Sea level much higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10196-1

by jacquesm • 5 months ago

107 63 5 months ago

nature.com

bikenaga• 5 months ago

[flagged]

buildsjets• 5 months ago

The only thing you ever post is AI summaries of articles. Why?

Schiendelman2• 5 months ago

I assume that's a bot that helps us not have to click on articles for basic information. Personally, I find it quite useful. I'd love to have that built into HN.

MisterTea• 5 months ago

We are more than capable of reading thanks.

sebmellen5• 5 months ago

The saddest part of global turmoil around AI, Iran war, etc. is how dramatically climate change has disappeared from the 'global conversation'. This is not something we can afford to ignore for much longer.

jatari• 5 months ago

Climate hasn't been a real topic of discussion since the Obama administration.

jonahrd• 5 months ago

I disagree, Greta Thunberg's whole thing started in 2018, leading to larger and larger climate protests and action globally...

..until about 2020, with COVID/russia-ukraine/Oct 7/trumps re-election following and burying it below tons of other news cycles.

crystal_revenge3• 5 months ago

And the Obama administration really just talked about it. It was under his administration that the US shale oil extraction really started heating up.

The problem is the only solution to climate change is keeping oil in the ground. There are other things that can be done to make a zero emissions transition less painful, but oil (and all other fossil fuels) need to start staying in the ground.

During the Obama administration is when we started to see a dramatic increase in US oil production [0]. The US hegemony is oil powered and founded on the petro-dollar. There's no way US policy can be aligned with anything remotely resembling a path towards a sustainable energy environment.

0. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...

michaelteter• 5 months ago

Fox News and Trump still routinely say it's a hoax. And their devotees repeat that line in one breath, and in the next breath say, "wow, we just set a new high temp record in January!"

tencentshill• 5 months ago

No, it just got boring. There have been massive renewable buildouts since then, as a direct consequence of those policies. No matter how much trump hates it, the economic scales have already tipped.

pocksuppet• 5 months ago

We've been getting progressively more dog-eat-dog short-term since Reagan.

dingnuts• 5 months ago

Close, but it's actually Nixon and the end of Bretton Woods

andai• 5 months ago

Isn't that artificially imposed survival fear the natural consequence of fractional reserve banking?

giraffe_lady2• 5 months ago

I don't think climate change is being ignored: AI, war profiteering, ICE, detention centers, destruction of the international system, global fascism are their answer to climate change.

It's not to prevent it, or to mitigate its damages, it's for the people who disproportionately caused it, and have already benefitted from it, to finalize their control over the resources they want. Some of those resources are some of us.

georgemcbay• 5 months ago

And they aren't even really bothering to hide it anymore.

A lot of Trump's seemingly odd obsessions like taking over Greenland and Canada are less odd (but still very unsettling) when you accept that the global power elite have already accepted that run-away climate change is inevitable and the only open questions are who is going to profit from it and how.

surgical_fire• 5 months ago

You don't have to worry about the future if you ensure there is no future.

axus• 5 months ago

Disagree, the motives are the same with or without climate change. We're still at the slow part of the curve. Knowing what's coming doesn't change their behavior.

beedeebeedee• 5 months ago

There are also some people in power who believe climate change is related to the end of times and eagerly welcome it to hasten their idea of ‘Armageddon’

Herring2• 5 months ago

You're giving them too much credit. They're just blindly seeking profit.

Humans are not that good at planning longer than 6 months to 5 years out. The brain is legacy hardware, optimized for the Pleistocene epoch. Reward circuitry (Striatum) often overpowers logical simulation (Cortex).

maest• 5 months ago

The US has been taking steps in the wrong direction wrt climate change and they will undoubtedly be judged to jave been on the wrong side of history on this one.

In the near term, however, Americans will blame everything except man-made pollution for the fallout from climate change.

sebmellen5• 5 months ago

Regardless of the politics of the day, where is the long-term, popular will (or capacity) for a "green/electric" revolution in the US? We are massively dependent on fossil fuels, and our quality of life is too.

At the same time, we don't have China's industrial capacity or their stomach for massive state-driven subsidies. I don't see how you escape peak oil otherwise.

0xffff2• 5 months ago

I say this as an American... I can't help but feel that the US will be judged to have been on the wrong side of history in virtually every topic for which there are sides in the last decade if not longer. For reasons I don't understand, we seem to be actively and aggressively working to destroy our country and as many global institutions as we can.

crystal_revenge3• 5 months ago

wrong side of history on this one.

There's not much history left. What we're seeing right now is people getting ready to win the end game of civilization. The oligarchs are well aware of the myriad existential threats to our civilization (and species) and are playing the game to make sure they're the last person alive living in comfort.

History will increasingly be told by powerful, oligarchical, modern warlords.

crystal_revenge3• 5 months ago

Reducing the severity of climate change (we've already signed up for potentially civilization destroying consequences, even if we could go zero emissions today), requires keeping proven reserves in the ground. No amount of "green" energy will impact our future if it doesn't mean we start using less fossil fuels (globally) than today.

Darkly, a disastrous global nuclear war that sends us back in time 500 years would be the most effective and most probable way of achieving this.

spongebobstoes• 5 months ago

what if we could capture carbon at a significant rate? I know that we can't right now, it's a hypothetical

noncoml• 5 months ago

Not because of AI or Iran war. It’s because we, in the US, voted for it to disappear.

metalman2• 5 months ago

Watch your warming oceans expand in real time here

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today

above shows what may be the earliest ever peak sea ice

and

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/

and the one above is absolutly terrifying , or should be to wanabe hegemnons thinking that the naritive, is thiers.

lazyasciiart• 5 months ago

Can you explain what background knowledge I need to be terrified looking at the second one?

metalman2• 5 months ago

it is a tool that shows daily snap shots of the SST to use it you need to have a good grasp on geography/oceanography, and then spen a bit of time each day looking at it, and cross corelating with things like hurricanes, to see the trace spiral of cooler water that a giant storm will imprint into the oceans surface, or this year, the very significant chanhes in the worlds major hot and cold currents, and size of the spill over from the south wester pacific into the atlantic.

bvdw• 5 months ago

The first link contains a banner that perfectly illustrates the tragic moment we're in: "Due to non-renewed funding, several Sea Ice Today tools and services are now suspended or reduced."

sebmellen5• 5 months ago

So we are more than 1 million square kilometers lower than our record minimum year of 2012. Holy shit.

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter...

jacquesm• 5 months ago

https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-scariest-climate-plot-...

bokohut• 5 months ago

Appreciate the URLs that reflect what some already know because I can just walk behind my house located along the Chesapeake Bay and see the real world physical impacts that are unfolding from the melting ice.

For those curious the water is not perpetually always higher as the attention seeking north east west south sites project but it is instead contributing to greater tides and thus greater erosion within the weather timing of those tides. These tides are well above what used to be "typical" within known past human time and the very high tides timed against significant weather events are greatly eroding the shoreline. As stated herein a few days back however, erosion brings significant lost items out of the soil which then become new discoveries for those aware to look. Having taken several multi hour shoreline walks in the past few days I have located quite a number of those Native American lost items as my collection significantly grows.

measurablefunc• 5 months ago

In almost every fictional story¹ dealing w/ near future outcomes every author just assumes that Miami & New York are under water.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

pjmlp• 5 months ago

We just started another war with unforeseen consequences to the planet, while destroying all resources to feed the AI monster, forget about all those paper straws.

mmooss5• 5 months ago

... 90% of the hazard assessments assume coastal sea levels based on geoid models, rather than using actual sea-level measurements.
A geoid is an equipotential surface model that approximates MSL based on gravity and the rotation of Earth. As geoid quality depends on gravity observations, uncertainties in global geoid models can range up to several metres in regions that suffer from gravitational data paucity ..., predominantly located in the Global South. Moreover, actual sea-surface height is not just determined by the gravity and rotation of Earth, but also by, for example, ocean currents and large-scale circulation, winds, tides, seawater temperature and salinity. As a result, time-average sea-surface height can deviate strongly (up to several metres) from a geoid, and its difference is the so-called mean dynamic topography (MDT).

I don't quite grasp how those flaws in geoid models lead to an overall significant underestimation of sea-level. Shouldn't all those average out?

uncertainties in global geoid models

Why would those tend toward underestimation?

sea-surface height is not just determined by the gravity and rotation of Earth, but also by, for example, ocean currents and large-scale circulation, winds, tides, seawater temperature and salinity.

Other than temperature and maybe salinity, those factors move water in a closed system: increasing water one place reduces it in another (?).

time-average sea-surface height can deviate strongly

Why would average deviation by positive and not zero or negative?

fred_is_fred• 5 months ago

Over the past 5 or so years, I've seen population projections missed over and over. Growth is slowing and it's slowing faster than projected. Almost every projection is too high. Does that have any impact on climate change rates? Or is it a wash because societies with shrinking populations are using more resources? I've not been able to find much research here.

Sea level much higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments

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