Provided for decorative purposes only.
Up here in Minnesota we’re enduring an unusual stretch of intense cold, interrupted by near normal temperatures, accompanied by lots of snow, starting in early or mid January, with maybe an end in sight. Or maybe not. All the houses appear to have horrendous ice dams, which is certainly new in my experience (50 odd years up here). I may spend part of the day trying to remove ice from my gutters, although if it remains as cold as it is right now (@ 9AM, it was -9°F, -23°C, but @ 11AM we’re up to -3°F) it would be a fruitless endeavour. Not to mention my gloves would freeze to the ladder. Meteorologists explain this as a result of a breakdown in the polar vortex. Such are the consequences of our climate change conspiracy, eh?
But this isn’t awful. Awful is the trend in North Carolina, especially Oregon Inlet, NC. It starts with this report from NOAA:
The relative sea level trend is 4.69 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence
interval of +/- 1.16 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from
1977 to 2018 which is equivalent to a change of 1.54 feet in 100 years.
But it’s not the water creeping up over the land just yet, because it’s not doing that. The problems? Storm surges and salt percolating up from below. Here’s WaPo’s Sarah Kaplan:
Of climate change’s many plagues — drought, insects, fires, floods — saltwater intrusion in particular sounds almost like a biblical curse. Rising seas, sinking earth and extreme weather are conspiring to cause salt from the ocean to contaminate aquifers and turn formerly fertile fields barren. A 2016 study in the journal Science predicted that 9 percent of the U.S. coastline is vulnerable to saltwater intrusion — a percentage likely to grow as the world continues to warm. Scientists are just beginning to assess the potential effect on agriculture, [East Carolina University hydrologist Alex Manda] said, and it’s not yet clear how much can be mitigated.
“We spend a lot of time and money to try to prevent salt,” [local farmer Dawson] Pugh says. “I worry what the future is. If it keeps getting worse, will it be worth farming?”
If farmers in coastal areas have any hope of protecting their land — and their livelihoods — the first step is to disentangle the complex web of causes that can send ocean water seeping into the ground beneath their feet.
A truly discouraging development for coastal farmers world-wide, as local scientists seem a little surprised by it. Speaking of a rising sea level sparked by rising temperatures, how’s that CO2 measurement out at Mauna Loa?
Just the same, really. Up and up and up. Hope my readers like the heat more than the wildlife does.
