Pnyin - Rising seas likely to overtake US coasts

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Rising seas likely to overtake US coasts

Updated: 2007-09-24 07:05


Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement
in Jamestown, Virginia, as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the
first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may
be slowly erased.

Global warming - through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing
ice sheets and warmer waters expanding - is expected to cause oceans to
rise by one meter, or about 100 cm. It will happen regardless of any
future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say.
And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and
the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of
big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront
getaways of rich politicians - the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John
Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches
in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.

That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps. The maps, created
by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the US
Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with
the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years,
others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a
scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it," said
University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the
February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in
Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what - the question is when."

This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations today, world
leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At week's
end, leaders will gather in Washington with President George W. Bush.

Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the
billions and not all spots could be saved.

And it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes an
even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms and
regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher and more
frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.

All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the 48 contiguous US states
would put about 65,000 square km under water, according to Jonathan
Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the
University of Arizona. That's an area the size of West Virginia.

The amount of lost land is even greater when the noncontiguous states of
Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said. The Environmental
Protection Agency's calculation projects a land loss of about 57,000
square kilometers.

Agencies

(China Daily 09/24/2007 page7)

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