Five feet of seawater to flood Florida's coastline over the next 100 years, scientists warn

Paul Quinlan in the Palm Beach Post: …Over the next 100 years, rising global temperatures are expected to cause seas to rise five feet in the vicinity of Florida, swamping the state's coastlines, pushing salt into underground wells and potentially flooding the Everglades with seawater, a group of top Arctic scientists warned.

Compare that to the average sea level rise worldwide over the past 100 years: just under 8 inches. The warning came at the end of the State of the Arctic Conference in Miami last week, where 450 scientists from 17 countries gathered to discuss climate change and anticipate its effects.

Scientists cited the rapid disappearance of sea ice and "greening" of the Arctic, recent tundra fires in Alaska and thawing permafrost across a broader region that has caused giant slabs of once-frozen earth to break off and slide down mountainsides, clogging rivers and streams. Their bottom-line message: global warming is not only real but accelerating as a result of man-made influences.

…"Global warming is not over. It has not stopped," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For example, using global temperature averages, each of the last four months have ranked as the top three warmest for their respective months, he said. "A regional cooling does not necessarily mean much in terms of global change," said Serreze….

An Everglades landscape, shot by Yonatanh, who has generously released it into the public domain