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Sunday, May 17, 2015

The 1% May Face The Wrath of Sea Level Rise First

Fig. 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza?
I. Who Gets It First?

Regular readers know that I have been writing about sea level rise (SLR) a lot lately, which means reading a lot of research material.

In this post I want to point out, based upon that recent research, what I see written and spoken often.

It is a misunderstanding frequently printed and spoken by social and corporate media.

That misunderstanding is the notion that life-threatening SLR will first be tilted against the world's poorest people:
"As the coastal cities of Africa and Asia expand, many of their poorest residents are being pushed to the edges of livable land and into the most dangerous zones for climate change. Their informal settlements cling to riverbanks and cluster in low-lying areas with poor drainage, few public services, and no protection from storm surges, sea-level rise, and flooding.

 These communities – the poor in coastal cities and on low-lying islands – are among the world’s most vulnerable to climate change and the least able to marshal the resources to adapt, a new report finds."
(World Bank: What Climate Change Means for ... the Coastal Poor). The New York Location of the World Bank is in between the Hudson River and the East River, thus, Fig. 1 seems appropriate.

New York Harbor and its surroundings are at the front of the line for tidal inundation and/or tidal disruption when Greenland does its thing (Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization).

The wealthy 1% will lose the dynamism of their fortunes first, by those events described in that Dredd Blog post.

Has anyone noticed any poor people owning the mechanisms and shipping fleets which utilize the ports of the world (Bulker, Container, Combo, Tanker, LNG, Multigas, or LPG)?

Is it the poor who thereby become wealthy 1% billionaires like Aristotle Onassis or Daniel K. Ludwig?

Hey World Bank, how about this comparison of the poor with the port users (Billionaire Greek Ship Owners, Shipping companies of the United States)?

Likewise, has anyone compared ocean-front property prices to property prices inland 20-100 miles?

II. Relying On Killers For "Protection"

So, when the military fails to stop the invasion (Why The Military Can't Defend Against The Invasion), and then SLR gets up high enough to shut down the ports, what is planned for the hoi polloi (A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA - 4)?

When civil unrest gets some steroids and goes through the roof, the 1% have directed their body guards, through the Commander In Chief, to make due:
Do What With These Tanks?
A new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks.

“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” said the War College report.

The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S.
(Will The Military Become The Police? - 3). Plans, orders, training, and equipping of the local police as surrogates for martial law have already taken place.

I am not sure that they contemplated unrest caused by SLR, but they do expect that unrest is coming, thus, they have been training and preparing for it:
This lesson is designed to describe the nature and causes of disaffection and social unrest; define the potential for social unrest in the United States; identify the types of confrontations; define crowd behavioral and psychological influences; identify patterns of disorder.
…
2. Application of Force.

a. General.

(1) Civil disturbance operations by federal forces will not be authorized until
 
Safe from SLR at last
the President is advised by the highest officials of the state that the situation cannot be controlled with nonfederal resources available. The mission of the control force is to help restore law and order and to help maintain it until such time as state and local forces can control the situation without federal help. In performing this mission, the control force may have to actively participate, not only in subduing the disturbance, but also in helping to detain those responsible for it. Control force commanders are authorized and directed to provide such active participation, subject to restraints on the use of force.

(2) Prior to committing any federal forces in the quailing of civil disturbance whether in CONUS or OCONUS commanders should train and continually brief the control force on the rule of engagement (ROE). The commander is responsible for drafting, interpreting, disseminating, and training the control force on the ROE. The staff Judge Advocate (SJA) should be included in the ROE development to ensure that it will not improperly constrain actions, but still will remain consistent with domestic and international laws, polices, and orders of the chain of command.
(U.S. Army Military Police School Civil Disturbance Operations Course). I have written about this in the context of the popular question "what could go wrong?"

For quite a while now, the gist of that writing has been about what happens once the "put them all in camps to protect and care for them policy" degrades into an operation of killer-cop types:
“Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, ....whence it becomes expedient for promoting the publick happiness that those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or accidental condition of circumstance.”
(Thomas Jefferson, emphasis added). The current nationwide policy, of giving used-battle-gear and equipment to local police forces, shows that "there are many here among us" who are not human-rights, civil-rights, constitutional-rights, or democratic-rights oriented.

There have always been, and will continue be, those who chose to push the limit way past those concepts, and on into tyranny:

III. The Demise of The Ports Will Be A Trigger

I recently wrote: "The roads to and from the harbor are closed, the power is off, everyone is gone inland to camps, etc., and it is that way at every port at every coastal area" (Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization).

Recall what the breakdown of International Commerce and Intercourse due to SLR damage to ports causes:
"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 - 8). Obviously the camps will have to be activated, and the policies mentioned above will be implemented (think Japanese Interment Camps of the 1940's, but on a much more massive scale).

I hope you can envision the reality that SLR is a big-time game changers (at only ~1m / 3 ft.), because it is a trigger for causing a mega-domino cascade (Will This Float Your Boat - 10).

The World Bank's own figures on civilization-sustaining trade @ world ports should make it clear that the most serious of worldwide recessions/depressions, at best, would result (Merchandise trade (% of GDP), Imports of goods and services (% of GDP)).

All of the international trading nations of this civilization will be impacted.

Don't forget to compute those damages as if they were choreographed at an ongoing Groundhog Day movie set, because the SLR is not going to stop just because we become uncomfortable (Will This Float Your Boat - 9).

The maximum stopping point is 263.5 feet of SLR.

I could go on, but I am sure you get the gist of it, so let's get back to the dynamics of SLR.

IV. Another Contributor To Greenland's Ice Demise

Warm water sources impact Greenland
I have written, along with many others, about the dynamics of a warming Arctic that are now impacting the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the resulting danger to the U.S. North East coastal population areas and ports.

I focused on that area because of their proximity to Greenland's impact, and because they have already experienced the planet's highest SLR (Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization).

Furthermore, there are new dynamics of warming that are joining older ones to imperil the Greenland Ice Sheet even more (Arctic's Hudson Bay Warming Rapidly, at Tipping Point, “If this warm blob of water in upper Indian Ocean is transported all the way to North Atlantic, that could affect the melting of Arctic sea ice," - Heat is Piling Up in the Depths of the Indian Ocean).

To close this section, I will urge you to watch the two short videos below (if you haven't already).
V. Conclusion For The 1%

Highly organized groups are still hunting down and prosecuting the NAZI architects in a society that killed some six million people in death camps.

By all indications, they will continue to hunt down those NAZI criminals as long as the hunters still have breath.

How do you in the 1% think you will fare should they determine that you did far worse than those NAZI mass murderers?

See you in the camps (Pentagon Warning).

The next post in this series is here.
HBO Vice: "Our Rising Oceans", with Dr. Eric Rignot:
-----------------------------------
2:43 - "One meter [of SLR] would be a global catastrophic event, 3 meters would remap the world as we know it?"

2:50 - "Yes, absolutely."



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2 comments:

  1. RandyMay 18, 2015 at 7:39 AM

    Are they beginning to get the picture? (link)

    No.

    It is a pabulum event.

    ReplyDelete
  2. DreddMay 19, 2015 at 2:24 PM

    Here is a story about how a 1% fossil fuel clean coal freak save us from Ebola (Peabody Energy exploited Ebola crisis for corporate gain, say health experts).

    ReplyDelete