From The Guardian, November 2012:
Sea-level rise is occurring much faster than scientists expected – exposing millions more Americans to the destructive floods produced by future Sandy-like storms, new research suggests...
The faster sea-level rise means the authorities will have to take even more ambitious measures to protect low-lying population centres – such as New York City, Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida – or risk exposing millions more people to a destructive combination of storm surges on top of sea-level rise, scientists said.
Scientists earlier this year found sea-level rise had already doubled the annual risk of historic flooding across a widespread area of the United States. The latest research, published on Wednesday in Environmental Research Letters, found global sea-levels rising at a rate of 3.2mm a year, compared to the best estimates by the IPCC of 2mm a year, or 60% faster...
Yada yada blah.
From The Daily Mail, May 2015:
Beijing is rapidly building several artificial islands in disputed waters...
It's difficult to tell from the aerial photographs, but those artificial islands are only a meter or two above sea level, so if the warmenists are right, they'll be unusable in a couple of decades and the problem sorts itself out.
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The artificial islands also neatly illustrate the point that 'land ownership' and 'the nation state' are synonymous.
Basically, whichever country is prepared to fight hardest gets to control the land and the surrounding sea; the country which controls the land gets to decide who 'owns' it. Let's say PR China built an island just for the heck of it of no military use and decided to sell ownership to private entities; the US government could, in its private capacity, acquire the freehold title, but the land is still part of PR China and would not become part of the USA
Debate Magazine
