The answer, according to Lorne Gunter is . . . not very soon, if at all:
For nearly a decade now, the tiny Pacific island-group nation of Tuvalu has made news for its government’s claim that the archipelago is being swallowed up by rising sea levels caused by global warming. The island government has even considered suing the world’s largest industrial powers for emitting the carbon dioxide that many scientists believe is trapping solar radiation in the atmosphere and leading to allegedly higher global temperatures. When the highly vaunted UN climate summit in Copenhagen in Dec. 2009 failed to produce a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto accords, the Tuvalu delegation was not shy about expressing its disgust and outrage, claiming that world leaders had consigned them to a slow extermination. (So slow — over 100 years — that almost no current Tuvaluns will live long enough to be killed by the encroaching oceans and their descendents will have plenty of time to row to safety. But let’s not pick nits.)
[. . .]
Two American experts on coastal construction and sea-level — James Houston, director emeritus of engineering research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Robert Dean, professor emeritus of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida — examined decades worth of data from all the tidal monitors around the U.S. and determined earlier this year that “worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years.” indeed, the rate at which oceans have been rising has “possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.”
Houston and Dean are committed warmists. They started their study with the expectation that their results would show rapidly increasing sea levels. Instead, they found that the oceans around the U.S. had risen little in the 20th Century and that the far from rising faster due to global warming were actually rising more slowly. If the trend of the past 80 years continued, the pair estimated that at most worldwide oceans would rise by 15 cms (ankle depth) by 2100, rather than the one to two metres most recently projected by the UN, or the 10 metres estimated by Al Gore.
Darn it. I know a guy who owned an office building in the Seattle area. A sea rise of 10 meter would leave his building on a new island. He could then buy the other owners out, cheap, in the ensuing panic.
Then he’d have an island in Puget Sound. With a building already on it. You know how much island property in the Sound is worth?
Comment by Brian Dunbar — October 14, 2011 @ 14:05
Another easy money-making scheme confounded by bitter reality.
Comment by Nicholas — October 15, 2011 @ 10:39