It would be lovely to have a beach house, but this doesn’t seem to be the best way to get one
Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at Nasa, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic (1).
The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59cm this century(2). Hansen’s paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. […]
(--George Monbiot)
25 meters, eh? My house sits about 28 meters above sea level, on a
point of land that separates the main channel of the Willamette river
from a fossil channel that contains the SPYellow Menace mainline
and US highway 99e. Push the water level up 25 meters and my house
would sit a whopping 3 meters above mean sea level on a debris island
on the southern end of Columbia Sound.
For some reason this doesn’t excite me? I wonder why? Could it be because some huge fraction of the world’s population lives at <25 meter elevation and the United States has already graphically stated that if hoi polloi are flooded, they can just drown.
Nothing’s going to be done about this, of course. A large majority of the upper classes would be delighted if the rabble would all die, and the Evil Party (which more and more strikes me as the reincarnation of The People’s Temple) is just full of people who would be delighted to commit revolutionary suicide just as long as the liberals died first.