Cumming in my wading boots, soon.

 

Seriously. Wtf has happened in Europistan?

 

Ths ppl hid the brains and cant find them.

 

http://m.spiegel.de/international/world/addressing-the-inevitable-how-to-prepare-for-the-climate-change-flood-a-1241890.html

 

Addressing the Inevitable

Preparations Begin for the Climate Change Deluge

 

Global sea levels are rising steadily as a result of climate change and the IPCC believes the deluge has already begun. What will it mean for humankind? And what changes will this bring to our coasts and our way of life? By DER SPIEGEL Staff

SOEVERMEDIA/ ACTION PRESS

 

Flooding on St. Mark's Square in Venice Oct. 30

 

Thursday, 12/6/2018 04:44 PM

 

A few weeks ago, Ioane Teitiota, a resident of the island nation of Kiribati, climbed into a fishing boat with six other men for a trip to visit relatives in London, Paris and Poland. The passage took eight days, and when they arrived, London, Paris and Poland were virtually empty.

 

The three settlements on Kiribati's eastern atoll Kiritimati were once given those names by the British explorer James Cook. And now, London, Paris and Poland are halfway submerged. The strip of land has become so narrow that waves rolling in from one side crash into the sea on the other.

 

The dikes, the mangrove breakwaters and the cement walls weren't enough, leading the residents to abandon their homes to the ocean. London, Paris and Poland have gone under.

 

The country that Teitiota calls home has a population of around 110,000 people who are spread across 32 atolls and an island, small dots in the vast blue ocean that are distributed across an area as large as India. The country's average altitude isn't even 2 meters above sea level.

 

Fourteen-thousand kilometers away from Teitiota's fishing boat, on the other side of the world, London, Paris and Gdansk are located safely and securely above sea level. It is a completely different world. There is, in fact, only one thing connecting Europe's coastal cities with the Pacific atoll of Kiritimati.

 

The sea.

 

There is only one of them. It is the same water in Miami, Shanghai or the North Sea island of Hallig Hooge. And the sea is rising. Nobody knows for sure how quickly or how high the ocean level might ultimately become. But rise it will.

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On Monday, the United Nations Climate Change Conference began in the Polish city of Katowice, the focus of which is the implementation of the Paris Agreement – following a summer of possibly record-breaking droughts and extreme hurricanes.

 

Three years ago, the international community agreed in Paris to limit the average global temperature increase to significantly below 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels. But the deluge has already begun. And it won't go away after 150 days like the one in the Bible. This one is here to stay.

 

It will take millennia for the polar ice caps to completely disappear, and perhaps they never will. But the fact that the sheet of ice covering Greenland is melting and the ice sheets of Antarctica are shifting, their edges breaking off more quickly: All of that can already be measured today.

 

There is a point of no return for the climate, and that point already lies behind us. The carbon dioxide is already in the atmosphere and it will remain there for longer than human civilization exists. And it will continue to warm the Earth's climate.

 

It is all really quite simple and follows the laws of physics: Water expands when it warms. Since industrialization, the Earth has warmed by about 1 degree Celsius, with the pace of warming having increased over the last several decades. Without an immediate and significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, NASA calculations indicate that an average temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius will have been reached by the middle of this century. A further increase to 3 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures, according to a report compiled by the German Advisory Council on Global Change, would result in sea levels rising by 5 meters (16.5 feet), though it might take hundreds of years for that level to be reached. The uncertainties inherent in such calculations are, of course, significant. But determined action taken by the international community would render such uncertainties superfluous.

 

Every coastline is in danger of flooding, whether in Kiribati, Manhattan, Dhaka or Rotterdam. We are all, if you will, in the same boat.

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