Climate Change thread: tl; dr - We are so screwed

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change thread: tl; dr - We are so screwed

Office Thug: Jan 17, 2008; Luke Cage just shut you down!

Claverjoe posted:

EDIT: Oooh, maybe you are trying to say that I'm bad for disliking LWR nuke plants? Because I'll admit I'm in Office Thug's camp in being favor of IFR reactors and CANDU style nuke plants.

I favor the breeder systems over the current systems by a longshot, but I'd rather do what China's doing and not wait around for those systems to finish development before doing something. Developing Gen IV systems, even in China, could take several decades in today's political environment.

For the purposes of replacing fossil fuel capacity, the real key to making nuclear work is to build it as fast as possible through things like standardization and factory-assembly of whole units. You can do this with LWRs and CANDUs just fine even though they're only 0.5-1.2% totally efficient and have limited inherent safety, the latter aspect costing them big time in regulations. Using any nuclear whatsoever for the time being would beat wasting our time and money with solar and wind at least.

# ? Jun 14, 2013 16:02

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# ? May 31, 2024 14:46

TACD: Oct 27, 2000

A recent article on permafrost thawing illustrates just how severe the feedback effects from this could be:

quote:

Over hundreds of millennia, Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon - an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That's about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth's soils. In comparison, about 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850. Most of this carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable topsoils within 10 feet (3 meters) of the surface.

But, as scientists are learning, permafrost - and its stored carbon - may not be as permanent as its name implies. And that has them concerned.

"Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures - as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years," Miller said. "As heat from Earth's surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic's carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming."

Current climate models do not adequately account for the impact of climate change on permafrost and how its degradation may affect regional and global climate. Scientists want to know how much permafrost carbon may be vulnerable to release as Earth's climate warms, and how fast it may be released.

...

It's important to accurately characterize the soils and state of the land surfaces. There's a strong correlation between soil characteristics and release of carbon dioxide and methane. Historically, the cold, wet soils of Arctic ecosystems have stored more carbon than they have released. If climate change causes the Arctic to get warmer and drier, scientists expect most of the carbon to be released as carbon dioxide. If it gets warmer and wetter, most will be in the form of methane.

The distinction is critical. Molecule per molecule, methane is 22 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide on a 100-year timescale, and 105 times more potent on a 20-year timescale. If just one percent of the permafrost carbon released over a short time period is methane, it will have the same greenhouse impact as the 99 percent that is released as carbon dioxide. Characterizing this methane to carbon dioxide ratio is a major CARVE objective.

...

The CARVE science team is busy analyzing data from its first full year of science flights. What they're finding, Miller said, is both amazing and potentially troubling.

"Some of the methane and carbon dioxide concentrations we've measured have been large, and we're seeing very different patterns from what models suggest," Miller said. "We saw large, regional-scale episodic bursts of higher-than-normal carbon dioxide and methane in interior Alaska and across the North Slope during the spring thaw, and they lasted until after the fall refreeze. To cite another example, in July 2012 we saw methane levels over swamps in the Innoko Wilderness that were 650 parts per billion higher than normal background levels. That's similar to what you might find in a large city."

Ultimately, the scientists hope their observations will indicate whether an irreversible permafrost tipping point may be near at hand. While scientists don't yet believe the Arctic has reached that tipping point, no one knows for sure. "We hope CARVE may be able to find that 'smoking gun,' if one exists," Miller said.

Don't forget that the effects of thawing permafrost are not going to be included in the 5th IPCC report and the climate projections have so far consistently been too conservative. tl;dr - we are so screwed.

# ? Jun 15, 2013 00:42

Paper Mac: Mar 2, 2007; lives in a paper shack

My understanding of the modelling results for changes in rainfall patterns is that it's pretty unanimous that the arctic is going to get "warmer and wetter", not "warmer and drier"..

# ? Jun 15, 2013 03:25

Vermain: Sep 5, 2006

I'm trying to think of anything that could really be done about the permafrost issue. It seems like some sort of massive geoengineering to reduce Arctic temperatures is about the only "feasible" option. I know it's been countered that global aerosols would likely have several negative side effects (monsoon changes, the requirement for continual injection, and so on), but what about relatively "localized" aerosols that are intended to specifically target the Arctic?

(I mean, in an ideal world, we wouldn't have to be thinking up weird science fiction schemes to keep the world climate from exploding, but here we are.)

# ? Jun 15, 2013 04:48

Paper Mac: Mar 2, 2007; lives in a paper shack

I think you can localise sulfates to some extent by injecting them at lower altitudes or at higher latitudes in the Brewer Dobson circulation, but my understanding is that doing so massively increases the flux rate required to get good particulate formation, as they're precipitating out way faster. One of the big draws of aerosols is that they're relatively cheap compared to pretty much every other mitigation/adaptation strategy, so increasing the flux rate makes it less attractive. I think if it gets done, whoever implements it is probably going to be shooting for global distribution.

# ? Jun 15, 2013 05:17

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

TACD posted:

the climate projections have so far consistently been too conservative. tl;dr - we are so screwed.

These pictures doesn't seem to make a great deal of sense. The projection lines, green and red, don't really agree with data anywhere, even at the very moment they begin. Though I guess blue is okay for a bit around 1994. Even if the climate projections are too conservative, it's hard to believe that they could get what was then the present wrong. Likewise, the arctic sea ice decline appears to show substantial divergence beginning around...the 1980s, ish? Well before any of the projections actually occurred.

# ? Jun 15, 2013 09:41

Arglebargle III: Feb 21, 2006

Well look on the bright side. If these projections are correct, we'll be able to colonize a new continent! Surely that will make up for losing some of the most densely populated and intensively improved land on Earth! :pseudo:

# ? Jun 15, 2013 11:02

Cetea: Jun 14, 2013

Here's an interesting article on climate change from a psychological viewpoint (a.k.a how do we make people accept climate change but not completely freak out at the same time):

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-real-story-risk/201210/climate-change-psychological-challenge

I think the solution might be partly psychological as well. If climate change is going to be dealt with at any point, first we need to make people want to deal with it rather than just having people saying "screw it, we're all dead anyway" or "it doesn't affect me, so I'm in the clear!" and do whatever they they want. Of course, we'd have to get past the stage where people are going "climate change is a lie made by politicians to get votes" first.

# ? Jun 15, 2013 11:33

such hawks: Jul 28, 2007

Strudel Man posted:

These pictures doesn't seem to make a great deal of sense. The projection lines, green and red, don't really agree with data anywhere, even at the very moment they begin. Though I guess blue is okay for a bit around 1994. Even if the climate projections are too conservative, it's hard to believe that they could get what was then the present wrong. Likewise, the arctic sea ice decline appears to show substantial divergence beginning around...the 1980s, ish? Well before any of the projections actually occurred.

The orange line is from a 2011 reconstruction of sea level rise from tidal data, so the modellers wouldn't have had that data set in 1990 when the projection was made. The graph is really showing that the satellite and tidal gauge data both show that sea level rise has exceeded most of the ensemble model projections for both the 3rd and 4th assessments.

# ? Jun 15, 2013 11:34

Inglonias: Mar 7, 2013; I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

Cetea posted:

...If climate change is going to be dealt with at any point, first we need to make people want to deal with it rather than just having people saying "screw it, we're all dead anyway" or "it doesn't affect me, so I'm in the clear!" and do whatever they they want. Of course, we'd have to get past the stage where people are going "climate change is a lie made by politicians to get votes" first.

The three modes of thinking you present are all pretty closely related according to the article you linked. It's all a form of "That's going to change my life forever! WELL I WON'T LET IT!" People come to that conclusion in different ways, but in the end, that's the driving thought behind them.

Changing topics somewhat, an organization I happen to support (350.org) is hosting several actions of various kinds around the United States for July in regards to climate change. If you're interested in joining them, you can find more information about it here. (A quick perusal

I am going to go to the event in DC, since that is the one closest to me.

# ? Jun 15, 2013 18:16

Sogol: Apr 11, 2013; Galileo's Finger

There are often several cases considered once you have become persuaded that change is occurring. If you are persuaded change is occurring you also must consider whether or not you feel that is limited to climate, or whether climate is symptomatic. Then you have to decide what role you feel humanity as a whole, historically and in this moment, has to do with those changes.

Personally, I am persuaded of all three: climate change is occurring, it is symptomatic, humanity is interacting with planetary systems at the same scale as planetary systems. Furthermore, I do not feel collapse is something that will happen in some imagined future, I am persuaded that it is already occuring. I don't spend much time trying to persuade anyone else of these things directly. I also don't spend much time trying to defend this point of view. I do try have my life correlate to this and work to build local community and institutionally based capacity for considering and working with our current condition.

If you have persuaded yourself of some version of this then there are three base cases often considered, which have been touched on and returned to in this thread.
1- change at a scale that disrupts the major social contracts and human built infrastructure on the planet
2- 'free market' or technological changes that mitigate the symptomatic level of change
3- social transformation in which social contracts arise consistent with structural changes occurring at a planetary scale

These aren't altogether mutually exclusive scenarios. If I am considering the matter strategically, one of the basic questions I might ask is whether or not I feel the next few decades will manifest a linear sort of change or something discontinuous. The simplest way to see this is to examine your active and functional plan for the future. Does it assume continuity or discontinuity? In either case, why and in what ways? What I decide about these things effects my actions, to the extent that I can keep my attention there consistently.

For instance, I am persuaded that collapse in many of the monolithic human systems of the industrial era is already occurring. Since this is the case for me, I might then want to understand something about the dynamics of monolithic collapse. In a cyclically self balancing system, such as we find in nature, monolithic collapse causes many linked, diverse examples of life to emerge in the footprint of the collapse. This creates a much more resilient system locally. If I am persuaded of that, which I am, I might then look to see what I could do in my own life to help promote such resilience locally and place my attention there. I might consider how to foster or recognize such capacity globally, without invoking such paradigms as economy of scale, or even efficiency.

As you can see this is an example of scenario #3, but does not preclude either #1 or #2. If I decide to enact #1 I might become a prepper and bunker up. There are good arguments for all that I suppose. Part of the difficulty is that it becomes an investment in the 'Mad Max' scenario, so I don't invest myself in this model. I do not see prioritizing my own survival as a viable path, given the current condition. One of the arguments made about #2 is that historically, technological change has happened quickly enough to respond to something like our current condition. Sometimes this is coupled with the idea that social change has no such history. I feel that in either case we are talking about an entirely new scale of change, since rather than some particular niche phenomena we are now talking about the entire planet as niche. Gene Sharp has a pretty accessible set of arguments about social change: http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf

The question of 'free market' and technological change contain several dilemmas for me. The first is that the fundamental models that seem to give these responses their efficacy are the same models that when enacted are creating the problematic phenomena and symptomatic effects, such as climate change. The effect that this dynamic typically has in a system is to increase the symptomatic effect, even while we are trying to address it. I feel that underlying this scenario is the idea that we can use the means by which we created the problem to solve the problem in a way that allows the maintenance of some imagined 'quality of life'. Of course the production of that 'quality of life', enjoyed by a tiny minority of the overall human population, is also the production of our current condition. One point of access I have found interesting for beginning to think about this is Jevon's Paradox. The argument is that increases in efficiency lead to increases in resource consumption. The questioned asked is about the use orientation of the system in which efficiencies are attained. For instance, imagine an energy system based on 'shareholder value' (profit maximization and consolidation). Though a claim might be made about efficiency in such a system with respect to environmental or social value, these are secondary concerns, at best.. It's just a point of entry and of course there are arguments about it both ways.

Economic and technological change and innovation seem to me necessary, but insufficient in the best case. In the worst case they are an extension of what we are already doing and accelerate conditions.

One of the places this conversation always goes is 'what about nuclear?' Personally I wish to ground that conversation in the question of whether people making the argument have ever spent any time in or around the aging assets of the industrial era? The upshot for me from having spent quite a bit of time in such places is that without a radical change in social contract, nuclear is a very bad idea even though it can seem to solve an immediate problem. Even with real meaningful change in social contract, such that profit maximization and consolidation of capital are no longer the context for design, decision making and action, the impact of the nuclear intervention is likely to outlive many social contracts enacting it.

I assume we are not leaving the planet nor abandoning biological existence within the time frame of the needed change. Mostly what I focus on as a result of all this is the realization of capacity for local resilience in the face of collapse. I have decided that some points are 'more leveraged' and I attempt to focus and practice there. When encountered it seems extreme and offensive to some people, delusional to others, and again not enough to many.

# ? Jun 15, 2013 18:44

Deuce: Jun 18, 2004; Mile High Club

TACD posted:

A recent article on permafrost thawing illustrates just how severe the feedback effects from this could be:

Don't forget that the effects of thawing permafrost are not going to be included in the 5th IPCC report and the climate projections have so far consistently been too conservative. tl;dr - we are so screwed.

The trouble is that there's one key projection that hasn't turned out to be too conservative, and that's temperature. Climate "skeptics" love to point out that temperatures are languishing on the lower end of the models' uncertainty ranges. To them, this ends the discussion. Scientists are wrong, la la la can't hear you. It doesn't matter that you try to explain things like solar variation and ENSO effects on temperature over a short time period, these aren't people looking for a complex discussion of a complex issue.

If they can't discuss even the basics of temperature variations, they aren't going to listen to this nonsense about "permafrost." Frost melts when it gets warm, it doesn't make things warm! :downs:

Then the whole thing is made worse like the guy who said a page or two ago that "pretty much everybody is going to die." That immediately makes your average person start ignoring the whole issue as a bunch of alarmism.

# ? Jun 15, 2013 18:44

Inglonias: Mar 7, 2013; I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

Deuce posted:

Then the whole thing is made worse like the guy who said a page or two ago that "pretty much everybody is going to die." That immediately makes your average person start ignoring the whole issue as a bunch of alarmism.

Or in my case, become too busy panicking to discuss the topic in a sane and logical manner. That could happen too.

# ? Jun 16, 2013 05:17

rivetz: Sep 22, 2000; Soiled Meat

Inglonias posted:

The three modes of thinking you present are all pretty closely related according to the article you linked. It's all a form of "That's going to change my life forever! WELL I WON'T LET IT!" People come to that conclusion in different ways, but in the end, that's the driving thought behind them.

Changing topics somewhat, an organization I happen to support (350.org) is hosting several actions of various kinds around the United States for July in regards to climate change. If you're interested in joining them, you can find more information about it here. (A quick perusal

I am going to go to the event in DC, since that is the one closest to me.

Thanks for the link. Signed up here in Portland. The site is frustratingly vague on the details of the protest, but to me it's one of these things where whatever they have planned, it's getting the public's concerns over climate change some/any kind of voice. Ultimately I just feel like there's nothing else I can do; sniping with skeptics on conservative message boards is just treading water.

# ? Jun 16, 2013 18:43

err: Apr 11, 2005; I carry my own weight no matter how heavy this shit gets...

rivetz posted:

Thanks for the link. Signed up here in Portland. The site is frustratingly vague on the details of the protest, but to me it's one of these things where whatever they have planned, it's getting the public's concerns over climate change some/any kind of voice. Ultimately I just feel like there's nothing else I can do; sniping with skeptics on conservative message boards is just treading water.

Going to the Portland one as well, coal exporting is an increasing issue in Olympia where I live, so I imagine it will be pretty big with WA people.

# ? Jun 16, 2013 21:51

Inglonias: Mar 7, 2013; I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

rivetz posted:

Thanks for the link. Signed up here in Portland. The site is frustratingly vague on the details of the protest, but to me it's one of these things where whatever they have planned, it's getting the public's concerns over climate change some/any kind of voice. Ultimately I just feel like there's nothing else I can do; sniping with skeptics on conservative message boards is just treading water.

I think they're so vague because they're still in the planning stages and will tell people when they get closer.

# ? Jun 17, 2013 01:05

WhiskeyJuvenile: Feb 15, 2002; by Nyc_Tattoo

Enjoy Miami while you can

quote:

When the water receded after Hurricane Milo of 2030, there was a foot of sand covering the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the Fontaine�bleau hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum. Most of the damage occurred not from the hurricane's 175-mph winds, but from the 24-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city. In South Beach, the old art-deco� buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A 17-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic. The storm knocked out the wastewater-treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay. Tampons and condoms littered the beaches, and the stench of human excrement stoked fears of cholera. More than 800 people died, many of them swept away by the surging waters that submerged much of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale; 13 people were killed in traffic accidents as they scrambled to escape the city after the news spread � falsely, it turned out � that one of the nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, an aging power plant 24 miles south of Miami, had been destroyed by the surge and sent a radioactive cloud over the city.

The president, of course, said Miami would be back, that the hurricane did not kill the city, and that Americans did not give up. But it was clear to those not fooling themselves that this storm was the beginning of the end. With sea levels more than a foot higher than they'd been at the dawn of the century, South Florida was wet, vulnerable and bankrupt. Attempts had been made to armor the coastline, to build sea walls and elevate buildings, but it was a futile undertaking. The coastline from Miami Beach up to Jupiter had been a little more than a series of rugged limestone crags since the mid-2020s, when the state, unable to lay out $100 million every few years to pump in fresh sand, had given up trying to save South Florida's world-famous� beaches. In that past decade, tourist visits had plummeted by 40 percent, even after the Florida legislature agreed to allow casino gambling in a desperate attempt to raise revenue for storm protection. The city of Homestead, in southern Miami-Dade County, which had been flattened by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, had to be completely abandoned. Thousands of tract homes were bulldozed because they were a public health hazard. In the parts of the county that were still inhabitable, only the wealthiest could afford to insure their homes. Mortgages were nearly impossible to get, mostly because banks didn't believe the homes would be there in 30 years. At high tide, many roads were impassable, even for the most modern semiaquatic vehicles.

But Hurricane Milo was unexpectedly devastating. Because sea-level� rise had already pushed the water table so high, it took weeks for the storm waters to recede. Salt water corroded underground wiring, leaving parts of the city dark for months. Drinking-water� wells were ruined. Interstate 95 was clogged with cars and trucks stuffed with animals and personal belongings, as hundreds of thousands of people fled north to Orlando, the highest ground in central Florida. Developers drew up plans for new buildings on stilts, but few were built. A new flexible carbon-fiber� bridge was proposed to link Miami Beach with the mainland, but the bankrupt city couldn't secure financing and the project fell apart. The skyscrapers that had gone up during the Obama years were gradually abandoned and used as staging grounds for drug runners and exotic-animal traffickers. A crocodile nested in the ruins of the P�rez Art Museum.

And still, the waters kept rising, nearly a foot each decade. By the latter end of the 21st century, Miami became something else entirely: a popular snorkeling spot where people could swim with sharks and sea turtles and explore the wreckage of a great American city.

Even more than Silicon Valley, Miami embodies the central technological myth of our time � that nature can not only be tamed but made irrelevant. Miami was a mosquito-and-crocodile-filled swampland for thousands of years, virtually uninhabited until the late 1800s. Then developers arrived, canals were dug, swamps were drained, and a city emerged that was unlike any other place on the planet, an edge-of-the-world, air-conditioned dreamland of sunshine and beaches and drugs and money; Jan Nijman, the former director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Miami, called 20th-century Miami "a citadel of fantastical consumption." Floods would come and go and hurricanes might blow through, but the city would survive, if only because no one could imagine a force more powerful than human ingenuity. That defiance of nature � the sense that the rules don't apply here � gave the city its great energy. But it is also what will cause its demise.

You would never know it from looking at Miami today. Rivers of money are flowing in from Latin America, Europe and beyond, new upscale shopping malls are opening, and the skyline is crowded with construction cranes. But the unavoidable truth is that sea levels are rising and Miami is on its way to becoming an American Atlantis. It may be another century before the city is completely underwater (though some more-pessimistic� scientists predict it could be much sooner), but life in the vibrant metropolis of 5.5 million people will begin to dissolve much quicker, most likely within a few decades. The rising waters will destroy Miami slowly, by seeping into wiring, roads, building foundations and drinking-water supplies � and quickly, by increasing the destructive power of hurricanes. "Miami, as we know it today, is doomed," says Harold Wanless, the chairman of the department of geological sciences at the University of Miami. "It's not a question of if. It's a question of when."

Sea-level rise is not a hypothetical disaster. It is a physical fact of life on a warming planet, the basic dynamics of which even a child can understand: Heat melts ice. Since the 1920s, the global average sea level has risen about nine inches, mostly from the thermal expansion of the ocean water. But thanks to our 200-year-long fossil-fuel binge, the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are starting to melt rapidly now, causing the rate of sea-level rise to grow exponentially. The latest research, including an assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suggests that sea level could rise more than six feet by the end of the century. James Hansen, the godfather of global-warming science, has argued that it could increase as high as 16 feet by then � and Wanless believes that it could continue rising a foot each decade after that. "With six feet of sea-level rise, South Florida is toast," says Tom Gustafson, a former Florida speaker of the House and a climate-change-policy advocate. Even if we cut carbon pollution overnight, it won't save us. Ohio State glaciologist Jason Box has said he believes we already have 70 feet of sea-level rise baked into the system.

Of course, South Florida is not the only place that will be devastated by sea-level rise. London, Boston, New York and Shanghai are all vulnerable, as are low-lying underdeveloped nations like Bangladesh. But South Florida is uniquely screwed, in part because about 75 percent of the 5.5 million people in South Florida live along the coast. And unlike many cities, where the wealth congregates in the hills, southern Florida's most valuable real estate is right on the water. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development lists Miami as the number-one most vulnerable city worldwide in terms of property damage, with more than $416 billion in assets at risk to storm-related flooding and sea-level rise.
South Florida has two big problems. The first is its remarkably flat topography. Half the area that surrounds Miami is less than five feet above sea level. Its highest natural elevation, a limestone ridge that runs from Palm Beach to just south of the city, averages a scant 12 feet. With just three feet of sea-level rise, more than a third of southern Florida will vanish; at six feet, more than half will be gone; if the seas rise 12 feet, South Florida will be little more than an isolated archipelago surrounded by abandoned buildings and crumbling overpasses. And the waters won't just come in from the east � because the region is so flat, rising seas will come in nearly as fast from the west too, through the Everglades.

Even worse, South Florida sits above a vast and porous limestone plateau. "Imagine Swiss cheese, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the rock under southern Florida looks like," says Glenn Landers, a senior engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This means water moves around easily � it seeps into yards at high tide, bubbles up on golf courses, flows through underground caverns, corrodes building foundations from below. "Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here," says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas. "Protecting the city, if it is possible, will require innovative solutions."

Those solutions are not likely to be forthcoming from the political realm. The statehouse in Tallahassee is a monument to climate-change denial. "You can't even say the words 'climate change' on the House floor without being run out of the building," says Gustafson. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, positioning himself for a run at the presidency in 2016, is another denier, still trotting out the tired old argument that "no matter how many job-killing� laws we pass, our government can't control the weather." Gov. Rick Scott, a Tea Party Republican, says he's "not convinced" that global warming is caused by human beings. Since taking office in 2011, Scott has targeted environmental protections of every sort and slashed the budget of the South Florida Water Management District, the agency in charge of managing water supply in the region, as well as restoration of the Everglades. "There is no serious thinking, no serious planning, about any of this going on at the state level," says Chuck Watson, a disaster-�impact analyst with longtime experience in Florida. "The view is, 'Well, if it gets real bad, the federal government will bail us out.' It is beyond denial; it is flat-out delusional."

Local governments, including Broward and Miami-Dade counties, have tried to compensate by forging regional agreements to cut carbon pollution and upgrade infrastructure to make their cities more resilient, but without help (and money) from the state and federal governments, it's pretty ineffective. Given how much Florida has to lose from climate change, the abdication of leadership by state and federal politicians is almost suicidal � when it isn't downright comical. Watson recalls attending a meeting on natural-hazard-response planning in South Florida, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state: "I mentioned sea-level rise, and I was treated to a 15-minute lecture on Genesis by one of the commissioners. He said, 'God destroyed the Earth with water the first time, and he promised he wouldn't do it again. So all of you who are pushing fears about sea-level rise, go back and read the Bible.'"

Rising seas will present an escalating series of challenges, most of which, on their own, will appear to be manageable. It's not hard to see how it will play out: As each new crisis arises, engineers will propose expensive solutions and people may be fooled into thinking that sea-level� rise is not such a big deal. But in many cases, sea-wall extensions and elaborate pumping and drainage systems will turn out to be giant boondoggles, with money shoveled out to politically connected contractors for projects that are ineffective or overwhelmed by continually rising seas. "Engineers want to sell solutions, and often that means downplaying the seriousness of the problem in the long term," says Wanless.

One of the first consequences of rising seas will be loss of drinking water. In fact, it's already starting to happen. Nobody understands this better than Jayantha Obeysekera, the chief modeler for the South Florida Water Management District, who is known to everyone as "Obey." The water-control system in Florida is crazily complex, even to people whose business it is to understand it. One recent hot morning, Obey and I visited several dikes and canals in the Miami area.

Our first stop was a big steel gate � in water-management parlance, it's called a "salinity-control structure" � in a poor black neighborhood in North Miami. We turned off a busy four-lane road and drove through a grassy area littered with soda bottles and plastic bags, stopped at the gate and stood at the edge of a 30-foot-wide canal. Three manatees floated lazily in the stagnant water. This canal, like hundreds of others in South Florida, was dredged in the early 20th century to allow water to drain out of the Everglades. The canals worked fine for a while, lowering the water level in the swamp enough to allow developers to pave them over and make millions selling the American Dream to sun-starved suburbanites. But then by the 1950s, people started noticing their drinking water was getting salty. In South Florida, the drinking-water supply comes from a big lake just below the surface known as the Biscayne aquifer. Engineers examined the situation and determined that the combination of draining the swamps and pumping out the aquifer had changed hydrostatic pressure underground and allowed salt water to move into the aquifer. To stop this, the Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District built dozens of these salinity-�control structures at key points on the canals. When they were closed, salty water wasn't able to flow into the canals. But if there was a big storm and intense flooding, the gates could be opened to allow drainage.

That worked pretty well for a time. The gates were engineered so that, when they were closed, the fresh water was about a foot and a half higher than the salt water. This freshwater "head" (as engineers called it) helped keep pressure in the aquifer and kept the salt water at bay.

But in the 50 years since the structures were built, much has changed. For one thing, nearly 80 percent of the fresh water flowing into the Everglades has been diverted, some of it into industrial-�agriculture operations. At the same time, consumption has skyrocketed: The 5.5 million or so people who now live in South Florida consume more than 3 billion gallons of water every day (including industry and agriculture). Almost all of that is pumped out of the aquifer, drawing it down and allowing more and more salt water to move in. At the same time, the sea level is rising (about nine inches since the canals were first dredged), which also helps push more salt water into the aquifer.

"Here, you can see the problem," Obey says, pointing to the saltwater side of the gate. "The water is only 10 inches lower on this side than on the canal. When this structure was built in 1960, it was a foot and a half. We are reaching equilibrium."

Obey explains that when there is a torrential rain (a frequent occurrence) and inland Florida floods, there is nowhere for the water to go. Cities on the western edge of Miami-Dade County, such as Hialeah and Sweetwater, are now at risk of massive flooding with every big storm. To solve this, the South Florida Water District is installing pumps on the freshwater side of the control structures on the canals. The pumps, which cost about $70 million each, can take the runoff water from storms and pump it into the ocean to alleviate flooding.

But stopping saltwater incursion is more difficult. The town of Hallandale Beach, just a few miles north of Miami, had to close six of its eight wells due to saltwater intrusion. The town now buys half its water from a well field in Broward County and is working on a deal to drill six new wells of its own, at a cost of about $10 million. Fort Lauderdale has also faced saltwater intrusion, as has Lake Worth, a community just south of Palm Beach. "In the long run, the whole area is likely to have problems," Obey says.

The conventional solution to this was simple: Drill new drinking wells farther west, away from the salty water. The trouble is, engineers have done that already and can't move any farther west without running into the Everglades. Instead, engineers are now turning to more radical solutions, such as trying to capture storm water and store it underground, or reuse water from sewage-�treatment plants. This will help, but ultimately South Florida is likely to rely more and more on desalination, a complex industrial-�scale process that eliminates the salt from the sea water. Right now, South Florida has 35 desalination plants operating, with seven more under construction. They have the capacity to produce 245 million gallons of potable water per day. But desalinization is expensive and requires huge amounts of energy. In 2008, the city of Tampa opened a new $158 million desalination plant, one of the largest in the nation, which produces up to 25 million gallons of fresh water a day � about 10 percent of the region's water needs. Construction costs alone will run about $6 billion to desalinate just one-third of the water used for southern Florida.

For many cities in South Florida, securing a reliable supply of drinking water is going to be a heavy financial burden. "South Florida is not going to run out of drinking water," says Fred Bloetscher, an associate professor of civil engineering at Florida Atlantic University. "But it will be an expensive fix." Bloetscher estimates it will cost upward of $20 billion to $30 billion to re�plumb South Florida and armor it with pumps and a stormwater-recapturing system to deal with a three-foot sea-level rise. And when the waters keep rising? "Well, you just have to believe that we will come up with some kind of a solution," Bloetscher says.

Later in the day, Obey and I visit another gate along what was once the Miami River. Today, it has been dredged and transformed into a charmless canal. Obey shows me the new pumps that were recently installed on the structure to control flooding in the area. We are standing on the east side of the structure, where the sea bumps against the steel gates. I ask Obey if he can imagine a day when South Floridians find themselves surrounded by the water but with no clean fresh water to drink. "I do not have an answer to that question," he says modestly. "Right now, I'm focused on the next decade or two. That will be difficult enough."
I was driving with Harold Wanless through Miami Beach one day when the sun suddenly disappeared and the skies opened up. When it rains in Miami, it's spooky. Blue sky vanishes and suddenly water is everywhere, pooling in streets, flooding parking lots, turning intersections into submarine crossings. Even for a nonbeliever like me, it feels biblical, as if God were punishing the good citizens of Miami Beach for spending too much time on the dance floor. At Alton Road and 10th Street, we watched a woman in a Toyota stall at a traffic light as water rose up to the doors. A man waded out to help her, water up to his knees. This flooding has gotten worse with each passing year, happening not only after torrential rainstorms but during high tides, too, when rising sea water backs up through the city's antiquated drainage system. Wanless, 71, who drives an SUV that is littered with research equipment, notebooks and mud, shook his head with pity. "This is what global warming looks like," he explained. "If you live in South Florida and you're not building a boat, you're not facing reality."

Michael G�ngora, a Miami Beach city commissioner, prides himself on his willingness to face reality. We met at a conference in April on extreme weather held downtown, where G�ngora spoke eloquently about the dangers of more intense hurricanes and about his commitment to sustainability. "We want to be the greenest city in Florida," he said proudly. G�ngora, 43, the state's first openly gay commissioner, is now running for mayor of Miami Beach. He was, notably, the only politician at the extreme-weather conference.

G�ngora has as much green cred as any politician in Miami. As commissioner, he has pushed for the first citywide recycling program and helped create a sustainability plan that encourages developers to erect greener buildings. When it comes to sea-level rise, he is no denier: "It is a big challenge," he told me one morning in his sparsely furnished office on the fourth floor of Miami Beach City Hall. Like most South Floridians, he believes sea-level� rise is something that is going to happen slowly and that engineers will figure out a way to address. "There is $24 billion dollars of real-estate investment here," says G�ngora. "The people who own that property are not going to let it just be washed away. We will figure out a solution. It's too valuable not to."

Truth be told, it's hard to live on a thin barrier island seven miles long like Miami Beach and be a climate-�change denier. The ocean-facing side is protected by a man-made dune and beach, which is 10 feet high on the southern end, but the west side of the island is only a few feet above Biscayne Bay. Not so many years ago, the west side was a mangrove swamp. When the city emerged in the 1920s, nobody gave any thought to sea-level rise � they just chopped down the mangroves and started building on the low, swampy ground. As a result, the west side of Miami Beach is among the most flood-prone areas in Florida. Whenever there is a full moon and a high tide, the sea water comes up through the old storm drains and flows into the streets. In some places, it bubbles up between the street and the sidewalk. During high tide, Miami Beach can feel like it is being swallowed up by the waves. And of course, as the seas rise, this is only going to get worse.

To address this, the city of Miami Beach hired CDM Smith, a Massachusetts-based engineering firm, to come up with a $200 million stormwater plan that, in theory, will keep the city dry for the next 20 years. Under the plan, the city will build sea walls, triple the number of stormwater-drainage pumps, reline storm-discharge pipes and install one-way valves on outlet pipes so that rising sea water cannot flow back into the pipes and flood the city. G�ngora is rightly proud of this plan. "No one else in Florida has come up with anything like this," he says. "I think it shows that we are dealing with this problem in a frank and realistic way."

G�ngora's plan, as it is now, runs into some troubles: It only addresses the consequences of six inches of sea-level rise, which is on the low end of scenarios over the next 20 years. When you ask G�ngora what happens to Miami Beach when the sea level rises three feet and inundates the entire west side of the city, he says, "I trust we will find a solution. I have been to Amsterdam. I have seen what the Dutch have done. If they can figure it out, so can we."

You hear this a lot in South Florida: The Dutch can do it, and so can we. The Dutch promote it, too. The Dutch Consulate in Miami hosts get-togethers to tout Dutch engineering firms, passing out beautiful coffee-table books that illustrate dike and storm barriers in the Netherlands. "It's like the Dutch East India Company all over again," Wanless says, referring to the Dutch company that dominated world trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. "They have expertise to sell, and they are pushing it hard."

The Dutch certainly have valuable experience living with water. Dutch engineers were involved in creating the massive levees that were built to protect New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and they are deeply involved in conversations about how to protect New York and New Jersey from another Sandy. But no Dutch engineering firm I talked to had any concrete ideas about how to save Miami. "New Orleans looks a lot like the Netherlands � it is below sea level, with a big dike around it," says Piet Dircke, program director for water management at ARCADIS in the Netherlands. "If you don't pump it out, the city drowns. It's a big bathtub. We know how to do that. Miami is different. It is also a low-�lying city but far more complicated because of issues about water quality, the porousness of the limestone the city sits on, as well as water coming in from the west, through the Everglades."

Some engineers point to the coastal resort community of Scheveningen in Holland as a possible inspiration for what might be done in Miami. In Scheveningen, engineers created an elaborate dike with a road and parking within it, as well as pedestrian walks and a man-made sand dune. But Scheveningen has an altogether different geology and coastline than southern Florida. Then there is the question of scale: The dike at Scheveningen is a half-mile long and cost nearly $100 million to design and construct. Miami Beach alone is seven miles long � the entire Florida coastline is more than 1,200 miles. Even if an elaborate dike like this were possible, you can't build a wall along the entire coast. If you just walled off Miami Beach, the water would still flow in from the bay side.

G�ngora touts the virtues of sea walls as a way to protect the city, but those have problems, too. For one thing, although they can help protect from storm surges, they don't necessarily keep the water out. "The water can just seep in through the limestone," says Richard Saltrick, the Miami Beach city engineer, who notes that in some places the seepage is slow enough that it can be pumped out. Another problem: The city of Miami Beach has about 60 miles of sea walls on the island. "The vast majority of them are on private property," says Saltrick. How do you force people to raise them higher � do you pass a law requiring everyone whose property includes a sea wall to spend tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade them? Does the city pay for it? And, of course, you can have 59.5 miles of six-foot-high sea walls, but if there is one open gap that is only three feet high, the water will come rushing in.

For the next 20 years, Miami Beach hopes to escape inundation by installing a network of about 40 pumps around the city that can be cranked up after storms to pump flood water off the streets and inject it deep underground. It's a good idea, and it may work for a while. But in the end, Saltrick believes the only long-term way to protect Miami Beach from sea-level rise is to raise the city itself: the roads, the buildings, everything. "It's a huge undertaking," Saltrick says. "But someday, it may come to that." The city is planning to raise roads when it can, but even that is an impossibly complex task in a built-up place like Miami Beach. "When you raise the road even a few inches, what happens to the water?" Saltrick asks rhetorically. "It runs off the road into the buildings and homes alongside it. So you have to raise those, as well."

Miami Beach has other infrastructure problems, too. One of them is how to dispose of the 22 million gallons of sewage the city's residents create each day. Right now, it's pumped out to one of Miami-�Dade County's wastewater-treatment plant, which sits on Virginia Key in Biscayne Bay. The decrepit old facility, which has been plagued by spills and overflow for a decade, is hugely vulnerable to storm surges and rising tides. And yet instead of moving the plant to higher, safer ground, the county wants to sink $550 million into repairs and system upgrades, leaving it where it is and risking its destruction by rising waters. "The only way to motivate people who are in denial about climate change is for the leaders to instill confidence that we'll all still be here in 2100 and that critical infrastructure � like water, roads and sewers � will be here, too," says Albert Slap, a lawyer who represents the Biscayne Bay Waterkeepers, an environmental group that is involved in the fight over the plant. "And right now, that leadership is sorely lacking."
Beyond all these fears that keep south Florida's environmentalists and urban planners up at night, rising sea levels present an even more chilling threat to life in greater Miami. Turkey Point Nuclear Plant, which sits on the edge of the Biscayne Bay just south of Miami, is completely exposed to hurricanes and rising seas. "It is impossible to imagine a stupider place to build a nuclear plant than Turkey Point," says Philip Stoddard, the mayor of South Miami and an outspoken critic of the plant.

The Turkey Point nukes began operation in the early Seventies, long before sea-level rise was an issue. But precautions were taken to protect the plant from hurricanes; most importantly, the reactor vessels are elevated 20 feet above sea level, several feet above the maximum storm surge the region has seen. According to Florida Power and Light, the electric utility that operates the plants, there is virtually no chance of a storm surge causing problems with the reactors. As evidence of this, Michael Waldron, a spokesman for the company, points to the fact that Hurricane Andrew, a Category Five hurricane, passed directly over the plant in 1992, with very little damage. "It goes without saying that safety is our number-one priority," Waldron said in an e-mail.

But Stoddard and other critics of the plant are not reassured. For one thing, although the plant did weather the hurricane, the peak storm surge, which was 17 feet high, passed 10 miles north of the plant. According to Peter W. Harlem, a research geologist at Florida International University, the plant itself only weathered a surge of about three feet � hardly a testament to the storm-readiness of the plant. How would Turkey Point fare if it were hit with a Hurricane Katrina-size storm surge of 28 feet?

Stoddard also points out that, although the reactors themselves are elevated, some of the other equipment is not. "I was given a tour of the plant in 2011," says Stoddard. "It was impressively lashed down against wind, but even I could see vulnerabilities to water." Stoddard noticed that some of the ancillary� equipment was not raised high enough. He was particularly struck by the location of one of the emergency diesel generators, which are crucial for keeping cooling waters circulating� in the event of a power failure (it was the failure of four layers of power supply that caused the meltdown of reactors in Fukushima, Japan, after the plant was hit by a tsunami in 2011). Stoddard� says the generator was located about 15 feet above sea level, and it was housed in a container with open louvers. "How easy would it be for water to flow into that? How well does that generator work when it is under water?"

Another problem: Turkey Point uses a system of cooling canals to dissipate heat. Those canals are cut into coastal marsh surrounding the plant, which is only about three feet above sea level.

But the biggest problem of all is that inundation maps show that with three feet of sea-level rise, Turkey Point is cut off from the mainland and accessible only by boat or aircraft. And the higher the seas go, the deeper it's submerged.

According to Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and the director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, the situation at Turkey Point underscores the backwardness of how we calculate the risks of nuclear power. The Nuclear Regulatory Committee, which oversees the safety of nukes in America, demands that operators take into account past natural hazards such as storms and earthquakes, "but they are silent about future hazards like sea-level rise and increasing storm surges," Lochbaum says. The task force that examined nuclear-�safety regulations after the Fukushima tsunami recommended that the NRC begin taking future events into account, but so far, they have not acted on the recommendation.

Still, Florida Power and Light insists the plant is perfectly safe. When I asked for details about their plans to armor the plant from sea-level rise, their PR reps were elusive. They told me that the plant's current design is suitable to handle sea-level rise but would not tell me how much. (Six inches? Six feet?) They would not disclose plans to protect or redesign the cooling canals. They assured me that "all equipment and components vital to nuclear safety are flood-protected to 22 feet above sea level." But when I asked to visit the plant and see for myself, they refused.

I went out there anyway. I was denied access to the inner workings, but I got a very nice view of two aging 40-year-old reactors perched on the edge of a rising sea with millions of people living within a few miles of the plant. It was as clear a picture of the insanity of modern life as I've ever seen.

Florida Power and Light thinks Turkey Point is such a great place for nukes that they are proposing to build two more reactors out there. Given the life expectancy of a nuke plant, it means that the people of South Florida would likely live with the threat of a radioactive cloud over their heads until at least 2085. The plan, which would cost upward of $18 billion, has not yet been approved by state or federal regulators.

Miami is the most connected city in America, a place where the entire economy is geared toward the next big banking deal, real-estate deal, drug deal. As Wayne Pathman, a land-use attorney in Miami, put it to me, "The biggest question for the future of Miami is how investors will react when they understand the risks of sea-level rise." The rivers of cash that are flowing into the city right now are pretty clear evidence that few investors are worried about that risk. Brickell, the hot new neighborhood where the $1 billion Brickell CityCentre, one of the biggest new developments in the city, is currently under construction, is a few blocks from the water � streets are already nearly impassable during big storms. "It's partly denial and ignorance, and partly a feeling that they can beat the odds," says Tony Cho, the president of Metro1 Properties Inc., a large real-estate firm in Miami.

One thing that may change that is insurance rates. After Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992, many large insurers stopped offering property coverage in the state, citing the high risks of hurricane insurance. That left Florida in a dangerous position, with only small regional insurers to underwrite storm coverage for homeowners. But in the event of a large storm, the small insurers don't have sufficient capital to cover the claims they would receive. To remedy the situation, the state began offering its own low-cost insurance under the name Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, which has become the largest insurer in the state. By subsidizing insurance, lawmakers hoped to keep costs down and development booming. The problem is, Florida is now on the hook for billions of dollars. "A single big storm could bankrupt the state," says Eli Lehrer, an insurance expert and president of the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

Flood insurance is likely to skyrocket, too. The National Flood Insurance Program is currently more than $20 billion in debt, thanks to payouts related to Hurricane Sandy and other extreme-weather events. In 2012, Congress passed the Flood Insurance Reform Act, which jacks the price of insurance up for people living in known flood zones. More reforms of this sort are sure to come. For a place like Miami, where virtually the entire city is a flood zone, the economic costs could be in the hundreds of billions.

The financial catastrophe could play out like this: As insurance rates climb, fewer are able to afford homes. Housing prices fall, which slows development, which decreases the tax base, which makes cities and towns even less able to afford the infrastructure upgrades necessary to adapt to rising seas. The spiral continues downward. Beaches deteriorate, hotels sit empty, restaurants close. Because Miami's largest economies are development and tourism, it's a deadly tailspin. The threat of sea-level rise bankrupts the state even before it is wiped out by a killer storm.
In the not-so-distant future, rising waters will certainly drown Miami. But is that necessarily the end of the city? John Stuart, the chair of the architecture department at Florida International University, is working with students and professors on a multi�year project to imagine what South Florida's future might look like. "It's pretty clear that we are not going to be able to stop the water from coming in, so how will we live?" One of their inspirations is Stiltsville, a collection of structures in built-on pilings in Biscayne Bay from the Thirties by Miami residents, some looking for a place to party beyond the easy view of the law (although they are abandoned now, a few of Stiltsville's structures still survive in the bay). Stuart and his colleagues are trying to imagine what a city in the water would look like � How do you get electricity? Who provides emergency services? "It is really unlike anything humans have tried to do before," Stuart says. "How do you build a floating city in this kind of environment?"

Stuart is energized by the challenge of thinking about this. And if sea-level rise happens slowly enough and Miami doesn't get hit with a hurricane and the drinking-water supply doesn't go bad and the real-estate market doesn't crash and the beaches aren't washed away, the city of Miami may well have time to transform itself into a modern Venice.

But more likely, the ocean will seep slowly into the city, higher and higher every year, until a big storm comes along and devastates the place and people begin to question the wisdom of living in a world that is slowly drowning. The potential for chaos is self-evident as Miami becomes a place people flee from rather than flock toward. Liberty City, a black community downtown, is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Miami. It also happens to be on some of the highest ground. "Developers will target this neighborhood," Hashim Yeomans-Benford, a community organizer in Liberty City, told me. "But I'm not sure it will be a peaceful transition." As we drove around one afternoon, Yeomans-Benford talked about the history of racial violence that simmers just below the surface in Miami. "People will not leave without a fight," he warned.

Americans will also have to face up to the fact that Everglades National Park, home to one of the most remarkable ecosystems in the world, is a goner. More than half the park will be inundated with just three feet of sea-level rise, and the rest of it will vanish shortly thereafter. "We are going to have to change the name to Everglades National Marine Sanctuary," one scientist told me. Besides the obvious tragedy of losing a unique ecosystem, it calls into question the wisdom of spending billions of federal dollars on the sentimental fantasy that the Everglades can ever be "restored."

One of the biggest uncertainties in Miami's future is how the rest of America will feel about rescuing the city. Nobody questioned the wisdom of spending $40 billion in tax dollars to rebuild after Katrina and another $60 billion to help rebuild after Sandy, but will they feel the same about Miami � land of millionaires and beach condos � when the time comes? Not that everyone doesn't love Miami. But at some point, Congress is going to balk at spending $50 billion to rebuild the city every time a tropical storm passes by.

"South Florida doesn't have the power of New York," says Daniel Kreeger, the South Florida-based executive director of the Association of Climate Change Officers. "We don't have any major cultural institutions, we don't have Wall Street, we don't have any great universities. The unpleasant truth is that it will be all too easy for the rest of the nation to just let South Florida go."

That is, of course, not the American way. We don't let cities go. We don't secede territory to the ocean. But this is the direction that our failure to cut carbon pollution is taking us. The loss of Miami will be a manifestation of years of denial and apathy, of allowing Big Oil and Big Coal to divert us from understanding the real-world consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels.

In Wanless' view, the wisest course of action now is to stop subsidizing coastal development and create federal and state policies that encourage people to move out of at-risk low-lying areas. "Instead of spending a billion dollars to build a new tunnel for the Port of Miami, we should be spending that money to buy people out of their homes and relocate them to higher ground," Wanless says. "We have to accept the reality of what is about to happen to us." But that won't happen without political leadership, and on this issue, of course, the state of Florida has none. ("I have a solution for that," says former speaker Gustafson. "We need to all march up to the capital in Tallahassee and burn the fucker down. That's the only way we're gonna save South Florida.")

Stuart compares Miami with Baiae, the ancient Roman resort town in the bay of Naples that was once a playground for Nero and Julius Ceasar. Today, because of volcanic activity, the ruins of Baiae are mostly under water. "This is what humans do," says Stuart. "We inhabit cities, and then when something happens, we move on. The same thing will happen with Miami. The only question is, how long can we stick it out?" But for Stuart, who lives in Miami Beach, the fact that the city is doomed doesn't diminish his love for the place. "That's the thing about Miami," he says. "You'll want to be here until the very end."

# ? Jun 21, 2013 12:40

Mazzagatti2Hotty: Jan 23, 2012; JON JONES APOLOGIST #3

Baruch Obamawitz posted:

Enjoy Miami while you can

Wow, great article!

It's amazing to me that more people don't recognize the symbolism in the threat of Miami, one of the greatest testament's to excess and consumerism in the world, being under water within the next century. With the amount of money that South Florida brings to the state, it's ludicrous that more state government officials wouldn't at the very least let the fears of statewide financial collapse sway their opinions. Perhaps something can be done if we send someone to infiltrate Florida Republican headquarters and remind them of the political jeopardy their party will be in when all the South Florida poors get relocated to their districts?

# ? Jun 21, 2013 14:15

bpower: Feb 19, 2011

Yeah. Great read. I couldn't help thinking about the Easter Islanders I read about in J. Diamond's "Collapse". When reading that chapter I wished they'd see sense and slow down the deforestation. Reading that article enforces how they were doomed from the start by human nature, I honestly got a chill reading that.

# ? Jun 21, 2013 21:18

NaanViolence: Mar 1, 2010; by Nyc_Tattoo

Awesome article, thanks. Is it just South Florida that will collapse, or is the rest of Florida in trouble as well?

# ? Jun 23, 2013 07:28

Sogol: Apr 11, 2013; Galileo's Finger

There are animations for most of the coastal cities in the US showing the effects of sea rise. It is based on one of these that the Mayor's office in Boston started a whole set of emissions programs, including an audit which is where you have to start. There are several cities in the US doing this sort of work and it is probably some of the best work being done in the US. The Mayor's offices collaborate with one another pretty well, since when they started none of them had any idea what they were doing.

A couple of years ago I spent several months in China helping to design and facilitate a set of dialogues with about 30 Chinese cities and 12 US cities on the question of 'zero emissions city planning and design'. These were all Mayor's offices and included Mayoral and Provincial DRC. They were very serious about it. China and the US have very different problems and change profiles. From a broad stroke view, China is mandating things top down and through the NDRC and DRC process. The NDRC is essentially like a vast project management office in many ways regulating what is pursued by what projects they sign off on and track. Translation to a local milieu (such as a city) includes a lot of distortion. The condition though is one in which there is top down pressure and even support for change, whereas in the US this does not exist. As a result, change in the US is very bottom up, often at the city level. One of the things the Chinese Mayor's were most interested in was the local governance and budgeting strucutres to allow the sorts of changes made in the US cities.

# ? Jun 23, 2013 17:28

Arkane: Dec 19, 2006; by R. Guyovich

Just for a little reality check on his disaster porn introduction:

quote:

With sea levels more than a foot higher than they'd been at the dawn of the century

Sea levels have risen by 1.8 inches from 2000 to 2013, or .129 inches per year. The author implies that will increase by a factor of ~5 to .6 inches per year over the next 17 years to reach 12 inches total. It's easier to see the stupidity of this via graph:

I don't think this is even PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE considering how slow these processes are. Which I guess just makes his line in his lone paragraph devoted to the science all the more ironic.

quote:

Sea-level rise is not a hypothetical disaster. It is a physical fact of life on a warming planet, the basic dynamics of which even a child can understand: Heat melts ice. Since the 1920s, the global average sea level has risen about nine inches, mostly from the thermal expansion of the ocean water. But thanks to our 200-year-long fossil-fuel binge, the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are starting to melt rapidly now, causing the rate of sea-level rise to grow exponentially. The latest research, including an assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suggests that sea level could rise more than six feet by the end of the century. James Hansen, the godfather of global-warming science, has argued that it could increase as high as 16 feet by then � and Wanless believes that it could continue rising a foot each decade after that. "With six feet of sea-level rise, South Florida is toast," says Tom Gustafson, a former Florida speaker of the House and a climate-change-policy advocate. Even if we cut carbon pollution overnight, it won't save us. Ohio State glaciologist Jason Box has said he believes we already have 70 feet of sea-level rise baked into the system.

He basically indicts himself as dumber than a child in this sentence I guess?

Also the line of "causing the rate of sea-level rise to grow exponentially" is of course counteracted by the fact that sea levels have grown linearly, not exponentially, for 20+ years now (and maybe even before that, depending how reliable the tide gauge record is). One need simply google Colorado Sea Level and click on the first link to see the data in graph form.

Further, we had two papers, in May 2012 and in May 2013, from two separate research teams of glaciologists, that both point out the fact that the 6 feet rises are out of the question by 2100, because the ice sheets cannot physically melt that fast even at the high end of the temperature increase predictions:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6081/576
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7448/full/nature12068.html

The 16 foot prediction from Hansen is par for the course. Truly the idiot-king of climate science. I guess Hansen's strategy is that when your previous predictions prove to be far too dire compared to reality, just exit the bounds of reality completely and make them even MORE dire next time. Here is Hansen's predictions overlaid against prominent models (made this when his sea level "predictions" "paper" was published):

Miami will probably be underwater before the next ice age if the previous interglacial was any indication, but it will be at some far distant future date with an unfathomably advanced population.

# ? Jun 23, 2013 18:24

Sogol: Apr 11, 2013; Galileo's Finger

It remains confusing to me why the case for mitigation/adaptation is so clear that action is being taken in a case like the Maldives and apparently coastal cities elsewhere are not effected by the same planetary conditions. E.g.:

http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/pr...ndings-indicate

# ? Jun 23, 2013 18:41

Devour: Dec 18, 2009; by angerbeet

Baruch Obamawitz posted:

Enjoy Miami while you can

That article is astonishing. Good thing I moved out of Fort Lauderdale last November back to California! :smugbert:

Want to know whats really hosed up about this? Once Miami/South Florida is underwater, republicans are STILL going to say Global Warming is a hoax. I loving guarantee it.

# ? Jun 23, 2013 19:03

Polygynous: Dec 13, 2006; welp

Devour posted:

That article is astonishing. Good thing I moved out of Fort Lauderdale last November back to California!

Want to know whats really hosed up about this? Once Miami/South Florida is underwater, republicans are STILL going to say Global Warming is a hoax. I loving guarantee it.

Of course the slightly clever ones have already moved on to "it's happening but humans aren't causing it / can't do anything about it".

When Miami drowns they'll turn on a dime to "it's too late to do anything" and probably blame Obama for not having done anything to stop it.

# ? Jun 24, 2013 01:23

Inglonias: Mar 7, 2013; I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

I don't see any posts mentioning Obama's climate change speech scheduled for tomorrow.

I'm pretty skeptical that this is going to be game changing, personally. I think that at best, we're going to get some lip service to the environmentalists, and then green-light the Keystone XL pipeline. At worst, the speech will be about green-lighting the Keystone XL pipeline.

# ? Jun 24, 2013 14:54

Konstantin: Jun 20, 2005; And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

spoon0042 posted:

Of course the slightly clever ones have already moved on to "it's happening but humans aren't causing it / can't do anything about it".

When Miami drowns they'll turn on a dime to "it's too late to do anything" and probably blame Obama for not having done anything to stop it.

The will be right though, since even today it's already too late to do anything. Climate change is happening, and it will cause massive death on an unprecedented scale, no matter what we do now. Read the OP, and realize that it is from a year and a half ago. We're hosed, and even the most radical ideas being proposed by anyone in power don't even come close to fixing the problem.

# ? Jun 24, 2013 15:13

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Inglonias posted:

I don't see any posts mentioning Obama's climate change speech scheduled for tomorrow.

I'm pretty skeptical that this is going to be game changing, personally. I think that at best, we're going to get some lip service to the environmentalists, and then green-light the Keystone XL pipeline. At worst, the speech will be about green-lighting the Keystone XL pipeline.

It could exceed all our expectations and talk seriously about the inevitability of exceeding 2 degrees average global temperature, talk about temporary fixes and long-term carbon reductions and I still don't think it would mean much because he either wont actually implement any necessary policies or wont have the ability to push anything through congress.

# ? Jun 24, 2013 15:48

Vermain: Sep 5, 2006

Dreylad posted:

It could exceed all our expectations and talk seriously about the inevitability of exceeding 2 degrees average global temperature, talk about temporary fixes and long-term carbon reductions and I still don't think it would mean much because he either wont actually implement any necessary policies or wont have the ability to push anything through congress.

Yeah. I am, although, at least somewhat gladdened by the news, since it is a shift (a subtle one, to be sure) from "privately acknowledging the issue and not doing anything about it" to "publicly acknowledging the issue and not doing anything about it." I've stopped hoping for the sort of Marxist "revolutionary moment" where the collective light bulbs turn on or whatever. This sort of progressive understanding and the (hopefully) concomitant policy changes that result are seemingly the best that can be done.

# ? Jun 24, 2013 15:57

Inglonias: Mar 7, 2013; I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

Vermain posted:

Yeah. I am, although, at least somewhat gladdened by the news, since it is a shift (a subtle one, to be sure) from "privately acknowledging the issue and not doing anything about it" to "publicly acknowledging the issue and not doing anything about it." I've stopped hoping for the sort of Marxist "revolutionary moment" where the collective light bulbs turn on or whatever. This sort of progressive understanding and the (hopefully) concomitant policy changes that result are seemingly the best that can be done.

Found a "detailed preview" of the speech here.

According to the article, the plan is to announce regulations for existing power plants using executive authority.

So, yeah. Not game changing, but it's something... I think.

# ? Jun 24, 2013 19:35

Hollismason: Jun 30, 2007; An alright dude.

I was doing some reading on the Dustbowl in relation to the Great Depression and that era. What are the odds climate wise that we could see another dustbowl type situation?

# ? Jun 25, 2013 07:52

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

The dust bowl in part was caused by bad general agricultural practices that left large amounts of top soil loose on the surface of the earth, I believe that has been mitigated to a certain extent. Living down here in Kansas though I can tell you it's dry and hot as gently caress.

# ? Jun 25, 2013 16:52

Seth Pecksniff: May 27, 2004; can't believe shrek is fucking dead. rip to a real one.

I suppose this is the thread for it, but Politico just reported that Obama will direct the State Department to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline "as long as it does not increase greenhouse gases". Which it probably will anyway.

# ? Jun 25, 2013 18:59

Job Truniht: Nov 7, 2012; MY POSTS ARE REAL RETARDED, SIR

Hollis posted:

I was doing some reading on the Dustbowl in relation to the Great Depression and that era. What are the odds climate wise that we could see another dustbowl type situation?

Very likely. This chart has been posted before in this thread. The Dust Bowl would've appeared as a -3 to a -5 on this chart.

# ? Jun 25, 2013 20:31

Sir Kodiak: May 14, 2007

Toad on a Hat posted:

I suppose this is the thread for it, but Politico just reported that Obama will direct the State Department to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline "as long as it does not increase greenhouse gases". Which it probably will anyway.

Will the Keystone XL Pipeline increase greenhouse gases? I thought the assumption was that the oil was going to get burned either way, it's just a question of where it will be refined and burnt, and whether we're going to pump it over a major aquifer. I'm not trying to downplay the environmental consequences, but I'm curious if the more-informed have an opinion on whether the pipeline would really be responsible for an increase in greenhouse gases.

# ? Jun 25, 2013 20:42

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Sir Kodiak posted:

Will the Keystone XL Pipeline increase greenhouse gases? I thought the assumption was that the oil was going to get burned either way, it's just a question of where it will be refined and burnt, and whether we're going to pump it over a major aquifer. I'm not trying to downplay the environmental consequences, but I'm curious if the more-informed have an opinion on whether the pipeline would really be responsible for an increase in greenhouse gases.

It makes it easier and more profitable to trade the products extracted, so the likelihood that it'll be burned increases. There's no way around that fact.

# ? Jun 25, 2013 20:44

Devour: Dec 18, 2009; by angerbeet

spoon0042 posted:

Of course the slightly clever ones have already moved on to "it's happening but humans aren't causing it / can't do anything about it".

When Miami drowns they'll turn on a dime to "it's too late to do anything" and probably blame Obama for not having done anything to stop it.

I'm really at the point where any politician or elected official that says Global Warming is a hoax should be impeached. It's loving lying under oath.

# ? Jun 25, 2013 20:56

toy: Apr 19, 2001

Sir Kodiak posted:

Will the Keystone XL Pipeline increase greenhouse gases? I thought the assumption was that the oil was going to get burned either way, it's just a question of where it will be refined and burnt, and whether we're going to pump it over a major aquifer. I'm not trying to downplay the environmental consequences, but I'm curious if the more-informed have an opinion on whether the pipeline would really be responsible for an increase in greenhouse gases.

Yes. The pipeline is crucial to tar sands development - the state department's assumption that it "would be burned anyway" is wrong.

# ? Jun 25, 2013 21:08

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Full outline of the speech

quote:

"I am willing to work with anybody�to combat this threat on behalf of our kids," he said. "But I don't have much patience for anybody who argues the problem is not real. We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society."

Well that's heartening to hear, at least. We really need to move on to other debates, rather soon, as we start tackling climate chang-

quote:

Creates a new, $8 billion loan guarantee program for advanced fossil fuel projects at the Department of Energy (think clean coal, etc.).

Oh for gently caress's sake.

Dreylad fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jun 25, 2013

# ? Jun 25, 2013 21:28

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# ? May 31, 2024 14:46

marsisol: Mar 30, 2010

Any mention of nuclear power or are we going to continue using a "mix" of energies?

# ? Jun 25, 2013 22:30

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change thread: tl; dr - We are so screwed

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