Combing for Beaches

It's a clear cold dawn here on the NCR.  -6 degrees (Farenheit) for those of us keeping score.  Easily the coldest day in the past couple of years and cold enough across a broad swath of the country that the climate change deniers and their media enablers will be in full voice today.  Meanwhile, a group of scientists are looking for and finding ancient beaches up to 100 miles from today's coastlines.  It seems that during the Pliocene era approximately 3 million years ago, most of the icecaps in the northern hemisphere and a good part of the Antarctic ice sheet had melted in response to volcanic activity over a period of many thousands of years.  The result was a rise in sea levels of up to 90 feet.  This was a gradual rise, but it inundated coastlines around the world.   Meanwhile, mankind has increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to levels comparable to those of the Pliocene in a mere 200 years.  Scientists are predicting a rise in sea levels of six feet by 2100, and are already saying that may be a conservative estimate.   A redrawn map reflecting the full melting of the Greenland ice cap and a large part of the Antarctic shows the east coast of the US a full 100 miles west of the present boundaries.  Large parts of Florida are underwater, and probably 35-50% of the population would be displaced.  That is a sobering thought, especially if you are under 20 years of age and can expect to have to deal with your elders' refusal to accept scientific evidence of an impending catastrophe.