Instahoglets - Gloomy Climate News

By Ron Beasley

For starters, the beach is going to get closer.

Two meter sea level rise unstoppable: experts

A rise of at least two meters in the world's sea levels is now almost unstoppable, experts told a climate conference at Oxford University on Tuesday.

"The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at Germany's Potsdam Institute and a widely recognized sea level expert.

"There is no way I can see to stop this rise, even if we have gone to zero emissions."

Rahmstorf said the best outcome was that after temperatures stabilized, sea levels would only rise at a steady rate "for centuries to come," and not accelerate.

So what you say?

Sea levels have risen about 20 centimeters in the past century and that effect was accelerating, speakers said.

That rise was adding to storms such as that in the Philippines, although that single event couldn't be attributed to climate change, said Rahmstorf.

"Of course the flooding from a given storm event would be less severe if we hadn't added those extra centimeters."

About 40 million people worldwide live in flood plains, said
Southampton University's Robert Nicholls. That is 0.6 percent of the
global population and 5 percent of global wealth, because of valuable
assets such as airports and power plants.

He was confident that coastal protection could hugely reduce
lost land and assets. The cost of that speakers put at anywhere from 50
billion euros ($72.85 billion) a year by 2020 to up to $215 billion a
year by 2100.

And how about this for a gloomy headline?

Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us

WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Now I think part of this is possible if not likely.  The earth now has an estimated population of over six billion people.  Thanks to Noble Prize winner Norman Borlaug they are dependent on oil for their food supplies and the oil will soon be gone with few alternatives available.  Unpredictable weather will  result in both floods and droughts making it even more difficult to grow food.  Loss of acreage because of sea level rise will also be a factor.  If any creature can survive the man made eco-disaster it's probably the ever adaptable man.  There will be a drastic population reduction but I think the survivors would be in the millions not the few hundred thousand suggested above.  I would also think that much of the technology would survive and in fact a new Stone Age existence might not be possible.