With respect, Matt, your premise is flawed and is typical of why Mainstream Media, Govt’s and decision makers find it so easy to dismiss Global climate change as a topic of concern.

The UN’s 2001 IPCC report suggested that at the end of the Century we could expect sea levels to rise 26cm. That’s not even a foot, Matt.

In the Autumn of 2004, Global Circulation Models began their weeks of runs for the 2007 IPCC report, AR4. Early results show that the 21st Century may see 40cm of sea level increase followed by 170cm in the next two Centuries. That is 210cm or 7 feet in 300 years.

It would be alarmist to scare your kids or send them back to school with notions like yours of 20 foot flooding. It reminds me of the old silly pictures of waters lapping at the lower stories of NYC’s World Trade Centre. Methinx Gore still uses them to sell his speaking engagements, book sales and movie videos.

There will be no action on climate change ’til the proponents learn to keep the discussions in perspective.

I am in the Yukon and we are experiencing our coldest Winter since they started keeping records in 1944. Bringing a sense of urgency to the table by scare tactics is just a turn-off for anyone who knows the difference between intra-annual weather patterns and climate.

Take care,
Freddy H>
North of 60

Thanks for your response and those actual numbers, Freddy. I understand where you are coming from and am not disagreeing with anything you say, but the accuracy of my number wasn’t my main point. I probably should have mentioned this, but one of the participants in the conversation just threw that out there as a figure. I don’t know where it came from - probably just his distorted memory of something he had heard. Considering that (amplified by your corrections), I think it’s important to try to understand how people process and remember numbers over time, i.e. not well.

I certainly don’t want to belittle accurate numbers or the importance of taking data and running models. Good science should certainly be at the heart of all of our discussions and decision making. That said, I think that it is also important to be able to talk about these issues in different ways - laying out contexts and developing story lines that might draw our neighbors in and reinforce their memories.

While I’m not at all satisfied by my country’s policies on this matter in general, the global warming / climate change discussion has persisted for quite some time now without being completely dismissed. Apparently something is going somewhat right with the distorted, inaccurate way people are discussing these matters, and I’m trying hard to hear the little grains of what matters to them and what they are trying to say to each other. Chalk it up to my training in communication, or my history exploring Music and sound with Pauline Oliveros, or whatever else you want, but I’m of the opinion that the most important activity in a conversation is listening.

Certainly sea level rises will not be sudden, and we will be able to deal with them in some way. I am amazed by how much the public has grasped onto the extreme scenarious of devastation, ignoring the subtle slow changes, like loss of fall foliage color in the Northeast or loss of certain migratory birds that are part of our lore. It seems to be part of some kind of terrible media frenzy of creating the greatest spectacle to grab the widest attention. How do we return in this scenario to sober realities?