The Illusion of Environmental Security - 3

The rise of the sea

The U.S. government is intensifying its fettish for spying on its own citizens.

It is now rolling out the drones for domestic spying.

In so doing the government ignores very real threats to the security and well being of the nation.

The threat that Dredd Blog is focusing on in today's post, which for all practical purposes has been ignored by the government for years, is the green house gas pollution that causes global warming induced climate change.

The deaths of "over 100 million people by 2030" because of that pollution is the 800 pound gorilla clearly visible in the room.

Here at Dredd Blog it has been said over and over that one of the most often seen phrase is "worse than previously thought", a phrase that brought some 2,290,000 Google hits ("worse than previously expected" and similar phrases add to the count).

Well, today there is another case of "worse than previously thought", which goes like this:

West Antarctica is warming almost twice as fast as previously believed, adding to worries of a thaw that would add to sea level rise from San Francisco to Shanghai, a study showed on Sunday.
...
The western part of the ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much warming as previously thought," Ohio State University said in a statement of the study led by its geography professor David Bromwich.

The warming "raises further concerns about the future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise," it said. Higher summer temperatures raised risks of a surface melt of ice and snow even though most of Antarctica is in a year-round deep freeze.

Low-lying nations from Bangladesh to Tuvalu are especially vulnerable to sea level rise, as are coastal cities from London to Buenos Aires. Sea levels have risen by about 20 cms (8 inches) in the past century.

The United Nations panel of climate experts projects that sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-24 inches) this century, and by more if a thaw of Greenland and Antarctica accelerates, due to global warming caused by human activities.

(Reuters, emphasis added; see this also). Twice 24 inches is 4 feet, but what if it also means a rise sooner than expected?

New York felt the results of sea level rise, as did New Jersey and other Eastern Seaboard states, with the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy this year and Hurricane Irene last year.

The storm surge on top of sea level rise and high tides there were too much for those states that have ignored the dangers for too long.

Nevertheless, as Dredd Blog recently mentioned, the current national energy policy activity, which should be an emergency policy to prepare for additional future climate catastrophe, is instead a furious effort by the fossil fuel industry heavily subsidized by government, to acquire and burn even more dirty oil.

The previous post in this series is here.

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