature) will destroy ecosystems.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFinally, I opine that this is a good idea to know ‘abusing water in a way of industry is forbidden’ may help us to protect water for future.
i agree with you erfan we should do some thing for this problem
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisone thing that make weather hot is co2 of car we can solve this problem by the using of public transportations like bus but the better ways is to use bicycle if we use it we loise weight and it doesnt have no air pollution.
as far as it is concerned,in the last century water in the oceans become over since some factories broadcast a lot of pollution in the air.this phenomenon destroy the ozone layer.and it can be limit the ice mount in the oceans.therefore water become higher and higher and atmosphere become warm.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe result is in the future we will have a few land.
I opine that its a good idea to use some machines that have less pollute to protect our planet in balance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswell,to me rising the level of the sea is one of the biggest problem in the century,not only can that effect on human life but also on animals and plants life,specially polar animals.anyway we have to reduce our using petroleum fuel,and we have to use another type of energy like nuclear energy or solar energy that is the friend with environment.
Water and fire succeed
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe town, the pasture, and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
- T.S. Eliot
To Erfan,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs this/the report said,we should do something to stop ice melting.One of the ways to do that is using/to use public transportation to lessen/make greenhouse gases less.
But the bad news is that slowing sea-level rising takes much time if you DO NOT do whatever to stop it. There are many ways to make this problem solved; for example using less energy or at least not wasting energy.
In the name of God
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgain thanks David Biello for this news.
The height the Ocean is developing and it'll come up and up as M.R Biello said.
Tide of water is very bad for us now ,In fact this is natural but is bad for us.
The Result is lots of cities will go under the ocean!
like those cities M.R Biello said and the more important country near us (i mean India)and its cities are now exactly now are going under the India ocean,and you know many people we'll have with no home.
Friends please take care.if mountain in the south will melt more we can't Imagine what will happen.
Do not imagine that(people will be living under the ocean). NO.
Use Public transport and these things.
Any way thanks for reading.
from aoteiwolog (M.H.M)
It is true that "liquid expands as it warms" but it is not true that "the oceans are warming from climate change." The oceans are cooling, I think. Systems resist change, and the Earth is resisting cooling by reducing cloud cover, and by raising sea level. As sea level rises, more heat is captured from sunlight, since water traps more sunlight than ground can.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSea level is rising because less evaporation at the equator is causing less snow in the Artic, and so ice is melting in the Artic. Global cooling is the cause of less snow in the Artic!
Global warming is only an illusion. Surface temperature rises as cloud cover decreases since sunlight is not blocked as much. But decreasing cloud cover is really due to global cooling, which decreases evaporation from oceans.
Our temperature measurements do not include cloud cover measurements, and so temperature measurements are faulty. But measuring sea level is easier since clouds do not affect such a measurement.
"Warming Oceans Will Follow Laws of Physics" is true, but the claim that "Warmer waters mean higher sea levels" is a claims without facts. I think, colder waters mean higher sea levels.