Would it be too much to ask that this thread be left free of the acrimonious tossing of feces that goes on in the GHG thread, and focus simply on real, observable changes to our planet's climate and the ways in which people and governments are being affected / are coping / etc.?
Louisiana's Coast Is Sinking
It’s becoming harder and harder to communicate the most urgent crisis facing Louisiana.
According to the U.S.G.S., the state lost just under 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000. This is the rough equivalent of the entire state of Delaware dropping into the Gulf of Mexico, and the disappearing act has no closing date. If nothing is done to stop the hemorrhaging, the state predicts as much as another 1,750 square miles of land — an area larger than Rhode Island — will convert to water by 2064.
An area approximately the size of a football field continues to slip away every hour. “We’re sinking faster than any coast on the planet,” explains Bob Marshall, a Pulitzer-winning journalist in New Orleans. Marshall authored the series “Losing Ground,” a recent collaboration between The Lens, a non-profit newsroom, and ProPublica, about the Louisiana coast’s epic demise.
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Using publicly available data, Galinski created a map on which areas that commonly appear as land on government issued maps—woody wetlands, emergent herbaceous wetlands, and barren land — were re-categorized to appear as water...
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On our map, the real map, the boot appears as if it came out on the wrong side of a battle with a lawnmower’s blades. It loses a painful chunk off its heel in Cameron and Vermilion parishes.
Some people might criticize us for taking out the wetlands entirely, and there are places that do exist in real life — like Isle de Jean Charles — that aren’t on our boot (although they are visible, if barely, on the map we used to create the boot). But maps are approximations, and we believe ours errs closer to the side of truth.
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On our true map, I saw something the human eye can’t perceive: I was standing on a barely visible stripe of earth far offshore, land that anyone who cares knows is in imminent danger of fading into oblivion. On our map, the beach where we stood and the road we traveled to get to it are barely holding on. The map sounds an alarm too few people have heard.
(
Business Insider)
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