The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.The author is Dave Lindoroff, and his bio says he's "a 34-year veteran, an award-winning journalist, a former New York Times contributor, a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a two-time Journalism Fulbright Scholar." How standards have fallen -- there's hardly anything scientifically accurate about his essay.
Cats live about 15 years, and global sea-level is rising about 3 mm/yr. So in the time span he envisions, sea-levels will rise only up to about 50 mm, or 5 cm, or .... 2 inches. Which isn't going to "inundate" anything.
Who cares, though, if it makes your political point? That, again, seems to be the attitude of the left these days.
This kind of alarmism does a lot of damage to the cause.
1 comment:
I agree to a point, David. Certainly both sides...er...liberally use hyperbole. And this causes fractured dialogue. But the shed in this op-ed reads "Global Warming Will Save America from the Right...Eventually" and the subhed reads "The future political map of America is likely to look a lot different, with much of the so-called “red” state region either gone or depopulated.".
So, contextually, this is a piece about politics.
This is not a measured discussion for the general population on likely impacts.
Rather, it is a dog-whistle intended to get the person who responds to this rhetoric to stop crunching their granola and nod their head yes.
Further, this is not Noam Chomsky or Al Gore or Sean Penn in the NYT or IHT, it is a semiretired guy in an on-line paper with a circulation likely in the three digits. So who cares.
Best not to give it any more attention than it deserves, in my view, which is very little.
Best,
D
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