This is a climate change and GIS nerd post. You've been warned.

An interesting development for our local student ASPRS chapter - we're looking at adopting a glacier (actually, a remnant snowfield) in the Trinity Alps. There's a glacier monitoring project based out of Portland State - we're hoping to meet with the program managers at a conference in April. As I understand it, they're using thermoimaging and GIS to monitor and model glacial response to climate change. I'm sure there's more to it, but that's the part that got me interested. Apparently, we'd get access to ASTER imaging to do it.

The glacier project complements my 480 project rather well. I'm about 10 hours into an analysis of the social impact of projected sea level rise scenarios on the peninsula communities of Humboldt County. Most of the literature indicates a 1m rise by 2100 under best case scenarios (CO2, CH4, N2O, O3 and black carbon aerosol emissions decrease) and 3m+ by 2100 if we keep our shit up (IPCC scenarios A1B or B2 - insufficient reduction in GHG emissions).* I'm planning on taking a digital elevation map, plotting sea level rise scenarios on it, and overlaying census block data for analysis. It's a lot harder for poor folks to move households (consider the Katrina event), so my hypothesis is that the poor will be hardest hit in the peninsula communities. Yeah, I know, it's obvious heuristically, but telling policymakers something is "obvious" doesn't work as well as pushing a scientific study under their noses. Of course, a lot of times that doesn't work either. It might be moot, though. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do a good analysis at this point - all the elevation models I've found so far don't have the precision I need to make the project work. I'm wondering if I'm going to have to do measurements myself with a GPS unit; I ain't paying for a LIDAR flyover, that's for sure.

Of course, all bets are off if 1500 sq mile ice sheets keep dropping into the sea. Those models predict as much as a 150+ feet rise in sea level. For reference, that's about the height of the Statue of Liberty.**

Buy a bike...and consider saving up for a good canoe.

* = Hansen, James, et al. 2006. “Global Temperature Change.” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 103: 14288-14293.

Incidentally, Hansen (a NASA Climate Scientist) is the same guy that said we have about 10 years to reverse course before we are basically committing to dangerous climate change (catastrophic sea level rise and 60%+ species extinction, etc).

** = Bell, Robin E. 2008. “The Unquiet Ice.” Scientific American 298: 60-67.