London 'under water by 2100' as Antarctica crumbles into the sea

by phil on Saturday Mar 25, 2006 6:39 PM

Dozens of the world's cities, including London and New York, could be flooded by the end of the century, according to research which suggests that global warming will increase sea levels more rapidly than was previously thought.

[Link to UK Times]

The comment thread on the topic is what's disconcerting. While there is a general consensus on scientists about global warming, the armchair intellectuals are skeptical about it.

Here's a link to the discussion thread on digg

Digg has generally intelligent commentary. But at the same time, how does a comment like this get +32 diggs?

Yeah right, imagine the hilarity if people in 1906 tried to predict 2006. They'd probably be debating how 300 million Americans will dispose of the manure generated by all the horses they use to get around.

This was my response that got 0 diggs:

So let me paraphrase this => "The level of accuracy of the scientific community has not changed in the last one hundred years."

So not true. Theories and estimates have been stabilizing over the past century. Case in point: age of the earth. The current estimate for the age of the earth has stopped changing: "Today's accepted age of the Earth of 4.55 billion years was determined by C.C. Patterson using Uranium-Lead dating on fragments of the Canyon Diablo meteorite and published in 1956." (wikipedia) Before, it flew anywhere from 4,000 years to 100 million.

Or even more mundane things, such as the nature of the solar system. We stopped revising our understanding of the Earth, its position, its shape, in the 16th century with Kepler.

The scientific community generally gets more accurate over time. And eventually they are totally or fairly close to 100% accurate. It happens.

Comments

Shaun Haber said on March 27, 2006 1:14 PM:

Hey Phil,
Digg is a cool site, but the people on there are kinda lame. It seems to be mostly teenagers and gamers.

I agree with your post.

Philip Dhingra said on March 27, 2006 2:49 PM:

Shaun!