Ocean Levels Rise to a 30-Year High - and Faster Than Expected (go.com) 77
The Washington Post reports:
Oceans last year reached their highest levels in three decades — with the rate of global sea level rise increasing around 35% higher than expected, according to a NASA-led analysis published Thursday... Last year's rate of average global sea level rise was 0.23 inches per year, higher than the expected 0.17 inches per year, NASA said in a news release.
The rate of global sea level rise follows a trend of rapidly increasing rates over the past 30 years. From 1993 to 2023, the rate of global sea level rise doubled, increasing from 0.08 inches per year to 0.18 inches, another NASA-led study showed. Overall, the global sea level has climbed by 4 inches since 1993.
More details from ABC News: Climate change was a major driver to an unexpected level of sea level rise in 2024, according to a new NASA analysis... The majority of the difference between predicted and actual sea level rise was attributed to thermal expansion — or the ocean waters expanding as they warm, researchers said. An unusual amount of ocean warming, combined with meltwater from land-based ice such as glaciers, led to the increase of sea level rise last year, according to NASA.
About two-thirds of sea level rise in recent years has resulted from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, with a third coming from thermal expansion, according to NASA. In 2024, those metrics flipped, with two-thirds of the rise attributed to expanding ocean water and one-third attributed to contributions from melting ice. "With 2024 as the warmest year on record, Earth's expanding oceans are following suit, reaching their highest levels in three decades," said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, head of physical oceanography programs and the Integrated Earth System Observatory at NASA... Human-amplified climate change is the primary cause for present-day rising sea levels, climate research shows.
The rate of global sea level rise follows a trend of rapidly increasing rates over the past 30 years. From 1993 to 2023, the rate of global sea level rise doubled, increasing from 0.08 inches per year to 0.18 inches, another NASA-led study showed. Overall, the global sea level has climbed by 4 inches since 1993.
More details from ABC News: Climate change was a major driver to an unexpected level of sea level rise in 2024, according to a new NASA analysis... The majority of the difference between predicted and actual sea level rise was attributed to thermal expansion — or the ocean waters expanding as they warm, researchers said. An unusual amount of ocean warming, combined with meltwater from land-based ice such as glaciers, led to the increase of sea level rise last year, according to NASA.
About two-thirds of sea level rise in recent years has resulted from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, with a third coming from thermal expansion, according to NASA. In 2024, those metrics flipped, with two-thirds of the rise attributed to expanding ocean water and one-third attributed to contributions from melting ice. "With 2024 as the warmest year on record, Earth's expanding oceans are following suit, reaching their highest levels in three decades," said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, head of physical oceanography programs and the Integrated Earth System Observatory at NASA... Human-amplified climate change is the primary cause for present-day rising sea levels, climate research shows.
SIlver lining (Score:5, Funny)
Well, the silver lining is, if you can afford currently cheaper land / property just abit inland, and a couple of metres higher from sea level, you will find that it will become expensive sea view / beach view property in a few years time. /s
No real SIlver lining (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the silver lining is, if you can afford currently cheaper land / property just abit inland, and a couple of metres higher from sea level, you will find that it will become expensive sea view / beach view property in a few years time. /s
By "a few years" you mean after the end of the century. Global warming is real and the associated sea level rise is indeed happening, but it won't be "meters" of sea level rise in your lifetime.
IPCC projections with all the messy details of assumptions are here: https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chap... [www.ipcc.ch]
More of a problem is flooding due to storm surges, where three different effects of climate warming reinforce each other: slightly higher sea level makes coastal areas more vulnerable to storm surge, warming makes storms more intense, exacerbating storm surges, and higher rainfall levels during storms contributes to flooding.
Re: No real SIlver lining (Score:3)
You might be surprised to know that large real estate companies have already been buying land with slightly higher ground just inland from Miami in anticipation of this...
Re: No real SIlver lining (Score:4, Interesting)
And one good hurricane will show what a foolish idea that is.
Re: No real SIlver lining (Score:5, Interesting)
You might be surprised to know that large real estate companies have already been buying land with slightly higher ground just inland from Miami in anticipation of this...
I expect it's storm surge, not sea-level rise per se, that they're worried about.
Unfortunately, as we saw with Hurricane Helene in Asheville (and other places), storm flooding can happen even if you're not right on the water.
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I expect it's storm surge, not sea-level rise per se, that they're worried about.
Which is not really relevant to the original posters comment about buying land further inland and a few meters higher. The sea level does not need to rise a few meters for the houses closer to the ocean to be washed away and the existing beach eroded away.
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Yeah the issue in most cases (not all, because sea rises aren't uniform) will be with, for example, hurricanes causing more damage with storm surge, as more land becomes floodable.
So it's not so much that the sea will come inland soon, it's that the coast will become more dangerous and less habitable, and flood risks from storm surges will change from being a problem half a mile inland (typically) to several miles inland.
Can we fix that? Not cheaply. If America's going to continue to have zoning, it might b
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Also note that the level varies from place to place due to temperatures, gravity and the Earth’s spin.
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To those than have been to historical sites along the Mississippi River there may have been mention on how and why these long standing sites are so far from the river itself. It is because when flooding happens anything closer will get swept away in the current or get so water logged that everything rots and needs to be torn down.
With cities along the sea we find people that forget that storm surges happen once every decade, perhaps once every century, and will destroy buildings that are not above these su
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Well, the silver lining is, if you can afford currently cheaper land / property just abit inland, and a couple of metres higher from sea level, you will find that it will become expensive sea view / beach view property in a few years time. /s
So we are doing the original plot from 1978 Superman then..
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Unless the super rich build a dike in front of you ... perhaps you can declare it a hilly view?
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.. don't believe the lies. Those are normal earth-sun-climate cycles repeating for millennias, for millions of years.
I'm going to go ahead and engage this trolling post regardless of its nature.
There's another cycle that's been happening over and over. The summer/winter one. What do we do when unpleasant summer-time weather rolls around? We invent and turn on A/C. What do we do when unpleasant winter-time weather rolls around? We invent and turn on heaters.
So, even if you happen to believe the "this isn't man-made" excuse, it doesn't negate the facts that it's happening, it's inconvenient, and we should do somet
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Re:All BS .. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, even if you happen to believe the "this isn't man-made" excuse, it doesn't negate the facts that it's happening, it's inconvenient, and we should do something about it.
I agree, however there are differing ideas of "what we do". You could spend every dollar you have on climate mitigation, and it will do as close to zero as you can possibly come. Climate is just going to keep on changing despite you. Money spent on adaptation and resilience however has a tangible and sometimes immediate payback time. In terms of "bang for buck", money spend on adaptation is orders of magnitude better value both individually and collectively than money spent on mitigation. My government (not the US) is effectively forcing me to spend limited dollars on the less useful things, its all about virtue signalling with them. In the end they are themselves a bigger problem than climate change is.
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https://www.renewcanada.net/on... [renewcanada.net]
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There are four arguments against investment in nuclear power: Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, and Vogtle. These are the four major latest-generation plants completed or near completion in Finland, the United States, the United Kingdom and France respectively.
Cost overruns at these recent plants average over 300%, with more increases to come. The cost of Vogtle, for example, soared from US$14 billion to $34 billion (A$22-53 billion), Flamanville from €3.3 billion to €19 billion (A$5-31
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So, even if you happen to believe the "this isn't man-made" excuse, it doesn't negate the facts that it's happening, it's inconvenient, and we should do something about it.
I agree, however there are differing ideas of "what we do". You could spend every dollar you have on climate mitigation, and it will do as close to zero as you can possibly come. Climate is just going to keep on changing despite you. Money spent on adaptation and resilience however has a tangible and sometimes immediate payback time. In terms of "bang for buck", money spend on adaptation is orders of magnitude better value both individually and collectively than money spent on mitigation. My government (not the US) is effectively forcing me to spend limited dollars on the less useful things, its all about virtue signalling with them. In the end they are themselves a bigger problem than climate change is.
I hear you, and you're right... there's a spectrum of value-to-expense.
I'm not sure which side of the political arena you're a fan of, but the current administration's virtue-signaling is "do not, under any circumstances, have any virtue." The "drill, baby, drill" position is very much scorn for anyone who tries to do anything climate-related. EVs for instance aren't pollution-free, but the faster we shift as much as we can to electricity that doesn't come from burning things, they better they get.
Hop
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Re: All BS .. (Score:4, Informative)
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worth noting, we're now above even the pessimistic "current path" on that graph, and fairly significantly at that.
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and it's going to get worse as we can see from the denial and irresponsibility of the complicit, these classist people with all our power are about to wreck our civilization with their greed and selfishness, this is exactly why ethics matter most
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That's just a graphic repeating the "hockey stick" bullshit from bad interpretations of past temperature data. I don't know how this keeps getting repeated and cited as if it were fact.
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That's just a graphic repeating the "hockey stick" bullshit from bad interpretations of past temperature data. I don't know how this keeps getting repeated and cited as if it were fact.
Because hundreds of researchers since then have verified the essential features of the curve.
I like Berkeley Earth myself, https://berkeleyearth.org/arch... [berkeleyearth.org] , but you can choose researchers on any one of four continents to cite.
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Notable is the world map he put between 18500BC and 18000BC.
It shows the "sunken continent" Sundaland, which is connecting east and south east Asia with Australia.
The water depth in that area is in general less than 200m
The total sea level rise since end of the last "ice age" is supposed to be around 140m.
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.. don't believe the lies.
Do the world a favour. An-hero yourself.
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This is not "normal earth-sun-climate cycles". We know this because we measure the solar output, and it hasn't changed.
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Then explain please why solar cells produce more and more electricity? /me dugs
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Then explain please why solar cells produce more and more electricity? /me dugs
Because the technology is getting better and the solar-cell conversion efficiency is increasing.
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Nope. But your stupidity and denial has been ovservable since there are humans around.
Glad I live at the top of a hill (Score:3)
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May need to buy a boat.
Where we are going, we won’t need roads.
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And nothing will come because of it (Score:5, Insightful)
Tuvalu is sinking. [youtube.com] Meanwhile, Miami is building $100m+ skyscrapers. [waresidences.miami]
Moral of the story: nobody will do anything to curb this crisis, because when one community goes underwater, the next one says, "Not my problem!"
Skyscrapers [Re:And nothing will come because...] (Score:3)
Tuvalu is sinking. [youtube.com] Meanwhile, Miami is building $100m+ skyscrapers. [waresidences.miami] Moral of the story: nobody will do anything to curb this crisis, because when one community goes underwater, the next one says, "Not my problem!"
Pretty much. What they are really saying is "we can make money in the near term, and we don't care much about whether this will still be a good place for skyscrapers a few decades down the road."
(Also, they're thinking that when climate-change induced storms wash away the beaches that make beachfront condominiums valuable, no problem, they'll just get the feds to pay the bill to ship in more sand. [scientificamerican.com])
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Nobody actually does care about climate change. If they did, they'd elect politicians who would. What does this mean exactly?
Democrats have opposed natural gas pipelines even though that would mean reductions in CO2 emissions as it means less coal and oil burned for electricity and transport, with natural gas replacing coal and oil we'd see lower CO2 emissions. It wasn't until 2020 that the Democrat party supported nuclear power to replace fossil fuels as a means to lower CO2 emissions, while the Republican party supported nuclear power.
It is with the most recent election that put Republicans in charge of the federal government
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Democrats have opposed natural gas pipelines even though that would mean reductions in CO2 emissions as it means less coal and oil burned for electricity and transport,
Yes and no on that. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel. It emits less carbon dioxide per unit energy produced in burning it than coal does, but "less" is not zero. Unfortunately, carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas. Methane is also a greenhouse gas, and leakage from natural gas usage will increase the greenhouse effect. So, natural gas is not a cure-all for greenhouse emissions.
Methane has a much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere than CO2, so in the long term-- twenty years-- natural gas produce
Doomed, we're all doomed (Score:2)
BBC Dad's Army:
https://youtu.be/V7NlFWh7Sz8 [youtu.be]
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This is what brain damage looks like online.
Re: THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS (Score:2)
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**THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS**
It's all a sham that most Slashdot dorks bought into.
Wow, that's a cogent argument if ever I saw one.
THE US FIXIDIT (Score:2)
YEAH YEAH because Europe didn't spent money. But Donatd Trump took Elon Musk's chainaw and delete crlimate change.
So all this didn't happen and won't ever happen and got sollved anyway (see "chainsaw").
Why are you still standing around gawking?
I thought I killed that media site. I'm pro free-speech like my DOGGIE BOYZ.
- DonaQ Q Trump. Q is for queer.
sea level rising. (Score:1)
When did this phrase become a thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Human-amplified climate change is the primary cause for present-day rising sea levels
I'm the opposite of a climate change denier, and I firmly believe that global warming is caused by humans. Yet I'd never heard that "human-amplified" qualifier before now. To me, it smacks of manipulation.
So I did a couple of quick searches. On DDG there were 15 hits from MSN, and 7 from other sources. On Google, there were 11 hits from MSN, and 75 from other sources. And overall, the vast majority of results came from news sites.
The small number of results tells me that "human-amplified climate change" is a recent phrase. And having news sites as its predominant source suggests to me that it's deliberate propaganda.
It implies that global warming is only partly the result of human activities, and that it would be happening to some extent even if we weren't furiously pumping out greenhouse gases at an alarming rate. Regardless of whether or not that's true, such language promotes an 'oh well, it's gonna happen regardless so we may as well get used to it' attitude.
It's the language of subservience, resignation, and defeat. As such, it serves the interests of the oligarchs who will build protected enclaves to shield themselves from the worst of the consequences while they let the rest of us suffer and die.
Bend over folks - it's gonna be a long hard ride...
Re:When did this phrase become a thing? (Score:5, Informative)
When did this phrase become a thing?
More than 20 years ago: "There is already in motion a process of sea level rise that will continue for many centuries as the extra heat trapped at Earth’s surface by the human-amplified greenhouse effect progressively enters the deep ocean water." -- From Climate Change And Human Health: Risks And Responses, by McMichael and Campbell-Lendrum, et al, published 2003 by the World Health Organization, ISBN-13: 978-9241562485. (Amazon link. [amazon.com]
I found 10 scholarly references with a single Google search: https://scholar.google.com/sch... [google.com]
It implies that global warming is only partly the result of human activities, and that it would be happening to some extent even if we weren't furiously pumping out greenhouse gases at an alarming rate. Regardless of whether or not that's true, such language promotes an 'oh well, it's gonna happen regardless so we may as well get used to it' attitude.
I see it as an attempt to combat the scientifically-supportable argument that there are natural processes that contribute to global warming by emphasizing the fact that the human contribution is what's driving things well beyond the extent to which those natural processes could achieve; making the argument that the "some extent" to which the Earth would be warming on its own is far, far, far less than what we are seeing.
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"Thanks for the info", I say sheepishly...
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Phrases like "human-amplified greenhouse effect" are often used in the scientific literature becase they're accurate. The Earth has always had a greenhouse effect, otherwise it would be an ice ball. Human activity amplifies it. You could also say "human-amplified warming" because we expect that the planet is in a warming cycle, but it's warming a lot faster because of human activity.
Phrases like that are often avoided in other contexts because they imply a situation more complicated than the binary human br
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The truth
There are four arguments against investment in nuclear power: Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, and Vogtle. These are the four major latest-generation plants completed or near completion in Finland, the United States, the United Kingdom and France respectively.
Cost overruns at these recent plants average over 300%, with more increases to come. The cost of Vogtle, for example, soared from US$14 billion to $34 billion (A$22-53 billion), Flamanville from €3.3 billion to €19 billio
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So let me get this right... (Score:1)
Based on the headline, 31 years ago sea levels were higher, but then they went down, and are now back up?
Please explain, I don't remember ever reading anything about sea levels dropping in the past 30-some years.
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Based on the headline, 31 years ago sea levels were higher, but then they went down, and are now back up?
Not quite. The headline refers to a 31-year record high rate of sea-level rise, not a record high sea level.
Please explain, I don't remember ever reading anything about sea levels dropping in the past 30-some years.
They didn't. Data here: https://www.climate.gov/news-f... [climate.gov]
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Since the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago, global sea levels have risen by more than 5,000 inch feet It's nothing un-usual, and even un-sure that human activity has accelerated sea level rise. [youtube.com]
You can see graphs of past sea level many places on the web, such as this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The sea level rise due to the end of the last glaciation occurred from about 15,000 years ago to about 8,000 years ago, and tailed off about 6,000 years ago. It's over.
And it's not a crisis, it's manageable.
Indeed. The first step in managing it is to decrease our emissions of carbon dioxide due to burning fossil fuels.
the gaslighting must continue (Score:1)
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while the ultras rich still buy beachfront mansions
Not quite. The ultra-rich buy beachfront mansions sitting on bluffs overlooking the water.
Not at sea level.
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All the data is here. https://www.climate.gov/news-f... [climate.gov]
Feel free to run your own models if you don't like the reported results.
4 inches is a huge amount... (Score:2)
...my wife told me so.
sea tides change (Score:3, Insightful)
If you've ever seen the Pacific Ocean, you know how dumb a thing this would be to say.
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Seems you have an odd way to measure low tide?
Usually low tide is at "0". And that is what a sea chart calls the depths.
That means the lowest thinkable tide level is what is given as water depths.
However some countries handle that different, e.g. Switzerland, no idea why, after all they have no oceans, define the water level 1m below low tide as the reference for water depths.
That means if you are sailing on the other side of the planet, you have to make sure what the local definition for low tide/water dep
So, are the elites fleeing the coasts yet? (Score:1)
Modern sea level rise is trivial (Score:2)
Since the last ice age, ocean levels have risen 16-20mm/year, peaking at around 45m/yr 11-14kya.
It slowed down - and continues to be - around 3-4mm/yr since about 6000 bc.
https://www.researchgate.net/f... [researchgate.net] (and others in that paper)
Specifically, pages 17-20.