Sea Level Debate Continues

story first appeared on usatoday.com

Echoes of Superstorm Sandy remain from Manhattan's once-flooded streets to Maryland's battered boardwalks to New Jersey's washed-away beaches.

No surprise. The Eastern Seaboard — or any coastal region — occasionally finds itself in the cross hairs of ferocious ocean storms. But it may have taken Sandy to drive home the added threat that scientists have been warning about for years: a rise in the sea level.

More of the same could lie ahead, suggest ocean scientists such as U.S. Geological Survey oceanographer Asbury Sallenger. The storm triggered the expected arguments about global warming's role, but that debate aside, the new constant for any storm is the increasingly important role likely to be played by sea level. In a study out Tuesday, climate scientists led by Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute report that since 1993 sea level has risen worldwide at a rate 60% higher than predictions. The findings appear in the Environmental Research Letters journal.

Sallenger says sea-level rise is accelerating along the East Coast

The real question, Sallenger and other ocean experts say, is what effect rising sea levels, which are accelerating along a "hotspot" stretching from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Maine, will have on storms hitting these places.

In June, Sallenger and colleagues reported in the journal Nature Climate Change that sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic Coast has been climbing at a rate three to four times higher than the global average since 1950. About 1.5 inches per decade now, it doesn't sound like a lot. But each inch counts, and New York Harbor's water level is 11 to 16 inches higher than it was a century ago, Sallenger says.

The accelerating sea-level rise springs partly from "subsidence," where groundwater withdrawals to sate thirsty towns and farms along the coast cause the ground to sink, and partly from warming waters in the North Atlantic, the study suggests. Warmer water simply takes up more space than cold water.

Not to be forgotten is that teetering infrastructure poses as much of a problem as global warming, says Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us.

Most climate scientists would see Superstorm Sandy as a largely natural event, not something born as a result of global warming, says Texas Tech climate researcher Katharine Hayhoe. But she acknowledges that the storm, sea-level rise and climate change are hard to disentangle.

A water level that's a few inches higher pales in comparison with a 14-foot storm surge in Lower Manhattan, but those few inches meant the surge was higher than it might have been otherwise.

And was the storm surge stronger because of climate change? Indeed. Warmer ocean temperatures could have provided up to 20% greater power for the storm, so climate change's role isn't necessarily an either-or question, Hayhoe says.

Most climate projections that look ahead to the coming century see hurricanes that look stronger, but are fewer in number. Why? Warmer waters strengthen storms but stronger winds above the equatorial oceans wreck the stillness that burgeoning tropical storms need to become ferocious hurricanes.

MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel says that while he does expect increased hurricane damage in the U.S. as the climate warms, Sandy is not a pure example of a hurricane. It was a hybrid event that started as a tropical storm, grew into a hurricane, and morphed into an intense nor'easter. He says climate science doesn't have enough data to say whether these hybrid storms like Sandy will become more or less frequent.

It also doesn't matter, Emanuel writes in the current Foreign Policy magazine, because the real problem is sea-level rise.

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that warming alone, which expands ocean waters, would raise sea levels worldwide by almost two feet over the next century. Add in future melting glaciers in Greenland and elsewhere, and sea level could rise more than 3 feet by then, NASA climate scientist James Hansen and Stanford's Ken Caldeira reported at last year's American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Sallenger believes the "hotspot" study suggests this worsening will continue, yet he acknowledges other researchers are taking a more "wait-and-see" attitude.

Also worth noting, a 2009 study led by Environmental Protection Agency analyst Jim Titus concluded that 60% of the East Coast's coastal land is zoned for more development, while less than 10% is zoned for wetlands that soak up storms.

At the same time, dikes, or seawalls, are an unlikely remedy for the entire East Coast, says civil engineer Robert Traver of Villanova (Pa.) University. Of the 25 most-densely populated counties nationwide, 23 are coastal ones. "We can't build barriers around everything," Traver says.

Geoengineering Effects Rainfall

Story first appeared in Reuters.

Large-scale engineering projects aimed at fighting global warming could radically reduce rainfall in Europe and North America, a team of scientists from four European countries have warned.

Geoengineering projects are controversial, even though they are largely theoretical at this point. They range from mimicking the effects of large volcanic eruptions by releasing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, to deploying giant mirrors in space to deflect the sun's rays.

Proponents say they could be a rapid response to rising global temperatures but environmentalists argue they are a distraction from the need to reduce man-made carbon emissions.

Critics also point to a lack of solid research into unintended consequences and the absence of any international governance structure for such projects, whose effects could transcend national borders.

A small geoengineering experiment in the UK was recently abandoned due to a dispute over attempts by some of the team involved to patent the technology.

In this new study scientists from Germany, Norway, France and the UK used four different computer models that mimic the earth's climate to see how they responded to increased levels of carbon dioxide coupled with reduced radiation from the sun.

Their scenario assumed a world with four times the carbon dioxide concentration of the preindustrial world, which the lead author says is at the upper end, but in the range of what is considered possible at the end of this century.

They found that global rainfall was reduced by about 5 percent on average using all four models.

Climate engineering cannot be seen as a substitute for a policy pathway of mitigating climate change through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the scenario studied, rainfall diminished by about 15 percent, or about 100 millimeters per year, compared to pre-industrial levels, in large areas of North America and northern Eurasia.

Over central South America, all the models showed a decrease in rainfall that reached more than 20 percent in parts of the Amazon region.

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