Tag Archives: Climate change

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Time to plan for rising sea levels

Climate change is the subject of intense debate, particularly over its cause.

Manmade or natural? It doesn’t matter to many of us who believe that the climate is, in fact, changing.

What’s more, it should matter even less to those who live along our coastlines where sea levels are rising. That is virtually beyond dispute. The ocean levels are increasing and they figure to threaten the very communities that sit at the water’s edge.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/12/24/on-climate-change-a-push-to-think-locally/

Thus is it time for local experts to take the hint from climatologists and other experts to deal with this issue locally rather than continue to think globally about climate change.

Texas is one of those many states sitting along large bodies of water that are facing increases in sea level. The Coastal Plain, in fact, rises from the Gulf of Mexico quite gradually, meaning that much of the plain rests at or just slightly above sea level for many miles inland.

We’re safe here on the Caprock, which sits nearly 3,700 feet above sea level. No one I’m aware of has said the Gulf of Mexico is going to rise that much.

But our neighbors downstate, along the Gulf Coast from the Valley to the Golden Triangle — indeed all the way along the coast eastward — need to begin thinking about the consequences of doing nothing.

It involves a lot more than just filling up sandbags, folks.

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‘Climate change’ is real, new study reports

I recently engaged in a brief Facebook “scuffle” with a couple of former journalism colleagues about climate change. They argue that the planet isn’t warming after all, citing studies published in the United Kingdom that back up their contention.

I’ve argued for some time that climate change is real. The only debate, as I’ve viewed it, is whether it’s caused by human beings or whether it’s part of Earth’s ecological cycle.

Well … yet another new report concludes the climate is changing and that — you guessed it — humankind is the culprit. CNN.com reports that the researchers among the most learned in the world and their findings are considered to be a bellwether.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/world/climate-change-5-things/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Oh, my. Here we go again.

CNN.com reported today: “Climate scientists are 95 percent confident — that is to say, surer than ever — that humans are responsible for at least ‘half of the observed increase in global average surface temperatures since the 1950s.'”

The study comes from the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change. I know exactly what my friends on the right — the climate-change deniers — are going to say about that: The United Nations? Everyone knows the U.N. is run by a bunch of political lefties who are out to destroy the industrial world as we’ve known it. They point to the occasional cold snap that blows in over the Panhandle as “proof” that global warming and climate change are hoaxes cooked up by former Vice President Al Gore’s cabal of environmental whack jobs.

I tend to view the U.N. — and Vice President Gore — more seriously than their critics.

CNN reported further: “Scientists are 90 percent sure that 1981-2010 was the warmest such span in the last eight centuries, and there’s a 66 percent chance that it was the warmest 30-year period in the last 1,400 years.

“While the last 15 years have not warmed as quickly, we’ve seen steady warming over most of the globe, and we haven’t seen a below-average temperature month since February 1985.”

Is this the end of the debate? Hardly. It’s just going to heat up even more … kind of like the way the planet has been getting hotter.