Is it true some parts will be under water in 2025? I'm kinda of worried cause someone told me about it bc it was on the news
Eh, not really. Like, technically, but that's a very dramatic way to put it.
What that person told you about was probably this prediction, which says that some roads on some of the Florida Keys might be underwater by 2025.
Does that suck? Yes. But it's also pretty limited in scope.
(And by the way, that's probably not "underwater all the time." There will probably be a number of years of "the roads will be underwater at high tide specifically." I can't currently find a source on this, but that's how tides work, and the Florida Keys article does specifically mention them as a main problem.)
The areas in danger first are pretty universally small, very low islands. Actually, a dozen or so small islands have already gone underwater in the Pacific Ocean, but very importantly, none of those islands were inhabited.
They were mostly small reef islands (that is, the entire island is exposed coral reef detritus) and other uninhabited shoals. Mostly, they were so small scientists had to check old satellite images to even figure out that they disappeared. Literally, we're talking about chunks of land that are just 100 square meters/300 square feet. Again, not great, but still very limited in scope.
As this Live Science article thankfully explains, it's pretty unlikely that any countries at all will disappear before 2100.
Also, just because land is below sea level doesn't mean it will be underwater, and there are very real steps we can take to defend a lot of endangered cities/islands.
For example:
Much of the Netherlands is already below sea level, but the country isn't disappearing, because the Dutch have put a lot of work into building and maintaining coastal defenses.
Multiple surveys (including the one that found the missing islands in Micronesia) also found that not all low-lying islands are vulnerable to erosion and flooding. This is because many islands are protected by mangrove forests, lagoons, or both
Mangrove reforestation in particular is genuinely a super effective anti-flooding strategy that is being deployed pretty widely, and is expected to increase a lot in the coming years. Mangroves are effective at not only preventing short-term flooding, but also mitigating sea-level increases (in part by preventing erosion)
Some islands, esp Pacific Islands, have actually grown during the past couple decades, not shrunk. It really depends on what the island is made up of. Not all land is automatically doomed
You can read more about how sinking countries are fighting back here, and the lessons we can learn from them:
-via Time, June 13, 2019
And finally, and this is good news for reasons I'll explain in a second:
Some of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world are at the top of the danger list. (Note: the predictions at that link are based on some fairly severe warming predictions. They do NOT necessarily reflect what's going to happen or when.)
The cities that are going to be in danger the soonest (still away btw) include New York, London, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Dubai. Lots of very rich people in those cities! Who would really like to not have to move (any of their ten different homes lol)
So, flooding aside, we're going to (by necessity) get a lot better at figuring out the quickest, cheapest, most scalable, and most effective types of coastal defenses real fast.
Are rich countries going to be way more able to get strong coastal defense systems up quickly? Yes. Does that suck? Sure fucking does!! But these solutions don't all require a lot of money or tech to implement, even at a large scale, especially when it's local communities driving the effort.
And, importantly, when rich countries pour a ton of money into figuring this out, that will hugely expand our understanding of what techniques work best, why, and how best to deploy them in different situations. Unlike physical structures, that's valuable knowledge that can be shared very, very widely.
And any technology that comes out of this is going to work like solar panels and other green energy: as more people use it, it will get cheaper and cheaper. Probably really quickly.
So, all told, no one's going to be swallowed up in the next few years. We have time to work on this and a lot of people are already doing so.
Mostly, experts predict that the first wave of large-scale issues will be happening around 2050.
Three decades doesn't sound like enough time, in the face of something like this. But you know what? Responses to climate change are speeding up exponentially, and different types of responses are multiplying and magnifying each other.
We went from inventing flight to landing on the moon in just 66 years.
I wouldn't count us out of the climate change fight yet.
(...I wouldn't count on retiring to Florida either, though)
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