Are Oceans Really Rising? How Will This Impact My Home?

While we try to focus on the more positive aspects of clean technology here at Green Home Authority, this is one question that our friends with beach houses just can't ignore. Over the past several years, even the past decade, scientists have hypothesized that global warming was indeed taking place and that CO2 trapped in our atmosphere would create a "greenhouse effect" which in turn would warm the earth... thus melting icebergs and warming the ocean.

Simply put, as land based icebergs melt they phase shift from a solid (ice) into a liquid (water) and run downhill into the world's oceans. This in turn causes the oceans to rise. Furthermore, as oceans warm, due to the greenhouse effect and warm glacial runoff, they expand and take up more space. So the issue of rising oceans is really hinged on global warming in two distinct ways, it's not just more water that's causing the problem it's also the temperature of the ocean itself.

Now, is global warming real? Yes, the atmospheric temperature on Earth is steadily rising and people are causing the rise by burning fossil fuels. Has global warming happened in the past before people started using cars and burning oil? Yes, the earth's atmosphere has warmed and cooled many times over the past several hundred thousand years. In terms of cooler periods scientists now have evidence that two asteroids hit the earth at different times. The first one killing off large dinosaurs and once again killing off woolly mammoth's and other "ice age" creatures. Researchers have able to find one crater as evidence just North of Venezuela (for the dinosaurs) and a rich deposit of nanocrystals (only formed by asteroids) in the south pole. The latest theory accounting for the lack of a second crater is that the asteroid hit an icy region of earth and thus did not leave a crater. Okay, so both of those events caused the earth to cool, when and why has it warmed?

The Earth has warmed several times throughout history as its rotational patterns have shifted and changed. This process is natural, and while still potentially damaging to Earth's ecosystems, it is not preventable. So is this recent phase of warming caused by the Earth's rotation? No, it is being caused by man, and what's more concerning is that CO2 levels today are higher than they have ever been over the past 400,000 years (as shown in the chart above borrowed from PBS). You may be wondering, how can we even know what the CO2 levels were that far back? Well, scientists have been drilling into ice sheets in Antarctica and pull out core samples (big tubes of ice). These core samples contain hundreds of layers of ice dating back hundreds of thousands of years, and the ice contains bubbles with prehistoric air... that in turn contains CO2. So these readings are very accurate and basically serve as irrefutable evidence of global warming.

Bummer, I know... So the next time your grandpa or says "bah, global warming isn't real, people can't do that kind of damage, we're too small" like mine does all the time... You can point him to the official United States Environmental Protection Agency website here which says that sea levels have already risen 5 inches in the past 100 years and are expected to rise up to 2 feet in the next 100. And that's just the EPA, many scientists estimate 2-3 feet of rise. Furthermore, the world community of researchers focused on glaciers have been shocked and amazed by the speed at which ice glaciers have been receding in recent years, much faster than first estimated.

Now I know what you're grandparents are thinking right now. Thank goodness I'll be dead! And you may even be thinking, sheesh, 2 feet isn't that big of a deal and I'm not going to live to 100 anyways. Well, it's actually more than it sounds like and it could happen a lot faster than we think. You see, as the ocean rises vertically one foot, it comes inland about 10 feet. So if  you live in India or many parts of Asia which are already at sea level, you are going to be displaced. Some places will be able to cope by using levvys (such as Denmark) but that cost's a ton of money and those systems are prone to failure. We'ere talking billions of people on the move as a result of changing landscapes. And what happens when billions of people are displaced? We could have war, but I'm hoping for one giant beach party! Another point worth mentioning here is that fresh water is going to be harder and harder to come by because those glaciers we talked about earlier (at least the ones in the Rocky Mountains) are where people in the US get a lot of fresh water. Without fresh water we will have to rely on desalination of ocean water, and that water will be increasingly polluted as oceans rise. Double bummer.

So if you have a beach house are you screwed? In my opinion, yes, you should get out of there quick or at least swap to a house that's a bit further back with roads going directly inland. I have already areas of Northern California near San Francisco (where I live) sliding into the ocean. One area called Devil's Slide was completely cut off when the road slid out into the ocean a couple years ago and now the state is spending millions to move the road closer inland by building a bridge and tunnel. The houses that line the cliffs there no longer have road access and people have to hike to get home each day. I've attached an aerial photo below showing the specific areas I'm talking about but the problem is happening everywhere along the coast, especially in Southern California. Now if you live in Colorado (where I used to live) it's easy to deny rising oceans, but it's not a very attractive trait. Who wants to be known as "Grumpy Grandpa" the one that denied it to the end and was really the source of most of these problems to begin with.

While the oceans are not expected to rise all at once and swallow up houses and coastlines like some kind of giant hurricane, storms are something to watch out for. If hurricane Katrina and others are any indication, changing gulf streams and other environmental shifts could devastate coastal areas such as Florida. The ocean currents that keep places like the UK livable are expected to slow down killing off millions of fish and making the dreary cold weather even worse. I personally think it's kind of ironic that Florida is such a popular place for grandpa types to retire, because it is poised to be under water within the next 100 years (or at least behind levys)... I just hope Mickey can swim, he didn't do so well in Fantasia. For more serious references definitely watch the new PBS NOVA special called Extreme Ice - and invite your parents or kids to join you. People can and will adapt, but I personally do not want to deny that a problem exists - taking personal responsibility and choosing to live more within your own means is a great step in the right direction. And remember, NOVA (the source of the videos listed above) is funded by the Public Broadcast Service which is run by our government and paid for by our taxes. They are as close to non-biased as you can get.