26 Comments

Sea levels are rising and threatening island nations due to AGW; this is definitely true. Causes of flooding in NW Europe are more complex though. One of the factors is ongoing isostatic adjustment of the lithosphere following the retreat of the ice sheets from the most recent ice age glaciation. For instance, southern England continues to experience massive flooding because it is actually sinking in elevation while the northern part of the island, Scotland, is rising in elevation. During the last glaciation Scotland was buried under something like 1000 feet of ice. The weight of all of that ice compressed the Earth's crust in the Northern hemisphere, pushing it down into the mantle (asthenosphere). This action pushed part of the relatively elastic mantle outward away from the area of compression. The migrated mantle then pushed up the crustal surface that overlayed it. In the case of Great Britain the ice-free southern half of the island rose up as the ice sheet compressed the northern half. Over the millennia since the ice sheet retreated the displaced mantle has been gradually migrating back under the now uncovered regions, causing those areas to rise back up in elevation and causing the areas that it had been previously pushed into to sink back down. This is what is happening in Great Britain and other parts of northwestern Europe. Local increases in sea level due to thermal expansion of the hydrosphere are compounding the effect and adding to the problem.

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But who has the gall to de-liver the bad news?

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Well, they do hate us for our freedoms.

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These are largely the same people who somehow think that our president being born in Hawaii gives them extra cover to attack his citizenship...so yeah, they clearly don't think anything that happens outside the continental US, Alaska, and our various oil fiefdoms matters at all.

Quick, somebody find an oil field or a diamond mine that is being threatened directly by rising sea levels. Maybe then these bastards would figure it the fuck out.

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Don't even think of telling Dr. Benishek that you've got a fever.

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Denialist crap <a href="http:\/\/www.thewire.com\/global\/2013\/01\/its-so-hot-australia-they-added-new-colors-weather-map\/60701\/" target="_blank">doesn't sell well in Australia</a>, either.

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The oil companies plotting their new tanker routes are particulary .... ugh ... what's the word for "cynical beyond human comprehension"?

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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

-Upton Sinclair

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Mmmmm Patrick McGoohan....

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I am really enjoying all of this marketing hype for "Idiocracy 2: You're Living It"

That's what this is, right? It's not actually real people who really don't understand that real high tide added to a higher sea level is an actual concern??

AH FUCK.

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you know what they say, once the camel gets its nose in the tent...

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Nice.

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To be fair, he's never read a peer-reviewed science journal aside from JAMA and Nature, which are notably <b>not about climatology</b>.

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the stupidity burns...

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Yes, Twitchy, tides are caused by the moon. You know what else is involved? The ocean. You know what's happening to the ocean now? It's getting bigger. So what happens when a the moon's gravity has more to affect? Bigger tides.

(Sorry, I didn't have time to craft the finger puppets to explain.)

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the toughest part of smoking a camel is getting the rolling paper around the hump...

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