California panel urges 'immediate action' to protect against rising sea levels

Global warming is projected to cause ocean levels to rise up to 55 inches this century. Report urges considering abandonment of some coastal areas and halting insurance subsidies in flood-prone areas. 55 inches is over 4 feet.

California's interagency Climate Action Team has issued the first of 40 reports on impacts and adaptation, outlining what the state's residents must do to deal with the floods, erosion and other effects expected from rising sea levels. Hundreds of thousands of people and critical infrastructure and property would be at risk if ocean levels rose 55 inches by the end of the century.

For example .. in the San Francisco Bay Area most of the major highways circling the area are along the bayshore. Both San Francisco and Oakland's airports are on land created by filling in part of the bay. A major seaport in Oakland would be at risk, as would oil terminals for a couple oil refineries. Several housing developments are along the shore, such as Foster City.

"Immediate action is needed," said Linda Adams, secretary for environmental protection. "It will cost significantly less to combat climate change than it will to maintain a business-as-usual approach."

Sea-Level Rise Maps are available showing the effects of rising sea levels.

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California panel urges 'immediate action' to protect against rising sea levels

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California Sea-Level Rise May Threaten $100 Billion of Property

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Leading article: When the ice melts, it is too late

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Sea-Level Rise Maps

External Media

Hundreds of Antarctic Peninsula Glaciers Accelerating as Climate Warms; UN Issues Global Ice and Snow Report

Using radar images acquired by European ERS-1 and -2 satellites, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) tracked the flow rate of more than 300 previously unstudied glaciers. They found a 12% increase in glacier speed from 1993 to 2003. These observations, echoing recent findings from coastal Greenland, indicate that the cause is the melting of the lower glaciers, which flow directly into the sea.

Glaciers tend to move at rather, er, glacial speeds, right? But glaciers around the world are disappearing at a "rapid" pace. This is but one article showing the increasing pace with which glaciers are moving into the ocean.

In An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore talked about this, and to me it sounded like he claimed that one day the glaciers covering Greenland would suddenly whoomph into the Atlantic Ocean and lickety split that global conveyor would stop just like that. But it seems instead it's just going to be an ever quickening pace.

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Hundreds of Antarctic Peninsula Glaciers Accelerating as Climate Warms; UN Issues Global Ice and Snow Report

Bleak IPCC Report Highlights Deadly Climate Impacts

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the main UN international group studying climate change -- has released the second installment of the IPCC fourth assessment report enitled "Impact, Adaptation and Vulnerability" [more | more2]. Building on February's IPCC report which found human greenhouse gas emissions are very likely to be the main cause of recent warming, thousands of the world's leading climate scientists concurred that heat-trapping emissions from industry and other activities are already influencing weather patterns and ecology. A further increase in global average temperatures of 3-5 degrees F is expected to lead to a wide variety of climate change exacerbated disasters including droughts, floods, hunger, disease, extinction of at least a fourth of the world's species, loss of vital global natural areas like the Amazon and Great Barrier Reef, and inundation of coasts and islands occupied by hundreds of millions of people.

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Bleak IPCC Report Highlights Deadly Climate Impacts

Stark picture of a warming world

"And we have far greater regional detail than in [our previous global assessment in] 2001 on things like glacier melting, and what the implications of that melting will be; on sea level rise, which clearly threatens a number of countries in the world including mega-deltas which are particularly vulnerable; and on agriculture, which has implications for food security."

...And the arguments can be quite hard to win in rich northern countries which, as the IPCC report acknowledged, may actually benefit from a modest amount of warming, and where resources are enough to defend against rising sea levels and shrinking rainfall.

...And there is little evidence to believe that a report painting severe consequences ahead for the poor of the world, however detailed and bought into by governments, will be enough to bring unprecedented change from all the well-off members of the community of nations.

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Stark picture of a warming world