Flooded Earth: How the global map and countries' coastlines will change by 2100 as higher temperatures cause sea levels to rise, flooding cities such as London and New York
This is an old, old prediction -- going back to the '80s. But nothing has ever come of it
Vast swathes of London, New York, Bangkok and other major cities will be underwater by 2100, according to terrifying sea level predictions based on the current trajectory of rising global temperatures.
As a result of rising water levels, the global map is set to change as we know it before the end of this century. Coastlines will be altered, and many cities will be rendered uninhabitable - displacing hundreds of millions.
With a recent United Nations report finding 'no credible pathway' to stopping global temperatures from rising above the 1.5 decrees Celsius (the 'preferable' target set by the Paris agreement), rising sea levels as a result of increasing global temperatures are considered inevitable by 2100.
As they meet in Egypt for Cop27, some world leaders are working to limit global temperatures from rising any further. Thanks to the rapid growth in clean energy technologies, the world has already started to curtail emissions. However, the current emissions pathway is still predicted to cause a global temperature rise of 2.7C to 3.1C by the end of the century.
A global temperature rise of 3C by 2100 would have a disastrous impact on millions around the globe, and nowhere would be immune to the effects.
Heatwaves will last longer and become more common, causing droughts and global food shortages. Global migration will rise, as will the spread of disease. And, as polar ice melts, sea levels will rise.
Scientists at Climate Central, a non-profit organisation, estimate as many as 275 million people currently live in areas that will be flooded in this scenario.
Low-lying London is predicted to be one of the worst affected major cities in the western world. A rise of even 2C could see central parts of the British capital along the River Thames flooded by 2100.
According to maps modelled by Climate Central, other parts of England will not be spared, either. A large portion of the Midlands will be submerged, while cities and towns along the Humber - including Hull - will also be flooded. Much of the coast on the South-East will also be at risk.
Across the English Channel, Northern France, Belgium, Germany and then around half of the Netherlands will also be underwater by 2100. The situation is particularly bleak for the low-lying Holland region of The Netherlands, known for its flat landscape of canals, tulip fields and windmills.
Should the sea level rise in-line with current predictions, only the centre of Amsterdam, and The Hague further south, could become islands in an otherwise flooded landscape.
Some major cities in the United States also face disaster in the 3C scenario. Rising sea levels and floods resulting from more extreme tidal activity would see parts of New York City, including lower Manhattan, under water. Across the Hudson river, Jersey City and parts of Newark are also in the danger zone.
Looking east, the southern coast of Long Island and its Barrier Islands will also see rising floodwaters.
Further down America's east coast, several coastal communities are also at risk. In the South, New Orleans - like Amsterdam in Europe - is expected to become an island as the surrounding flood plains are submerged.
Some projections say Miami, on the southern coast of Florida, would simply cease to exist in 3C rises.
On the West Coast, southern Los Angeles including Long Beach and Seal Beach are predicted to flood in the 3C scenario. Further north, communities around San Francisco bay - including Oakland - are also predicted to suffer.
Northern France, Belgium, Germany and then around half of the Netherlands will also be underwater by 2100. The situation is particularly bleak for the low lying Holland region of The Netherlands, known for its flat landscape of canals, tulip fields and windmills. Amsterdam and The Hague could become islands in an otherwise flooded landscape
Rising sea levels and floods resulting from more extreme tidal activity would see parts of New York City, including lower Manhattan, under water. Across the Hudson river, Jersey City and parts of Newark are also in the danger zone
On the West Coast, southern Los Angeles including Long Beach and Seal Beach are predicted to flood in the 3C scenario. Further north, communities around San Francisco bay (pictured) - including Oakland - are also predicted to suffer
With all that being said, it is the population of Asia that is expected to be most adversely affected by rising waters.
When it comes to flooding, Shanghai in China is one of the world's most vulnerable cities. Models suggest that 17.5 million people could be displaced by a global temperature rise of 3C, thanks to the former fishing village's location on the Yellow Sea. The Yangtze river runs to the north, while the Huangpu river runs through the centre.
Cities such as Shanghai, which rely heavily on water-based infrastructure, are particularly vulnerable. The vast city is built on several islands, has two long coastlines, several shipping ports and miles of canals.
In recent years, China has been building vast flood prevention walls to protect Shangai. Some have blocked the ocean from view entirely to its residents.
Climate Central's projections of sea level rises also show Thailand's capital of Bangkok being all but wiped out by flood waters in the event the world hits 3C. While the sea level itself would not be enough to submerge the whole city, the whole of Bangkok would be at risk of severe flood waters.
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Pols who push electric cars ignore basic math and physics
By John Stossel
Politicians praise electric cars. If everyone buys them, they say, solar and wind power will replace our need for oil.
But that’s absurd. Here is the rest of my list of “inconvenient facts” about electric cars.
“The future of the auto industry is electric,” says President Joe Biden. He assumes a vast improvement in batteries. Better batteries are crucial because both power plants and cars need to store lots of electric power.
But here’s inconvenient Fact 3: Batteries are lousy at storing large amounts of energy. “Batteries leak, and they don’t hold a lot,” says physicist Mark Mills.
Mills thinks electric cars are great but explains that “oil begins with a huge advantage: 5,000% more energy in it per pound. Electric car batteries weigh 1,000 pounds. Those 1,000 pounds replace just 80 pounds of gasoline.”
But future batteries will be better, I point out.
“Engineers are really good at making things better,” Mills responds, “but they can’t make them better than the laws of physics permit.”
That’s inconvenient Fact 4. Miracle batteries powerful enough to replace fossil fuels are a fantasy.
“Because nature is not nice to humans,” explains Mills, “we store energy for when it’s cold or really hot. People who imagine an energy transition want to build windmills and solar panels and store all that energy in batteries. But if you do the arithmetic, you find you’d need to build about a hundred trillion dollars’ worth of batteries to store the same amount of energy that Europe has in storage now for this winter. It would take the world’s battery factories 400 years to manufacture that many batteries.”
Politicians don’t mention that when they promise every car will be electric. They also don’t mention that the electric grid is limited.
This summer, California officials were so worried about blackouts they asked electric vehicle owners to stop charging cars!
Yet today, few of California’s cars are electric. Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that all new cars must be electric by 2035! Where does he think he’ll get the electricity to power them?
“Roughly speaking, you have to double your electric grid to move the energy out of gasoline into the electric sector,” says Mills. “No one is planning to double the electric grid, so they’ll be rationing.”
Rationing. That means some places will simply turn off some of the power. That’s our final inconvenient fact: We just don’t have enough electricity for all electric cars.
Worse, if (as many activists and politicians propose) we try to get that electricity from 100% renewable sources, the rationing would be deadly.
“Even if you cover the entire continent of the United States with solar panels, you wouldn’t supply half of America’s electricity,” Mills points out.
Even if you added “Washington Monument-sized wind turbines spread over an area six times greater than the state of New York, that wouldn’t be enough.”
This is just math and physics. It’s amazing supposedly responsible people promote impossible fantasies.
“It’s been an extraordinary accomplishment of propaganda,” complains Mills, “almost infantile . . . distressing because it’s so silly.”
Even if people invent much better cars, wind turbines, solar panels, power lines and batteries, explains Mills, “you’re still drilling things, digging up stuff. You’re still building machines that wear out . . . It’s not magical transformation.”
Even worse, today politicians make us pay more for energy while forcing us to do things that hurt the environment. Their restrictions on fossil fuels drive people to use fuels that pollute more.
In Europe: “They’re going back to burning coal! What we’ve done is have our energy systems designed by bureaucrats instead of engineers,” complains Mills. “We get worse energy, more expensive energy and higher environmental impacts!”
I like electric cars. But I won’t pretend that driving one makes me some kind of environmental hero.
“There’ll be lots more electric cars in the future,” concludes Mills. “There should be, because that’ll reduce demand for oil, which is a good thing. But when you do the math, to operate a society with 5 or 6 billion people who are living in poverty we can’t imagine, when you want to give them a little of what we have, the energy demands are off the charts big. We’re going to need everything.”
That includes fossil fuels.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/16/pols-who-push-electric-cars-ignore-basic-math-and-physics/
*****************************************************Earth CAN regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years to stay in a habitable range
Earth can regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years to keep them within a steady range, a new study confirms.
The planet contains a 'stabilizing feedback' mechanism that's able to keep the climate pendulum from swinging too far in either direction across long timescales.
It's believed this is accomplished through 'silicate weathering' - a geological process during which the slow, steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that draw carbon from atmosphere and into ocean sediments, thereby trapping the gas in rocks.
The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, are based on a study of paleoclimate data that record fluctuations in average global temperatures of the last 66 million years.
Researchers applied a mathematical analysis to determine if the data revealed any patterns that would show a stabilizing phenomena to keep global temperatures in line on a very long timescale.
They found that there seems to be a consistent pattern whereby the planet's temperature swings get dampened over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. That duration is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is thought to act.
'You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,' Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), said.
'But it's never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth's climate.'
Through previous research, scientists have observed the movement of carbon in and out of Earth surface environment to stay relatively balanced - despite global temperature swings.
Scientists believe we are currently in a period of warming and have urged policymakers to enact a range of changes to curb carbon emissions or become carbon-neutral.
Arnscheidt and his colleagues analyzed the history of average global temperatures across 66 million years to consider a range of different timescales, including tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, to see if any stabilizing patterns emerged within each timescale.
'To some extent, it’s like your car is speeding down the street, and when you put on the brakes, you slide for a long time before you stop,' Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics at MIT, said in a statement.
'There’s a timescale over which frictional resistance, or a stabilizing feedback, kicks in, when the system returns to a steady state.'
Although scientists have suspected for a long time that silicate weathering can help to maintain our planet's carbon cycle, this is the first time they've observed direct evidence of the mechanism.
'On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback,' Arnscheidt explained.
'But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.'
One noteworthy finding of their work is that on much longer timescales, meaning over a million years, the data did not reveal any stabilizing feedbacks - which led to the question: What kept global temperatures in check?
'There’s an idea that chance may have played a major role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,' Rothman offered.
'There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,' Arnscheidt said.
'We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.'
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The green mob won’t rest until Christmas joy is utterly destroyed
Lock up your fairy lights! Hide that door wreath! Block the chimney right this minute! The planet-saving Puritans are coming for Christmas, armed with righteous zeal and tins of soup to hurl at your father-in-law’s framed watercolours. There will be no DFS vans delivering new sofas in suburbia. Even the Pope’s festive tree is at risk of being cancelled.
Wait – is that Mariah Carey I hear playing, comrade? Cease and desist or we’ll glue ourselves to your porch. Cometh the most wonderful time of the year, cometh the Winterval wokeys who want to bully, harangue and guilt trip us into performative misery and handwringing Weltschmerz.
Yes, there is much to feel bleak about, what with inflation, energy prices and the war in Ukraine. But just because we could be depressed doesn’t mean we should, and it most certainly doesn’t mean we must.
Where’s the harm in putting up a Norway spruce and bringing an LED twinkle into our chilly homes? Frankly, warming the cockles of our hearts is a lot cheaper than warming the rest of us. And wouldn’t it be nice to set aside real life for a bit and enjoy the sort of celebrations that the Covid lockdowns made impossible? Why shouldn’t we make merry and feast on the last few turkeys that haven’t succumbed to avian flu? We’ll eat veg on Boxing Day.
There is something especially mean-spirited about protesting against the Vatican’s Christmas tree and refusing to allow the traditional 200-year-old fir to be felled, as green activists have managed to do in Italy. The centre of a religion with 1.3 billion believers surely deserves some respect. These foolish eco-warriors conveniently forget that Pope Francis is a vocal exponent of action against climate change. He wrote an encyclical on the ecological crisis back in 2015, for pity’s sake.
But no. Bringing people together (which in the long run is the only way to alter human behaviour) comes a poor second to the adrenalin-rush of bossy boots hectoring and virtue-signalling. And so Oxford Street’s atmospheric lights will go part-time, with a two-thirds cut compared to last year. This will apparently make it a “leading sustainable district”. Now, I may not be a world-leading economist, but I doubt Stygian gloom will do much for retailers desperately needing to boost lacklustre sales and promote family footfall.
Not even the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which is running its annual light show on biofuel in order to slash emissions by up to 90 per cent, has escaped the censuring gaze of the ultra-green lobby. It has been urged to “turn out your fairy lights” and encourage visitors to “look at the unviolated stars” instead. One particularly aggrieved ecotist asked: “What’s your carbon footprint on this? You should really know better.” What a self-indulgently bleak way to look at the world.
Like most people, I try my best to help the planet. I recycle. I reuse. I take the bus. Hell, I “identify” as flexitarian. But Christmas is for treats. So while John Lewis may once again top the tear-jerking advert league table, my favourite seasonal offering is the fabulously retro Argos ad in which an entire community descends on a young couple for December 25, bearing trifles and crackers. It is silly, joyful and sociable; as the best Christmases should be.
But I fear the militant green mob will not be happy until our high streets are shrouded in darkness and the light has died in our eyes.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/16/green-mob-wont-rest-christmas-joy-utterly-destroyed/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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