OT: sea level rise in Florida

The latest New Yorker - 21 and 28 December 2015 - has a hilarious piece on sea-level rise in Florida, "The Siege of Miami" by Elizabeth Kolbert.

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It mentions that Forida's Republican governor, Rick Scott, had instructed state workers not to discus climate change, or even use the term.

Awkward, when Floria rest on porous limestone, full of fresh water, which is less dense that sea-water, so the water table in parts of Florida is higher than sea level, and frequently higher than the land surface. Lakes - with fish - appear at inland spots when the tide is high, and drain away when the tide goes down.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Bill Sloman
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You just don't understand Florida:

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No water, no mud.

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Grizzly H.
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mixed nuts

.

Not yet. There's quite a lot of water tied up in the Greenland and West Ant arctic ice sheets, and when the ice starts sliding off in large chunks, as now seems to be unavoidable, Florida will become much less extensive, and a lot damper. Parts will remain dry, but not all that many of them.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Bill Sloman

mental midgets in denial...

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bloggs.fredbloggs.fred

South Florida wants to secede in an effort to address the issue:

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Grizzly H.
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mixed nuts

The sea level is rising in Florida because of post-glacial rebound.

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Reply to
Wanderer

I got a thrill up my leg from this statement in the New Yorker article: "The amount of water on the planet is fixed (and has been for billions of years)." >:-}

What about hydrocarbon combustion? ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Jim Thompson

I watched the video and I still don't understand Florida.

I do recall people there driving pickups while drinking beer, in plain sight.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

Wrong direction, I think. It's the land that's rising.

Bigger problems: draining/pumping causes subsidance, and federal flood insurance lets people build and rebuild neighborhoods on land that has flooded for thousands of years.

And then, some people want to live in Florida for mysterious reasons.

When things get too wet, people build levees. Sea level seems to be rising 2-3 mm per year, about a foot per century, so keeping ahead of that could be done by girl scouts with spades and pails.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

You didn't go to the website. The land is rising in Canada because of the glaciers retreating from the ice age. This is sucking up the mantle underneath the US. Florida is in the pink area that is sinking.

Reply to
Wanderer

Canadian snow birds should be required to carry one large suitcase of genuine glacial till per family member as an admission fee to Florida and people with friends and family in the north should be taxed one (1)

40 lb bag of dirt/month.
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Grizzly H.
Reply to
mixed nuts

You said that "The sea level is rising in Florida because of post-glacial rebound."

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

Doh. I see what you mean.

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Wanderer

Yep, that's a possibility. The downside, is the porous subsurface with saltwater channels, can collapse with extra load from above. The newly arrived dirt supplement will partly fill the sinkholes, though!

Reply to
whit3rd

No big deal. Florida has been swampy for 10s of thousands of years, but people notice it more lately. I grew up in New Orleans, below sea level. I used to look UP at ships on the river, just over the levee. A hundred years of electric-power pumping is making NOLA sink even more.

This is a great book:

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You can play the Randy Newman song "Louisiana" while you read it.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
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John Larkin

Probably dwarfed by hydrogen loss from the upper atmosphere anyway.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Phil Hobbs

e

t.

term.

Jim-out-touch-with-reality-Thompson hasn't taken on board that while hydroc arbon combustion has perceptibly lowered the oxygen concentration in the at mosphere, it's a very small change.

There's a much smaller mass of oxygen in the atmosphere than there is of wa ter in the oceans - 1.2x10^15 tons as opposed to 1.5x10^18 tons of water in the ocean - and there's not nearly enough fossil carbon to put much of den t in atmospheric oxygen, even if the fossil carbon industry can't be stoppe d from digging it all up and selling it to be burnt as fuel.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Bill Sloman

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t.

term.

John-out-of-touch-with-reality-Larkin hasn't noticed that building levees o n top of porous limestone doesn't work - there's a hole in the bottom of th e bucket, and the water flows in under the levee, not over the top.

Levees are useful for dealing with storm surges, which go away quite rapidl y, but perfectly useless against sea level rise, which doesn't go away unti l the next ice age kicks in,

The current rate of sea level rise isn't all that threatening - though quit e high enough to be creating problems in Florida right now - but what John Larkin refuses to notice is that when ice sheets start sliding off into the oceans, sea level rises quite rapidly. This is called a "meltwater pulse" and there were four of them at the end of the last ice age.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Bill Sloman

That's one contributing effect. Greenland gong post-glacial is going to happen rather faster, and make a rather bigger difference.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

So all the work they have done in the Netherlands is useless?

Dan

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dcaster

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