1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
Offline 
- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries
Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries
The worsening of tidal flooding in American coastal communities is largely a consequence of greenhouse gases from human activity, and the problem will grow far worse in coming decades, scientists reported Monday.
Those emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, are causing the ocean to rise at the fastest rate since at least the founding of ancient Rome, the scientists said. They added that in the absence of human emissions, the ocean surface would be rising less rapidly and might even be falling.
The increasingly routine tidal flooding is making life miserable in places like Miami Beach; Charleston, S.C.; and Norfolk, Va., even on sunny days.
Though these types of floods often produce only a foot or two of standing saltwater, they are straining life in many towns by killing lawns and trees, blocking neighborhood streets and clogging storm drains, polluting supplies of freshwater and sometimes stranding entire island communities for hours by overtopping the roads that tie them to the mainland.
Such events are just an early harbinger of the coming damage, the new research suggests.
“I think we need a new way to think about most coastal flooding,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, the primary author of one of two related studies released on Monday. “It’s not the tide. It’s not the wind. It’s us. That’s true for most of the coastal floods we now experience.”
Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences
Human Fingerprints on Coastal Floods
Sea-Level Rise from the Late 19th to the Early 21st Century
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.