Coastal homes in Australia at risk from rising sea levels
Government report shocks country where 80 per cent of population lives on coast
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Australia's love affair with the beach is in danger of being rudely terminated. A parliamentary report released yesterday suggests that the government may have to force people to abandon prime oceanfront homes along thousands of miles of coastline vulnerable to rising sea levels.
The report, published in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit on climate change in December, sent a shiver through a country where 80 per cent of the population lives on the coast. With more than 700,000 homes within two miles of the ocean and less than 20ft above sea level, rising seas – together with more frequent storm surges and higher tides – are a serious threat.
A parliamentary committee spent 18 months investigating the state of Australia's coastline, and MPs were shocked by what they found. Mal Washer, deputy chairman of the Joint Standing Committee on Climate Change, said yesterday: "There's little in reality left of our coast. It's all breakwaters or sandbags... It's a disaster."
Mr Washer said that popular beaches, such as those lining the Queensland Gold Coast, a popular tourist destination, would not exist if sand was not pumped on to them artificially.
The report, entitled The Time to Act is Now, calls for national guidelines to govern development in sensitive coastal areas, replacing the current piecemeal approach by local councils. Mr Washer told ABC radio that a line should be drawn around the coast, "and beyond that there should not be development".
In one coastal town, Byron Bay, in northern New South Wales, where houses are already being assailed by the waves, the Greens-dominated council is trying to prevent homeowners from building sea walls to protect their properties. The council has adopted a policy of "planned retreat", which would allow nature to take its course. The parliamentary committee says that policy may have to be enforced more widely, especially given the fiendishly complex insurance and liability issues raised by climate change.
With increasing numbers of Australians moving to the coast in pursuit of the national dream of beachside living, none of this is welcome news. Mr Washer warned: "It's already presenting major problems, but in the future it's going to be a nightmare for us."
The Labor government is trying to establish an emissions trading scheme, in the face of bitter opposition from industry and conservative MPs. Yesterday's report was seized on by the Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, as further evidence of the need for such a scheme, aimed at reducing Australia's carbon emissions.
The relevant legislation has already been rejected once by the Senate which Labour does not control. Next month it will make another effort to steer the bill through; if it fails again, that could, theoretically, trigger an early general election.
Alan Stokes, executive director of the Sydney-based National Seachange Taskforce, which represents coastal councils across Australia, yesterday echoed calls for a ban on development in certain areas. He said some spots were so vulnerable to the effects of climate change that "there can be no guarantee that people can live there in the future in a sense of security".
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Comments
Since there has been NO significant sea level rises to date, the cause has to be other factors. Due to the long term variations in tides the high water sea levels have been falling! From now until 2016 they will rise. This is just a natural cyclic process, and has negated any sea level rises there might have been.
So no one should have seen any effects of sea level rises in the last 18 years. So all the stories and pictures are due to other factors.
Do you think nature made the flat coast lands just for our enjoyment. No, they are created at that level from the sea level because they were made by the sea. By building roads and levees the natural process to maintain and grow the land has been destroyed.
The biggest factor being the draining of the West Coast Marshland. The land is heaped in to ridges and canals cut to supply material. This erosion is just nature washing away the developed land to try to regain the flat marshes. The issue is all to do with LOCAL bad planning and building. They even emptied a lake into one of the new canal systems and "drowned" all the fish in the lake destroying the whole of the area's wildlife in one go.
Try telling your little rant to the folks in the Pacific Islands and the Maldives who have already lost huge parts of their low-lying countries...
To much weight on one side. What you need in Perth is more people to balance out the weight levels then it won't tip over.
Resveratrol
The Australian government is fully commited to excavating as much coal as possibe and shipping as quickly as possible to China, so the Chinese can get it into the atmosphere as quickly as possbible, some of it being consumed in the manufacture of syntehtic koala bears that line the shelves of shops in Australian cities for tourists to buy. And, like every other bizarrre western government, the Australian government is fully commited to motor racing and tourism, and any other activity that wastes fuel and generates disproportionate amounts of pollution -gotta get the oil used up as quickly as possible and converted into CO2 by any maans possible, but preferably by a means that produces nothing but smoke and noise.
Here we are at peak oil, and on the brink of devastating abrupt climate change, with billions of peolle on the brink of starvation.... and we have circus clowns for leaders.
It's all completely insane.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien
You'll note that the fossil of this sea-living creature was found in a Dorset cliff somewhat above current sea levels. The most likely explanations are that either the sea was higher than it currently is, a tsunami stranded the creature on land or that considerable forces have pushed the seabed above sea level. All of these explanations demonstrate substantial natural causes to which life has naturally adapted. Extinctions may occur (our own demise would actually seem to fit with some of the more extreme views of the AGW movement) but the earth continues: it does not need to be 'saved' by our puny self-righteousness.
The fact is that the threat to the Australian coastline is no different to the threat to any other coastline since time began. For example, the East Anglian coast (reclaimed from nature by human intervention) has long suffered erosion. It has been disappearing at an increasing rate lately only because our self-interested politicians choose to spend taxpayers money on global warming alarmism and its corporate advocates instead of providing the relatively tiny sums needed to preserve the coastal defences left to us by previous, less self-absorbed generations.
Adaptation to change is a much more sensible approach, especially when all the predictions prove as groundless as they surely are. We're good at adaptation and as the World Bank report 'Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change Study' suggests, even if the current doomsday scenarios were to prove correct, the cost of adaptation would be significantly lower than the measures being proposed at Copenhagen.
Big government and big business are behind these constant scare stories and anybody who thinks that punitive green taxes and global governance are going to save the earth (let alone benefit them or the environment) needs to take a long, cool look at the whole story, not just the propaganda being circulated by the Independent and others.
Yes, knotheads, places like Tuvalu, the Maldives, the Seychelles will go under: better book your travel now. The displaced inhabitants will be booking their travel, too, and one hopes they come to live near you. But that's OK--there aren't too many of them, are they? Not all at once, anyway.
To the doubters: the current scientific consensus (among people actually doing the science, not just opining about it while pocketing their honoraria from EXXON) stands at 6" of rise by 2025, 5' of rise by 2100, and 20' of rise over the 300 years following. That's from the vertical expansion of warming seas plus the melting of Northern Hemisphere ice. If nothing changes to reverse carbon output in the meanwhile, the South Pole will eventually melt too, for a total rise of some 200'. So either change your minds or let your attention drift: at 6" your local beach may well survive awhile, and you won't be alive to deal with the 5' anyway, will you? Oh--do you have kids? They might have a thought about all this themselves.
Have you any proof that sea levels are rising any faster now than they were 50 to a 100 years ago to an extent that would give 6 inches rise by 2025 which is only 16 years away. I have looked and I cannot find any such data.
A little research would show you that there are many Scientists who are not buying the supposed consensus and that a fair proportion of them are in climate or related disciplines. You also produce the usual smear that anyone who disagrees with your viewpoint is in the pay of Exxon et al. Care to produce the proof for that disgraceful slur.
Something may stop it warming, of course--even mysterious solar activity:who knows?--but trends tend to build on themselves. This trend, according to almost all the professionals at work on the phenomenon, has been building a long time and has been steadily accelerating in step with greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. It's possible that something currently unknown is more responsible for the warming, but it's nuts to counsel any further wait-and-see as the temperature goes up. The cost for being wrong is too high: we fry.
The scientists involved--again, their consensus is nearly universal--see something rolling over the horizon at us and have raised a united alarm. If one dismisses the possibility that they simply love the planet, and their children and progeny beyond who have to live here, what could their motivation be? Do they hope to establish themselves as an alternate New World Order? Are all holders of Ph.D.'s secretly Marxists looking for any excuse to grab another shot at world domination? Please! When you look at the people on all sides of an issue and consider their possible motivations for their stance, scientists actively at work on that issue come out with more credibility than people who have something to lose if those scientists carry the day.
The sorry fact is that a number of people in science have sold their reputations to EXXON and the like. They cannot have done so without an awareness of who sets up and funds the 'public' interest groups that trumpet their opinions, and so anything they say is suspect, at the very least. You don't do science by aligning yourself with the people who have the most money at stake in preserving the status quo. Of course, there are other people in science who haven't put themselves in the deep pockets of corporations and industry groups and who still criticize aspects of climate change studies. Some of them are actually hard at work on some aspect of the problem--Roger Pielke Jr. comes to mind--some of them are natural contrarians who will always eschew the bandwagon, some of them are emeritus scholars no longer in the laboratory or the field who resist all evidence that the discipline they love has moved on since their retirement. But those among the Pielke group who criticize their peers' pronouncements, or the political use made of their work, tend to be concerned about limiting predictions to what can be supported by a given piece of research; regarding the big picture, they are on board with the rest: it is getting hotter, and we have problems ahead that threaten to overwhelm us.
The unverified Models should not be in quotation marks as that is exactly what they are. I know this not only from personal experience but because of letters that I have read from Systems Engineers stating that the Verification Procedures used in the IPCC Models would not be tolerated in other disciplines.
The Planet is NOT warming at present. Temps are stable or, arguably, slightly declining since 1997. There is a lot of noise in the annual average temps but, if you plot them on a graph, I think that they show a possible top developing. It is too early to be certain but should become clear in the next 3 to 5 years.
You seem to set great store by the supposed consensus in Climate Science that CO2 is the main culprit for the warming that occurred from the late 50s to the mid or late 90s, prior heating was when Solar was a more important driver. I can quote many cases from the History of Science where the consensus turned out to be wholly or partially incorrect. Also there are Scientists who have suggested other causes for the warming in the second half of last Century. Professor Eastman thinks it is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Emeritus Professor Philip Stott thinks it is the Atlantic Multi Decadal Oscillation. Both think that we are in for decades of cooling. Others have claimed refutations of the basic CO2 Hypothesis. It is quite possible that all these people are wrong but it does, at least, suggest that we use a modicum of caution before embarking on projects to reduce CO2 emissions, other than those which are a good in their own right.
I tend to believe that CO2 does have an impact on temps but the ONLY way that we can get predictions of the amount and rate of rise is from the Models. Since they did not predict the temps from 1997 to 2008, look up the predictions being made in the 90s if you do not believe me, that, again, suggests a modicum of caution is called for before embarking on the more extreme measures that are being proposed. If we reduce CO2 emissions by 80%, as suggested in the UK, then we will bugger our Economy since the only way that could be within the possibility of being achieved would be to make massive structural changes and generate Electricity from Fission Power, for example. You will have noticed that those Greens who are most committed to the 80% reduction are the ones who also shout no to Nuclear.
Look up the sea level values for the last 100 years and you will see that the annual rate has been fairly constant and is, actually, somewhat lower than normal for the last decade or two. Thus, I do not see how the figures quoted in the Media can be justified for future sea level rises. Several Scientists in the Field have stated that the levels are not rising unusually fast.