These stories came in together, one from Vanity Fair, the other from the International New York Times. Essentially the same story: how two small islands could disappear as sea-levels rise. But very different worlds, and expectations.
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Miami Beach, a low-lying city to begin with, is already feeling the effects of sea-level rise. Every time there’s a heavy rain, the locals brace for flooding on Alton Road, the main north-south thoroughfare of the city’s west side …
On top of all this, Miami Beach must contend with a fairly new phenomenon that has come to be known locally as sunny-day flooding, in which Alton Road and its neighboring streets are awash in water even when no rain has fallen. …
… curiously, at the very same time that some climate scientists are questioning whether the city will even survive into the next century, Miami Beach is going through an economic and building boom that evokes nothing so much as Bloomberg-era New York at its most sparkly and flash. In the last 12 months alone, the city has added more than 2,000 hotel rooms
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From the International New York Times:
Ghoramara is one of a few islands that sit at the mouth of the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges, about 90 miles south of Kolkata, India. Ghoramara and its sister islands are vanishing, as satellite images show their shoreline borders shifting, shrinking and sinking with the waters. Its people subsist on rice and fish and are so impoverished they fish by casting nets from the land because they can’t afford boats. They are hardly the culprits of climate change, but the first to feel its ravages.
Now let me get this straight. “Miami Beach, a low-lying city to begin with, is already feeling the effects of sea-level rise.” Oh indeed! I am surprised it is just feeling the effects now.
Where I was born in East Yorkshire, on the coast, from about Flamborough Head to Spurn Point, the coast had been eroding since Viking raiding parties first landed, and likely well before: Indeed ten thousand years ago (the end of the ice age) hunters walked from Schleswig-Holstein to Yorkshire as the ice receded.
Miami, Flamborough, it’s the same ocean. Sooner or later water finds it’s own level: be it Vancouver Island, on the North Pacific, Miami on the Atlantic or Holderness on Yorkshire’s North Sea, East Coast!
I have been an avid sailor since the year dot: Royal Navy sailing dinghies and whalers: my 22′ Biddy, gunter rigged, early 1950’s sailing out of Scarborough Harbour and, on arrival on the West Coast, my 16′ Flattie following the booze cruise to Bowen. Latterly, sailing my Ranger 22 on the Salish Sea from Victoria to Toba Inlet and all points between.
Needless to say the Salish Sea is a well-traveled, well-marked marine highway. You cannot miss a marker and, after getting too old to go boating, I have a view of Nanaimo Harbour resplendent in its tide markers and buoys that tell the story.
By virtue of the moon there are neap tides (very low) and spring tides (unusually high).
I am told sea levels have risen 6″ in the last decade. That doesn’t seem like a lot but if you live on Miami Beach or Holderness it will show.
Looking out my window there is a concrete marker warning mariners of a rock bang in the middle of Nanaimo’s harbor: with sea growth, algae and sea weed the marker shows were sea levels have been over the life of the marker. It tells were sea levels have been in the 15 years I have watched from my 10th story window.
Would not a 6″ inch rise clearly show on the algae?
Other than neaps and springs the marker shows sea level pretty much were it was in 2001 when I first came to live here!
Further clarity is need on this subject of global warming and sea levels!
Come on Roger the trepidation of rising seas is a biblical metaphor essential to put the fear of death in the young ones. It’s a world wide marketing campaign.
The Dutch and the Singaporeans are laughing.
Roger: You mention being told of a 6″ rise in sea level in the past decade. I don’t know who told you that, but if you take 3 mm per year as a reasonable estimate over the past decade (ref IPCC) and assume that Nanaimo matches the global mean, you would be closer to 3 cm, or 1.2″. You are out by a factor of five.
Then you should consider your ability to discern a 1.2″ rise over 10 years, when the tide range in Nanaimo is probably around 12 feet (just guessing).
Further clarity on this subject can best be gleaned from the scientific studies and published literature, not so much by watching the water in the bay each day, IMO.
We’ve been trying to measure the sea level for years but it won’t keep still. Fortunately, the problem is being solved with a simple solution. A big hole has been drilled 12km deep into the earth in the Kola Peninsula near the Arctic Circle in Russia. A canal is going to be soon built that will run 20km to the sea and the water will just go down the hole to the centre of the planet.