How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 102: Sea Level Rise Increase Underestimated According To Science
German scientists have discovered the thermal expansion of water due to higher temperatures contributes more to sea level rise than initially thought. The study also found that sea level rise is not uniform around the world as some places will receive a 5x increase of the global average while other places will be the same.
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http://www.speakupforblue.com/session102
Welcome to The Speaker For Blue Podcast, session 102. Today we're going to talk about climate change. I know it's been a while since we haven't talked about it, but it's time to talk about it because there's a new study that says sea level rise from the ocean warming has been under estimated, which can be scary for a lot of places and less for some others. But we need to talk about it and that's what we're going to talk about on today's episodes. Stay tuned. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of The Speaker For Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of speakerforblue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. That's right. Everything I do as an entrepreneur, I do to protect the ocean. Hence the word "ocean printer" that I made up and I'm sticking to it. Anyway, I hope you had a great weekend. It is Monday. I don't even know the date. I think it's February 1st, actually. January went by really, really fast, so all of our news resolutions are probably broken by now. You know, you're trying to lose weight, you're trying to eat healthy, it's probably broken, or hopefully it's not and you're kind of going past. But studies show that at least a month after or just a month, maximum month, a lot of people break their promises to themselves on their news resolutions. But I'm here to say, keep going, keep going with those promises, especially if you're making a promise to protect the ocean in your daily life. So yeah, that's my PSA announcement for today. I hope you had a great weekend. I mean, I did. I had a very busy weekend, saw my parents for the whole day, which was awesome. They couldn't spend time with the kids. They're off to Australia, actually tomorrow, which is awesome. I'm very, very envious. And then we also got to do some skiing in a six degree weather, which is very, you know, just unheard of anymore, or, you know, in the past. Especially when you go skiing, it's cold, it's minus 10, minus five, that's a perfect day. And it was actually too hot to ski. I found I was, you know, tearing off layers of clothing, just so that I wasn't sweating buckets on the way down the slopes. They're not big slopes. I live in Ontario either hills, I guess you can call them, but my kids are getting into it. My wife and I, we take the kids out with some friends and their kids and they love the hills. They love just going up and down all day long. So it's a lot of fun and I had a great weekend. But today, we're going to talk a bit about climate change and it actually, I'm glad we talked about it because skiing yesterday really brought on the oh crap, you know, there is such a thing as climate change. We're about to go for a week of weather here in Ontario in the pluses, you know, at one point hitting plus nine as a high and only minus one is a low. I don't know if that breaks record records, but usually February, it's minus 30 degrees, minus 20 degrees Celsius with, you know, and then further colder with the windchills. So it's kind of scary that we're getting this weather this year and it's been getting warmer and warmer every year and it seems like this year especially is a record breaking year. So it makes sense to talk about climate change and it's interesting to say because I think a lot of people as I talk about this specific topic of sea level rise and how we're talking about how sea level rise has been underestimated from the past, I guess, models or estimation. A lot of people are going to be like, oh, look, these scientists, they don't know what they're talking about. They're always finding new things and that's, you know, but that's science people. They're always finding new things. They're always rejigging their algorithms. They're looking at their models and they're saying, wait a minute. What if we incorporate this? What if we incorporate that and things change? You know, sometimes, you know, this is new to us, this climate change stuff is new even though we've been, you know, scientists have been saying for years, things change and unfortunately in this case, things are rapidly growing. And when we talk about sea level rise, a lot of people talk about, oh, the glaciers are melting, you know, all the icebergs up north are melting and the glaciers are melting. So, you know, the melting ice is creating this problem. And then some people have told me, oh, well, they're still, you know, they're still ice, you know, these massive ice sheets and they're still all these glaciers around. So why, you know, why do we have to worry about it? Or I can't see the sea rising to rising too much. So, you know, what's the point of it? Well, it's actually, it is actually rising and there's actually two components to sea level rise, which I want to talk to you right now about. And this is kind of interesting to me because it makes sense to me. I didn't really think about it before that there were really two reasons. So there's two factors in sea level rise and how it can rise. There's the melting ice, of course, which we're all familiar with, right? As ice melts, especially it was packed in ice in the glaciers up north and in the Antarctic, you know, you get, you just get more water, you know, more ocean in the more fresh water, actually, in the ocean. So not only does that allow that provide more volume for the ocean, but it provides more fresh water, which is a completely different issue. But it provides more volume to the water. So it's going to, you know, there's going to be more water in the ocean and it's going to rise because of that because it's got nowhere else to go. The other part of the other factor of sea level rise is thermal expansion of water as it warms. This is something that you never think about because you don't really care. Let's be honest, you don't know about it. But essentially, if you think about it as water or anything warms, it expands, right? When it's cold, it retracts, when it's warm, it expands. So then if it expands, water can only really go one way and that's up. So it's going to go up and it's going to raise the sea level rise, or I was going to raise the sea level, sorry. But until now, researchers only believe that the oceans rose between 0.1 and 1 millimeter per year due to thermal expansion. But then they took a fresh look at satellite data between 2002 and 2014 and it shows the seas are actually expanding about 1.4 millimeters a year due to thermal expansion. So there's a quote by one of the co-authors, Jurgen Kusch, professor at the University of Bonn, who's a German professor at the University of Bonn. They say, "To date, we have underestimated how much of the heat-related expansion of water mass in the ocean contributes to global rise in sea level." So he says, "The overall sea level rise is actually about 2.74 millimeters per year." So that's combining both thermal expansion and melting ice. Now that is crazy. I know you're probably thinking, "Ah, 2.74 millimeters is actually not that much." But you think about it, that's a 2.74 millimeters globally. That's saying that, "Okay, if everything is even," if we assume that everything is even, I'm not going to say that the ocean is flat because I don't want people to be like, "Ah, hey, do you say the oceans are flat? The world is flat." That's not true. I didn't say that. But if you think everything is even and there's a globally, there's a 2.74 millimeter rise, that's actually quite a bit if you calculate the volume of the ocean, the ocean surface and you add 2.74 millimeters on top of that. I don't know what that volume is, but that's actually quite a bit. So 2.74 millimeters is actually a lot more than you think, especially when you put it over a globe, all the oceans, that's 70% of our planet. So it's quite a bit. Now, you also have to think about that sea level rise is not just uniform throughout the entire world. For instance, around the Philippines, it's actually five times the global rate. And meanwhile, the sea level rise on the West Coast, the U.S. West Coast, is largely stable because there's hardly any ocean warming in that area. So it's not even. So don't expect it to just be even, but you've got to realize, sometimes it's going to rise more than others. Hence, that's why some island nations are actually finding that they have to leave the island because of the sea level rise and how the island is probably very close to mean sea level. So that means that the land from the island is actually at the sea level or just above the sea level, and if that rises 2.74 millimeters per year, they don't have much time. If they're, say, they're 30 centimeters above sea level and it's rising 2.74 millimeters a year and it has been doing that for a while, they didn't have much time. A lot of some islands, not a lot, but some islands are actually moving. They have to pick up their entire culture, their entire way of life that they've had for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and they have to move. A lot of these islands that are moving are very basic in terms of they don't have grocery stores, they don't have internet connection, they live off of the land and the water, right? They don't have toilet facilities. These are very, very, I don't want to say basic isn't a bad thing, but these are just, they just live off the land, they're very natural, and imagine picking that culture up and moving to a different island that may not have that. You're switching everything around, they've got to get jobs, they've got to earn money, they've got to support their families, that is a huge shock to their system, right? Their way of life, and moving homes, imagine you have to move your home. Now, the other thing that you're going to see is you're going to see from this increase is you're going to see an increase of amount of damage from severe storm surges, right? So we've seen a lot of storms come around, and Australia, you're seeing an increase in cyclones, cyclone rates, you're seeing a lot of increases in hurricane rates, especially during warmer times, warmer weather. You're seeing some strong severe storms, severe drought, severe extreme events, but when you see storm surges come in, they come in further because there's more water. So it's actually reaching further, so if you live along a coast of an ocean and you live close to the coast, you better look at the floodplain and you better look at where that storm surge is going to change and where it's going to come up because it may come to your house, right? And if you look at anything like things like hurricane Sandy or super storm Sandy, like when we covered, I would put the episode down, but when we talked to Bill Wise from the New York Sea Grant, we talked a lot about super storm Sandy and the storm surges that came up there and how far it came up, coming all the way into Manhattan and damaging everything from New Jersey Manhattan along the northeast coast. So we're seeing a lot of this happening and it's because there's a lot more of an increase than we anticipated and now we're seeing it, right? And now we're getting the effects. So this is something that we need to worry about. This is another call to just say, let's stop contributing to the global rise in temperatures, which is let's stop contributing to emissions. Let's stop contributing to the purchasing of products that require the natural resources that produce these emissions, right? Let's cut those down. That means cut on petroleum products like plastic is a huge thing. If we cut down our plastics, not only will we stop or reduce significantly the amount of petroleum used, which contributes to some carbon emissions, but we're also reducing the amount of plastic pollution that goes into the ocean. So you're getting a two for one deal here people and it's not difficult to do. There are a lot of different alternatives that you can get that you can use. You can use glass products instead of plastic products, right? And they'll last longer. They may be more expensive to the best bang for your buck plus you're saving the environment. You're saving yourselves, especially if you live on a coast, right? Or in your waterways, not just coasts like rivers and streams, they all get affected. So yeah, it's really just this is more of a call to like, okay, these are the effects. Let's start reducing. You may not see the reduction right away, but you will see a reduction eventually. And that's what we need to do is we need to just stick to it be consistent with the fact that we're reducing plastics, we're reducing petroleum products, we're buying more efficient cars, we're forcing the the the the manufacturers to make more electric cars. I just heard the other day that Tesla's putting out a more inexpensive car. I think it starts at $35,000 US to buy, which is better than the $85,000 because more people can afford it. I can't, but more people can afford it, you know, and and you're seeing more hybrid cars and electric cars coming around and electric stations, recharging stations and stuff. So you're seeing more of this, which is great, but we got to be consistent. We got to keep going out there and keep going out there and doing what we can. I'm not saying go out and buy a $35,000 car. Just save the environment. Don't go out of your, you know, get broke because of it, but you know, start asking for these kinds of things and start really focusing on different aspects, you know, of the environment and say, what can I do right now that I don't have to, it doesn't have to be crazy expensive and I can change, right? Energy use, change that, it'll actually, it'll actually benefit you financially, it'll bring down your energy bill, turn off some lights, right, buy some LED lights, they're brighter and more effective, more efficient. It costs more, but you will hopefully never have to replace them or very little. So it makes sense, best bang for your buck, okay? So anyway, I forgot at the beginning of the show to thank our supporters at Patreon because I shouldn't be able to forget those guys because they're helping me and they're helping this podcast just kind of continue and save the ocean by, or protecting the ocean by really just getting the message out there through the podcast community and they're doing that. So I just want to thank Chris and Claire Jefford, I want to thank Dr. Judith Weiss and I want to thank Ron and Judy for your support, I really appreciate it. If you want to support ocean conservation being told all around the world through this medium, this podcast medium, you can do so by going to speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N. It's a very secure site that allows creators, podcasters to get funding or get support, potential support from people who just really love what they're doing. So you can do so at speakupforblue.com/patreon P-A-T-R-E-O-N and it'll be in the show notes at speakupforblue.com/session102 and you can actually get the link from there as well or on your podcasting app or wherever you see Speakup Blue, you can also get that as well. But yeah, you can go and you can support on a monthly basis, just remember it is a monthly basis, remember that when you put in your number, any support would be greatly appreciated there are different incentives for different levels of support, and I would greatly appreciate your support. So thank you very much, you've been listening, that's the end of our show today, you've been listening to Speakup for Blue podcasts, I am your host, Andrew Lewin, happy Monday and happy conservation. [Music]