Rise in sea levels threatens California ports

Facebook's sprawling Menlo Park campus is surrounded by water on three sides. It's beautiful now, but in 50 years its location could be problematic. According to ClimateWire, Facebook and 256 other Silicon Valley tech companies sit in a dangerous flood zone.

In a recent PBS documentary, the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, Paul Fraim, talks about how flooding has become a monthly occurrence in his town, and how global warming and sea level rise are as much a daily issue for him as education and fighting crime. In some parts of Norfolk, streets turn into rivers at high tide. Homes are flooded five out of six years. People lose their carpets, their appliances, their savings.

Sea levels are set to rise by up to a metre within a century due to global warming, a new Australian report said Monday as it warned this could make "once-a-century" coastal flooding much more common.The government's first Climate Commission report said the evidence that the Earth's surface was warming rapidly was beyond doubt.Drawn from the most up-to-date climate science from around the world, the report said greenhouse gas emissions created by human industry was the likely culprit behind rising temperatures, warming oceans, and rising sea levels.

California, like Greece is perpetually in fiscal trouble. Overoptimistic revenue forecasts coupled with spending $2 billion more than expected has California in a deep hole. Governor Jerry Brown has the same non-solution as ever, hike taxes. Brown wants a "temporary" (as in seven years) tax hike. Given we all know there are no such things as temporary tax hikes in California (seven years is permanent enough in the first place), and also given the California school budget needs an axe, the I say let him.

“The short-term rate of global sea level rise has decreased by about 25% since the release of the AR4—and a new paper shows that some 15% of the observed rise comes not from global warming, but instead from global dewatering…. [R]ather than raising its projections of sea level rise, perhaps the IPCC ought to consider lowering them once again.”

The world's coral reefs could be wiped out by 2050 unless urgent action is taken to stop threats posed to the "rainforests of the sea" by everything from overfishing to global warming, a report warned Wednesday.Warmer seas caused by global warming; ocean acidification blamed on carbon dioxide pollution; shipping, overfishing, coastal development and agricultural runoff all pose a threat to coral reefs, which hundreds of millions of people depend on for a living, says the report.

The twin ports together handled 20.3% more cargo boxes this year than in 2009 as trade began recovering from the global recession.The resurgent tide of international trade lifted nearly all major U.S.