John Batchelor July 13 Why Save Tangier Island torrent

Why Save One Particular Island? @jongertner, NYT Magazine


http://www.dennisprager.com/another-breakdown-97-scientists-fraud/

http://www.jewishjournal.com/dennis_prager/article/global_warming_revisited

https://www.prageru.com/courses/environmental-science/climate-change-what-do-scientists-say


Schulte first visited the island in 2002, when the corps asked him to look into the restoration of some nearby oyster beds. “My first impression was just how low everything on Tangier was,” he recalled. Most of the island, which consists of several long sandy ridges connected by footbridges and amounts to a little over a square mile, is about four or five feet above sea level. The low elevations and the quiet, bird-filled wetlands and tidal creeks produce a sense of living with the water, rather than beside it. Schulte has returned to Tangier several times over the past decade to track its health. Last year, when some money became available at the corps to research the impact of climate change on coastal areas, he and a couple of colleagues began a study on Tangier, believing that this tiny island might also yield insights into the vulnerability of cities and towns all along the Eastern Seaboard. They concluded that Tangier had lost two-thirds of its landmass since 1850. To scientists who study the Chesapeake, this was not surprising: Over the past four centuries, Schulte estimates, more than 500 islands have disappeared from the bay, about 40 of them once inhabited. The most striking aspect of the Tangier research, however, was how bleak the island’s future looked.

Some of its troubles are the result of the same forces behind sea-level rises everywhere. Warmer global temperatures make oceans bigger — a process known as thermal expansion — and thus increase sea levels; at the same time, land-based glaciers around the world, along with the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica, are melting into the ocean. “But they’ve got it worse here,” Schulte said. Tangier’s location in the center of the bay, along with its friable turf of sand and silt, leaves it dangerously exposed and fragile. What’s more, the land in and around the Chesapeake is sinking, because of lingering effects from geological events dating back 20,000 years. “They’re just in a very untenable position,” Schulte said. “And they don’t have any options right now other than something big to turn them around.” A very big construction project, in short.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/should-the-united-states-save-tangier-island-from-oblivion.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fearth&action=click&contentCollection=earth&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront



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