How THEY handled rising sea levels

[Rokcet Scientist]

They didn't try to fight climate change, like we – unrealistically – seem to be planning today (Copenhagen, etc.), but they adapted to the changing situation by abandoning their homesteads and moving inland.

Not that they had much choice, of course.

And neither do we, today. But for some reason we seem hell-bent on wasting trillions on trying, unsuccessfully, to reverse climate change.

Rising seas 'clue' in sunken world off Orkney

A unique discovery of submerged man-made structures on the seabed off Orkney could help find solutions to rising sea levels, experts have said.
They said the well preserved stone pieces near the island of Damsay are the only such examples around the UK.
It is thought some of the structures may date back thousands of years.

Among the many structures found submerged was an apparent table with four supports.

Geomorphologist Sue Dawson said that people have survived and adapted in the past and it is that adaption to climate change that needs to be learned from.
One of the team, archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones, of the University of Aberdeen, said of their freezing investigations under the December seas off Orkney: "We have certainly got a lot of stonework. There are some quite interesting things. You can see voids or entrances.

The really interesting thing about this bay is the stories relating to things under the sea and sea-level change. Our ancestors were dealing with similar problems to ourselves and we'd like to see how they coped with it
Caroline Wickham-Jones
Archaeologist

"There's this one feature that is like a stone table - you've got a large slab about a metre and a half long and it's sitting up on four pillars or walls so the next thing we need to do is to get plans and more photographs to try and assess and look for patterns.
"The quality and condition of some of the stonework is remarkable. Nothing like this has ever been found on the seabed around the UK."

Geophysicist Richard Bates, from the Scottish Oceans Institute, said: "We've got other sites down on the south coast of England where we have got submerged landscapes, meso-neolithic landscapes as we have here but what we haven't got anywhere else is actual structures.
"I don't say that's unique - that we'll never find that anywhere else, but so far we haven't seen such things before."

In general Scotland's mainland has been getting higher - but the surrounding islands have been sinking.

Sue Dawson, a geomorphologist from the University of Dundee, has been studying how and why the coast line is constantly changing. She said: "One of the key premises behind a lot of the study of the past is that the past is a key to the present and the future.
"So we can look to times when maybe environmental changes have been much more rapid and much more catastrophic in some instances and people have survived and adapted and it's that adaption to climate change is one of the key things that we need to get to grips with."
The experts said the seabed around Orkney may be littered with man-made structures.

Experts believe this could be a submerged grave headstone.

Richard Bates added: "We can look at the terrestrial landscape around here and see how man's occupied that.
"Pretty much anywhere in Orkney you can see a vista which has part of man within it, ancient man in the environment.
"The similar case is going to be in this drowned landscape so the few places we have seen so far are the biggest features but we expect to see much more as we dissect that landscape in finer and finer detail."
And they believe that while looking at an uncertain future it may pay to look into the past.
Caroline Wickham-Jones said: "The really interesting thing about this bay is the stories relating to things under the sea and sea-level change. Our ancestors were dealing with similar problems to ourselves and we'd like to see how they coped with it."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scot ... 416600.stm

Let's save trillions and not try to stop the inevitable from happening: let's adapt to the situation (evolution!), like our ancestors did. Let's not fight it in vain.

[Minimalist]

Okay. 35 families from Bangla Desh will be showing up to live in your apartment.

That's your allocation!

[Rokcet Scientist]

Okay. 35 families from Bangla Desh will be showing up to live in your apartment.

That's your allocation!

No they won't, because my condo will be submerged too...

Now, if we don't waste those trillions on uselessly fighting the inevitable submergence (what makes you think we can stop it?) we could apply them towards building a new place to live, on the high ground. For me and for those 35 families in Bangla Desh! (So they won't have to come here).

Now you know another reason why I am a fan of the EU. We here in The Netherlands need that land to live on in the future, because we're losing ours!

[kbs2244]

“In general Scotland's mainland has been getting higher - but the surrounding islands have been sinking.”

That doesn’t sound like climate to me.

[Rokcet Scientist]

“In general Scotland's mainland has been getting higher - but the surrounding islands have been sinking.”

That doesn’t sound like climate to me.

The point is rising sea levels, kb, not climate (change).

[E.P. Grondine]

“In general Scotland's mainland has been getting higher - but the surrounding islands have been sinking.”

That doesn’t sound like climate to me.

Tectonic activity where plates are colliding, while the islands are not affected.

[Rokcet Scientist]

while the islands are not affected.

They sunk, E.P.!
You call that "not affected"...?

[kbs2244]

“Geomorphologist Sue Dawson said that people have survived and adapted in the past and it is that adaption to climate change that needs to be learned from.”

OK
I misunderstood this quote.

She is a “geomorphologist” not a “climate expert.”

[Digit]

Scotland is ring due to isostaic rebound, England is sinking! The pivot point seems to be about along the line of the Wash and the Severn estuary.

Roy.

[E.P. Grondine]

They didn't try to fight climate change, like we – unrealistically – seem to be planning today (Copenhagen, etc.), but they adapted to the changing situation by abandoning their homesteads and moving inland.

Not that they had much choice, of course.

And neither do we, today. But for some reason we seem hell-bent on wasting trillions on trying, unsuccessfully, to reverse climate change.

Let's save trillions and not try to stop the inevitable from happening: let's adapt to the situation (evolution!), like our ancestors did. Let's not fight it in vain.

You know, I don't know enough about AGW to decide if its real or not. My guess is that if India and China start turning out CO2 at the current developed countries levels problems may ensue.

Couple of problems, RS. First there's 6,000,000,000 of us living on planet Earth now, so simply moving may not be much of an option.

Second, we don't know how this will affect food supplies.

Three, you're assuming that its going to cost trillions. At least here in the US, the efficiency energy use is abyssimal. Whether AGW is real or a misinterpretation of normal GW, improving it would save hundreds of billions of dollars, and is most likely the easiest to accomplish of the alternatives.

[Minimalist]

I can think of lots of reasons to switch from carbon fuel to solar, wind, etc. and none of them have anything to do with global warming.

[Rokcet Scientist]

[...] there's 6,000,000,000 of us living on planet Earth now, so simply moving may not be much of an option. [...]

Only a small part of those 6,000,000,000 live in low-lying areas that need abandoning, E.P...

[Rokcet Scientist]

I can think of lots of reasons to switch from carbon fuel to solar, wind, etc. and none of them have anything to do with global warming.

I can think of much better reasons to go all nuclear.
Fission for the 21st century, fusion for beyond.

[E.P. Grondine]

[...] there's 6,000,000,000 of us living on planet Earth now, so simply moving may not be much of an option. [...]

Only a small part of those 6,000,000,000 live in low-lying areas that need abandoning, E.P...

Have you done any calculations on that? Others have, and the results are not pleasant.

While I no longer have the ability to estimate whether AGW is real or illusory, I need to give you some personal perspective.

When I started reporting on impacts in 1997, Benny Peiser's Cambridge Conference was
a mailing list of 80 people who had attended a meeting of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies which was held at Cambridge to discuss impact events. In 2004, when I stopped reporting to work on what was going to be 3 books, its readership was at 800, and at that point Benny turned it entirely to global warming scepticism, leaving impact researchers without a way to rapidly communicate.

I could understand his reasons for doing so, how Kyoto had affected the European economies, and that cap an trade would not work, and that the science is difficult, but as one of those impact researchers you can imagine that I am little bitter about this. The thing that bothers me in this whole AGW debate is that everyone does not look at the holes in the ozone layers at the poles, and that includes Benny.

Then Benny got worse, turning from science to propaganda. There's big money involved, lobbying stood at about $1.8 Billion last year, and Benny's readership now at 8,000.

In the meantime, impact research and detection money still remains underfunded.

Bottom line, RS, whatever your thinking about AGW, you got it from Benny, one way or another.

[Digit]

Sometime ago, I was bored, I did a lot of reading on the subject of 'sea level rises'. What triggered me into doing so was the figures quoted from the now somewhat disgraced CRU. Then I found that they used the figures from Newquay in Cornwall in the UK. Problem is, Cornwall is sinking. So as an engineer I am very familiar with the need for a datum from which to take measurements.
It didn't take long to understand that no precise measurements can be taken using land as a datum.
Then I learned that the latest measurements are taken using a satelite, which again begged the question as to how stable is a satelite's orbit!
Eventually I found an explanation, which was they averaged out the orbit, which then begged the question as to how they measured that!
Radar!
The end result was a figure for sea level rise over a number of years, which I now forget, but the interesting point was the plus and minus error was the same as the calculated rise!!!

Roy.