Florida To Drown!!
By Paul Homewood
Happy Birthday Miami Beach!!
Unfortunately, the schmuck who wrote this piece for AFP is worries that it won’t be there much longer, and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT!
But the city is also looking to the future. City hall has organized for Friday a conference on rising water levels as a result of global warming. It is one of the main challenges facing this resort which is just 1.2 meters (four feet) above sea level.
The Florida coast has already seen 12 inches (30 centimeters) of sea rise since 1870, according to 2014 figures from the World Resources Institute.
Another nine to 24 inches are anticipated by 2060.
Miami Beach residents are commonly seen wading through knee-deep waters to get to their homes and businesses during high tides and floods.
Officials are investigating the use of tidal control valves and new water pumps to improve drainage as the authorities try to find long-term solutions to keep the city going.
And the reality?
The nearest long running station to Miami is Fernandina Beach:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8720030
There has in fact been very little increase in sea level there in the last 30 years or so, and most of the rise took place in the first half of the 20thC.
The long term trends can be seen better via the 50-yr trends. The fastest rise was seen back in the 1930’s (yes, that warm period that has been adjusted out of existence). Current levels of sea level rise are consistent with rises since the end of the 19thC.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/50yr.htm?stnid=8720030
Part of this sea level rise is due to the land sinking , which according to Church & White amounts to more than 30mm/century>
http://www.psmsl.org/products/reconstructions/church.php
The reality is that sea levels have been rising around Florida for thousands of years, purely because of natural reasons. The idea that mankind has anything to do with it at all, or can do anything about it, belongs to medieval witchcraft.
Even King Canute knew that.
Perhaps the most telling comment in the AFP story is this from a long term resident:
Miguel Gonzalez, who arrived from Cuba in 1980 and has lived in Miami Beach ever since, celebrated the day’s fun with friends and family.
But he complained that the city has become more expensive in recent decades, with major real estate projects and the restoration of the art deco district, the city’s crown jewel with more than 700 buildings boasting that architectural style.
"You have to be an Arab sheikh to enjoy this now. It is overpopulated. And there is no access for the poor," said the retired electrician who used to work at seaside hotels.
Now I somehow don’t think that all of these rich dudes would have invested all of this money in projects that will be under water in a few years time.
Trackbacks
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Thanks, Paul.
Since 1971, Key Biscayne, just 10 miles south of Miami Beach, has had the same 2-3″ of flooding after extreme spring tides or strong rain storms.
I give more credence to subsidence of the Miami Beach island.
The same is predicted, for New York City. Excerpt from this website:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fischetti-sea-level-could-rise-five-feet-new-york-city-nyc-2100/
“By 2100 devastating flooding of the sort that Superstorm Sandy unleashed on New York City could happen every two years all along the valuable and densely populated U.S. east coast—anywhere from Boston to Miami.
And unless extreme protection measures are implemented, people could again die.
Hyperbole? Hardly. Even though Sandy’s storm surge was exceptionally high, if sea level rises as much as scientists agree is likely, even routine storms could cause similar destruction. Old, conservative estimates put the increase at two feet (0.6 meter) higher than the 2000 level by 2100. That number did not include any increase in ice melting from Greenland or Antarctica—yet in December new data showed that temperatures in Antarctica are rising three times faster than the rate used in the conservative models. Accelerated melting has also been reported in Greenland. Under what scientists call the rapid ice-melt scenario, global sea level would rise four feet (1.2 meters by the 2080s, according to Klaus Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. In New York City by 2100 “it will be five feet, plus or minus one foot,” Jacob says.
Skeptics doubt that number, but the science is solid.” (Don’t laugh too hard now!)
(Of course, all global warming science is solid because it comes from “scientists”. Their computer models are so accurate that they predict these things 85 years out but can’t get the weather right 3 days out.)
“The Lake Wales Ridge scrubs occupy remnants of ancient beaches and sand dunes that marked Florida’s shoreline millions of years ago when sea levels were 100′ higher.”
http://www.floridata.com/tracks/scrub/floridascrub.cfm
As a resident of FL, we have a long way to go before the Lake Wales beaches are returned to their glory.
Tidal records are like temperature records, able to be downgraded for previous decades.
I kidd you not
OT Paul, but congratulations on winning the Best European Blog in the 2015 Weblogs Award. Very well deserved.
+1
+1
8 inches per century, including sinkage, with no increase in the rate of rise, if anything a small reduction. It’ll take a while.
If you are desperate, you could move to Sydney, where it’s two and a half inches per century, and not much has been built in the first four feet above sea level.
http://rense.com/general13/tidal.htm
Florida needs to worry more about a tsunami from La Palma than any sea level rise.