Are We Boiling The World's Oceans

Our local curmudgeon has a few things to say about those in Pamlico County who deny climate change science. Early last week, Tony Tharp, whose sailboat Yoknapatawpha II has just moved to a mooring ball at Stewart, Florida, took on Pamlico County's membership in NC-20.

First asking how much the county pays for its membership, he observes: . ."..our county shouldn't even be a member of this off-the-rails collection of climate-change deniers and sea-level-rise naysayers." The group, he observes, "boasts on its website that it has provided state regulatory officials with, "numerous scientific studies showing that despite 80 years of manmade CO₂ increase, there is no acceleration in Sea Level Rise."

That's nonsense, of course. 

The science is quite clear. The world is getting warmer. Fast. And humans are the cause.

Here is the data and the explanation. 

Thirty years ago when I was reading early reports on global warming that seemed puzzled that atmospheric temperatures weren't rising as fast as CO2 levels suggested they should, it occurred to me the scientists were looking in the wrong place. They should, I thought, look at ocean temperature. It turns out they were looking in the oceans, but not deep enough. Now they are looking in the deep ocean and that's where much of the heat energy has been going. How much heat? The amount of heat energy absorbed by the oceans each year is alarming. In 2013 the oceans absorbed the heat equivalent of 378 million Hiroshima size atomic bombs.  Over the past 16 years the rate of heat absorption has ballooned from the heat of two atomic bombs per second to twelve per second. Not good for fish and other ocean life. Not to mention acidification of the oceans because of atmospheric carbon. And not good for agriculture and other human activities, as this heat energy enters the atmosphere.

Residents of East North Carolina - and for that matter, anyone in the real estate industry - should be raising the roof in protest at the inaction. If there is any dispute about global warming, it is different estimates among climate scientists about how quickly our ice fields on land will melt, and therefore how high the sea will rise.

The present estimate is as much as a meter (39 inches) sea level rise by end of the 21st century. When the Antarctic ice cap and the Greenland ice cap melt, the sea level rise will exceed 200 feet. Raleigh will be a coastal town.
 
As Tony Tharp points out, even some in the real estate industry are worried:

Len Berry, director of Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Environmental Studies, reports developers have quietly contacted the university to check out projections of how much sea level will rise in the coming decades as they look for future safe investments . . . Jason King, with the Dover, Kohl urban planning group in Coral Gables, says the firm’s planners are now factoring in changing sea level in work with developers. King reports mortgage lenders “are following the discussions very closely” on sea level rise, as are many others in real estate. (Source)

"And when," as Tharp contends, "NC-20 claims on its website that its goals are, "science-based environmental regulation (and) science-based sea-level rise projections" you can rest assure that's code for denying the science that already exists in both areas.'

Wake up, folks! There's still time to do something. But not much longer.