California Will Be Underwater In A Few Years??

Its happening really bad in Bangladesh. Its sad because the people there can't afford to move away from it, and they cant farm as well because of all the salt water from the rising sea. I dont know about California much, but we can see from other areas of the world that the sea levels really are rising.

 

My information is that subduction, a slipping of the Pacific plate under the North America plate, is not a gradual process, but will be a sudden event generating an earthquake. Think of rubbing a cat's hair the wrong way. The hairs will bend for a while and then suddenly snap back into upright position. The Earth's crust behaves in a similar sudden fashion. There may be a lateral slip component, but there is also a direct (perpendicular to coastline) component.

A sudden subduction and earthquake would be bad news for shoreline inhabitants on the British Columbia coast, as it was in Indonesia not long ago.

 

Part of the Pacific plate is being subducted by the North American plate, but not the north/west side of it. Here is a link to a map that shows the directions it is moving - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagelates_tect2_en.svg
The movement and direction of the plates have been directly measured for some time now. I have personally walked/explored on/through/over many of the faults in California and its not being subducted.

 

To my way of thinking, and I'm no expert, there are forces pushing the Pacific plate against the North American plate, but there will be no rapid movement until some critical force level is reached. Then there will be a sudden movement accompanied by an earthquake and/or tsunami. Among other available sources, try the following Canadian government page:
http://earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/zones/cascadia/threat/effects_e.php.
In general, very few scientists try to predict when a major event (Richter 9) might occur. One source hazards a guess about catastrophic sliding once every 500 years:
http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/geodyn/cascadia_e.php.

 

The Cascadia Subduction zone, that the links you provided show, are a different situation then what is going on with the areas south of it (the area I was talking about). The Pacific plate is not being subducted in the Cascadia subduction zone either, if you notice there is a small plate named the Juan De Fuca plate, that is under going subduction.

 

Its my understanding that if all glaciers melted, the sea level would only rise between 30 and 80 inches (roughly). Along the west coast of the US, that isn't a big deal (relatively). Places like Bangladash, which is situated mostly on a delta, could potentially lose 80 percent of their landmass. They are already losing much land there as it is.

 

Ha, no. If all of the world's ice mass melted (which won't happen) sea level worldwide would go up about 400 ft. The Gulf Coast would be in Tennessee We expect to see sea level rise in the range you're talking about this century, though sea level is rising faster than predicted, so we may have increase our estimates a fair amount. On our current path we'll probably see a good 0.5 m if not several meters of sea level rise by the end of the century.

cj

 

We'll probably have to wait and see.
Although I think this could be unlikely, as global warming gets too much undeserved credit according to what I've been reading.

 

For the science behind the warnings, see
http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100091700,
a review of the book "Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming" by
Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer.

The 'Y2K' problem, which forecast significant computer program aborts due to use of a two digit year format, was a real problem which was in large part fixed prior to 1 January 2000. If programmers (and their corporate Systems Steering Committees) hadn't addressed the issue, there would have been more issues like people aged 106 being sent letters telling their parents to enroll them in elementary school.

 

At what point does action become appropriate then? How much warming does there need to be before we decide to take action? Do we have to wait until after there has already been substantial damage and until we have already changed the climate is significant and unreversible ways (unreversible over many thousands of years) to change our behavior?

Indeed, some people do tend to want to attribute every problem to global warming. Generally these people don't get taken seriously. On the other end of the spectrum are folks that take the position that global warming has not caused any problems whatsoever, or the particularly looney even go so far as to suggest that there has been no warming, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Should we take these people seriously?