Once upon a time most of Jesusland was under water.

Maybe if the US corporatocracy thinks Wall St is going to drown they might actually do something about it. They certainly show no interest in saving Bangladesh or the Maldives or similar areas.

Oh yes, I forgot, there aren't any rich white males living in those areas....

The feedback snowball gets larger and gains momentum by the day.

Buck, did you read a couple of weeks ago about the methane rising off the Norwegian coast? That feedback is going to turn the snowball into a giant avalanche I fear.

And all the while, the deniers camp is frothing at the mouth and posting wildly over the fraudulent e-mails 'proving' that climate change is a hoax...

I would bet serious money that the e-mails in question have the same providence as the forged Niger uranium documents used to start the Iraqi occupation.

Isn't it curious that these e-mails 'surfaced' just ahead of the Copenhagen Climate Summit? Just in time to throw a nice big wrench in the works and keep anything substantive from being done, as they will no doubt be used by the Corporate side to 'prove' that there is no climate change after all.

I think it is high time to take these thugs to task.

In the street.

Reading, Dr. Orrin Pilkey's new book "The Rising Sea" I've noted that Pilkey who is the dean of US Coastal Geologists out of Duke U. says that we can expect sea rise of at least 20 ft. by 2100! He says that most scientists, Govt's and all the media misunderstood the 2006 IPCC report on global sea rise. What happened was the basis for predicting sea rise was altered from the 2001 report that had included polar ice sheet and greenland melting. These areas were excluded from the revised report in 2006! This made it look as if the ests. for sea rise had fallen not risen. Pilkey pts. out that this had the effect of confusing everyone. The real sea rise estimates are now far higher even since the 2006 report because its NOW known that Greenland and the Antarctic are all melting at increasingly rapid rates!

One little silver lining to all this...

At a sea level rise of just 15 feet (4.5m) the tidal Potomac's waters are is lapping at the bottom steps of the US Capitol, at 55 feet (16.5m), it spills into the Rotunda and fills the congressional chambers.

Much as there was "flat Earthers" for many years after the globe was circumnavigated, so too will the paid &/or deluded climate deniers be with us even as low lying lands become part of the ocean floor. What needs to be done is that they need to be made as irrelevant to the discussion at hand as flat Earthers became during the end of the 16th Century. Mockery works for me.

Here's a fun thing to do if you live near the coast. Beg, borrow or steal a GPS. Most of them can tell you your distance above sea level. Now get a big piece of blue chalk and go for a walk by the beach. Mark walls and trees and bridges at the four meter height. I use a blue wavy line that turns into '350.org'.

I dream of an action involving a powerful rotating laser, like those fancy carpenter's laser levels, but mounted four meters up from the water level on a sailboat's mast. I'd tour the harbours of the world, drawing the updated waterline with a line of laser light on the city's streets and buildings at night.

Of course you'd have to adjust your line height every two days or so when worse news comes in from the scientific community.

"Up to now, scientists had thought that East Antarctica was in "balance," meaning that it accumulated as much mass and it gave off, perhaps a bit more."

I believe this is 'game-changing' news. Up to now, the belief has been that the West Antarctica ice sheet was the problem. But most of the ice is in the East, and it was even hoped that increases there might compensate for losses in the West. No longer. We now have a fairly complete picture:
Arctic: melting
Greenland: melting
W Antarctic: melting
E Antarctic: melting

I'm more confident than ever that my prediction of a month ago that a sea level rise of 3 ft (1m) within 20 years is correct. The bad news just keeps on accelerating.

ubrew, "accelerating" is the definitive word that scientists keep leaving out of their projections.

From that old song, "Baby, you ain't seen nothing yet!"

When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson

I know I'm a broken record on this, but this is all part of the unfolding, sixth extinction. Indeed, we ain't seen nothin' yet!

The film version of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" opens on Wednesday.

Denialists will use the large error bars being nearly as big as the estimate to suggest that the estimate of ice loss is wrong.

The ice sheets may be one third gone before there is statistical one hundred per cent certainty. And carbon dioxide levels may be past 450 ppm before error bars clearly indicate the rise is hundred percent human triggered.

At least the melting of ice will be helping to keep the oceans and the earth a bit cooler, and offset the larger temperature rises that will eventually happen after the ice goes and the northern tundra has melted.

After this our world will be in end stage pandemonium with climate catastrophe. Coming soon to be a reality that will effect us all.

And still right now, those that benefit most from the carbon economy resist with all their polical might and money, any scheme that will reduce carbon emissions for the benefit of all. I hope they live to see the fruits of denial. Coming real soon to become harsher reality for you.

I was a bit disappointed at possibly being dead before major changes occur (I hope to last until around 2060)...I feel better, now, that I may have a chance to be a part of much...even if I just get to, briefly, be in a big crowd of rebellious people getting tazed or lasered from a flying platform as we run for higher ground, where our out-of-shape leaders have holed up and sequestered the really good food, water, women and pot...

It's not the sea level rise that will ruin your beachfront house. It's the storm surges from the super-hurricanes that will carry your house up the street, or the peak wind gusts and more occasional twisters that will scatter your roof about a mile downwind. You don't really have to wait as long as 50 years for 380 ppm of CO2 to bag your house 2 or 3 times before you give up and move inland. Actually, your home insurance company wants to raise your rates right now.

The problem with the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (the really big one!) is that a portion of it rests on the seabed. Relatively warm ocean waters can undermine the ice sheet even in freezing temperatures. Then sections of the ice sheet can crumble and float off to warmer waters. A large section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has the same problem. The westernmost part of the Greenland Ice Sheet is also resting on the sea bed.

After the ice sheets melt, we will have to redraw Greenland and Antarctica to match the new reality. Of course, by then the oceans will all be 100 to 200 feet higher so we'll need new world maps anyway.

Back to the ice a mo. If it rests on the sea bed it is effectively partly floating, so surely the displacement will be less than if it were totally land bound?

Anyway, there are too many of us all wanting a fun, lazy life, which soon we won't be able to have. We'll fight and kill and destroy, and only a few rich a a lot of poor slaving for them will be left. I'll get killed, so I won't see the outcome. Pity.

Another possible factor---

As land-borne icesheets melt, the water mass flows to the oceans and spreads out by centrifugal force, most of it at the equatorial bulge.

When spinning mass changes locations, forces (torque?? angular momentum??)change on the tectonic plates, as well as the unburdened land surfaces they melted off of tending to rise (very slowly, but massively).

The thing is, that the resulting magma flows (mostly undersea at plate boundaries) from the tectonic activity may be the source of the last 2-3 degrees of warming that will bring us to the Eemian limit much sooner than other data show.

How about a real Geologist commenting on this?

Offering to sell oceanfront property in Arizona may not be a joke much longer!