This chart is
PNG's chart of the week for obvious reasons and comes from
Mother Jones:
Proxy reconstructions are necessary because tide gauge observation data does not go back beyond 100 years or so. The reconstructions are based on salt marsh microfossils records from North Carolina that show sea level changes correspond to global temperature increases. When the world started to warm up with the industrial revolution, sea levels began to rise quickly. During the "Little Ice Age" sea levels dropped. As the Current Occupant prepares to release the enormous additional amount of greenhouse gases that will come with the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, ask yourself: who's national interest is he representing?
The boarded up South Ferry subway station in Manhattan's Battery Park displays an ominous mark. Rust and salt trace the level reached by floodwaters in the Sandy hurricane disaster at 13.88 feet above low-tide. That's a record bettering all historical floods by
four feet. Its going to get worse. Melting in Greenland and Antarctica
will push sea levels up by
more than three feet by the end of the century. Storms now considered 100 year events will occur more frequently; predictions range from every 3 to 20 years. If seaside megalopolises like New York and Tokyo want to stay where they are, billions will have to be spent on infrastructure to combat flooding.
