A government-funded study predicts rising sea levels will likely submerge over 4,000 miles of internet cables and more than 1,000 data centers in the next 15 years.
But even the study’s authors admit their results are based on the “most extreme” sea level rise scenario of six feet by the end of the century.
The study’s dire predictions are based on a future sea level rise that’s worse than even the most “extreme” scenario in the latest National Climate Assessment Special report released by the Trump administration in 2017.
The study, by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Oregon researchers, uses the “most extreme” scenario considered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“We find that 4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water and 1,101 nodes (e.g., points of presence and colocation centers) will be surrounded by water in the next 15 years” with a foot of sea level rise, the study’s authors wrote.
“That was a little bit unexpected,” co-author Paul Barford told NBC News. “We sort of expected that it might be parceled out over a longer period of time, but that’s not the case.”
Of course, news headlines blared warnings the internet was in danger from man-made warming.
“Rising seas could knock out the internet — and sooner than scientists thought,” NBC News reported. “Climate change could literally break the internet,” reads The Huffington Post’s subheadline.
National Geographic went with the not-so-subtle headline: “The Internet Is Drowning.”
But how realistic is this dire prediction? The new study relies on an extreme scenario that projects more sea level rise than the latest NCA report’s most extreme scenario.
The NCA presents a range of sea level rise estimates of between 0.3 and 0.8 feet by 2030, but Barford and his colleagues went beyond that by modeling internet infrastructure inundation from sea level rise of one foot by 2030.
The NCA’s “intermediate” sea level rise scenario only predicts half a foot of sea level rise by 2030 and 3.3 feet by 2100. Barford’s study relies on a scenario of 6 feet by the end of the century.
“Specifically, in the next 15 years, as much as 2,429 miles of metro fiber conduit will be submerged after a 1 ft of sea level rise, whereas as 2,637 miles of metro fiber conduit will be affected in the next century,” the study found.
Researchers overlapped NOAA sea level rise data with internet cable and data center information mapped out by the website InternetAtlas.org.
The study was funded by the federal government, including the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security.
Read more at Daily Caller
What a shock! Government-funded research yields… Catastrophe!
Given that the ocean rise has consistently stayed in the mm’s per year for the last decades somehow it will suddenly shoot up to where we get 1 foot increase in 15 years? I guess I’d like to try what these “scientists” are smoking!
Of course in a few thousand years the earth will look like from that idiotic movie WATER WORLD WITH Hollywood airhead Kevin Kosner flip flopping and swimming dolphin style with dumb webbing between his fingers and those stupid gills all this Global Warming/Climate Change poppycock and Hollywood airheads like DiCaprio having nervous breakdown over this whole thing
Really, the Internet infrastructure submerged in 15 years? At 1.5+/-0.2 mm/yr, according to [1], that would be 2.25 cm altogether, hardly detectable when compared to tides and waves. Who would have thought the Internet to be so fragile.
On the positive side, we won’t have to worry about election interference!
Frankly, the study is baloney, and to see this kind of pseudo-science trash being paid for by the taxpayers is scandalous.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0502.1
Best case scenario: I hope sea level rises 15′ by the end of this year. Then we can knock out the massive amount of ‘bovine scatology’ that comes through the internet. I’m old enough to remember and gentler and more civilized time before the net.
Cheers
It is disturbing that tax payers are funding such junk as this study.
Now let’s take a look at how the internet started. The military wanted some means of communication for nuclear defense that would still work with much of the system knocked out. That was the beginning of the internet. It can still work with large pieces missing.