Friday, August 30, 2019

Top Lies About Sea Level Rise. ( Only the melting of ice on land can cause sea level to rise. The melting of floating ice has no effect.)

#1 TRUTH: Approximately 98% of potential sea level rise (SLR) is stored in the ice sheets and glaciers of Antarctica and Greenland.
Image result for cup of ice
You can demonstrate this phenomenon with a simple experiment. With ice cubes floating in a glass, mark the level. When the ice has melted, the level will be unchanged. You need to add more ice cubes to the glass to change the level of water. 



LIE: The rapid melting of the polar sea ice around the North Pole is related to rising sea level.
EXPLANATION: Only the melting of ice on land can cause sea level to rise. The melting of floating ice has no effect. You can demonstrate this phenomenon with a simple experiment. With ice cubes floating in a glass, mark the level. When the ice has melted, the level will be unchanged. You need to add more ice cubes to the glass to change the level of water.  That is what happens as the ice sheets on land melt and flow into the sea. Melting all the ice on Antarctica would create about 185 feet (56 m) of higher sea level globally. Melting all the ice on Greenland would cause about 24 feet (7 m). Even at the present accelerating rates of melting it will take many centuries for all the ice to melt, but remember just 1 to 2 feet of sea level rise is devastating to coastal communities and all the signs point to that happening within decades. 
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#2. TRUTH:  Rising sea level is now unstoppable this century.  We can (and should) try to slow the rate of rise, but have passed a tipping point.
LIE:  We can stop rising sea level by switching to renewable energy, promoting bicycling, recycling, or other very good environmental efforts.
EXPLANATION:  The oceans have been warmed more than one and a half degrees F (almost one degree C) over the last century. This was caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trapping heat, similar to the way that a sheet of glass traps heat in a greenhouse. That excess heat will cause a lot of ice to melt, raising global sea level. This new reality demands that we simultaneously work to slow the warming, AND begin adaptation for certain sea level rise while there is still time.
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#3. TRUTH:  Preparing for rising sea level is quite different than being resilient to flooding from big storms and heavy rainfall.
LIE: Planning for rising sea level is the same as being more “resilient” to future storms.
EXPLANATION:  Even the flooding from massive storms like Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy, recedes in hours making it possible to rebuild and recover. Rising sea level requires a different design approach because it is fundamentally permanent flooding. Higher sea levels will last for centuries, and this new base water level will compound the effects from storm surges and extreme tides, causing even more damage.
flooding-sandy

#4 TRUTH: Sea level rise can vary greatly in different locations.
LIE: Sea level rise will have similar effects everywhere.
Explanation: The primary reason that SLR varies from place to place, is that land is moving slightly down or up, affecting the relative ocean height. For example, since 1880, sea level is only 4 inches higher in Los Angeles, but 46 inches higher in New Orleans. The difference is that Los Angeles has been uplifted a few inches, while New Orleans has subsided approximately 38 inches. Variations can also be caused by changing ocean currents, local topography, and redistribution of the Earth’s mass as the polar ice melts.  This is why communities and businesses need to do sea level rise vulnerability assessments specific for their location.
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#5 TRUTH: We cannot precisely predict sea level far into the future.
LIE: The models for sea level rise are completely accurate.
Explanation: The models of climate change, melting ice, and rising sea level are getting better and better and now are quite sophisticated. These newer models continue to raise the upper limit for sea level.  Most recently the NOAA report in January 2017 added a new upper bound for SLR this century of up to eight feet (2.5 m). The lower limit is still described as one or two feet.  However, even this report is not a accurate description of what will realistically happen. See my recent blog post 
The problem is that glaciers globally and the two major ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland may collapse rather suddenly and unpredictably. They behave somewhat like earthquakes, avalanches, or tsunamis, which are still not possible to forecast with any precision. With earthquakes we have enough record of seismic events to make some statistical forecasts, such as there is a 10% chance of a category 8 earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area in the next fifty years, but hardly anything precise in terms of where and when the next big one will occur.
Historically there is evidence that sudden ice sheet collapse causes relatively sudden changes in sea level.  The geologic record is clear that sea level can rise at least a foot per decade, a rate that would have catastrophic effect globally. The models of rising sea level generally omit any such catastrophic collapse because of the inability to predict exactly when it will happen. Thus even the latest curves from that NOAA report shown just below, are smooth — omitting any abrupt change. It is very important that we continue to improve the models based on the melting in the Arctic and Antarctica, while at the same time realizing that the models will never be able to predict the big sudden collapses of the ice sheets that will result in the rapid sea level rise.https://www.johnenglander.net/sea-level-rise-blog/top-10-lies-sea-level-rise-part-1/
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Prepare To Retreat Before Global Warming Kill Us All





Summary: The latest issue of Science has a powerful paper about our coming desperate attempts to prepare for climate change. Let’s look under the hood to see how scientists produce advice for policy-makers. It reveals that the peer-review process is broken, greatly weakening our ability to see and prepare for climate change.
A melting Earth.
ID 33491903 © Rolffimages | Dreamstime.
Flipping through my new issue of Science, one of America’s top two science journals, this caught my attention: “The case for strategic and managed climate retreat” by Anne R. Siders et al. in Science, 23 August 2019. It is a powerful paper by three rising stars from Harvard and Stanford. It is getting a lot of attention (e.g., in Naked Capitalism’s daily links). From the abstract; red emphasis added on buzzwords …
“Faced with global warming, rising sea levels, and the climate-related extremes they intensify, the question is no longer whether some communities will retreat – moving people and assets out of harm’s way – but why, where, when, and how they will retreat. …We argue for strategy {sic} that incorporates socioeconomic development and for management that is innovative, evidence-based, and context-specific. …
“In some cases, retreat may need to include reparations or payments for loss and damage to address historic practices that placed communities at risk or to enable communities to retreat in a way that does not exacerbate past wrongs (for example, forcibly relocated indigenous, minority, or impoverished populations, or greenhouse gas emissions from major economies that contribute to rising seas, imperiling island nations). …
“The opportunities presented by succeeding in this work are immense, and the climate risks are urgent and growing.”
That sounds ominous! But before adopting their recommendations, I read on to learn the basis for this forecast. Here it is.
Retreat in response to natural hazards already occurs. It can be driven by major disasters, when people abandon their homes and relocate permanently. Economic pressures such as decreasing agricultural yields or rising insurance prices sometimes push people away from hazardous areas. Government programs have relocated populations out of at-risk areas, moved roads and other infrastructure, imposed setback requirements, banned return to disaster-prone areas, or condemned and demolished buildings considered too risky (28). Even in areas experiencing overall growth, some people are retreating (such as in Manila, Nairobi, and New York City) (24710).
“Whether driven by disasters, market forces, or government intervention, people will continue to move from hazardous places as climate risks escalate.”
Let’s see those references about people who are moving “from hazardous places as climate risks escalate.”
  1. Managed Retreat – A Strategy for the Mitigation of Disaster Risks with International and Comparative Perspectives” by Stefen Greiving et al. in Extreme Events, March 2018. This discusses responses to a wide range of natural disasters. It gives no examples of retreat due to climate change, let alone anthropogenic climate change.
  1. Managed retreat as a response to natural hazard risk” by Miyuki Hino et al. in Nature Climate Change, May 2017. Gated; open copy here. They examined 27 cases of managed retreat, but linked none of them to climate change.
  1. Managed Coastal Retreat: A Legal Handbook on Shifting Development Away From Vulnerable Areas” by Anne R. Siders (then a graduate student at Stanford), a Columbia Public Law research paper, November 2013). 158 pages. It describes responses to natural disasters. I found no links to climate change.
  1. A climate of control: flooding, displacement and planned resettlement in the Lower Zambezi River valley, Mozambique” by Alex Arnall in The Geographic Journal, June 2014. I do not have access to this.
  1. Planned Relocations, Disasters, and Climate Change: Consolidating Good Practices and Preparing for the Future” by Sanjula Weerasinghe for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 2014. The Google Scholar link provided does not go the paper. No examples of retreat due to climate change. They mention Alaska and Fiji, but give neither details or supporting citations.
  1. Agency-driven post-disaster recovery: A comparative study of three Typhoon Washi resettlement communities in the Philippines” by J. Sedfrey S. Santiago et al., in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, March 2018. Gated; open copy here. Again the Google Scholar link provided does not go to the paper. Typhoon Washi hit in December 2011. It was a tropical storm, fifth-strongest category on the Tropical Cyclone Intensity Scale and sixth on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (i.e., the category below hurricane). Not an unusual event (details here). The paper does not mention climate change.
  1. Climate change, migration and conflict: receiving communities under pressure?” by Andrea Warnecke et al. for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, 2010. It gives no examples of retreat from climate change.
None of those references support the claim. I see this happening more often lately (e.g., Michael Mann did it in his testimony to Congress; details here).
Here are the references the authors give to support their belief that “the climate risks are urgent and growing.”
  • _.
  • _.
  • _.
That is bizarre, for that claim is the foundation for the paper and the basis for its significance. What does “urgent” mean? What do they mean by “growing?”
More specific to the paper’s conclusions, what numbers of people will be forced to retreat under each of the scenarios used in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5)? Most simulations show relatively small effects from RCP2.6. Most show that RCP8.5 would be a nightmare. AR5 gives no probabilities for each RCP. If the authors found no studies about retreats for each RCP, that would be worth mentioning.
Summary
The authors give no evidence that climate change is forcing “retreats.” How many people will climate change force to retreat in the near future, or in the 21st century? The authors do not say. Readers do not know what the authors mean by “the climate risks are urgent and growing.” Severe inconvenience or extinction? More broadly, the paper gives no evidence supporting “the case for strategic and managed climate retreat.”
This paper is alarmism, without the details and evidence characteristic of good science. It does provide an example showing that peer-review has collapsed in fields related to climate science. If the conclusions are politically pleasing, the paper gets waved through. This does not build confidence in the need for massive police action.
About the authors
The authors are fast-tracd academics. Anne Siders has a JD from Harvard and PhD from Stanford. She is an Environmental Fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Environment. Miyuki Hino is a Ph.D. candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford. Katharine Mach is an Associate Professor at the University of Miami School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and a lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and the US Fourth National Climate Assessment.
Other posts in this series
  1. The replication crisis in science has just begun. It will be big. – Climate science is just one of the affected fields.
  2. A crisis of overconfidence in climate science.
  3. About the corruption of climate science.
  4. The noble corruption of climate science.
For More Information
Ideas! See my recommended books and films at Amazon.
For a briefing on the current knowledge about rising sea levels, see these by climate scientists Judith Curry.
  1. Let’s prepare for past climate instead of bickering about predictions of climate change – Doing something is better than nothing.
  2. Manufacturing climate nightmares: misusing science to create horrific predictions.
  3. Focusing on worst-case climate futures doesn’t work. It shouldn’t work.
  4. “Climate’s Uncertainty Principle“ by Garth Paltridge.
  5. Listening to climate doomsters makes our situation worse.
  6. Enlisting peer-reviewed science in the climate crusade.
  7. How fast is the world warming? Is it burning?
  8. See how climate science becomes alarmist propaganda.
To help us better understand today’s weather
To learn more about the state of climate change see The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change by Roger Pielke Jr., prof at U of CO – Boulder’s Center for Science and Policy Research (2018).https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/29/prepare-to-retreat-before-climate-change/
The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

Michael Mann's Tree-Ring Circus And "Hide the Decline" Song.



Image result for michael mann's hockey stick



This has been a tough week for climate hustler Michael Mann, who lost his defamation and libel lawsuit against respected climatologist and warming skeptic Dr. Tim Ball at the same time it was announced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that there has been no U.S. warming since 2005.
Mann, who poses as a climatologist at Penn State, has had his court case against genuine climate scientist Dr. Tim Ball dismissed, with Mann ordered to pay court costs, for failure to produce supporting evidence to prove his claim that global temperatures took a sharp upward turn when the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel use began pouring CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
He didn’t because he can’t, and the fact is that the global warning he speaks of is Mann-made, a fantasy based on a career of perpetrating climate fraud, as indicated by NOAA’s report that there hasn’t been any U.S. warming for nearly a decade and a half and maybe even beyond that. As noted by James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, in a piece for Real Clear Energy:
When American climate alarmists claim to have witnessed the effects of global warming, they must be referring to a time beyond 14 years ago. That is because there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, according to updated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. NOAA selected locations that were far away from urban and land-development impacts that might artificially taint temperature readings… There is also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s. Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago. All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data.
The use of properly positioned temperature recording stations coupled with satellite date, a relatively recent innovation that covers the whole earth, has given us a more realistic picture than computer models that can’t even  predict the past and fraudulently manipulate raw data from dubious sources.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts documented the inaccuracy of old weather station data used by NASA on hisSurfaceStations.org website. Watts said that “90 percent of them don’t meet (the government’s) old, simple rule called the ‘100-foot rule” for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence.” Many of the U.S. stations were in locations such as paved driveways, near rooftop exhaust vents, even near idling jet engines.
In 2016, Mann testified before the Democratic Platform Drafting Committeethat actual data didn’t really matter because we could actually see climate change happening. The Washington Times noted both his appearance and at least one contradiction to his claims based, not on computer models, but on actual empirical observation:
Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious…
Mr. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, spoke before the committee June 17 in Phoenix… Mr. Mann told the panel that “the signal of climate change is no longer subtle, it is obvious,” citing hurricanes, flooding in Texas and South Carolina, the California drought and “record heat” in Arizona.
Skeptics have hotly challenged the link between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and “extreme weather” events, noting, for example, that hurricane activity is on the decline.
A nine-year “hurricane drought” of Category 3 storms starting in 2006 beat the previous mark of eight years from 1861-1868, the longest such streak since such recording began in 1851,according to a May 2015 study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Mann has proven adept over his career at making controversial, no, fraudulent adjustments made to the raw data. Mann might be remembered as one of the participants in what Investor’s Business Daily dubbed a “tree-ring circus” -- the Climategate scandal. As IBD noted at the time:
Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in 2009, when emails were unearthed from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. In one email sent to Mann and others, CRU director Philip Jones speaks of the "trick" of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:
"I've just completed Mike's nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline (in global temperatures)," the email read.
It was that attempt to "hide the decline" through the manipulation of data that helped bring down the global warming house of cards.
The graph created by professor Mann and his colleagues carefully selected and manipulated tree-ring data to supposedly prove that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts -- in a pattern resembling a hockey stick -- in the 20th century due to man-made greenhouse gases. Mann et al. performed the neat trick of making the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.
The graph relied on data from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Here, too, the results were carefully selected. Just 12 trees from the 252 cores in the CRU's Yamal data set were used. A larger data set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages. They were not included.
“Hiding the decline” and any actual evidence that global warming hype was nothing more an attempt by climate change scammers to impose what has become a religion. MIT Professor Richard Lindzen is quoted in the Daily Caller questioning the tenets of this new religion:
Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons…
Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.
“Global Warming has become a religion,” writes Lindzen. “A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.”
The goal is to use climate change as a means to increase government power over every aspect of our lives, what we make, how we make it, what energy we use, what cars we drive, even what food we eat. And now the high priests of the global warming religion are demanding what other false religions have demanded -- human sacrifices upon their altar. As Michael Mann has found out, facts are stubborn things and tree rings don’t always ring true.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/michael_manns_treering_circus.html

This Picture Spoke A Thousand Words About ‘Climate Change’ – until it didn’t @CNN @BBC @AlGore




Bjorn Lomberg writes on Facebook:
Oops, remember that viral sled-on-water picture showing “our ongoing climate catastrophe” (CNN)?
Turns out it is entirely normal, happened in the 1800s, and will probably happen *less* with higher temps.
But Al Gore wants permission to use it in his slideshow.

In the article Lomborg cites, it says:

Spring in Greenland interpreted as climate change: “This is completely normal”

CNN has presented a photo as evidence of the devastating impact of a warming planet, but that is not necessarily what the photo shows. Scientists say this is a typical and damaging climate doomsday story.
Sometimes a picture speaks more than a thousand words. Sometimes the picture merely speaks what the viewer wants to hear. Over the past week, a photo of a dog sled moving through melt water in a fjord near Thule in north-west Greenland went global.

Sometimes a picture speaks more than a thousand words. Sometimes it deceives. Over the past week, a photo of a dog sled moving through melt water in a fjord near Thule in north-west Greenland went global as supposed evidence of climate change. The photo was taken by Steffen M. Olsen, a PhD researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI).
Foto: Asger Ladefoged

The picture was taken by a scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) and appears ominous. As if the ice is melting fast under the feet of the dogs and might at any moment crack and pull the sled down into the deep water. As if the very foundation of humanity is melting before the camera.
The photo has been shared by CNN, the BBC and several of the world’s leading papers, and even the former U.S. Vice President and one-time presidential candidate Al Gore, who joined the fight against climate change in 2001, has asked the DMI for permission to use the picture in his efforts to convince the world that action is urgently needed to prevent a looming climate disaster.
Full story here (paywalled)


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