Miami will be swallowed as sea levels rise--no doubt about it

...but climate change deniers are looking the other way, so nothing is being done to prepare for the inevitable, which is going to arrive sooner than most expect. Actually, it's happening even now. South Florida is on its way to obliteration.  Read this article for the facts: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/11/miami-will-be-swallowed-as-sea-levels-rise-but-the-climate-change-deniers-who-run-it-look-the-other-way/   Remember the book about W. Bush entitled "Obliviously On He Sails"?  Well, here is a whole state doing the same thing...And one could say the same thing about our country...and the world.  We scorn the historical Nero for fiddling while Rome burned, yet here we are today. Do you see any similarities?  Unfortunately, lessons on Earth most often seem to be learned the hard way.

Miami will be swallowed as sea levels rise, but the climate change deniers who run it look the other way

By Robin McKie, The Observer
Friday, July 11, 2014

EXCERPT:  The trouble is that no one is thinking about climate change or sea-level rises at a senior management level.”

The problem stems from the top, Kirtman said, from the absolute insistence of influential climate change deniers that global warming is not happening. “When statesmen like Rubio say things like that, they make it very, very hard for anything to get done on a local level – for instance for Miami to raise the millions it needs to build new sewers and canals. If local people have been told by their leaders that global warming is not happening, they will simply assume you are wasting their money by building defenses against it.

“But global warming is occurring. That is absolutely unequivocal. Since the 1950s, the climate system has warmed. That is an absolute fact. And we are now 95% sure that that warming is due to human activities. If I was 95% sure that my house was on fire, would I get out? Obviously I would. It is straightforward.”

This point is backed by Harold Wanless. “Every day we continue to pump uncontrolled amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we strengthen the monster that is going to consume us. We are heating up the atmosphere and then we are heating up the oceans so that they expand and rise. There doesn’t look as if anything is going to stop that. People are starting to plan in Miami but really they just don’t see where it is all going.”

Thus one of the great cities of the world faces obliteration in the coming decades. “It is over for south Florida. It is as simple as that. Nor is it on its own,” Wanless admits.

“The next two or three feet of sea-level rise that we get will do away with just about every barrier island we have across the planet. Then, when rises get to four-to-six feet, all the world’s great river deltas will disappear and with them the great stretches of agricultural land that surrounds them. People still have their heads in the sand about this but it is coming. Miami is just the start. It is worth watching just for that reason alone. It is a major US city and it is going to let itself drown.”