Let's have another Global Warming thread to play with

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

Originally posted by Badly Shaved Monkey
(BSM lives at an altitude of 79m and will only buy a boat if Antarctica melts. Having less far to drive to the beach would be nice.)

"Coast" BBC TV, 2/9/05- Sea levels are likely to rise by 26cm by some point (can't remember exactly when) in the next 50 years. This was narrated over footage of giant waves breaking over the seafront cottages of Torcross in a storm. Frankly if the 30-foot waves were 31-fooot, I'm not sure those cottagers would have noticed. I feel that the image was not a fair representation of the effect of a 26cm rise in sea level.

Even as one who is fairly happy to accept the consensus that we are at least in part creating global warming, I may not be alone in being underwhelmed by dire predictions of catastrophe based on the sea being a few inches deeper. Am I right to leave my evacuation plans until they are playing cricket on the lush grass of the South Pole?

To put it another way- if you paint all the coastal contours below 0.5m blue instead of brown there aren't many places that look different. Repaint everything below 50 or 100m and that's a different matter.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I think the crucial fact in all these debates is the Total Uncertainty Principle. The TUP says we don't know how high sea level might go and -frankly, we're a bit vague about where it is now. "Mean sea level" even applied to the UK alone, is a statistical abstraction.

If the whole weather system gets more energetic at the same time as sea level rises a foot, it might make a catastrophic difference to how high a really big storm surge could go, like in the 1950s.

A surge like that might be on the order of thirty feet above msl in the channel. Sure it would make only a slight difference to the coastline in the long term, but it could put most of London and the south east of England under several feet of floodwater for days or weeks. (Hence the Thames barrier).

Lloyd's of London might sink. I'd be happy to pay for a couple of tons of Persil, we could clean the whole place up.

130m.
(And rising. Thank you, god, for making me Scottish.)