Rising Seas May Sow Havoc Much Sooner Than Predicted

 Mother Jones -  New research shows, in many places, sea level rise will cause coastal flooding and other disruptions much sooner than anyone realized. It’s not that the water is rising faster; it’s that the land was lower to begin with. Calculating when a rising sea will flood any one place involves a lot of math: you need to know the height of the water, the range of the tide, the elevation and slope of the land, the pace of sea level rise, and how much the land itself is rising or falling, among myriad other factors. As with all of science, the accuracy of these predictions is only as good as the data flowing into them. The problem, according to the new study by Ronald Vernimmen and Aljosja Hooijer, two data analysts working on flood risk in Southeast Asia, is that time after time, the measurements of coastal elevation that scientists feed into their models have been wildly inaccurate. In tropical forests, says Vernimmen, these misinterpretations can be off by 20 meters or more. “Obviously, you can’t use that,” he says.