WeatherNationTV Chief Meteorologist Paul Douglas looks at how climate change leads to rising sea levels and what coastal cities can expect to see by 2040. Also, more on torrential downpours and record setting rainfalls.
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And I already get flooding at the end of my driveway when it rains at high tide. What, me worry?
Thank dog for a weatherman who actually believes in AGW. A lot of them think they’re smarter than climatologists, when, in fact, they just look good on TV.
Actually the part of the Galveston behind the seawall was elevated 15 ft after the 1900 storm. So if it was done with the tech back then it could be done today. To boot there was no federal aid for the construction of the seawall or the raising of the city. For the chart showing are they talking about behind the seawall or west of it? West of it is perhaps 3-4 foot elevation and without subsidized federal flood insurance would not have much built there (becasue bankers are not total fools, and do know that 15 foot storm surges are possible which would wipe that area down to the sand.
Of course most of the places cited are barrier islands is it Miami or Miami Beach for example. For a long time it has been know that barrier islands are very poor places to build.
Please explain how the temperature, etc… looked the last ~10,000 years prior to the peak of each previous Milankovich cycle. What caused the temperature to reverse course and why would we not expect it to happen this time.
Good question.
I don’t quite understand the first part of your question … sounds like you may already have an answer in mind for that. But the second part of your question is pretty straight forward to answer.
Milaknovich cycles, the orbital geometry of the earth/sun system’s influence on insolation over the course of a year, corresponds very well at a medium scale to ice ages coming and going, and at a more detailed level (very cold, semi cold, etc). However, the insolation changes themselves don’t seem to cause shifts as much as allow shifts, where we can see it happening in fine resolution.
For example, two or three things can happen more or less at once; A particularly cold sequence of years in the northern hemisphere coupled with a lot of winter rain fall just because of the jet stream combined with the cooling effects of a big volcano going off (or two) can cause the spread of ice and snow that could be the beginning of a glacier. But if the orbital geometry has high late June insolation, it all melts. But if the same set of events happens and the orbital geometry has late June with low insolation, maybe you get ice and snow covering a large area through the summer, so the next winter, which was going to be cool and wet anyway, is cooler and there you go … glacial growth. As we are seeing now, the albedo of ice and snow in turn is a feedback mechanism (at the moment, warming = reduced albedo = warming etc. etc. )
However, even though the orbital geometry is essentially the same long term for tens and tens of millions of years, this effect is only visible as a strong signal in the paleoclimate record for less than 5 million years, but really, 2.5 million years (the first part of that 5 mya the signal is much weaker.
It is probably true that during periods when there is a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere orbital geometry ceases to be a major factor and ice ages are simply something that won’t happen. It is probably true that the amount of CO2 for that to happen is roughly where we are now, maybe a bit less, maybe bit more, depending.
So Milankovich cycles are not going to putting us in and out of glacial periods again unless the amount of CO2 and/or other greenhouse gases goes down.