lightblueline

In Santa Barbara, you can walk on seaside sidewalk and look up to see ribbons marking the 7 meter elevation above your head. These ribbons and the associated information being handed out this week are the work of a group of students at Santa Barbara High School.
Their website describes their work:

The Los Angeles Times (March 12, 2009, Margot Roosevelt reporting)

The initial results of the Governor's project to inform coastal areas about potential vulnerability to sea-level rise are beginning to arrive.

Here is an excerpt from the LA Times article:

"California's interagency Climate Action Team on Wednesday issued the first of 40 reports on impacts and adaptation, outlining what the state's residents must do to deal with the floods, erosion and other effects expected from rising sea levels.

The New York Times (March 13, 2009) reports from Climatewire (JEAN-MARIE MACABREY reporting) the results of the special IPCC meeting in Copenhagen.

Here is an excerpt:

"Scientists are gloomy; economists are more upbeat. Such was the bottom line of an epic, three-day international congress of climate change experts that ended here yesterday.

Source: University of Copenhagen March 10, 2009

"Research presented today at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen shows that the upper range of sea level rise by 2100 could be in the range of about one meter, or possibly more. In the lower end of the spectrum it looks increasingly unlikely that sea level rise will be much less than 50 cm by 2100. This means that if emissions of greenhouse gases is not reduced quickly and substantially, even the best case scenario will hit low lying coastal areas housing one in ten humans on the planet hard.

Ice melting across globe at accelerating rate, NASA says: CNN.com 12/17/2008. By Emanuella Grinberg

You can read the whole story here:
Ice melting across globe at accelerating rate, NASA says

Excerpt below:

"(CNN) -- Between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion tons of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted at an accelerating rate since 2003, according to NASA scientists, in the latest signs of what they say is global warming.

This speech marks the beginning of a new era in US federal support in stopping climate change.

Matthew Yi at the San Francisco Chronicle (11/15/2008) writes about this new executive order. Something that will, no doubt, have impacts at the local level too.
Read the whole article here:
Governor tells staff to prepare for warming

Excerpt:
"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order Friday directing state agencies to study the effects of global warming and recommend how the state needs to adapt to such changes in land use planning and building new infrastructure.

National Geographic reports that the sea level rise in this century will be somewhere between two and a half and six and a half feet. Of course, looking at the next five-hundred years (which is what lightblueline suggests we do, since we do that anyhow for floods and earthquakes) this would translate into a rise between twelve and a half and thirty-two and a half feet. Split the difference and you have about the seven meter rise lightblueline has always been focused on.