The popular phrase from the HBO show Game of Thrones, “winter is coming”, no longer applies to our world. That is because regular and smooth seasonal transitions have become a thing of the past. The summers have been getting increasingly hotter while the winters have become shorter and sporadic but also more extreme. The repercussions of Global Warming that scientists (That’s 97% of the entire scientific community) have been warning us about for years have arrived. So, the more appropriate saying is, “winter is possibly coming, but we don’t know when or how bad”.
In a recent New York Times article (Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun, Justin Gillis) the threat level of the melting ice caps was described as….well…..threatening. “These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt. Moreover, the high seas interfere with the drainage of storm water”. As crippling an effect as those dangers will have, they’re only the start. Consider that mankind has always built upon the shores of rivers and coast and in the last 5,000 years we’ve gotten pretty good at developing our communities along the waterfront. Unfortunately, we aren’t very adept at living in communities where the water arrives after we’ve already established our presence. Another major effect of the melting ice caps and anyone living along the eastern coast will confirm this, is that massive hurricanes have become dangerously frequent. According to a study (Trade-off between intensity and frequency of global tropical cyclones) in 2015 by scientists Jim Elsner and Namyoung Kang, it was stated that due to the rising temperatures from greenhouse effects, the hurricanes we’ll be experiencing fewer storms but certainly more intense and destructive storms. The H.R.D. (Hurricane Research Division) reports that since 2005, the United States has had a yearly average of 3.3 storms classified as Major Storms. These are the storms on the scale of Katrina and Sandy that are so damaging they call in the F.E.M.A. boys.
The response of many major cities, like Miami Florida and New Orleans, is to build Sea Walls or levees. For those of you who don’t know, levees are man-made earthworks meant to keep floods at bay. It sounds simple enough to build dirt and clay mounds along the water’s edge to keep people safe. However, that job’s importance is often neglected by Washington, in which case you get faulty levees due to poor funding and low maintenance like what happened in New Orleans during Katrina. The Republican led congress has been refusing to address the issue of rising sea levels (as well as refusing to acknowledge the reality of global warming), meaning it’s up to local governments to fund any anti-flooding construction. Thus raising the question of can humanity afford to live along the coast in the years to come?
What is certain is that modern humanity will have a great deal of adapting to do in order to live on this transforming planet. However, to what degree our future governments will address this crisis remains something of a mystery.
Image source: The Atlantic
Minus 6 this morning on my thermometer. Winter is already here if you ask me.
There has actually been NO global warming in the last 20 years. The sun has no sunspots. Winter in the southern hemisphere was a bad one. Things are looking grim.
https://iceagenow.info/
You should rely on science evidences not on your feelings.
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Al Gore had a lot of good and real scientist along, and get Nobel price even. They were totally wrong I believe.
But what do I know. I'm just uneducated dumb guy on steemit. We'll see who is right on the end.
here is some pretty good stuff
check out the rest of that graph, not just a limited section.
please educate yourself out of this pit of propaganda. endlessly refuting this nonsense is boring. human caused climate change is a demonstrable hoax. we are polluting our air, water, and land. we need to stop. we have nothing to do with climate change. i understand this can be confusing. CO2 is not the problem. focus on the real threats or we are history.
I'm glad to see more and more people realizing about climate change hoax.
it took me a while, but about 7 years ago someone whose opinion i respected because of the example they set, challenged me to prove myself wrong. when it came to the subject of what was then called global warming, this was astonishingly easy. there are mountain ranges of evidence just underneath the thinnest skin of propaganda. i cannot tell you how foolish i felt. it seems that almost everything that is popularly believed is some kind of lie or more.
You shouldn't blame yourself anyway, because industries who release CO, and toxic gases in the air are the first who should be blamed. U.S., Russia, China etc
Matthew is the first major storm to hit the US in 4000 days.http://www.drroyspencer.com/2016/09/matthew-to-arrive-4000-days-after-last-major-hurricane/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425232/climate-change-no-its-not-97-percent-consensus-ian-tuttle
The "97 percent" figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.
it's even worse than that. check this out :
that jack of the lantern looks for all the world as if it might be a troll.
You say the nicest things.
Would that be Alinsky Rule #5?
i wasn't trying to ridicule but is the most powerful weapon a troll? or did i get the dynamic backwards?
Well, when I bought my house I made sure it was at least 300 feet above sea level in a nice cooler climate area free of hurricanes - just in case.
Maybe I can rent out my spare room if some places become uninhabitable - (hopefully this won’t be needed). Climate Exodus
Thanks for posting!