My house would be underwater if the sea rose

Let's all go thank the blogger who wrote the Google hack to make the flood maps possible.

Leave a comment on the diary he announced this in.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

Surprisingly enough it seems that the answer is 'none of the above' (for the poll questions - 70m would leave all of the borough underwater).

Fun game but it's not the cities I'm worried about - wealthy, densely populated, urban areas can probably count on a certain leeway - they're worth the expense of protecting.

I'd be on the beachfront if the sea level rose by 14m, apparently.

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker

I'd still have to drive 2h to get to the Atlantic and 1h30 to get to the Mediterranean, even if the sea level goes up by 14m. That's quite unfair, even more so since I don't drive.

Here at 6000 feet (1800 meters) there's no beach in my future. Drought, on the other hand, is a bit of a concern--although we can easily enough cut off the water to Los Angeles in order to keep our lawns green.

Also, luckily, the Wyoming coal and gas fields that provide our electricity and heat are also beyond reach--as long as those nasty coastal dwellers don't suddenly get a hankering to live in the sunny, high altitude West...

kewl tewl.

Nomad will probably spit coffee on the keyboard.  but it's a nice thought experiment.  makes things more conceivable.

we may be the only species in terrestrial history to run exquisite, exhaustive predictive models of our own swan dive...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

The Google hack is very nice. Here is another way to get such information, slower and more cumbersome, but probably more accurate (Google altimetry is <it>very</it> inaccurate): it's based on the NOAA altimetry/bathymetry database:
GEODAS  Design-a-Grid
You'll need to download a viewer to your machine to view the generated grids

I'll try and post some maps I generated with this tool, when I understand how to do uploads on EP. Interesting to note, France is one of the least affected portions of the world. Most affected, besides the obvious Bangladesh, Netherlands, islands, etc... are:

US East Coast and Florida (lots of property damage :-)

North of China (this spells big trouble)

The plains east of Ural

British East Coast (sorry, but it's not really a good idea to relocate to Perigord or Spain just now, see below)

The plain of the Po in Italy (bye bye Venice)

But you should also note that this won't happen in our lifetime !

Loss of floating ice has no impact on the sea level (well, a few centimeters due to salinity difference), because it's already lifted by Archimedes force, due to the displacement of its weight of water. So only continental ice counts, and that's:

70 cm for temperate glaciers (lesst than the planned 2m for thermal expansion of the upper layer of the oceans)

7 m for Greenland

70 m for Antarctic

BUT: if you calculate the thermal inerty plus latent head of fusion of all this ice, divide it by the total amount of sunlight power retained by anthropic greenhouse (I spare you the figures, but I really did it on a spreadsheet, can dig it out if someone is interested), you'll find out that it will takes something like a thousand year to melt, assuming 3x margin of error and all the sunlight power directed straight to the poles and zero ice albedo (which exactly the pessimistic opposite of reality).

So in short: even our grandchildren will never see a 5 m rise in the level of oceans. Some will argue that the ice could flow from the continent into the sea, which would raise sea level without the need for the ice to melt. And this is probably happening for Greenland ... But for the antarctic, the altitude of the bedrock below the ice just doesn't offer enough slope for this (actually, the bedrock is sunk into the crust by the weight of the ice, and a good part of the antarctic continent is hardly at sea level, there is a nice radar map which shows you that on Wikipedia).

In my view, the most worrying parts of Global Warming are the increase in the frequency of now-extraordinary storms, potential loss of the gulf stream, and relocation of nasty bugs and parasites (like malaria) to the temperate areas.


Pierre

Sadly the data cuts off at about 60/65 degrees north, just when I was getting interested. No data for anything north of Stockholm.
(I realise disk space isn't free.)

Thanks!


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sapere aude

So I got curious about dear old California...and while SF loses all its bay front (back to the ocean from whence it came), another "bay area" just as large forms between Sacramento and the coastal foothills (where the Sacramento, San Joaquin and Sierra rivers all come together). Then I got curious about the Sea of Cortez...and it looks like the Salton sea becomes linked to that!! Hm,, maybe buy some land south of Salton sea now, and it will be beach front for our grandkids...<ouch>

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia