Beating Back the Tides (excerpt) : NASA

High-tide floodwaters in downtown Annapolis on April 4, 2017. Credit: City of Annapolis

 "It was a sight you don’t normally see: a jellyfish lying dead in the middle of a parking lot partly submerged in water. But this was no ordinary parking lot. This particular section of asphalt in downtown Annapolis, Maryland, is among a growing number of areas prone to frequent flooding in the seaside town. The jellyfish had slipped in from the Chesapeake Bay through an opening in the seawall.

“You can literally kayak from the bay right into this parking lot,” said NOAA oceanographer William Sweet on the September day that we visited. The tide was relatively low that day.

On days with the highest tides of the year, whole parking lots and streets in Annapolis are underwater, causing delays and traffic congestion. Compromise Street, a major road into town, is often forced to shut down, slowing response times for firefighters and other first responders. Local businesses have lost as much as $172,000 a year, or 1.4% of their annual revenue, due to high-tide floods, according to a study published in 2019 in the journal Science Advances.

High-tide floods, also known as nuisance floods, sunny-day floods, and recurrent tidal floods, occur “when tides reach anywhere from 1.75 to 2 feet above the daily average high tide and start spilling onto streets or bubbling up from storm drains,” according to an annual report on the subject by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.) These floods are usually not related to storms; they typically occur during high tides, and they impact people’s lives. Because of rising seas driven by climate change, the frequency of this kind of flood has dramatically increased in recent years.".... By Jenny Marder,
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Go to complete NASA article

The Arctic is in a death spiral. How much longer will it exist? (excerpt): The Guardian

 "The region is unravelling faster than anyone could once have predicted. But there may still be time to act."

"At the end of July, 40% of the 4,000-year-old Milne Ice Shelf, located on the north-western edge of Ellesmere Island, calved into the sea. Canada’s last fully intact ice shelf was no more.

On the other side of the island, the most northerly in Canada, the St Patrick’s Bay ice caps completely disappeared.

Two weeks later, scientists concluded that the Greenland Ice Sheet may have already passed the point of no return. Annual snowfall is no longer enough to replenish the snow and ice loss during summer melting of the territory’s 234 glaciers. Last year, the ice sheet lost a record amount of ice, equivalent to 1 million metric tons every minute.

The Arctic is unravelling. And it’s happening faster than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago. Northern Siberia and the Canadian Arctic are now warming three times faster than the rest of the world. In the past decade, Arctic temperatures have increased by nearly 1C. If greenhouse gas emissions stay on the same trajectory, we can expect the north to have warmed by 4C year-round by the middle of the century."

Go to Guardian article and photo essay

 

• The great thaw: global heating upends life on Arctic permafrost – photo essay

Gloria Dickie

Related:  Vigorous action needed, and soon, on climate change (excerpt): Yale Climate Connections

 

Arctic,Antarctica,Greenland ice melt,#icemelting,sea level rise,#climate crisis,

Donald Trump is hampering fight against climate change, WEF warns (excerpt) : The Guardian (2 years ago)

Trump digs coal

Two years after 2018 the situation is even worse.

"World Economic Forum outlines huge increase in all five eco risks since the US president assumed office


The World Economic Forum delivered a strong warning about Donald Trump’s go-it-alone approach to tackling climate change as it highlighted the growing threat of environmental collapse in its annual assessment of the risks facing the international community."

............." the WEF avoided mentioning Trump by name but said “nation-state unilateralism” would make it harder to tackle global warming and ecological damage.

The WEF’s global risks perception survey showed Trump’s arrival in the White House in 2017 had coincided with a marked increase in concern about the environment among experts polled by the Swiss-based organisation.

It said all five environmental risks covered by the survey – extreme weather events, natural disasters, failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and human-made natural disasters – had become more prominent.

“This follows a year characterised by high-impact hurricanes, extreme temperatures and the first rise in CO2 emissions for four years. We have been pushing our planet to the brink and the damage is becoming increasingly clear. 

“Biodiversity is being lost at mass-extinction rates, agricultural systems are under strain, and pollution of the air and sea has become an increasingly pressing threat to human health.”

Trump has threatened to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris agreement under which nations agreed to take steps to limit the increase in global temperature. He has said the commitments made by his predecessor, Barack Obama, would damage the American economy.

Other states have said they will keep to the pledges made in Paris, an approach supported by the WEF."

Larry Elliott Economics editor

Thu 18 Jan 2018

Go to complete The Guardian article

ALSO

Trump suggests the climate may actually be 'fabulous' after an ominous UN report on looming disaster

Sinéad Baker

Oct 10, 2018, 

Trump digs coal

  

   • President Donald Trump on Tuesday sought to cast doubt on a UN report on climate change that had dire warnings about how little time we have to stop a global catastrophe.

 
   • Trump suggested that the world’s climate might actually be “fabulous” and that he’d seen reports expressing that position.

 
   • The UN report outlines the effects of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

 
   • Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax,” and last year he announced he would pull the US out of the Paris climate accord.

Trump, WEF, Paris Agreement, #climate crisis, #jailclimatecriminals, #criminales-climáticos-de-la-cárcel, #criminalesclimáticosdelacárcel, #extremeheat, #icemelting, hurricanes,  climatechangedenial

Sea level rise from ice sheets track worst-case climate change scenario: Phys.org

Credit: CC0 Public Domain 

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica whose melting rates are rapidly increasing have raised the global sea level by 1.8cm since the 1990s, and are matching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's worst-case climate warming scenarios.

According to a new study from the University of Leeds and the Danish Meteorological Institute, if these rates continue, the ice sheets are expected to raise sea levels by a further 17cm and expose an additional 16 million people to annual coastal flooding by the end of the century.

Since the ice sheets were first monitored by satellite in the 1990s, melting from Antarctica has pushed global sea levels up by 7.2mm, while Greenland has contributed 10.6mm. And the latest measurements show that the world's oceans are now rising by 4mm each year.

"Although we anticipated the ice sheets would lose increasing amounts of ice in response to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere, the rate at which they are melting has accelerated faster than we could have imagined," said Dr. Tom Slater, lead author of the study and climate researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.

"The melting is overtaking the climate models we use to guide us, and we are in danger of being unprepared for the risks posed by sea level rise."

East Antarctic Melting Hotspot Identified by Japanese Expedition – Ice Melting at Surprisingly Fast Rate: SciTechDaily

"Ice is melting at a surprisingly fast rate underneath Shirase Glacier Tongue in East Antarctica due to the continuing influx of warm seawater into the Lützow-Holm Bay.

Hokkaido University scientists have identified an atypical hotspot of sub-glacier melting in East Antarctica. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, could further understandings and predictions of sea level rise caused by mass loss of ice sheets from the southernmost continent.

The 58th Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition had a very rare

opportunity to conduct ship-based observations near the tip of East Antarctic Shirase Glacier when large areas of heavy sea ice broke up, giving them access to the frozen Lützow-Holm Bay into which the glacier protrudes.

“Our data suggests that the ice directly beneath the Shirase Glacier Tongue is melting at a rate of 7–16 meters per year,” says Assistant Professor Daisuke Hirano of Hokkaido University’s Institute of Low Temperature Science. “This is equal to or perhaps even surpasses the melting rate underneath the Totten Ice Shelf, which was thought to be experiencing the highest melting rate in East Antarctica, at a rate of 10–11 meters per year.”'

"The Antarctic ice sheet, most of which is in East Antarctica, is Earth’s largest freshwater reservoir. If it all melts, it could lead to a 60-meter rise in global sea levels. Current predictions estimate global sea levels will rise one meter by 2100 and more than 15 meters by 2500. Thus, it is very important for scientists to have a clear understanding of how Antarctic continental ice is melting, and to more accurately predict sea level fluctuations.

Sea level rise is so much more than melting ice: Verge Science video

While researching climate change, we heard something confusing: the sea level in New York City is rising about one and a half times faster than the global average. We couldn’t figure out what that meant. Isn’t the sea level...flat? So we called up an expert, Dr. Andrea Dutton, and went down the rabbit hole. And, we did our best to visualize her truly bizarre answers with animations, dioramas, and a lot of melting ice.

Subscribe: http://bit.ly/2FqJZMl

Related:Greenland's melting ice sheet has passed the point of no return, scientists say (excerpt): USA Today


sea level rise, #searise, #climatechange, #cambio-climatico, #icemelting, #jailclimatecriminals,  

Greenland's melting ice sheet has passed the point of no return, scientists say (excerpt): USA Today

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Greenland's ice sheet dumps more than 280 billion metric tons

Even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.

of melting ice into the ocean each year.
 
•  Even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.
• Scientists analyzed 40 years of satellite data from more than 200 large glaciers draining into the ocean.

Greenland's melting ice sheet has passed the point of no return. 

In fact, glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking, a new study suggests.

"Glacier retreat has knocked the dynamics of the whole ice sheet into a constant state of loss," study co-author Ian Howat, an earth scientist from Ohio State University, said in a statement. "Even if the climate were to stay the same or even get a little colder, the ice sheet would still be losing mass."

This "tipping point" means the snowfall that replenishes the ice sheet each year cannot keep up with the ice that is flowing into the ocean from melting glaciers.

Doyle Rice

USA TODAY

Updated August 18, 2020 

 

Read the original story 

 

Related:If you thought July was hot, you were right: It was one of Earth's hottest months ever recorded (excerpt): USA Today