sea level rising by 1.09 yard in 50 years

Global warming, or if you're metric, a meter.

So, we'll check to see if this turns out to be right in 2057. See you all then, if you live to be that long. I certainly hope I will. I can imagine myself at age 73, clutching a crickety old cane, living in Sacramento or North Dakota because San Francisco, my proximate city, will be buried like Atlantis.

Changes are finally coming. I couldn't be more delighted. Yes, many things will be lost, but I think they will be quite symbolic, mythologized, forgotten, and recovered like the city of Troy, and speculated on.

Like the story of Atlantis, which people believed was destroyed because the gods thought it was inhabited by an evil race of men. The destruction of all our coastal cities will be seen as the result of anger of our Christian or the Arabs' Islamic God. And our migration inward into the heartland of America but a pitiful show of our solidarity.

This is all a result of human action, but what I say will be buried with the sediments of time. The more popular belief in an interventionist extraterrestrial and non-natural entity is what will prevail.

Now, there are some who think that Nature is finally getting her comeback. If they choose to so personify Nature in this way, let them personify her. It is merely science that the sea level will rise, not that there is some equally vengeful Mother Nature weaving her little storms and raising her seas to batter and billow at us, the continent of our ambition.