OT: sea level rise in Florida

You can read all about it on the beeb (it's in English - not American - don't assume it means exactly what it seems to mean):

Check out this 300 year old bridge:

Sainsbury's won't be a quick trip for those on the west side of Tadcaster for a year or two.

"But it was a record for Scotland and Wales, with 333.1mm and 321mm respectively

and

"It was also /easily/ the warmest December in the Central England temperature (CET) series from /1659/. Mean temperatures were 5

no stations in Wales or central southern England recorded any air frosts; temperatures were often comparable with those that might be expected in October, April, /or even May/."

Source: UK Met Office, just google for many many derivative reports.

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e season is anything other than weather?

Meanwhile, has it been so awful? Are there bodies piled in the streets? My area just got a lucky few-week blast of warm air, and we're all lovin' it. Next week it's back to the Canukistan Zephyr / Icicle Express.

Cheers, James Arthur

No. But it is noteworthy. Apparently it is mixed up with the strong El Nino event.

The great fear here is that the Gulf Stream will "switch off"; there are already signs that it is not going as far north as it used to. If that happens, and apparently that has happened quite suddenly (decades) in prehistoric times, then polar bears will be roaming London.

It has been awful for people in some parts of N England and Scotland. Many people have been flooded, twice. In places where they shouldn't have been flooded. Cause: unusually heavy unusually prolonged rainfall.

t Antarctic 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.

The New Yorker article makes it clear that there are restricted suburban ar eas of Florida that are having trouble with the sea level rise we've alread y got.

This may be playing to the fear and doom audience, but that's the media's m ain market. Pollyanna-optimism doesn't sell - it's been tried.

Stop trying to pretend that you know anything about climate models - you my have been exposed to elementary curve fitting, but it's equally clear that you have never even heard of finite element models.

ke'

It's a little more subtle than that, but AGW isn't so much "confirmed" - wh ich doesn't happen in science - as shown to be close enough to reality to b e useful, which is more than can be said for you.

Just a half-wit, with unconvincing pretensions to knowing what he's talking about.

Do try to avoid using phrases from the Urban Dictionary

This isn't that kind of ghetto. And calling you dim isn't "blackmouthing" y ou. It's warning potential readers that you don't know what you are talking about, and have a history of giving bad advice. It doesn't make you look g ood, but what you post does a more thorough job to anybody who knows even a little about the subjects on which you pontificate.

spectively

n one

The American Great Lakes have been unusually cold a few years' running now.

If that's the fear then warm weather should be heartening, not frightening.

n'

Rain is the usual cause of flooding, no surprise there. But, per press reports, the U.K., 1/5th America's size, has ~30,000 mostly elderly people die from *cold* each winter. Surely they'll appreciate a little warmth?

From 2013: "Energy row erupts as winter deaths spiral 29 per cent to four year high of 31,000

Campaigners say Government should be "ashamed" as official figures reveal t housands of over 75 year-olds perished in Britain during the coldest winter for nearly 50 years "

Cheers, James Arthur

They should have known better. Dubbya was a worse president, but Reagan's regime did more damage. One can't blame Reagan for it - he was a glove puppet, clearly going senile during his second term - but the people writing Reagan's scripts didn't do anything good for the US at all.

As a result of a correct assessment of your political judgement, or pure laziness?

The Gulf Stream last got turned off - for 1300+/-10 years - during the Younger Dryas, as the planet came out of the last ice age from c.

The area around the North Atlantic got a lot colder, but the heat that normally flows north flowed south, and warmed up a large chunk of the southern ocean, releasing lots of dissolved CO2, which seems to be a big chunk of what got us out of the ice age and into the current interglacial.

It's difficult to persuade denialists that local events - like the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age - aren't disproofs of anthropogenic global warming. Not because they don't know better, but because they let them paint word pictures that look good to the dumber bits of the target audience.

The Daily Telegraph doesn't usually go in for embarrassing a Conservative government, but the price of electricity had just gone up.

It was the New Yorker that was paying attention to Florida, not me - and I labelled the article "hilarious" which isn't exactly being anxious or gloomy.

John Larkin clearly didn't read it - it's an eight-page article and his attention span is rather smaller than that.

If you observe a random process long enough, you can see all sorts of patterns that don't exist. And write learned papers on why they exist.

If your projections are 5 or 10 years out, people have pretty much forgotten when you turn out to be wrong.

So, roughly a century ago, before the IPCC had been invented, you had some even wetter winters.

One way to treat bridges is to let them alone for a few hundred years, until they fall down.

Great read, "The Nine Tailors" by Dorothy L. Sayers. Murder and big flooding in low-lying England in 1934.

The very best loonies predict the complete extinction of our species because of global warming.

People live in Nigeria, in Greenland, in Alaska, in Panama, and in Siberia. But somehow a few degrees more is going to kill every one of us.

AGW ranks about #20 on the average citizens' list of concerns. Makes sense, with another mini ice age likely starting.

Yes. The better amongst us learn how to extract signals from noise, thus reducing the probability of making mistakes. Most people don't learn.

The better amongst us have the humility to realise, and preferably quantify, what isn't known, and to refine their predictions as new data and understanding materialises.

The, um, less good cherry pick data that suits their predilections, don't disclose conflicts of interest, and refuse to change their stance when new data and understanding materialises.

Now you're being silly.

You're being silly , again.

What's silly is to blame almost everything that happens on AGW, which is what most of the press does.

No.

The thermohaline circulation is dependent on cold water from arctic icemass cooling cooling the water, which sinks to the seafloor and returns to the equator. That's why all the water in the Gulf Stream doesn't just pile up near north Norway :)

No cold water means the Gulf Stream can't flow. The early signs of that are already occurring: the Gulf Stream is tending to be a little more southerly than it was in the past.

Take that understanding one step further, and you can see there is the potential for a "schmitt trigger" threshold and hysteresis.

Ah, you're reading the Torygraph. That's your basic mistake :) The Torygraph has reclusive, strange (even by Murdoch standards!) proprietors that have Agendas To Be Pushed.

The way it works is that their journalists are graded on the number of articles that they publish, and the journalists know which type of story is more/less likely to be printed. Guess which type they write?

Many Torygraph articles go through entertaining contortions to twist any story into one which bashes the BBC. Ditto any story which can be show the NHS in a bad light.

It is, of course, purely coincidental that the Barclay twins would stand to make a profit if the BBC and/or NHS is whittled away.

You can write all you like, but if you want to publish them in a respectable peer-reviewed scientific journal, they do have to make some kind of sense.

Nobody has forgotten that Pierre Gosselin made a remarkably silly prediction back in 2008 about where the temperature is going to be in 2020 (and 2015)

John Larkin does have this unfailing skill at picking out the silliest climate deniers around, and posting links to them here.