Sea level continues to rise, and we are still all doomed.

[conuly]

http://usat.ly/1chGyVu

At least, those of us who live near the coast are doomed by an inundation of water. Since that happens to be most of the world, most cities being near the coast, the rest of you are doomed by an inundation of refugees.

This is old news, but nobody paid attention the last several times they were told, so journalists keep acting like it isn't.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Nobody pays any attention because we've all known we're doomed for half a century at least, ever since Silent Spring and the Cuban Missile Crisis. So now, if we haven't (yet) polluted the biosphere so badly that all the food is poisoned and dying, and if we haven't (yet) started a nuclear/bioweapons WWIII that will lead to the extinction of most vertebrates, including ourselves, and if we haven't (yet) been struck by a pandemic of everything-resistant mutant viruses, we can look forward to the seas rising and gradually flooding out our coastal cities some time in the next century. Assuming we live that long.

See, it just sounds like such small potatoes by comparison. Killer storms, like in what-was-it, that disaster flick about climate change where they all ended up hiding in the library from the deadly snowstorm - giant tsunamis and volcanos (and maybe interdimensional rifts, OMG!) from tectonic shifts - all kinds of planetary disaster from getting hit by a stray asteroid - all those, people can believe in, because they've seen them already. But who'd make a movie about waterfront properties declining in value over the course of a decade or two as the wealthy owners see the handwriting on the wall and start selling out while they can?

We're maritime here as it is - when the sea rises, we'll be smaller islands and narrower peninsulas, but we won't go under, we'll just move uphill. Won't be inundated by refugees either; in fact a lot of people will probably move inland. That's fine with me, but I'm staying, even if I have to live on a boat.

[conuly]

Viruses won't be the problem, bacteria will be. Hello, unsexy pneumonia!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Viruses are already a problem, and becoming more of one at an astonishing rate, but bacteria will get their turn as well, no doubt.

Pneumonia hasn't ever been sexy, has it? though TB apparently had its fanciers, back in the day.