Don’t Invest In Beachfront Property

Or, alternatively, why my great-great-grandkids will have beachfront property if they just hang out in our town, 100 miles from the coast:

The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.

The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.

“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

I’m exaggerating slightly. With a three-meter rise in water levels, the Louisiana Gulf coast would begin just south of Baton Rouge. That’s 30 miles from here. Still, that’s pretty freaky.

Believe me, I’m not making light of this. But what can we do? At this point, there’s no stopping it, and if it were possible to stop it, humankind wouldn’t. Only thing we can feasibly do now is adapt, it seems to me. Watching the national news yesterday, seeing the drought in California, and the incredibly violent storms raking the Midwest, I thought: the new normal.