June 5th 2009
The Latest Sea Level Hysteria
N
ew York liberals will have to look for a new place from which to launch their anti-conservative diatribes if the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters is right:
Sea levels off the coastline of the Northeastern United States and Nova Scotia could rise more than in other regions within the next century if the Greenland Ice Sheet melts at an accelerated rate, according to a paper in the May 29 edition of Geophysical Research Letters.
According to the paper, “Transient Response of the MOC and Climate to Potential Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the 21st Century,” sea levels off the coast of New York, Boston, Halifax, and other Northeastern cities could rise 12 to 20 inches more than the average sea level rise by the year 2100 as ocean currents circulate water from the melting ice sheets in Greenland.
“If the Greenland melt continues to accelerate, we could see significant impacts this century on the northeast U.S. coast from the resulting sea level rise,” lead author of the paper Aixue Hu, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement. “Major northeastern cities are directly in the path of the greatest rise.” (From Daily Environment Report, June ’09)
Fifteen to twenty inches more than average by 2100 … let’s see, that’s 90 years from now, so that’s about a quarter-inch rise per year.
A quarter-inch a year is four times the rate of average sea level rise since 1880, right, which has been humming along at 0.6 inches a year. To put that in perspective, it’s even greater than the number of times Obama has increased the national debt in the five months he’s been in office – just a measly three times.
Accelerated melting of the Greenland ice shelf is dependent on a lot of ifs. Ocean temperatures would have to rise. The North Atlantic Current would have to respond to that rise by shifting to the north. And atmospheric temperatures would have to rise as well. And the computer models would have to be accurate.
That last one’s a bugger because intuitively, it’s pretty obvious that if the ocean gets warmer, cloud cover will increase from move evaporation, and increased cloud cover will flummox those persnickety computer models.
Besides, a brilliant friend tells me, the hysterical paper is based on a running average of sea levels, like most hysterical papers, which yield “outlandish and statistically unsupportable claims of sea levels a century hence, to tens of a foot.” Actual sea level measurement, rather than running averages, yields the cool, calm and collected data. But what fun is that?
Further messing up this little global warming nightmare is the chart on the left, which tracks ocean levels since about 20,000 years ago. As you can see, they began rising after the peak of the last ice age, really took off about 15,000 years ago, plateaued for two brief spells, and have run pretty darn flat for the last 8,000 years.
So what does all this mean? Not that islands are sinking anywhere, at least not any time soon, but that bureaucrats are having a heyday. Someone has to do something with this data, and boy are they!
My brilliant friend spells it out: The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (not to be confused with a panel of climate scientists) says ocean levels will go up 17 inches a century – three times more than they have been. And they’re planning for our future accordingly.
The California Coastal Commission, however, has decided it’s going to base its planning on a 36-inch-per-century spike in ocean levels, and it’s making anyone who’s building in the Coastal Zone develop plans to protect homes from those levels. Oh, but it doesn’t allow you to build sea walls, so go figger.
But wait! When regulating itself and its fellow Earth-hugging agencies, the Coastal Commission uses an 11-inch-per-century sea level rise for its planning. The thousands of homes adjacent to the new Bolsa Chica wetlands restoration project will soon have ocean tides immediately adjacent to their homes, protected by a little bitty levee that isn’t certified by FEMA and only anticipates an 11-inch ocean level rise over the next 100 years.
The area in red in this image will become a tidal wetland as soon as oil field clean-up in the area is completed. The homeowners on the other side of that red line better hope the Coastal Commission is dead wrong with its 36-inch sea level rise prediction and spot-on or less with the 11-inch rise it applies when it’s doing its own touchy-feely projects.
Now, if you’re asking yourself why do private landowners have to plan for 36-inch rises while the agencies that write the rules can skate by with 11 inches, you just don’t understand how government works.
Posted in Coastal Commission, Environmentalism, Global warming, Regulatory Madness | 3 Comments » | |
Trackbacks/Pings
Leave a Reply
[The "Comment Box" is WYSIWYG except that you have to double space between paragraphs!
Type it the way you want it to look -- Just remember to double up those line spaces.]
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Comments
June 6th, 2009 at 4:50 am
Another little clod in the Warmist churn is that the sophisticated Argos ocean-monitoring buoy system is apparently showing that the ocean is COOLING. So much so that scientists are complaining about them because the data does not agree with what the computers predict. Now there’s reall science for you.
June 6th, 2009 at 8:32 am
That’s quite a series of straw men you built for today’s post, Laer.
First you accuse “New York liberals” of launching anti-conservative diatribes. Now that’s a huge revelation! Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with a scientific journal, “Geophysical Research Letters” or otherwise.
Next you challenge the conclusions of the paper you reference. Fair enough, but you could have done that without mentioning any ideology. But you did, and in so doing watered down facts which speak more clearly on their own.
Then you bring up the IPCC estimates of sea level rise of 17 inches per century, as opposed to Aixue Hu’s estimate that is 15 to 20 inches more per century than average, although it is not clear what “average” he refers to.
Okay, we have estimates of sea level rise that are all over the map, but they’re roughly the same magnitude. Good enough for planning purposes. Those estimates can be used in one of 3 ways. We can ignore them, we can try to decrease the rate of rise or we can try to accommodate that rise.
In my view, it is inappropriate and irresponsible from a planning perspective to ignore sea level rise, even the 0.6 inches per year we’ve experienced over the past 150 years or so. I also think it’s foolish to spend resources in a vain attempt to stop or decrease that rate of rise.
That leaves accommodation or acclimation that planning agencies such as the California Coastal Commission must consider, which seems reasonable to me.
So why take a cheap shot at the Coastal Commission? You accuse them of applying different standards with different estimates for sea level rise, then fail to back that up.
When and where did the Coastal Commission impose an 11-inch sea level rise as the standard of review? When and where did they impose a 36-inch sea level rise? Were those standards based on the Coastal Act, or on a Local Coastal Program?
I could take you on your word, but I’m not aware of ANY codified rate of sea level rise that planning agencies must use. Surely you can provide a link to the staff reports for specific projects that back up your assertions, reports which are readily available online.
And surely you can clarify the distinction between a Coastal Commission project and one that is a private landowner project.
Or maybe you can’t. Which is it?
June 10th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I took a not-so-cheap shot at the Commission, Frank, because it deserved one. In July of 2000, it approved the Bolsa Chica restoration, a project it liked politically, using a sea level rise estimate of 0.9 feet in 100 years. In June 2001, 11 months later, it came up with about 3 feet rise in 100 years for everyone else. That’s not fair, scientific or good governance.