QuoteSome of Jacksonville's signature real estate — land around EverBank Field, downtown office towers and hotels — will be underwater if sea-levels change, prompting a regional planning council to recommend being prepared for that potential reality to occur.
So is the city planning ways to cope with that?
"It's really not," said Marsha Oliver, a city spokeswoman.
A lot of uncertainty remains about how fast the ocean will rise.
So far, that fact and the lack of any immediate hazard have been reasons enough for city administrators to not think deeply about changes that could be sweeping and widespread, but also decades and decades in the future.
That frustrates people who think Jacksonville should start planning before real problems surface.
"They are determinedly not looking at it," said Allen Tilley, a retired English professor who runs a listserve that curates reports about climate change. He said he thinks higher sea levels will change the water table enough within 15 years to affect some septic tanks, wells and long-forgotten underground gas tanks.
Full article: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2015-12-31/story/many-questions-few-plans-handling-sea-level-changes-jacksonville
I happen to love fish, just think of the seafood explosion when those little bugger start swimming through the grasshopper swarms on Everbank Field. There has just got to be a way to capitalize of this stroke of good luck... San Marco Fishery's has a ring to it. :D
Quote from: stephendare on December 31, 2015, 05:00:39 PM
Wow. It only took the TU ten years after we started actively discussing it to deem it noteworthy.
Per usual. Wish now I had clipped and saved the TU Editorial pieces regards Global Warm Theory during the 1980's....on second thought, it no matter.
Interesting thing is how do you determine a 4mm rise in sea level? Water moves all the time. It is influenced by tides that vary from season to season in timing and intensity. Tides are also affected by wind direction. A Nor'easter rises water up in the river over the tide. Rain which varies in intensity, volume, seasons, and storm events also rises the level of the river. Three hundred sixty five days a year, four tide changes per day, variable number of variable storm events and how do they determine with engineering OCD accuracy 4 mm?
Overstreet,
Go to tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/products
Basically they take a reading every six minutes and use a mean deviation from an established datum.
And you look at worldwide trends, and you do it over a very long time. 75 years is considered a minimum for observation of a sea-level change trend. Believe it or not, we have some pretty good data going back that far, just not as ubiquitously as today. As for worldwide temperature change, I'm not sure what the timeframe is (probably different for air and sea), nor how they control for heat island effects.
Whatever your politics might be, the IPCC truly is the state of the art whenever it is revised.
I certainly think we should be curbing our emissions (and all forms of pollution in general), but I don't see the urgency with respect to planning for sea level rise away from long term infrastructure projects (which generally are accounting for it). Everbank ending up under water isn't exactly something that will happen quickly even when the rise becomes very noticeable. The lifespan of the average home (heck, development), or any modern building, isn't even all that long - FEMA Flood Zones may be a sufficient enough tool to plan for multi-decadal rise when it comes to development.