Catastrophic inland migration
Same old same old – it’s vastly worse than we thought and we’re doing nothing at all to slow it down.
Sea level rise will become unmanageable at just 1.5C of global heating and lead to “catastrophic inland migration”, the scientists behind a new study have warned. This scenario may unfold even if the average level of heating over the last decade of 1.2C continues into the future.
The loss of ice from the giant Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s due to the climate crisis and is now the principal driver of sea level rise.
The international target to keep global temperature rise below 1.5C is already almost out of reach. But the new analysis found that even if fossil fuel emissions were rapidly slashed to meet it, sea levels would be rising by 1cm a year by the end of the century, faster than the speed at which nations could build coastal defences.
And, I’m guessing, faster than the speed at which nations could build new housing and transportation and other infrastructure for millions of refugees from coastal cities. Heyup city planners, you’ve got the populations of San Diego and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Seattle plus all the smaller cities and towns and suburbs near them, heading your way. Also Houston, New Orleans, Florida (yes all of it), DC, Baltimore, Newark, New York, Boston, plus all the smaller cities and towns and suburbs near them.
The world is on track for 2.5C-2.9C of global heating, which would almost certainly be beyond tipping points for the collapse of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets. The melting of those ice sheets would lead to a “really dire” 12 metres of sea level rise.
Today, about 230 million people live within 1 metre above current sea level, and 1 billion live within 10 metres above sea level. Even just 20cm of sea level rise by 2050 would lead to global flood damages of at least $1tn a year for the world’s 136 largest coastal cities and huge impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods.
But here’s the problem. That’s the future. This is now. Humans are hopelessly bad at doing difficult things now to avoid much worse things 20 or 30 or 50 years down the road. The giant cruise ships will continue to trundle in and out of Seattle and New York and Miami and the ice will continue to melt. People will continue to buy huge heavy SUVs and live 20 miles from where they work and the ice will continue to melt. The headlines will continue to warn us and the ice will continue to melt.
Unpopular opinion but true. David Attenborough | “The source of all our problems = POPULATION GROWTH”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZnlrxm1vAY
Yes but all of those are “blue cities” so it’s not Real America™’s problem.
Coastal communities will be the first to feel the effects, but so will riparian communities.
I live on the banks of the Murray River, part of the Murray-Darling Basin that drains approximately one-third of Australia, contains our three longest rivers, and ultimately drains into the Coorong. Due to over-extraction and the river’s slow-flowing nature*, the river mouth is often closed by silt and needs dredging to keep the river flowing to sea, and barges have had to be built to prevent seawater from flowing upstream into the river.
Lock 6 at Murtho has a current water height of 19.27 metres above mean sea level, and while that may sound high, that is 620 km from the river mouth. I live 383 km from the river mouth, and the river here is only 6.1 metres above mean sea level. At the mouth, the river is a bare 600mm above mean sea level, meaning it won’t take much of a sea rise for water to begin flowing back upstream, filling the lower river with saline water, killing off the freshwater fish and denying irrigation and stock water to farmers. Yet those same farmers keep voting for climate change-denying politicians.
* The river is so slow flowing that even during the 2022-23 flood, we had 4 – 6 weeks to know if we would need to evacuate to higher ground.
Our house is safe, because we’re almost eighty above mean sea level – but a rise of twelve metres will destroy most of every nearby town and turn our bit of East Cork into an offshore island. There have been two catastrophic flood events in the nearest market town since we returned from Australia. Some buildings still show the marks left by the water. Waist high (to a tall man) and shoulder high. They were caused by heavy rain upstream of the town and exacerbated by high tides.
Meanwhile in South-Eastern Norway, where the bulk of the population lives, 2021 still stands as the last somewhat “normal” year so far. In what we used to think of as a “normal” year the water flow in our rivers would increase something like five-fold, and the levels in our reservoirs (i.e. lakes) would rise several meters above the “highest regulated water level” around the second half of May due to snowmelt in the mountains. This “spring flood” was considered so reliable that hydropower companies would lower their reservoirs towards the “lowest regulated water level” during the winter season (when the demand for power was high and prices were good), knowing that they would be filled up again in May [1].
Well, the old “normal” ended in 2022. That’s when the trusted spring flood remained completely absent due to record low levels of snow in the mountains. Along with the European energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine this had the effect of pushing energy prices for the consumers up to economy-breaking levels, and if not for heavy rainfall in late September/early October we would almost certainly have faced energy rationing during the winter of 2022/2023.
By contrast the next two years were practically the polar opposite, with the extreme weather event “Hans” totally dwarfing the spring flood in August of 2023 (usually the driest season of the year!), leading to widespread flooding damages and pushing energy prices for the power companies down to record-low levels [2]. 2024 may very well have been even wetter on average, with “flood-ish” condtions from early April to late October (!), but more manageable since we didn’t have a single concentrated deluge comparable to “Hans”.
Well, guess what. We’re back to the same situation as 2022, with hardly any snow in the mountains, no spring flood, and bone dry conditions. At least we were a little more prepared this time (I like to think I had a tiny hand in that by sounding the alarm bell already back in February) and began holding back water before the reservoirs managed to sink too low…
As I have previously pointed out, most people I talk to still seem to think of each new extreme as a temporary “freak anomaly” (occurring in a vacuum), or conclude that two record-dry and two record-wet years in a four-year period “cancel out”, leaving everything “normal” on average. And, to be fair, four data points is hardly a basis for making any strong strong inferences about the future. I’m pretty sure it won’t be good though. On a “brighter” note, one of the
fewmany things the MAGA crowd and the woke crowd both have in common,apart frombesides post-truth politics, identity politics, intolerance of opposing views, cancel culture, mob justice, arguments from sound volume/number of repetitions etc. etc. is the same commitment to make sure the world (or at least the man-made part of it) is not worth saving anyway. As I keep saying, I do feel bad about all those other species doomed to go down with us, though. I always thought the armadillos were showing a lot of promise…[1] This didn’t just make sense from a purely economic point of view: Even back then there was a real danger of flooding populated areas if snowmelt coincided with heavy rain. You definitely don’t want all that water to go straight into the rivers at the same time with no buffer, and filling up a lake is a great buffer!
[2] Sunday the 16th of July between 2 PM and 3 PM spot prices reached an all time low of -61,84 € per Mega-Watt-hour. I.e. that’s how much power companies had to pay for every MWh of energy produced! (Due to changes in my workplace, I haven’t been paying close attention to the spot prices in the last two years, so for all I know this all-time low may very well have been surpassed since then).
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Catastrophic inland […]
@GC Gal, it’s certainly true that many of the problems we see with the environment wouldn’t be nearly so bad if we hadn’t had such enormous world population growth during the 20th century. It’s also likely that the 21st century will follow a completely different pattern, peaking and then declining again. A hundred years from now, the world population may be less than it is today.
Western people intentionally having fewer children will have almost no impact on anything. All developed countries already have births below replacement rate. Within a few years, the only countries with fertility above replacement will be in a band across the middle of Africa – the same countries that still have a life expectancy under 60.
As Attenborough’s comments suggest, the greatest difference that could be made in population growth would come from providing women living in that band of high-fertility countries with more stability, freedom, education, and choice.