Rising seas will make waves, even inland
There’s an apt new descriptor now for climate change — zombie. As in “zombie ice” from Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet that will eventually raise global sea levels by at least 10.6 inches. This is more than twice what was previously forecast, according to a recent study.
But why do we care, you ask, since we’re hundreds of miles inland from any coastline? Stick with us.
Zombie ice is doomed ice, researchers say. Doomed to melt because while it is still attached to thicker areas of floating ice, it is no longer tethered to and being replenished by parent glaciers that themselves now receive less snow.
The clear result is rising sea level, perhaps as much as 30 inches, but now unavoidably expected to be, on average along U.S. coastlines, 10-12 inches in the next 30 years — we’re talking 2050. That’s as much as the rise measured over the past 100 years, according to an earlier study.
Previously the expected rise was more in the range of 2 to 5 inches by 2100, according to last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
The new study’s lead author, Jason Box, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told the AP it is “more like one foot in the grave.”
Back to why we care:
For starters, this nearly extra foot of water in the sea — coupled with hotter temperatures — will bring heavier storms, making them still more costly. For every degree Fahrenheit the air warms, it can hold about 4% more water. That leads to higher humidity and heat indexes, and it also brings us more rain extremes.
Just look at this summer. As of the last week of August, the U.S. had seen six 1,000-year rain events in five weeks — three of them in the southeast in Texas, Mississippi and Kentucky. One a year, the U.S. should expect. Not six. In mid-july, even before these last six floods, NOAA had tallied nine 2022 weather disasters each resulting in at least $1 billion in damages. From 1980 to 2021, the average number of such costly disasters was 7.7.
Sciencedaily reported two years ago that “river avulsions” — catastrophic floods triggered when a river charts a new path to the sea — could occur more frequently as sea levels rise. The nature of those changes will depend on both the rate of sea-level rise and the sediment load carried by the river, according to models developed by California Institute of Technology researchers and their colleagues.
There’s more. Forget the science of storms and river flows for a moment. Just think about potential population shifts.
Even in 2017, scientists forecast that a 5.9-foot rise in the oceans by 2100 could displace as many as 13.1 million people in the United States. Across the planet, 180 million people could be at risk.
If you think immigrants streaming across our borders are a problem now, what do you think will be happening when the oceans are covering lower-lying countries around the globe? Do you think walls of any size will stop the surge of flood-swept people to higher ground?
Suffice it to say that people from coastlines everywhere are going to be moving inland. And guess what? The only properties left to tax are the ones inland. Hmmm. Eyes wide open.
“No state is left untouched,” according to climate migration researcher Mathew Hauer. He noted that more than half the counties in the country are likely to be affected by that coastal influence migration.
It’s clearly past time to get serious about climate change.
The newest Greenland ice melt study’s co-author William Colgan, another glaciologist, said the rising sea-level high mark estimate may be a best-case scenario. The year 2012 (and to a different degree 2019) was a huge melt year, when the equilibrium between adding and subtracting ice was most out of balance. If Earth starts to undergo more years like 2012, Greenland melt could trigger 30 inches of sea level rise, he said. Those two years seem extreme now, but years that look normal now would have been extreme 50 years ago.
“That’s how climate change works,” Colgan said. “Today’s outliers become tomorrow’s averages.”