Free Republic

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, rising seawater levels and chronic flooding threaten to disrupt daily life, damage homes and businesses, and swallow land in the relatively near future, according to a new study. For some parts of the Eastern Shore, there soon may be no more there there. That’s the takeaway from a report released Wednesday by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The study, “When Rising Seas Hit Home: Hard Choices Ahead for Hundreds of U.S. Coastal Communities,” looks at the impact rising sea levels caused by global warming will have on coastal regions across the country. Maryland, with 3,100 miles...

Scientists say treated wastewater could help Virginia’s coast respond to rising seas. A local sanitation department for the Hampton Roads region wants to start injecting the water deep underground instead of dumping it in rivers that flow into the Chesapeake Bay. The U.S. Geological Survey says the water could likely expand the sandy aquifer underground, causing the ground to rise. …

(CNN)—NASA's rockets are astounding machines, capable of blasting into space at thousands of miles per hour and withstanding temperatures twice the melting point of steel. But they can't take off underwater. Rising sea levels caused by melting ice caps threaten to disrupt a handful of NASA launch sites along U.S. coastlines, the space agency warns. In the coming years, launch facilities at Florida's Kennedy Space Center and other places may need to be retrofitted or even moved inland, NASA says. "Every NASA center has its own set of vulnerabilities, and some are more at risk than others," NASA climatologist...

WASHINGTON (CBSDC) — Secretary of State John Kerry warns U.S. ambassadors that they will be dealing with “climate refugees” in the not-too-distant future. Kerry told U.S. ambassadors at the Global Chiefs of Mission Conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday about the threat climate change poses around the world. “There’ll be climate refugees that all of you will be coping with at some point, if not now, in the not-too-distant future,” Kerry said. “Ninety-seven percent of all the scientists for 20 years tell us unequivocally that this is happening and happening now, and humans are causing it, and we have a...

Report comes after North Carolina senate proposes bill to ban predictions of increase in rates of sea-level rise. Research from the US Geological Survey (USGS) shows that sea levels are rising much faster between North Carolina and Massachusetts than anywhere else in the world. The news comes less than two weeks after North Carolina's Senate passed a bill banning state agencies from reporting predictions of increasing rates of sea-level rise. Asbury Sallenger, an oceanographer at the USGS in St Petersburg, Florida, and his colleagues published their report today in Nature Climate Change1. They analysed tide-gauge records from around North America...