Kindra Arnesen

A passionate narration of the inept and duplicitous assessment and clean up of BP's Deep Horizon Oil Spill. This woman spits fire!

Kindra's speech at the Gulf Emergency Summit was filmed by FluxRostrum.

The Ban

tcktcktck... BOOM!

As many of us expected, the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen has failed to reach a substantive or binding agreement. The United States negotiating team refused to commit to specific targets for emission of greenhouse gases, continuing the policy initiated during the administration of George W. Bush when we refused to join other developed countries in signing the Kyoto Protocol.

Particularly positive develompents in Copenhagen include a strong showing by developing countries, including civil society participants alongside the official delegations. A new crop of climate activists has emerged, loosely coordinated through organizations such as Friends of the Earth, the Climate Action Network and the tcktcktck Global Citizens for Climate Action.

As Kumi Nadoo writes in his open letter to President Barack Obama, the paltry cuts in greenhouse gas emissions which the United States may successfully enact through the Waxman-Markley bill will fall considerably below what is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. In addition, we have yet to make a commitment to long-term financial assistance for poor countries which will need to adapt to the impacts of our rapid industrial development throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nadoo admonishes Obama for a lack of ambition and warns that many who were energized by his promise of hope are now becoming discouraged. Like Nadoo, I too cling on to hope. To quote Nadoo, "the prospect of personal leadership at the negotiations allows me to retain some ‘audacity of hope’ that (Barack Obama) will have both the courage and the vision to make history."

COP15 COPS OUT


NGO leaders of the Climate Action Network lament the effort by Barack Obama and the United States delegation to hijack the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.

African Cities and Sea Level Rise

This post is stimulated by a recent African Loft post on this same topic. David Wheeler and numerous coauthors with the Center for Global Development (CGD) have compiled the fundamental data. Alexandria in Egypt and Lagos in Nigeria are particularly at risk both because of their likely inundation by rising seas and because of their rapidly increasing populations.

As noted by Gupta and others (2009), "variations in coastal morphology will magnify the effects in some areas, while largely insulating others." Their complete paper projecting storm surge impacts for developing countries can be downloaded at the CGD webpage here. An appended spreadsheet (.xls 53k) further tabulates the data for 327 cities. Alexandria ranks second and Lagos third based upon the population projected to be exposed to storm surges by the year 2100.

Asian cities are also at serious risk, with Manila ranking at the top of the CGD compilation. Cities in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma), Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam are also among the top 20 in the CGD table. Impacts projected for Vietnam's Mekong delta by the CGD and many independent scientists were reported in a recent New York Times article by Seth Mydans.

Wheeler and his coauthors with the CGD are certainly qualified to compile these data and explain their implications for risk assessment and public policy. Wheeler himself stands out as a clear thinker who both comprehends the scientific literature and interprets it to the general public in simple language. Following the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Wheeler (2007) penned a note about the sea level projections in which he correctly criticized their overly conservative use of glacial ice melting rates for Greenland and West Antarctica. As discussed in an earlier post on African Loft, a scenario in which these ice sheets continue melting at their present rates will in fact result in catastrophic submergence by the year 2099 along the coast of West Africa. Nigeria would be particularly affected because of the dense population in Lagos and other coastal cities.

A Tour of Governor's Island

Art and Science

Nori Jung is shown above standing in front of a map which I made with one of my students here at Valdosta State University. Nori created her own artwork on her popular television program, Norivision, using our map as inspiration. The map combines a LIDAR raster image based upon measurements using a laser taken from an airplane with our field measurements. The points on the map are our field measurements and the contour lines were drawn using the raw elevations and differences between the LIDAR pixel values.

National Hurricane Center shuffle

The director of the National Hurricane Center, Bill Proenza, was "reassigned" yesterday. Today it has been anounced that Proenza will be replaced by veteran forecaster Ed Rappaport.

After replacing veteran NHC director, Max Mayfield, Proenza was outspoken regarding the center's need for more federal funds to fulfill its mission. Proenza was poorly regarded by his own staff of highly trained meteorologists and hurricane forecasters, however.

Rappaport apparently has more clout with the staff, having been with the hurricane center since 1987. He has received a "thumbs up" from Jeff Masters over at his Wunder Blog, although comments on the blog show a mixed reaction from the meteorological community. Rappaport reportedly was considered a leading candidate to replace Max Mayfield but took himself out of the running over family issues.

Cutty Sark fire

Fire broke out on the historic clipper ship Cutty Sark at 4.45 AM GMT (12:45 AM EST) Monday morning. By 6:28 AM GMT (2:28 AM EST) the fire had been put out by the London Fire Brigade. Nonetheless, the ship was all but destroyed. Arson is suspected.

The Cutty Sark was the centerpiece of harbor redevelopment in Greenwich, England. Fortunately, much of the rigging, flooring, and hardware from the ship had been removed as part of an ongoing restoration projected to cost 25 million pounds. Now an additional 10 million or more will have to be raised to begin building her from the ground up in dry dock.

In a moving memoir, journalist Ceri Radford fondly recalls how the Cutty Sark attracted her to make Greenwich her home. Over 120 readers have left comments bemoaning her fate on the Cutty Sark website. We should all join them if we treasure objects of maritime history.

Fort Jay and other Star Forts

Yesterday morning I finished the text to a paper I have been trying to write for several years about my geoarchaeological investigations on Governors Island in New York Bay. I still have some figures, tables, and so forth to revise in order to get a camera-ready copy out the door to the editors. The intact archaeological contexts on the island are mostly associated with the above star-shaped fort, Fort Jay, built between 1806 and 1809. In 2001, several years after I completed my fieldwork, the Governors Island National Monument was created to circumscribe both Fort Jay and Castle Williams, built between 1807 and 1811 along the northeastern shore of the island.

My role as geoarchaeologist did not require much familiarity with the details of the historic structures on the island, and I surfed the web a bit yesterday looking for primary information beyond what is incorporated into the seemingly quite accurate Wikipedia entries on Fort Jay and on Governors Island. My own studies encompassed a "national historic landmark district" of 92 acres which the Wikipedia entry suggests may still exist in spite of the subsequent designation of a much smaller "national monument" of only 22 acres linking the two forts. The star fort, Fort Jay, is part of the "First System" of American coastal fortification. Fort Jay was known as Fort Columbus until 1904 due to the unpopularity of John Jay because of his negotiations with Great Britain. The circular casemated work, Castle Wiliams, was part of the "Second System" of American coastal fortification. Castle Williams was used to hold Confederate prisoners during the civil war and as a military stockade thereafter until 1966, when the army turned the island over to the coast guard.

Coast Guard "brats" who grew up living on the island between 1966 and the closing of the coast guard base in 1996 have their own webpage about the island. Excellent photographs posted by bloggers jschumacher and Mike (Satan's Laundromat) have prompted a variety of comments on the past, present, and future of the island. If you have a personal interest or opinion about what is going to be done with the island, then the place to go is the Governors Island Alliance. I just voted there for a "prow" design in which most of the artificially created southern end would be turned into green space surrounding a large basin.

The most interesting webpage that I ran across in this mad surfing was a star forts database that has been developed by Oliver Bromley. Mr. Bromley appears to have used java to code this database in such a way that every photograph or drawing is linked as an object both to other objects in the database and to primary source material available on the internet at webpages for other authors and institutions. Not only did I learn a great deal about the long history of design and construction of star forts, Mr. Bromley's creative programming for internet applications gives me hope for new sharing and integration of scientific information as the internet takes on a more open architecture.

Sea Level and Global Warming (continued)

Stefan Rahmstorf posted a clarification of the IPCC AR4 sea level projections on the Real Climate blog this Tuesday. There are 95 comments at this writing (Thursday morning), only a few of which show much insight or real grasp of his data and model results. As the above graph from Rahmstorf (2007) shows, tide gage readings are showing a recent rapid sea level rise which appears to represent an abrupt change from the "stabilized" very slow rise which has prevailed for the past 5,000 years or so^{1, 2}. For the long term perspective on postglacial sea level rise, I suggest the excellent post by Greg Laden which appeared on the same day.

¹Rahmstorf, Stefan, 2007, A semi-empirical approach to projecting future sea-level rise, Science 315(5810): 368-370.

²Church, J. A., and N. J. White, 2006, A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise, Geophysical Research Letters 33: L01602.

Protection of Georgia's Coastal Marshes
The Georgia coast is "mesotidal," meaning that it has a relatively large "tidal range" between the mean high tide and the mean low tide. In other words, there is a great expanse of brackish to saline marsh, bog, wetland, or however you wish to refer to it. The delicate balance of physical and chemical conditions in these coastal marshes supports extremely diverse assemblages of plants and animals.
As shown in the above figure¹, plants in Georgia's coastal marshes are distributed in zones determined by elevation, substrate, water chemistry, and tidal dynamics. In view of their considerable research value^2,3,4 to biologists, chemists, and geologists as well as their value in maintaining the chemical and biological health of Georgia's coastal environments, the marshes definitely deserve protection from the rapid development of our coast for tourism, recreation, and other commercial purposes. The Coastal Marshes Protection Act ( O.C.G.A. 12-5-280, et seq.) does just that, providing the Coastal Resources Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR) with the authority to protect tidal wetlands. A permit from the DNR Marshlands Protection Committee is required to dredge, fill, or build on any coastal marsh.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, the DNR Coastal Resources Division is currently proposing amended rules for protecting coastal marshes. The state legislature is supposed to be voting sometime this week on these rules, which propose a 25 foot buffer "between the upland component of the project as measured horizontally inland from the coastal marshland-upland interface." The "buffer" appears to be adapted from an approach that has been taken for floodplains of inland waterways. Tidal marshes are considerably more complex. The Sierra Club is claiming that these rules will weaken the protection of the coastal marshes, because lawsuits they are pursuing against developers have yet to be decided in the courts. Similar comments have also been submitted by Jim Stokes, president of the Georgia Conservancy. Stokes notes that recommendations solicited from the Georgia Coastal Research Council, funded by the DNR itself, have not been followed in the amended rules. Hopefully the rules will be rewritten so that they are clear enough to be implemented but strong enough to ensure protection of the coastal marshes.

¹Teal, John M., 1962, Energy flow in the salt marsh ecosystem of Georgia. Ecology 43: 614-624.
²Odum, Eugene P., and Smalley, Alfred E., 1959, Population energy flow of two invertebrate species in a salt marsh ecosystem. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 45: 617-622.
³Sherr, Evelyn B., 1982, Carbon isotope composition of organic seston and sediments in a Georgia salt marsh estuary. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 46(7): 1227-1232.
⁴Alber, Merryl, and Hollibaugh, James T., 2003, Why is the Coastal Marsh Dying? The Network Newsletter 16(2).