Stephan: One out of three Americans will be impacted by sea rise. Here is a first estimate of what that is going to cost the country. And who do you think will be paying this tab? Why you and me, of course. I actually expect the cost to be about three times this estimate, in large measure because during the Trump administration no serious effort has been made to make any preparation of the chain of disasters we are seeing.
To protect themselves from the inevitable threat of rising sea levels, coastal communities in the United States will have to shell out more than $400 billion, according to a new report released by the Center for Climate Integrity.
Authors of the new report estimate 50,000 miles of coastal barriers will need to be built across 22 states over the next two decades. The report, compiled with the help of engineering firm Resilient Analytics, organizes the costs by city, county, congressional district and state.
Not surprisingly, researchers with the Center for Climate Integrity expect Florida to pay the steepest price — more than $75 billion — to protect its coastal communities from rising seas.
For the report, researchers relied on moderate sea-level rise projections and expected yearly storm surge. Should sea levels rise more quickly than expected, governments will be forced to spend more and build more quickly.
Recent surveys of melting patterns in Antarctica and Greenland suggest Earth’s biggest ice sheets are increasingly unstable, with melt rates accelerating as a result of warmer air and ocean temperatures. Climate scientists agree that the burning of […]
No Comments
Thursday, July 11th, 2019
William Poundstone , - Vox
Stephan: This morning I got an email from a reader who asked me, How long do you think we have, Stephan. With climate change and everything, how long do you think humanity will last?"
I didn't really have an answer so I went looking for what others might have said. I found a lot of nonsense, a lot of ideological and religious BS, and then I found this.
Credit: Javier Zarracina/Vox
The most mind-boggling controversy in the contemporary philosophy of science is the “doomsday argument,” a claim that a mathematical formula can predict how long the human race will survive. It gives us even odds that our species will meet its end within the next 760 years.
The doomsday argument doesn’t tell what’s going to kill us — it just gives the date (very, very approximately).
When I first came across this idea, I thought it was absurd. A prediction must be founded on data, not math! That is by no means an uncommon reaction. One critic, physicist Eric J. Lerner, branded doomsday “pseudo-science, a mere manipulation of numbers.”
Yet I now believe the doomsday prediction merits serious attention — I’ve written my latest book about it. Start with J. Richard Gott III. He’s a Princeton astrophysicist, one of several scholars who independently formulated the doomsday argument in the last decades of the 20th century. (Others […]
1 Comment
Thursday, July 11th, 2019
DAVID CORN, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Day after day I keep waiting for a Republican in the Congress, or a cabinet officer, to put forward a fully thought out and articulated vision of how to deal with climate change. An alternative to what AOC, Sanders, Inslee, or Warren are proposing. We know it won't come from Trump who says he doesn't believe in climate change, although he has started to gaslight the country about how he is doing everything in his power to produce, "clean air, pure water."
Meanwhile, for the community of climatologists, geologists, marine biologists, arctic specialists, and other scientists, the men and women who study climate change every day, and who command the facts, their sense of urgency grows exponentially. Here is one take on that.
Credit: Devin Yalkin
On election night 2016, Kim Cobb, a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, was on Christmas Island, the world’s largest ring-shaped coral reef atoll, about 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. A climate scientist, she was collecting coral skeletons to produce estimates of past ocean temperatures. She had been taking these sorts of research trips for two decades, and over recent years she had witnessed about 85 percent of the island’s reef system perish due to rising ocean temperatures. “I was diving with tears in my eyes,” she recalls.
In a row house made of cinder blocks on the tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she monitored the American election results, using a satellite uplink that took several minutes to load a page. When she saw Donald Trump’s victory, she felt shock and soon descended into severe depression. “I had the firm belief that Washington would act on climate change and would be acting soon,” the […]
No Comments
Thursday, July 11th, 2019
Peter Wehner, Contributing Editor - The Atlantic
Stephan: It is my view that the most dangerous group in the United States is not inner-city youth gangs, or something like that. Rather it is White evangelical christofascists. I don't know whether it is a matter of low IQ, willful ignorance, the Fox propaganda operation they all watch or what. But they actually believe, as this report describes, that Trump is God's chosen leader for America, and they support the moral abyss that is the Trump administration without reservation. Trump was right. He could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York, and this group would give him a pass, just as they have his lies, his cheating, his corruption, and his confessed sexual molestation.
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) stands with Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. after delivering keynote address at commencement in Lynchburg, Virginia, U.S., May 13, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas
Last week, Ralph Reed, the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s founder and chairman, told the group, “There has never been anyone who has defended us and who has fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump. No one!”
Reed is partially right; for many evangelical Christians, there is no political figure whom they have loved more than Donald Trump.
