Indian Ocean Sea Level Rise Threatens Costal Areas

[giovonni]

Indian Ocean Sea Level Rise Threatens Costal Areas



A new study in Nature Geoscience finds that Indian Ocean sea levels are rising unevenly and threatening residents in some densely populated coastal areas, particularly those along the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, and Java. This image shows the key player in the process, the Indo-Pacific warm pool, in bright orange. This enormous, bathtub-shaped area spans a region of the tropical oceans from the east coast of Africa to the International Date Line in the Pacific. The warm pool has heated by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, or 0.5 degrees Celsius, in the past 50 years, primarily because of human-generated emissions of greenhouses gases.

Newswise — Indian Ocean sea levels are rising unevenly and threatening residents in some densely populated coastal areas and islands, a new study concludes. The study, led by scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), finds that the sea level rise is at least partly a result of climate change.

Sea level rise is particularly high along the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and Java, the authors found. The rise-which may aggravate monsoon flooding in Bangladesh and India-could have future impacts on both regional and global climate.

The key player in the process is the Indo-Pacific warm pool, an enormous, bathtub-shaped area spanning a region of the tropical oceans from the east coast of Africa to the International Date Line in the Pacific. The warm pool has heated by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, or 0.5 degrees Celsius, in the past 50 years, primarily because of human-generated emissions in greenhouses gases.

"Our results from this study imply that if future anthropogenic warming effects in the Indo-Pacific warm pool dominate natural variability, mid-ocean islands such as the Mascarenhas Archipelago, coasts of Indonesia, Sumatra, and the north Indian Ocean may experience significantly more sea level rise than the global average," says lead author Weiqing Han of CU's atmospheric and oceanic sciences department.

While a number of areas in the Indian Ocean region are experiencing sea level rise, sea level is lowering in other areas. The study indicated that the Seychelles Islands and Zanzibar off Tanzania's coast show the largest sea level drop.

"Global sea level patterns are not geographically uniform," says NCAR scientist Gerald Meehl, a co-author. "Sea level rise in some areas correlates with sea level fall in other areas."

The new study was published this week in Nature Geoscience. Funding came from the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor, as well as the Department of Energy (DOE) and NASA.

-----Wind and sea level-----

The patterns of sea level change are driven by the combined enhancement of two primary atmospheric wind patterns known as the Hadley circulation and the Walker circulation. The Hadley circulation in the Indian Ocean is dominated by air currents rising above strongly heated tropical waters near the equator and flowing poleward at upper levels, then sinking to the ocean in the subtropics and causing surface air to flow back toward the equator.

The Indian Ocean's Walker circulation causes air to rise and flow westward at upper levels, sink to the surface and then flow eastward back toward the Indo-Pacific warm pool.

"The combined enhancement of the Hadley and Walker circulation forms a distinct surface wind pattern that drives specific sea level patterns," Han says.

In the Nature Geoscience article, the authors write, "Our new results show that human-caused changes of atmospheric and oceanic circulation over the Indian Ocean region-which have not been studied previously-are the major cause for the regional variability of sea level change."

The new study indicates that in order to anticipate global sea level change, researchers also need to know the specifics of regional sea level changes.

"It is important for us to understand the regional changes of the sea level, which will have effects on coastal and island regions," says NCAR scientist Aixue Hu.

The research team used several sophisticated ocean and climate models for the study, including the Parallel Ocean Program-the ocean component of the widely used Community Climate System Model, which is supported by NCAR and DOE. In addition, the team used a wind driven, linear ocean model for the study.

The complex circulation patterns in the Indian Ocean may also affect precipitation by forcing even more atmospheric air than normal down to the surface in Indian Ocean subtropical regions, Han speculates.

"This may favor a weakening of atmospheric convection in subtropics, which may increase rainfall in the eastern tropical regions of the Indian Ocean and drought in the western equatorial Indian Ocean region, including east Africa," Han says.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

About the article:

Title:
Indian Ocean Sea Level Change in a Warming Climate

Authors:
Weiqing Han, Gerald Meehl, Balaji Rajagopalan, John Fasullo, Aixue Hu, Jialin Lin, William Large, Jih-wang Wang, Xiao-Wei Quan, Laurie Trenary, Alan Wallcraft, Toshiaki Shinoda, and Stephen Yeager


original story link;
http://www.newswise.com/articles/ind...&page=3&search[status]=3&search[sort]=date+desc&search[has_multimedia]=

[theguardian]

Hi Giovonni,

Very good article, concerning the Rising of the sea level , its true, I live on the island of Mauritius, i can notice that some little spot on the beach where i use to play when i was child is already under water.
I think the rising of sea level is global but mainly little island can suffer first.

Peace.

[jackovesk]

Posted by giovonni (here)
Indian Ocean Sea Level Rise Threatens Costal Areas



A new study in Nature Geoscience finds that Indian Ocean sea levels are rising unevenly and threatening residents in some densely populated coastal areas, particularly those along the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, and Java. This image shows the key player in the process, the Indo-Pacific warm pool, in bright orange. This enormous, bathtub-shaped area spans a region of the tropical oceans from the east coast of Africa to the International Date Line in the Pacific. The warm pool has heated by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, or 0.5 degrees Celsius, in the past 50 years, primarily because of human-generated emissions of greenhouses gases.

Newswise — Indian Ocean sea levels are rising unevenly and threatening residents in some densely populated coastal areas and islands, a new study concludes. The study, led by scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), finds that the sea level rise is at least partly a result of climate change.

WHAT A LOAD OF RUBBISH..!

More Govt. Fed Global Warming Propaganda.

Al Gore & The Globalists Bank Balance - LOVES YOU ALL!

I welcome the rebuttle from all you Greens, I have studied these Lies for years even before the "Climate Gate Emails"!

You have been HOODWINKED by the MSM & the GLOBALISTS yet again! You all obviously want a NWO One World Govt. & One World Currency and to RFID Chipped and become one of their Slaves!

Well Guess What? I DON'T..!

[giovonni]

note~ i also post this story on another thread~" trends that will effect your future"~ but thought i duplicate it here in response to the previous post~ giovonni


Frankly, I don't hold out much hope that we will do anything until it is too late. If you look at history you see clearly that great empires destroy themselves from within, usually as a result of willful ignorance. It is themselves not their enemies that cause their collapse, and I think the same is happening with us.




You can't explain away climate change
Some hold that global warming stopped in 1998, but scientists know better.

July 22, 2010

You probably won't hear it from columnist George F. Will, Fox News commentators or the plethora of conservative blogs that have claimed global warming essentially stopped in 1998, but recent figures released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the highest since record-keeping began in 1880. What's more, the first half of 2010 was the hottest such period ever recorded, and Arctic sea ice melted at a record-setting pace in June.

The heat can probably be attributed at least in part to periodic and entirely natural changes in ocean temperatures and surface air pressure — the El Niño/La Niña phenomena most likely played a role. But the fact that peak years are getting hotter while even relatively "cool" years now tend to remain above historical averages (the 10 warmest years on record all occurred within the last 15 years, according to the NOAA) shows that something else is at work. A consensus of climate scientists worldwide, including not only the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but the national scientific academies of the United States and the rest of the developed world, have identified that "something else" as anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases, which reflect the sun's heat back onto the Earth rather than letting it escape into space.

Climate skeptics such as Will et al either deny that this warming is happening — an increasingly untenable position in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is — or insist that it doesn't matter. They argue that it would be more expensive to try to solve the problem than to adapt to it, and that in any case, the effects of higher temperatures won't be all that damaging. Climate modelers, who have accurately forecast the currently observed climate oscillations, sea-level rise and ice melting, do not agree. They predict catastrophic destruction in coastal cities, droughts, crop failure, forest loss, insect infestations and other woes.

For us, it's not a difficult decision which side to believe: scientists who directly observe and measure climate changes and whose accuracy is rigorously tested by their peers, or pundits with little knowledge of climate science whose views are informed by a long-held resentment of environmentalists and government regulation. Yet the latter group, working hand in hand with big energy companies that profit from the filthy status quo, have injected enough doubt into the national debate to paralyze Congress — which seems little closer to imposing greenhouse-gas limits or placing a market price on emissions than it was during the laissez-faire George W. Bush administration — and confuse the public, who in recent polls are increasingly inclined to believe that the threat of climate change has been exaggerated.

Granted, scientists themselves deserve some blame for the shift in attitudes. Climatology, even more than other fields, is undergoing changes that are unsettling for those in the trenches. A relatively obscure line of work until policymakers started seriously considering carbon curbs in recent years, climate science is suddenly at the center of a raging international debate. Meanwhile, a sedate culture of publication and private peer review has been roiled by a new media environment; today, critics of a scientist's work don't have to publish a carefully reviewed study in a major journal, they just have to fire off an indignant blog post.

When scientists at the prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia responded to such critics by sending catty e-mails to their colleagues, and when those e-mails were made public by hackers last November, it did more to impede action on climate change than Big Oil could have achieved with an army of lobbyists. Yet investigations have shown that the e-mails amounted to little more than fits of pique. The most recent review, conducted by an independent team funded by the University of East Anglia, found no evidence that the researchers had undermined scientific findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or any other group, and that they neither withheld access to data nor tampered with it.

We'd love to hear climate skeptics explain away the results of such investigations and address the latest report from the NOAA. But we suspect they'll do what they usually do when confronted with facts that contradict their worldview: ignore them.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
original story link;
[url]http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-climate-20100722,0,1056514

¤=[Post Update]=¤

note~ i also post this story on another thread~" trends that will effect your future"~ but thought i duplicate it here in response to the previous post~ giovonni


Frankly, I don't hold out much hope that we will do anything until it is too late. If you look at history you see clearly that great empires destroy themselves from within, usually as a result of willful ignorance. It is themselves not their enemies that cause their collapse, and I think the same is happening with us.




You can't explain away climate change
Some hold that global warming stopped in 1998, but scientists know better.

July 22, 2010

You probably won't hear it from columnist George F. Will, Fox News commentators or the plethora of conservative blogs that have claimed global warming essentially stopped in 1998, but recent figures released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the highest since record-keeping began in 1880. What's more, the first half of 2010 was the hottest such period ever recorded, and Arctic sea ice melted at a record-setting pace in June.

The heat can probably be attributed at least in part to periodic and entirely natural changes in ocean temperatures and surface air pressure — the El Niño/La Niña phenomena most likely played a role. But the fact that peak years are getting hotter while even relatively "cool" years now tend to remain above historical averages (the 10 warmest years on record all occurred within the last 15 years, according to the NOAA) shows that something else is at work. A consensus of climate scientists worldwide, including not only the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but the national scientific academies of the United States and the rest of the developed world, have identified that "something else" as anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases, which reflect the sun's heat back onto the Earth rather than letting it escape into space.

Climate skeptics such as Will et al either deny that this warming is happening — an increasingly untenable position in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is — or insist that it doesn't matter. They argue that it would be more expensive to try to solve the problem than to adapt to it, and that in any case, the effects of higher temperatures won't be all that damaging. Climate modelers, who have accurately forecast the currently observed climate oscillations, sea-level rise and ice melting, do not agree. They predict catastrophic destruction in coastal cities, droughts, crop failure, forest loss, insect infestations and other woes.

For us, it's not a difficult decision which side to believe: scientists who directly observe and measure climate changes and whose accuracy is rigorously tested by their peers, or pundits with little knowledge of climate science whose views are informed by a long-held resentment of environmentalists and government regulation. Yet the latter group, working hand in hand with big energy companies that profit from the filthy status quo, have injected enough doubt into the national debate to paralyze Congress — which seems little closer to imposing greenhouse-gas limits or placing a market price on emissions than it was during the laissez-faire George W. Bush administration — and confuse the public, who in recent polls are increasingly inclined to believe that the threat of climate change has been exaggerated.

Granted, scientists themselves deserve some blame for the shift in attitudes. Climatology, even more than other fields, is undergoing changes that are unsettling for those in the trenches. A relatively obscure line of work until policymakers started seriously considering carbon curbs in recent years, climate science is suddenly at the center of a raging international debate. Meanwhile, a sedate culture of publication and private peer review has been roiled by a new media environment; today, critics of a scientist's work don't have to publish a carefully reviewed study in a major journal, they just have to fire off an indignant blog post.

When scientists at the prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia responded to such critics by sending catty e-mails to their colleagues, and when those e-mails were made public by hackers last November, it did more to impede action on climate change than Big Oil could have achieved with an army of lobbyists. Yet investigations have shown that the e-mails amounted to little more than fits of pique. The most recent review, conducted by an independent team funded by the University of East Anglia, found no evidence that the researchers had undermined scientific findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or any other group, and that they neither withheld access to data nor tampered with it.

We'd love to hear climate skeptics explain away the results of such investigations and address the latest report from the NOAA. But we suspect they'll do what they usually do when confronted with facts that contradict their worldview: ignore them.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
original story link;
[url]http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-climate-20100722,0,1056514