The future is already coming down around our ears. In Queensland, Australia we are witnessing Katrina like floods leading to drought, fire, plague, pestilence and crop failures. In North Dakota the Red River is projected to flood in the spring. With the rate of increase and severity increasing at an increasing rate for climate change consequences we have run out of time to put decisive action off.
rising sea levels severe enough to destroy many American cities are now unavoidable
People building multi million dollar homes on the dunes of North Carolina's barrier islands are realizing that they can't just keep replenishing their beaches and that there are a couple of thousand square miles that will be underwater by 2100. The Billions necessary to relocate that infrastructure will probably be going to places like Manhattan and Miami which share the same problem.
I thought Rachel made a good point about the shooting in Tucson, AZ that after having two or three instances of deranged shooters going postal every year for the last couple of decades, referring to these tragic episodes as unimaginable or inconceivable is not really appropriate.
Many nuke plants are projected to be underwater soon
I hear a lot of talk about nuclear energy as a possible alternative energy solution but looking at some of the locations where existing plants use seawater to cool facilities show that many
nuke plants are projected to be underwater soon
The reason is that the plants need water for cooling, and this applies not only to nuclear plants but to coal, oil and gas power plants as well. All these plants work in the same way, they produce electricity by heating up high quality steam and pushing in through a turbine, which turns the turbine, producing electricity. After it has turned the turbine, the steam must be turned back to water before it can be used to turn the turbine again, and so water is used to cool down the steam.
New nuclear plants are at grave risk of flooding
Brisbane, Australia where many American troops first entered the war in the Pacific in 1942 has for the last month and a half been subjected to flooding on a biblical scale.
England, Bangaladesh, South Pacific Islands, Taiwan, Arctic Permafrost, the East and Gulf coasts of the US are threatened by rising sea levels even as Australia, Pakistan, India and China are threatened by rivers which are ever more frequently overflowing their banks, washing away roads and cars and taking out whole villages.
In the Netherlands houses are being designed to float away in floods with their utilities anchored by flexible connectors and their foundations built of light weight concrete that isn't anchored to the soil and is designed to move with the building.
The worst case analysis probably won't come down on us overnight. It may take the rest of the century for cities to be flooded a foot deep and a millenia for the mile thick polar ice caps to be completely gone and water world to arrive, but the damage to nuke plants at sea level may come relatively soon.
Even without clear cutting for logging, agriculture or pasturage forest fires are going to change many of our rain forests into grasslands and Savannah at best and deserts at worst.