Climate change is causing the melting of the polar ice caps as well as the melting of ice shelfs and glaciers in many areas of the globe. If all the Ice of the planet melted sea level would rise by more than 60 meters (200ft). So let’s hope it won’t go that far. But even if only parts of the ice melt, sea levels will rise. In many areas of the planet this effect is already noticed.

The rising sea will wash across great swaths of South Florida. Salt water will contaminate the well fields. Roads and farmland and low-lying neighborhoods will be inundated. The soil will no longer absorb the kind of heavy rainfalls that drenched South Florida last weekend. Septic tanks will fail. Drainage canals won’t drain. Sewers will back up. Intense storms will pummel the beachfront. Mighty rainfalls, in between droughts, will bring more floods.

The economic losses and the mitigation costs associated with the effects of global warming over the next few decades will be overwhelming. It will cost a medium-sized town like Pompano Beach hundreds of millions just to salvage its water and sewage systems.

A sobering study released by Florida Atlantic University contemplated the effects of global warming in specific terms, particularly for South Florida, considered one of the more vulnerable metropolitan areas in the world, with six million residents clustered by the ocean, living barely above sea level.

The study from FAU’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions, adding to an overwhelming scientific consensus about the disastrous effects of global warming, and along with growing hard evidence that temperature changes are already altering the environment, ought to have sent tremors through the halls of government.

Except it didn’t. Perhaps the most peculiar phenomenon associated with global warming has been a burgeoning disdain for climate science even as scientific consensus grows more urgent. Forget the stickier question of whether global warming has been fueled by human activity (as an overwhelming percentage of climate scientists believe), a poll by the Pew last year found that only 59 percent of Americans will even acknowledge the earth is warming, compared to 79 percent just five years ago.

This peculiarly American phenomenon comes despite a decade of record high temperatures. And despite findings of a sustained global temperature increase from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Hadley Centre in England, and, just last week, the University of California’s Berkeley Earth project, which compiled more than a billion temperature records dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world.

If a billion temperature readings and a record-breaking drought this summer in Texas and Oklahoma weren’t convincing enough, global warming should be as plain as the Google Earth satellite photos of polar icecaps.

“It is really quite an unbelievable time,” said Harold Wanless, chairman of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami. Wanless, who contributed to the FAU study, described the “dramatically accelerating melt from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.” He said, “We have forced the greenhouse gasses to levels that have not been reached since sea level was about 100 feet higher than present.”

And yet, Wanless lamented, “The population and many politicians seem to be grabbing at whatever denial statements are tossed out. Seems a bit like smoker and alcohol addiction.”

Somehow, lamented FAU’s Ricardo Alvarez, an expert on structural vulnerabilities and hazard mitigation, denial of global warming has been absorbed into an ever more contentious competition between political convictions in the U.S. “It’s no a matter of belief. It’s not religion,” he said.

Climate is not politics. Not abortion. Not gun rights. Yet another Pew poll this spring found 75 percent of far right conservatives, 63 percent of libertarians and 55 percent of self-described “Main Street” Republicans did not “believe” in global warming. The denial doctrine seems to have been embraced by the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, with the exception of Jon Huntsman, as a rite of passage.

Barry N. Heimlich, lead researcher on the FAU study, suggested Friday that the media has contributed to the gulf between science and the public. “By giving equal credence to positions that are not well supported by science, the media presents a confusing and distorted picture to the public,” he said. “I believe that the media has a responsibility to present all sides of a story, but it also has an obligation to emphasize the truth and provide people with the proper balance of information so they can make intelligent, informed choices based on information that is reliable, supported by facts and not manipulated by special interests.”

Yet Heimlich is something of an optimist. In a state dominated by right-wing politics, with a climate denier in the governor’s office, he said, South Florida has remained a relative island of climate enlightenment. Heimlich talked about the green initiatives by both the Broward and Miami-Dade county commissions and by city governments. He spoke of the sense of urgency among the 40 South Florida water managers he interviewed for the study.

Heimlich insisted that in the hundreds of talks he has given across the region, from schools to political groups to civic organizations, deniers are a diminishing presence. It could be that the utter specifics that Heimlich and his researchers have accumulated simply scare the skeptics into silence. Daunting facts just tumbled out of his mouth: add another six inches to the sea level, he said, and 15 of Miami-Dade’s 28 flood-gate structures lose their ability to drain the region. Those six inches are an imminent inevitablity.

The study (http://www.ces.fau.edu/files/projects/climate_change/Fl_ResilientCoast.pdf) uses a single city, Pompano Beach, to illustrate the coming hazards facing water managers and local government. Within the next few decades, Pompano Beach will need to relocate well fields, build pump stations, replace septic tanks with a modern sewage system, reclaim wastewater, build a saltwater conversion plant and perhaps relocate residents from lowlying areas. It won’t be cheap.

And then there’s the beachfront. The study warns of erosion and of the possibility of very intense hurricanes, with a devastating sea surge riding atop heightened sea levels. The oceanfront, once the very allure of South Florida, will come to seem a treacherous and risky stretch of real estate.

Stephen Leatherman, co-director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research, who contributed to the study, insisted the science here was settled. He said via e-mail, “My work on sea level rise is straightforward — global warming causes sea level to rise, and rising sea level results in land loss, especially beach erosion…. There are no scientists that disagree with this statement, albeit the public may still be confused or not willing to accept this situation,” he said. “Especially if they own beachfront property.”

The question becomes, as climate deniers flourish in inverse proportion to the actual evidence, whether there’ll still be enough sand enough left on South Florida’s beaches to bury our collective heads.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/26/3226426/commentary-climate-change-deniers.html#ixzz1bsGp2Alo

Commentary: Climate change deniers may be washed away by rising seas – KansasCity.com.

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Ever wonder why general awareness of climate change and global warming is at such a low level? Of course, you are aware of it, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. But there are so many people out there who just don’t seem to care about the world wide problems climate change will bring with them in the very near future.

A new paper argues that climate educators and communicators are ignoring deeply held beliefs that influence climate skepticism.
It is the great riddle of the day in climate circles: Why is public concern about global warming so shallow, and why do widespread doubts about man-made climate change persist?

Everyone seems to have a pet theory. Al Gore blames the media and President Obama. Some green critics argue that Gore should look in the mirror. Let’s not ignore the recession, scholars remind us. Yes, but the lion’s share of blame must go to those “merchants of doubt”, particularly fossil fuel interests, and climate skeptics, plenty others assert. Err, actually, it’s our brain that’s the biggest problem, social scientists now say.
Commentary
Another reason, similar to that last one, is that cultural and religious beliefs predispose many to dismiss evidence that humans can greatly influence the climate. In fact, geographer Simon Donner in a paper published this week in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, argues:
“Successful climate change education and outreach programs should be designed to help overcome perceived conflict between climate science and long-held cultural beliefs, drawing upon lessons from communication and education of other potentially divisive subjects like evolution.”
Donner is not the first to try to bridge the gap between science and religion. E.O. Wilson gamely attempted to do so several years ago, with his book, The Creation. In a 2006 interview with NPR, Wilson acknowledged that, “the usual approach of secular science is to marginalize religion” in debates on environmental issues. After the book’s publication, this writer facilitated a lengthy dialogue between Wilson, ecologist Stuart Pimm and leading evangelical Richard Cizik, on areas where science and religion could find common ground. Expanding on that public dialogue has proven difficult. If anything, the polarized political landscape and the continuing climate wars have narrowed the space for science and religion to be reconciled.
Still, those who want to overcome obstacles to climate action should be mindful of culture’s importance, Donner stresses in his paper. He writes that “lingering public uncertainty about anthropogenic climate change may be rooted in an important but largely unrecognized conflict between climate science and some long held beliefs. In many cultures, the weather and climate have historically been viewed as too vast and too grand to be directly influenced by people.”
Donner writes that scholars studying public attitudes on climate change should factor in such cultural worldviews when accounting for climate skepticism. He surmises: “Underlying doubts that human activity can influence the climate may explain some of the malleability of public opinion about the scientific evidence for climate change.”
Donner suggests that climate educators and communicators learn from approaches that have worked in the evolution debate. He informs us:
“Pedagogical research on evolution finds that providing the audience with opportunities to evaluate how their culture or beliefs affect their willingness to accept scientific evidence is more effective than attempting to separate scientific views from religious or cultural views.”
Moreover, Donner argues that “reforming public communication” on climate change “will require humility on the part of scientists and educators.” He concludes:
“Climate scientists, for whom any inherent doubts about the possible extent of human influence on the climate were overcome by years of training in physics and chemistry of the climate system, need to accept that there are rational cultural, religious and historical reasons that the public may fail to believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, let alone that it warrants a policy response. It is unreasonable to expect a lay audience, not armed with the same analytical tools as scientists, to develop lasting acceptance during a one-hour public seminar of a scientific conclusion that runs counters to thousands of years of human belief. Without addressing the common long-standing belief that human activity cannot directly influence the climate, public acceptance of climate change and public engagement on climate solutions will not persist through the next cold winter or the next economic meltdown.”
The intersection where science and religion meet is all too often home to an ugly collision. Donner advises that such crack-ups can and should be avoided in the climate debate.
Can it be done?

Why Culture Matters in the Climate Debate | The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.

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You may have noticed that temperatures everywhere have become more and more extreme. Summer highs and winter lows are beyond anything ever measured. There is no more doubt as to if or if not the world is warming up.

FOR those who question whether global warming is really happening, it is necessary to believe that the instrumental temperature record is wrong. That is a bit easier than you might think.

There are three compilations of mean global temperatures, each one based on readings from thousands of thermometers, kept in weather stations and aboard ships, going back over 150 years. Two are American, provided by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one is a collaboration between Britain’s Met Office and the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (known as Hadley CRU). And all suggest a similar pattern of warming: amounting to about 0.9°C over land in the past half century.

To most scientists, that is consistent with the manifold other indicators of warming—rising sea-levels, melting glaciers, warmer ocean depths and so forth—and convincing. Yet the consistency among the three compilations masks large uncertainties in the raw data on which they are based. Hence the doubts, husbanded by many eager sceptics, about their accuracy. A new study, however, provides further evidence that the numbers are probably about right.

The uncertainty arises mainly because weather stations were never intended to provide a climatic record. The temperature series they give tend therefore to be patchy and even where the stations are relatively abundant, as in western Europe and America, they often contain inconsistencies. They may have gaps, or readings taken at different times of day, or with different kinds of thermometer. The local environment may have changed. Extrapolating a global average from such data involves an amount of tinkering—or homogenisation.

It might involve omitting especially awkward readings; or where, for example, a heat source like an airport has sprung up alongside a weather station, inputting a lower temperature than the data show. As such cases are mostly in the earlier portions of the records, this will exaggerate the long-term warming trend. That is at best imperfect. And for those—including Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas and would-be president —who claim to see global warming as a hoax by grant-hungry scientists, it may look like a smoking gun.

To build confidence in their methodologies, NASA and NOAA already publish their data and algorithms. Hadley CRU is now doing so. A grander solution, outlined in a forthcoming Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, would be to provide a single online databank of all temperature data and analysis. Part of the point would be to encourage more scientists and statisticians to test the existing analyses—and a group backed by Novim, a research outfit in Santa Barbara, California, has recently done just that.

Inconvenient data

Marshalled by an astrophysicist, Richard Muller, this group, which calls itself the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, is notable in several ways. When embarking on the project 18 months ago, its members (including Saul Perlmutter, who won the Nobel prize for physics this month for his work on dark energy) were mostly new to climate science. And Dr Muller, for one, was mildly sceptical of its findings. This was partly, he says, because of “climategate”: the 2009 revelation of e-mails from scientists at CRU which suggested they had sometimes taken steps to disguise their adjustments of inconvenient palaeo-data. With this reputation, the Berkeley Earth team found it unusually easy to attract sponsors, including a donation of $150,000 from the Koch Foundation.

Yet Berkeley Earth’s results, as described in four papers currently undergoing peer review, but which were nonetheless released on October 20th, offer strong support to the existing temperature compilations. The group estimates that over the past 50 years the land surface warmed by 0.911°C: a mere 2% less than NOAA’s estimate. That is despite its use of a novel methodology—designed, at least in part, to address the concerns of what Dr Muller terms “legitimate sceptics”.

Most important, Berkeley Earth sought an alternative way to deal with awkward data. Its algorithm attaches an automatic weighting to every data point, according to its consistency with comparable readings. That should allow for the inclusion of outlandish readings without distorting the result. (Except where there seems to be straightforward confusion between Celsius and Fahrenheit, which is corrected.) By avoiding traditional procedures that require long, continuous data segments, the Berkeley Earth methodology can also accommodate unusually short sequences: for example, those provided by temporary weather stations. This is another innovation that allows it to work with both more and less data than the existing compilations, with varying degrees of certainty. It is therefore able to compile an earlier record than its predecessors, starting from 1800. (As there were only two weather stations in America, a handful in Europe and one in Asia for some of that time, it has a high degree of uncertainty.) To test the new technique, however, much of the analysis uses the same data as NOAA and NASA.

Heat maps

In another apparent innovation, the Berkeley team has written into its analysis a geospatial technique, known as kriging, which uses the basic spatial correlations in weather to estimate the temperature at points between weather stations. This promises to provide a more nuanced heat map than presented in the existing compilations, which either consign an average temperature to an area defined by a grid square or, in the case of NASA, attempt a less ambitious interpolation.

It will be interesting to see whether this makes it past the review process. Peter Thorne, a climatologist at the Co-operative Institute for Climate and Satellites, in North Carolina, describes it as “quite a hard sell in periods that are data sparse”. He adds: “That doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It means you’ve got to prove it works.”

Two of the Berkeley Earth papers address narrower concerns. One is the poor location of many weather stations. A crowd-sourcing campaign by a meteorologist and blogger, Anthony Watts, established that most of America’s stations are close enough to asphalt, buildings or other heat sources to give artificially high readings. The other is the additional warming seen in built-up areas, known as the “urban heat-island effect”. Many sceptics fear that, because roughly half of all weather stations are in built-up areas, this may have inflated estimates of a temperature rise.

The Berkeley Earth papers suggest their analysis is able to accommodate these biases. That is a notable, though not original, achievement. Previous peer-reviewed studies—including one on the location of weather stations co-authored by Mr Watts—have suggested the mean surface temperatures provided by NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU are also not significantly affected by them.

Yet the Berkeley Earth study promises to be valuable. It is due to be published online with a vast trove of supporting data, merged from 15 separate sources, with duplications and other errors clearly signalled. At a time of exaggerated doubts about the instrumental temperature record, this should help promulgate its main conclusion: that the existing mean estimates are in the right ballpark. That means the world is warming fast.

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Just yesterday another scientist got cought with his hands in the mess, deleting and beautyfying the data related to rising sea levels caused by climate change/global warming on his report. It is unbelievable what these scientists do. Don’t they have any honor? Let’s not even mention ethics or morals…
Read on to get details on this shameful act of data falsification on annual climate change data reports.

It wasn’t really a surprise, but the recent actions of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality hit a new low, which is saying something for a body that repeatedly sides with business interests over environmental concerns.

Now, without any explanation, it has deleted references to climate change and its impact on rising water levels in Galveston Bay from a scientific article written for a TCEQ report. That’s called censorship.

Two years ago, as reported last week by the Chronicle’s Harvey Rice, TCEQ contracted with the Houston Advanced Research Center to produce a report, one compiled periodically by TCEQ’s Galveston Bay Estuary Program. John Anderson, a Rice University oceanography professor, was asked by HARC to write an article on sea-level rise in Galveston Bay. When the article was submitted, TCEQ deleted several references to human impact on climate change and on sea-level rates in the bay.

Agency spokeswoman Andrea Morrow gave no reason for the deletions, saying only that TCEQ disagreed with parts of the article. Anderson accused TCEQ of censorship. “It’s not about the science,” he said. “It’s all politics.” He refused to accept the changes, saying the article was a distillation of a 10-year study he conducted with other scientists, peer-reviewed and published by the Geological Society of America – in other words, a solid scientific study.

HARC vice president Jim Lester, editor of the report, and co-editor Lisa Gonzales sided with Anderson, and asked that their names be removed from the edited version. The ensuing stand-off, with neither side willing to give ground, ended with TCEQ deciding to kill the article.

Weighing in on his SciGuy science blog last week, the Chronicle’s Eric Berger called Texas “the epicenter of climate skepticism,” pointing to the plethora of fossil fuel energy companies doing business here, and to Gov. Rick Perry’s often-stated skeptical views on global warming.

So it’s to be expected that TCEQ officers, Perry-appointed, most often echo Perry’s sentiments.

We salute Anderson and his colleagues for standing their ground, and we stand appalled and embarrassed by TCEQ’s disgraceful an-tics.

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