“Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat”

'We've nothing to worry about – climate change is just a myth'. I'm quite sure you have heard that said before. But is it? Climate change scepticism is nothing new. Most aspects have been contested both in the media and in academia. You might like to know that sea level rise doesn't escape the net either. To gain a more reliable view we should take a look at the bigger picture rather than just cherry picking particular studies that might back-up our argument or by looking at small time scales without thinking about how these might appear differently if we examined more data.

Luckily, scepticism is not such a bad thing. As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote ‘Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat’ suggests, something can be gained from opposing arguments and debate. Jerry Mitrovica, Professor of Geophysics at Harvard, thinks the value in his field is that sceptics ‘force us to look at sea level with a renewed interest and insight that will help us go into the future’. His talk given at an interdisciplinary climate change meeting in 2011 can be watched below.

While I would encourage you to watch as it was informative and relatively easy to understand, I will try to sum up the key arguments of sceptics which the talk is structured around.

• 2 mm/year is not anomalous – sea level has been rising at this rate for thousands of years.
• Sea level change varies dramatically from place to place – melting ice sheets cannot be the culprit.
• Even so, 2 mm/year is small and stable.

I don’t want to give the game away straight away (in case you want to watch the talk) so my next post in a few days time will explore how Mitrovica challenges the claims of sceptics and where this leaves societies at risk. 

A Warm(ing) Welcome

Where to start? Well, you may have seen that this blog is entitled, Under Threat, Under Water – Societies at risk. And this, I hope, will be what is discussed. The aim, quite simply then, is to explore the risks that changing sea level poses coastal communities around the world. Okay so you may be thinking what impacts will rising sea levels have? You will find out don’t worry. The severity of threat posed is highlighted by the fact that around 40% of the world’s population lives within 100km of the coast and that in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected sea level rise between 18cm and 59cm by 2100.

Rather than having a set agenda of topics, I hope that this blog becomes a journey through which my thoughts and ideas progress over time thanks to engagement with recent literature, news, and opinion. Therefore a combination of popular and academic material will be used to help encapsulate current thought making it both interesting and informative. The main focus will be on the communities affected, which could mean looking at the social and economic impacts, as well as the politics involved on both the local and global scales to mitigate these problems.

It seems fair to begin by revealing the two key processes that combine to bring about sea level rise. Firstly, our warming climate acts to heat the oceans making the water expand. Secondly, the melting of land-based ice sheets and glaciers adds to the total amount of water in the oceans, leading to changes in sea level around the world. Sea level change is not consistent globally due to several reasons that I shall come to explore in greater detail in future posts. Additionally, it must be noted however that sea level has been fluctuating over thousands of years. This blog will look to the past to show whether recent trends can be traced back through the records.