Strangelove wrote: ↑Mon Jun 03, 2019 6:56 pm
https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
PETER JAMES SPIELMANN June 29, 1989
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels
if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.
Shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands, while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time, according to a study by UNEP and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.
He said even the most conservative scientists ″already tell us there’s nothing we can do now to stop a ... change″ of about 3 degrees.
Well, it has risen 1.0 degrees since 1960, but only 0.6 since 1989.
Then again, assuming it's an American article, he could be using the outdated and rather quaint Fahrenheit system, if so, the 0.6 degrees Celsius should be multiplied by 1.8, which makes it 1.0 Fahrenheit.
And yes, people say even if we stop emitting CO2 completely, the temperature will still keep rising for quite some time as the warming of the permafrost has it releasing huge amounts of methane, that will keep the warming trend going.
We'll see. I'm optimistic. The transfer from fossil to renewable is taking off, especially in Europe and China, and at the same time they are developing techniques to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it underground, or even better - making graphene out of thin air!
https://www.nationalgrapheneassociation ... -products/
I expect the world to keep warming for a few decades but then stabilize as we at long last do take the measures necessary to rid ourselves of the fossil fuel dependency and instead start reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere with various new methods.
As for the sea levels, they
are rising:
Only about 7-8 cm since that article, but roughly 30 cm (a foot in medieval measures) since 1900.
Note that he said that sea levels will rise "up to three feet"
when the polar caps melt. That is an ongoing process that might take up to a hundred years, and just three feet is a very conservative estimate of what that would mean. It could rise quite a bit more. As shown in this graph:
Sea levels won't affect Sweden much though, as we are still rising out of the sea since having been weighed down by the ice sheet during the last ice age. Northern Sweden rises from the sea by roughly 1 cm per year, so the 1 metre sea level rise over a century estimated by most scientists is a zero sum game for us. Well, apart from the southern tip, that may get lost eventually. They are already having some problems with increased sea erosion eating away at the coastline.
I assume Canada could be in a similar position as us? You probably also still rise from the sea, right?
It'll be a lot worse for places like Bangladesh, the Maldives, Netherlands and Florida. Do not buy real estate in those places, iykwim...
