lightblueline

The San Francisco Chronicle (February 18, 2007) has published a set of maps detailing how even one meter of sea-level rise will impact the entire bay:

"New maps show that neighborhoods and roads in many cities near the San Francisco Bay shoreline would be under water if global warming causes tides to rise as much as 3 feet in the coming decades, and officials say regions face key decisions about where people will be able to live and build.

The maps, which the Bay Conservation and Development Commission prepared for The Chronicle, offer a detailed look at how a changing shoreline would affect life around the bay.

Here are the latest Google Earth layers for 7-meter lightblueline Santa Barbara. There's also 5m, 3m, and 1m.

As Santa Barbara prepares to welcome James Hansen on February 5, we can read an interview he did which aired on February 2 on the program Living on Earth.

Dr. Hansen describes the scenario where ice sheet melting in the past resulted in a sea level rise at the rate of one meter every twenty years. When lightblueline talks about the vulnerability that climate change brings to coastal cities, this type of nonlinear process is precisely the target of our action. We are not predicting a seven meter rise in a century, even though this has happened in the past. We are predicting that the "business as usual" scenario of carbon generation will result in a global climate where we cannot be certain that the polar ice sheets will remain intact over the next several hundred years. The vulnerability to sea level rise is the same whether it takes seven decades or seventeen decades. We share a common future in Santa Barbrara that our children's children will face. We have only a few years to turn the situation around.

The Washington Post (February 2, 2007), like a thousand other news outlets, reviewed the latest report by the IPCC. This report offers the highest confidence to date that humans are affecting the global climate. On the topic of sea-level rise the Post says,

"The report was the first of four to be released this year by the panel, which was created by the United Nations in 1988. It found:

_Global warming is "very likely" caused by man, meaning more than 90 percent certain. That's the strongest expression of certainty to date from the panel.

Draft of the new curb marker design for the standard 3 inch by 10 inch marker.

Image from Google Earth

The Arctic Sea ice

The floating sea ice of the Arctic covers an area equal to that of the United States. The permanent presence of sea ice, ice sheets, and continuous permafrost are unique features of the Polar Regions. Even though it is characterized by its harsh environment and vast landscapes the Arctic serves as the home of many forms of life, including organisms living in the ice, fish and marine mammals living in the sea, birds, land animals such as polar bears, and human societies. But much more than that, its white ice cover reflects huge amounts of sunlight and thereby helps the world stay cool.