Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization - 5

RMS Titanic hits Greenland iceberg

I. Background

The subtitle to today's post is "Karma may be made out of water & gravity."

In this series I have been drawing attention to the vessels of Petroleum Civilization.

Petroleum Civilization is the sub-civilization within the overarching Industrial Civilization which is said to have begun circa 1750 (Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization, 2, 3, 4).

That is being done in the context of the world's sea ports, through which pass 95% of import / export equipment, goods, commodities, food, fuel, and the like.

In other words, all of the things which current civilization depends on for international sustenance:

"By volume, more than 95 percent of U.S. international trade moves through the nation's ports and harbors, with about 50 percent of these goods being hazardous materials."

(Will This Float Your Boat - 10, quoting NOAA Ports). Without ports there is no more civilization as we have known it (IMO: "Maritime transport is essential to the world’s economy as over 90% of the world’s trade is carried by sea ...").

II. What Will SLR and SLF do?

The focus of the series is the weakness of sea ports, so, initially I focused on their weakness to sea level rise (SLR).

Today, I will add an additional discussion about sea port weakness to sea level fall (SLF).

I will also add the inexorable problem facing public works departments and port authorities.

That problem is the fact that both SLR and SLF produce different SLR / SLF at various locations around the globe.

Thus, the rising at one place will be a falling at another place.

Not only that, those varying sea levels will change constantly, going up or down, as ice sheets continue to melt.

Which means the problem will not go away simply by building a new port (Will This Float Your Boat - 9).

III. What Caused Such A Wacky Science Fictionish Apocalypse?

Many entities engineered Industrial Civilization, however, Oil-Qaeda engineered Petroleum Civilization (Oil-Qaeda: The Indictment).

The result is a civilization that burns all manner of fossil fuels, a civilization that is addicted to those fuels like a heroin drug addict, and a civilization that thereby causes the global warming of the Earth.

Global warming has damaged the global climate system, causing among other things, ice sheets to melt.

The ongoing gravity impact when ice sheet meltwater flows into the sea, or when chunks of the ice sheet calve into the sea, has an impact on local sea level near the ice sheet, as well as on remote sea level way over the horizon.

Normally, the ice sheet creates, in effect, what is a perpetual high tide around the land mass upon which the ice sheet rests.

When the ice sheet loses its mass to the surrounding sea, it also loses the high tide sea level that surrounded it, because the loss of the power of its gravity goes away along with the loss of its ice mass to the sea.

A low tide sea level then becomes the new normal sea level around it.

The details are in two recent Dredd Blog posts (Sea Level Fall: The Forgotten Aspect of Sea Level Rise?, Is A New Age Of Pressure Upon Us? - 7).

Those posts, along with the video, indicate that the sea levels of the world are now in flux, going up here, but going down there, all at the same time all around the world.

It is an engineering nightmare for any engineers who would build new ports to replace the current doomed ports.

IV. Existing Ports Are Dinosaurs

Most ports are many years old, some many centuries old, all built at the sea level of their time (which had not changed much at all until 1750 on, until our time).

All of those port sea levels are going to increasingly change one way or another in our time, except for a very few that will not be impacted in this crazy ice sheet melt scenario.

The amount of up, down, or very rarely unchanged, will be "determined" by individualized local political bodies in some cases.

Some of them will inexplicably deny the reality floating around their neighborhoods, as some already have (Social Dementia Causes Heated Misunderestimations - 2, Inhofe's One Man Troofiness Crusade).

But, the facts are that the overwhelming majority of ports are going to drown or dry up, as either SLR or SLF impacts their sea port.

V. Conclusion

I plan to monitor the cacophony that evolves following President Obama's "there is such a thing as too late," which he expressed as he began a process of diminishing GHG emissions in the U.S.

One can only wonder if he realizes that the United States is targeted by both Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets in this death spiral process (Greenland & Antarctica Invade The United States, 2, 3)?

He does not seem to be fully aware of what is going on, because he assisted Oil-Qaeda to drill for more fossil fuels in the very dangerous clathrate and methane hydrate infested Arctic Ocean area (Barry & Oil-Qaeda vs Arctic Wilderness, 2).

Doing so this late in the game is a murderous endeavor (Oil-Qaeda & MOMCOM Conspire To Commit Depraved-Heart Murder).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Professor Jerry X. Mitrovica on the gravity of the situation which we don't hear about often enough:

05:00 ... an ice sheet has mass and gravity, so it has a gravitational effect on the sea water around it.

18:15 ... if glaciers melt in Alaska, sea level around Alaska will drop.

14:20 ... the scientific literature points out that sea level does not rise nor fall the same all around the globe (scientists have called it "the European problem"). 

19:15 ... analysing unevenness of SLR / SLF informs which ice sheet is melting (e.g. in Greenland or in Antarctica).

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