Your Hometown News Source
Your Hometown News Source
The sea level is rising. We are in an “interglacial period” within the Pleistocene Ice Age, according to the learned. It has been melting ice for the last ten thousand years. So, we miniscule Earthlings are fighting an uphill battle.
To put it in perspective, most of us are not worrying about the inexorable melting of icebergs for the next 100, 1000, or 10,000 years. That’s not necessarily good, it’s just the truth.
The majority of meteorologists agree the sea is rising. They don’t all agree on the cause or how to stop it. Rather than stupefy you with statistics of the greenhouse gasses, their source and who’s to blame, let us examine the future: In the last 21-odd years the sea level has risen an average of 1/8 inch per year, which is above the 19th century average. Based on this, from 2020 to 2028, it will rise 1 inch, by 2036 it will have risen 2 inches, etc., until by 2108 it will reach one foot in 4 generations.
We agree we can’t stop it. We will continue to eat meat and potatoes, pork and rice, taco and beans worldwide. We will keep building cities, roads, cars, airlines, air conditioners, MRI machines, heaters, the internet, telephones and life-giving/energy-consuming sources created by man.
As the years pass, our human ingenuity will build cleaner machinery, our descendants will continue to improve and invent our essentials; food, water, shelter. They will develop genetics that will improve our future.
We can also expect the population of Earth (7.7 billion) to continue to rise, third world countries to modernize and consume more and more energy. We can also expect wars between governments to get even worse and unconceivable weapons with which to threaten. All factors that will inhibit any worldwide cooperation on good causes.
In defense of those who have taken up the banner of World Wide Famine, Global Cooling, Greenhouse gases, Global Warming, or Climate Change, they should be taken seriously. They have good intentions. Time will tell how we will deal with the problem.
For the time being, in the midst of this “interglacial period,” we can follow our ancestors. If we lived on the beach in 1866, we can assume that the sea was rising then too.
The same for 1939, 1970 and 2001. What did those humans who lived on the coast at sea level through the centuries do when the tide came in? Simple, they moved back to higher ground or bought a houseboat.