The Sunday New York Times has an article warning that accelerating sea level rise means we’d better start thinking of abandoning some of our coastal areas – even some large cities.

“We can’t afford to protect everything. We will have to abandon some areas.”

The latest science shows we should be planning for a sea level rise of at least 3 feet over this century.

Scientists long believed that the collapse of the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica would take thousands of years, with sea level possibly rising as little as seven inches in this century, about the same amount as in the 20th century.

But researchers have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica.

As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 — an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over.

And the calculations suggest that the rise could conceivably exceed six feet, which would put thousands of square miles of the American coastline under water and would probably displace tens of millions of people in Asia.

The scientists say that a rise of even three feet would inundate low-lying lands in many countries, rendering some areas uninhabitable. It would cause coastal flooding of the sort that now happens once or twice a century to occur every few years. It would cause much faster erosion of beaches, barrier islands and marshes. It would contaminate fresh water supplies with salt.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress has posted a graph showing sea level rise in three scenarios.  Of course we’re on track for the worse-case scenario which would result from our “do nothing” policies, where the midpoint of the range of sea level rise is nearly five feet.

The Times article says Orrin H. Pilkey of Duke University, one of the deans of American coastal studies, is advising coastal communities to plan for a rise of at least five feet by 2100. Romm points out that Pilkey in fact is advising to plan on a rise of at least seven feet.

Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition recently proposed a new Goal 20, which would require Oregon communities to begin planning for sea level rise. Oregon Shores’ draft goal assumed a modest 2-foot rise by 2100, about half the sea level rise considered likely in the 2009 report  The Impacts of Sea-Level Rise on the California Coast prepared for California’s Interagency Climate Action Team by the Pacific Institute. Oregon Shores’ proposal, inadequate as it was, was dismissed by the Land Conservation and Development Commission.

Especially after the most recent election results, planning for anything other than a continuation of business as usual is a non-starter, in the U.S. as well as here in Oregon. We will continue to do nothing until we are literally swamped by events.

Recently the media have given a lot of coverage to a supposed new scientific consensus that sea levels will rise by about one meter by 2100. For example, this is from a story in Physorg.com:

Recent studies agree that sea level will rise by roughly one meter over this century for a mid-range emission scenario. This is 3 times higher than predicted by the IPCC.

New research from several international research groups, including the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen provides independent consensus that IPCC predictions of less than a half a meter rise in sea levels is around 3 times too low. The new estimates show that the sea will rise approximately 1 meter in the next 100 years in agreement with other recent studies. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.

But it’s not that simple, as this chart posted at Climate Feedback shows:

As you can see, the lower range of estimates of sea level rise are converging at around one meter. The upper range of the latest estimates is now hovering around two meters.  And it seems that every year, as scientists’ understanding of ice sheet dynamics grows, estimates of future sea level rise are growing as well.

You’d think people who live along the coast would be beginning to get a little concerned, wouldn’t you?  Think again.

From Florida, Mark Schrope reports that coastal development continues virtually unabated in Miami in spite of its vulnerability:

Right now Florida is showing almost no leadership on responding sensibly to storms and to rising sea level,” says Robert Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Orrin Pilkey of Duke University in North Carolina, a well-known proponent of greater constraints on coastal development, is even more forthright. “I call it an outlaw state,” he says. “Florida has been particularly irresponsible and it’s going to pay the price very soon.

As Climate Feedback points out, worse than just ignoring the threat of sea level rise, the state of Florida has taken drastic action to ensure that waterside properties damaged in storms can be rebuilt in the same locations time and time again.

Here in Oregon, plans by the City of Newport to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion and to impose new rules governing how construction can occur in them are raising the outrage of property owners. Oregonlive reports:

Property owners here are furious over city plans to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion — and how construction can occur in them.

Proposed building code changes for new construction in areas known as geologic hazard zones will cost property owners billions of dollars, they say, and are bound to trigger lawsuits.

Talk about the changes began circulating town this month. Angry locals swamped a Planning Commission meeting and quickly formed the Central Coast Home and Business Owners Association to fight the changes, which they accuse Newport officials of trying to sneak in.

At the heart of the battle is the city’s plan to adopt maps made by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries in 2004. The maps show landslide and erosion zones, coding them in red, orange and yellow according to the degree of risk. Red is the highest. . . .

Opponents say the changes are naive and wrongheaded — and will cost everyone. They fear that under the changes, existing buildings in red zones would become “nonconforming” uses, making them nearly impossible to refinance, sell or insure.

The city has backed off some of the most controversial proposals, and “further revisions are likely.”

Better an inevitable “natural” disaster than what development interests call an “economic disaster.” In Oregon, as elsewhere, it seems our approach to an unpalatable situation is to bury our heads in the sand. Until we drown.

A recent post reported on scientists’ findings that Greenland’s glaciers are melting from the bottom up. Findings from another team of scientists help explain why: subtropical waters from warmer latitudes are reaching Greenland’s glaciers, driving melting and likely triggering an acceleration of ice loss.

Credit: Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The research team, led by Fiamma Straneo, a physical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, found that subtropical waters are reaching Greenland’s glaciers, driving melting and likely triggering an acceleration of ice loss. Melting ice also means more fresh water in the ocean, which could flood into the North Atlantic and disrupt a global system of currents, known as the Ocean Conveyor.

Science Daily quotes Straneo:

This is the first time we’ve seen waters this warm in any of the fjords in Greenland. The subtropical waters are flowing through the fjord very quickly, so they can transport heat and drive melting at the end of the glacier.

The Greenland ice sheet’s contribution to sea level rise over the last decade has doubled due to increased melting and especially to the widespread acceleration of outlet glaciers.

The research teamconducted two extensive surveys during July and September of 2008 in Sermilik Fjord, a 100-kilometer long glacial fjord in East Greenland connecting Helheim Glacier with the Irminger Sea. In 2003 alone, Helheim Glacier retreated several kilometers and almost doubled its flow speed.  Deep inside the fjord, researchers found subtropical water as warm as 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius). The team also reconstructed seasonal temperatures on the shelf using data collected by 19 hooded seals tagged with satellite-linked temperature depth-recorders. The data revealed that the shelf waters warm from July to December, and that subtropical waters are present on the shelf year round.