ysabetwordsmith | Rising Seas

From:

dialecticdreamer

Great, both places I've settled are likely to end up on the wrong side of beachfront. (Blurp, blurp, bubble, SUNK.)

From:

ysabetwordsmith

I'm sorry to hear that. Yes, it's depressing. But I am more frustrated by the fact that the people in power refuse to address the problem, than just the fact that it has already happened. We're past the point of stopping climate change, and we're running out of even mitigation time.

From:

finch

I may live to regret it, but I think I'll wait until the rest of liberal Cascadia packs up and moves to the other side of the mountains too. ;)

From:

dialecticdreamer

in their lifetimes, THEY THINK, so it's not /their/ problem.

I'm not trying to sound like I'm bashing the rich, but frankly, he or she who USES THE MOST RESOURCES is responsible for this mess, and should UTTERLY be expected to help FIX it.

Not happening.

So my kids are going to (maybe) raise kids in a world which is /definitely/ worse off than we are today, than we were in 1984, than we were in 1944.

Pretty soon, we're going to run out of PLANET.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>> in their lifetimes, THEY THINK, so it's not /their/ problem. <<

Exactly.

>> I'm not trying to sound like I'm bashing the rich, but frankly, he or she who USES THE MOST RESOURCES is responsible for this mess, and should UTTERLY be expected to help FIX it. <<

As far as I'm concerned, if you're holding 80% of the wealth, you are obligated to pay 80% of the bills. Conversely if you have no resources, you have no obligations and instead are owed resources.

>> Not happening. <<

Problem.

>> So my kids are going to (maybe) raise kids in a world which is /definitely/ worse off than we are today, than we were in 1984, than we were in 1944. <<

We're already losing ground in terms of health and life expectancy, let alone standard of living.

>> Pretty soon, we're going to run out of PLANET. <<

Sadly so. Infinite growth in a finite system is the philosophy of the cancer cell, and we all know how that ends.

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

From:

mdlbear

I see a seawall in my future. Not for me -- our house is considerably uphill from the beach -- but a good chunk of downtown Seattle is going to be underwater.

Fortunately, unlike New Orleans, Puget Sound isn't subject to storm surges.

They're saying it'll take two centuries or more for the West Antarctic ice sheet to collapse. I don't believe it, either.

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

Regretfully, this is far too true... and yes, storm surges can be upto 300% higher than average sea level.

You possibly know I run a ongoing climate model, part of my own research, which is a sum over predictions. [basically taking an average of the best guess predictions from various sources.] I've been doing this since the 80's, in one form or another.

Based on this, and taking into account current trends and geological data, we're looking at a loss of around 45-60% of currently inhabited coastal land, and a displacement of around ~25% of the estimated population of the western hemisphere.

I'm not even going to guess the impact this will have, but combine this with a probable loss 75% of arable land due to drought and ground-water contamination by salt... well, it's not good. It's going to take some heroic measures just to prevent civilisation from imploding.

From:

zeeth_kyrah

It's going to take some heroic measures just to prevent civilisation from imploding.

Which is where my job takes over. Inspiring heroes is Who I Am in the VERY large sense; but what is inspiration without knowledge? So teaching, and providing access to information, is a part of that.

Even with this, however, it's going to be desperate. Western culture barely acknowledges the dynamic of people as a single group, much less people and land in a relationship together. With that disconnect from each other and our environment in favor of a strong connection to money as a substitute relationship, how can we get enough people in power to observe the truth about what's happening and act on it effectively?

The only way is to turn everyone into heroes -- heroes who work together to turn the tide, like the stories told of the Celtic gods (who had to team up and organize who was doing what in order to win).

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

First step in solving any problem is to recognise the fact that there is a problem, and what the scale and nature of it. That's basically what I'm trying to do.

The second step is to find people capable of addressing the problem... which is where we are now.

From:

ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

>> First step in solving any problem is to recognise the fact that there is a problem, and what the scale and nature of it. <<

Sadly most of the people in power are still in massive denial, and trying to convince other people that everything is fine. They sound like addicts.

>> That's basically what I'm trying to do. <<

Same here.

>> The second step is to find people capable of addressing the problem... which is where we are now. <<

I have really had no luck with this.

From:

tomtac.livejournal.com

Two suggestions, then.

First, http://ssi.org , The Space Studies Institute. An unlikely set of heroes, if one doesn't like nerds and engineers with computers.

Founded by Professor Gerrard O'Neil, he taught civil engineering. One day, he added a "fun" calculation to his class exam: since they already knew how to calculate the specifics of a suspension bridge, do the very same calculation for a space station which was exactly a suspension bridge that was circular.

He was surprised that the answers were amazingly workable, a space habitat 25 miles across. Going on from there and relying on the math and engineering alone (no wishful thinking), he and his teams have shown exactly how we can produce our own living area in space out of the materials out there -- so that, when our Earth is not room enough, much of humanity can be living off-planet anyway.

In a nutshell: a step-by-step plan that produces space habitats from materials outside Earth's gravity well, and the habitats produce more space habitats. The first makes another, those two make two others, and those four, in another eight cycles, make a thousand of them. Each ten cycles bumps it up that way, to a million of them, to a billion of them, and ... in a matter of decades, there is more land area in the habitats than on Earth and more people living up there.

* * * * *

And my point here -- as we make our own situation on Earth even more desperate, it will be easier and easier to get the population interested in moving out into space.

----> Expect that desperation soon <----

My home town in Massachusetts was very ho-hum and in denial about an ecological disaster waiting to happen. (The town dump was polluting the water supply underground.) As nearly always is the case, by the time it becomes "undeniable" and everyone believes, it has become "far too late". (When the town's beaches and lakefronts and reservoir started smelling, they all got upset, but the worst was, and is, still yet to come.)

When the global warming crisis is undeniable, it's probably too late to stop it.

The second -- Well, Wordsmiths, Authors, and Bloggers can be screaming about the world that's coming. One really good book or movie about the refugees trying to escape ocean waves, while the rest starve looking for some place where nature still favors growing food, that could get people worried. While stories about a 23rd century in which we have SOLVED this crisis would perhaps inspire them in a direction of practical effort.

* * * * *

This is REALLY timely, given the two papers published Monday on how the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting much faster than predicted, and in an unstoppable way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/earth/collapse-of-parts-of-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-has-begun-scientists-say.html?_r=0

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/antarctica-ice-sheets-collapsing-sea-levels-rising-nasa-finds/

From:

ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

I like the idea of space colonization. But it will not solve our problems. First, the lifebearing resources will still have to come mostly or wholly from Earth; wreck that and we are fucked. Second, it's the Jedi Tree problem; we must face whatever we bring with us. Space will kill you if it can. You must be extremely careful of the fragile microenvironment all the time, and you must be able to cooperate fluently. We can't manage those things even on the much more forgiving planetary surface. Forget surviving in space. We're lucky if we can keep highly trained experts alive up there. Most humans wouldn't last five minutes no matter how many safety catches you installed.

From:

tomtac.livejournal.com

There are plans out there that will work in lessening the problem of CO2 and overheating, but I expect we will can't avoid parts of the disaster playing out.

The bit about writing stories about the-horrid-world-to-come is still worth doing.

o The ABC TV special "Earth 2100" (based
on the graphic novel) was a pretty
good dramatization of how the Global
Warming issue could mess everything up
(still on youtube, still on vimeo at
http://vimeo.com/79730798 ).

o Stanley Kramer got people to worry
about our ability to thoroughly mess up
the planet with the film
"On the Beach"; Linus Pauling called it
"the film that saved the world".

* * * * *

>> areas up to 10 feet above current levels will be submerged, storm activity will make quite a lot more space beyond that unsafe to inhabit. Remember the storms are getting bigger!

Too many people, too little planet. Eventually moving people off planet (please remember to check SSI's math, the numbers are correct) will indeed alleviate the global strain on the ecosystem. Meanwhile, no storms and flooding or seas in the space habitats.

>> we're breaking the atmospheric integrity in ways we know nothing about

See the above, but also we will learn a lot about how atmospheric systems work when we've had to manage a couple of our own that we've created.

>> the lifebearing resources will still have to come mostly or wholly from Earth...

There is water and oxygen (and everything else we need) out there to be mined -- and that's the approach presented.

>> it's the Jedi Tree problem; we must face whatever we bring with us.

Which is true whether we go or not.

Edited Date: 2014-05-17 12:39 pm (UTC)

From:

ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

>> Which is where my job takes over. Inspiring heroes is Who I Am in the VERY large sense; but what is inspiration without knowledge? So teaching, and providing access to information, is a part of that. <<

Yeah, I've been doing that since my toddler years. It's frustrating how little progress I've made. But I follow the Oracle rules: It is my job to present information. What other people do with it is their responsibility.

>> Even with this, however, it's going to be desperate. Western culture barely acknowledges the dynamic of people as a single group, much less people and land in a relationship together. <<

Yes, that's a problem.

>> With that disconnect from each other and our environment in favor of a strong connection to money as a substitute relationship, how can we get enough people in power to observe the truth about what's happening and act on it effectively? <<

We can't and they aren't. There isn't time to change the whole cultural paradigm before the biosphere collapses to a lower level of stable function. There's too much cultural momentum in the current direction.

>> The only way is to turn everyone into heroes -- heroes who work together to turn the tide, like the stories told of the Celtic gods (who had to team up and organize who was doing what in order to win). <<

That's something else I try to promote, again with minimal success. Being a hero is WORK. People these days don't want to do that. They flee when I ask them to do even basic things.

Feel free to prompt for heroic teamwork, though. I'm happy to fantasize about it.

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

I'm pretty sure by this point that civilisation as a whole cannot be saved... nor should it be. Because lets face it, with the kind of overgrown briar-patch of problems we have, burning it down to start over might be the least painful solution.

I'm afraid it's gonna be building lifeboats from here on out... and most people don't even known which end of a hammer to hold metaphorically speaking. [or possibly literally in some cases.]

From:

ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

Alas, you have good points there.

From:

johnpalmer.livejournal.com

Alan Cole and Chris Bunch wrote some books set in a fantasy world - the Far Kingdoms and stories of the sister of the protagonist of the Far Kingdoms - and one thing I liked about them was that they made the adventuring business pretty serious insofar as they described how each adventure might be preceded by intense training and careful prep.

They didn't make it sounds like horrible, onerous work, but they did make it seem like work. I appreciated that. (And I mourn how few stories talk about that. A fighter doesn't need to practice daily, but will know there needs to be regular practice or one starts to lose one's edge. If you've practiced a lot of sparring, an ordinary punch/kick/thrust/swing/parry (should that end with a SPROING and a bent back beak?) seems comfortably slow; as practice recedes, they start to seem faster and faster again.

From:

ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

>> Alan Cole and Chris Bunch wrote some books set in a fantasy world - the Far Kingdoms and stories of the sister of the protagonist of the Far Kingdoms - and one thing I liked about them was that they made the adventuring business pretty serious insofar as they described how each adventure might be preceded by intense training and careful prep. <<

That sounds great. I wrote one poem about the apprentices of several adventurers getting rudely shocked by how dangerous the trade could be and how much work it took to prepare for, but now I can't find the darn thing.

>> They didn't make it sounds like horrible, onerous work, but they did make it seem like work. I appreciated that. <<

That's good to hear. I made a point of this in Polychrome Heroics, where some poems such as "Through the Haze" show Damask practicing, and others like "The Hall of Mirrors" show different kinds of preparation.

>> (And I mourn how few stories talk about that. A fighter doesn't need to practice daily, but will know there needs to be regular practice or one starts to lose one's edge. If you've practiced a lot of sparring, an ordinary punch/kick/thrust/swing/parry (should that end with a SPROING and a bent back beak?) seems comfortably slow; as practice recedes, they start to seem faster and faster again. <<

Agreed. Feel free to ask for things like this in any of my relevant prompt calls.

From:

thnidu.livejournal.com

I am in no way disagreeing with the awful truths involved here, but please translate this. I cannot make any sense of "300% higher than average sea level". I'm a total layman wrt topography and oceanography, and AFAIR I have never seen any reference to "average sea level" except as effectively the zero reference point for land elevation. Too me, that phrase is like "300% higher than zero Celsius": WTF?

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

Ok... the average or median sea level is the midpoint between high tide and low tide.. it's your hypothetical zero point for measuring land elevation. It's roughly what the sea level would be if there were no tides. The 300% higher point is basically a short-hand way of saying; storm surges can be up to 3 times higher than the normal mid point and thus higher than the highest boundary for sea level, i.e the highest high tide.

A secondary point is of course that although your average sea level will rise X amount thanks to global climate change, the highest level will actually be some function of X, and thus higher. The maths is pretty frightful, but since tides are basically this large bulge of water sploshing around the oceans, if you increase the average hight of the sea itself the the volume of the bulge increases as the cube power... which is a complex way of saying your high tides get a lot higher if you increase your average sea level just a bit. [actually it's a lot more complicated than that].

But a rough back of the envelope calculation by way of example, a 10ft rise in sea levels means that whereas normally you'd get a coast line that would see a 4ft difference in tides, you'd see a 35ft tidal difference

Edited Date: 2014-05-15 02:15 am (UTC)

From:

ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

1) Thank you for doing the math.

2) Fuuuuuuuuck.

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

Well, look at it this way... there's gonna be some wicked gnarly surf by the end of the century!

From:

kelkyag

Your explanation of the math still doesn't make sense. 300% of what? It sounds like what you want to say that is if the current median sea level is X, and the current highest high tide level is X+T, then if the median sea level rises to X+W, the highest high tide level will be X+W + (some function of W and T, possibly 3W+T).

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

Ok... your sea level is thus: take a point midway between hightide [Ht] and lowtide.[Lt] That is your average.[A] [and we'll ignore waves]

A storm surge [S] can be upto three times [300% increased] above this average level[A] so if Ht is 4ft above A, then S is ~12ft. [although the actual amount is dependent on a lot of variables, so that's just a ballpark figure]

However, the separate point I made was that if you raise A by 10ft, then Ht-A is also increased by a complex factorial [which is calculated using the equation for area under a curve, in 3D to give the volume of the tidal bulge] But essentially it means that by increasing the average sea level by a little, you increase where the high tide is by a lot.

From:

kelkyag

A storm surge [S] can be upto three times [300% increased] above this average level[A] so if Ht is 4ft above A, then S is ~12ft.

This is where you are putting it badly. "Relative to average sea level, a storm surge can be 300% higher than high tide" expresses this more clearly. The base sea level does not give you anything to have 300% of; you need that *and* the high tide level.

And yes, please do provide the calculus formulas for the increased high tide level -- my 3W+T was based loosely on your "300%" assertion, but now it sounds like you meant the 300% increase of storm surge over high tide to be a constant factor, but the increase in the high tide level over the average level as the average level increases is you are asserting is ...?

From:

thnidu.livejournal.com

Thank you,

kelkyag!

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

"but the increase in the high tide level over the average level as the average level increases is you are asserting is ...?" I'm sorry, I did not understand that inquiry, would you like to try again?

From:

kelkyag

If I have understood correctly, which I am still not sure I have, your separate second assertion is that if average sea level increases by X feet, then the high tide level is increased by "a complex factorial" which is substantially larger than X. I am asking for the formula you are using for "a complex factorial" (a 3D integral related to the overall volume of the oceans?).

tl;dr: "Please show your work."

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

In a word, no. This isn't a maths lesson and I do not need to provide information you can google for yourself, same as I did in order to calculate it in the first place. [because I didn't think it important enough to bookmark].

If you'll forgive me for saying so, but this is the same sort of tactic deniers use to obfuscate debates, they appear to agree, then pick an irrelevant point, pretend confusion and keep asking for endless clarifications and explanations... None of which ever satisfy them no matter how much exhaustive detail one goes into... and then when you give up in disgust they claim victory and say you cannot prove what you said.

Well, sorry, but I'm not playing that game mate. I've answered your question, if you genuinely want better answers then A; get a maths degree and work it out for yourself, or B: google it. I'm not your search engine or tutor.

From:

kelkyag

Thank you for clarifying how seriously I should take your assertions.

Unverifiable and/or out of context assertions of fact are also a lamentably common debate tactic. One of the things I appreciate immensely about

ysabetwordsmith is that she cites her sources, and I can assess them for myself or chase them further as I see fit.

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

I didn't say it was unverifiable, I just said I wasn't doing your work for you. Truth be told, I looked up the equation, plugged it into wolfram alpha and ran a best guess at the numbers. I didn't bother bookmarking it because it was irrelevant to the main point. You can do the same since you don't want to believe me. If you want to disbelieve me, fair enough... because honestly I don't care. We've screwed the planet, arguing over exactly how much and in what way we're going to be shafted is pointless. If want to debate that, go find a nice echoing wall.

Edited Date: 2014-05-16 09:13 pm (UTC)

From:

ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

This discussion is starting to turn into an argument. Please keep it civil. Remember that this is supposed to be safe space. Nobody is obligated to do extra work or teaching on here, but should be appreciated when they do. If somebody wants further detail, they can look it up themselves.

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

Thank you.

From:

ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

You're welcome. *hugs* I appreciate your contributions here. And you did eventually make the explanation where I could figure it out.

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

Yeah, sorry if I was bit short on verbiage there, and touch cranky to boot. I've been struggling to revive a deceased tablet all day and swearing slightly at incomplete instructions and arcane bits of hardware... ergo, not as much time to deal with the niceties as usual.

From:

msminlr.livejournal.com

The city on the "Ten Most Endangered" list that surprised me, was Stockton, CA, which is in the Central Valley. I had NO IDEA that so much of the river valley that drains the Central Valley to San Francisco Bay is that low-lying.

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