Blissful Intentional Science Ignorance - Encouraged and Promoted by Big Media

Over six years ago our local weekly newspaper, The Independent (big laugh) Coast Observer, emailed me that my letters would no longer be published. However, on rare occasions one of mine slips through, and this is the latest.

Editor

Believers in human-caused climate change argue that they follow the science, but then don’t. For example, sea-level increase; many Bay Area scientists predict a six-foot increase by 2100, but these predictions lack mention of San Francisco’s tide gauge, installed in 1854, the oldest in the Western Hemisphere. Its history is easily accessed online, as are those of all the world’s tide gauges, at psmsl.org. Per San Francisco’s 166-year record, sea level has risen six inches, at a steady pace of 3.6 inches per century. At the end of 2021 sea level was at its lowest for the past eight years, and 4.6 inches lower than its peak in 1983.

San Francisco tide gauge record since 1854 showing the 1983 peak 

and lack of significant change since then.

 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website shows sea level at Los Angeles increasing at a steady rate of 3.8 inches per century. Neither San Francisco nor Los Angeles show any increase in the rate of sea-level rise for the past century, and if their current rates are sustained the forecasted six-foot increase will be reached after the year 3800.

The Los Angeles rate of increase of 0.96 millimeters per year is less than four inches per century (3.8 inches)

The San Francisco rate of increase of 1.94 millimeters per year is less than eight inches per century (7.6 inches ) and was achieved by a curious adjustment by NASA at ~1896 not found in the tide gauge data. 

 

Many scientists also ignore Greenland ice core studies that indicate that we now live in the coldest 1,000-year period of the past 10,000 years. 

(It's a pity that I wasn't able to put these charts and links in my letter to the editor, because as you can see, a picture is worth a thousand words.)

 

For (human-caused global warming) scientists, ignorance is bliss.

Unprecedented? No Way!

In an Ed. Note to my August 30 letter “Unprecedented?”, the ICO Editor erroneously stated that Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, but by then Sandy had diminished to “post-tropical cyclone” strength. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that Sandy wasn’t a hurricane when it hit the US.

Hurricane insurance policies have deductibles that would have been triggered if Sandy had still been a named hurricane at the time of landfall, and if hurricane warnings were in effect. However, neither of those conditions were met.

The ICO compared “apples to oranges” to call Sandy the second costliest “hurricane” in US history. When adjusted not only for inflation, but for population and city growth and higher living standards, Sandy is actually only sixth in terms of dollar losses (Katrina is second). In terms of deaths Sandy doesn’t even make the US top ten, or the top 100 for Atlantic tropical cyclones since 1492.

Losses from man-made natural disasters like Katrina – human errors led to the New Orleans levee failures - can easily exceed natural disaster costs. For example, 9/11 costs are estimated conservatively at over a trillion dollars, or over 20 Sandys.  Sandy was also a man-made natural disaster due to building in a known storm-vulnerable area.

The bad news for natural climate change deniers is that, for the first time (since 2002), there have been no Atlantic hurricanes through August, and that accumulated cyclone energy in the Atlantic is about 30 percent of normal.

For “hiatus” deniers, the absence of increased global warming is now 17 years. Central England records show the 2013 temperature is about the same as 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age. 

It’s hard to blame warming when it isn’t warming.

Hot?

Not.

The Great Grist Battle of 2013

This has been a great week for anthropogenic global warming skeptics, like yours truly. The long period without global warming, 17 years and counting, is taking a toll on alarmists, and they are starting to ratchet down predictions of catastrophic warming to much lower, although still ridiculous, levels. Some were summarily cut in half, from 9° Fahrenheit by 2100 to 4.5°F. The decelerating rate of sea level rise, measured decreasing from 3 millimeters per year (12 inches per century) to half that, also makes it hard to support the “expert” projections for over five feet by 2100. To reach five feet by 2100, the rate of rise would have to suddenly increase by 11.3 times its present value and be sustained at that level for 88 years. Such an increase has not been seen even during the 30°F warming at the end of the Younger Dryas 12,000 to 8,000 years ago, when sea level rose an average of 4.5 feet per century and there were huge ice caps at low altitudes all over the Northern Hemisphere to melt. 

(click the image below to enlarge it)

I have especially enjoyed a two-week exchange of comments to an article in Grist Magazine: "How to respond to people who say the cold weather disproves global warming." As soon as I read the article I got excited, because while the author wrote with a  superior, condescending tone, his science didn't even meet middle-school standards. However, that didn't stop him from having many defenders amongst the Grist readership, who tend to be both leftist and climate alarmist. Grist comments luminaries such as "frflyer", J4zonian", and "TomSparc" leaped upon each of my comments with cut-and-paste commentary from alarmist websites such as "SkepticalScience" and "RealClimate", while exhibiting ignorance of climate history and basic physics while demonstrating poor reading comprehension. In my own comments I refuted theirs while always trying to support my points with charts and graphs. I had a huge advantage in that regard, since my research has led me to the many available to serious natural climate change students, and so few for alarmists. Understandable, because it's hard to chart baloney.

(click to enlarge)

This odd comment, which struck me as their defiant surrender to my tireless scientific rebuttals and an appeal to alarmist religious Gaia fervor, was posted by "J4zonian" and seemed to end my Grist battle: “Fellow Grist readers: We have responded. We've disproven every post this person has made, pointed out lies or errors and (he) has proved (himself) impervious to facts, reason, knowledge and science. (He) continues to post deceptive cherry-picked denialist nonsense devoid of context and when refuted simply moves on to other lies. (He) is comitting (sic) what will certainly come to be known as a crime against humanity and even more serious, Gaia. (He) and (his) sock puppets or fellow dupes and shills have zero credibility here. I'm not really concerned about others here believing the nonsense; more about (his) well-being.

Climate Catastrophe is real, happening, and human-caused. Unless we take massive, rapid action in the next 10-20 years at the very most it will destroy civilization, very likely cause the extinction of humans along with millions of other species and could possibly end all life on Earth by killing Gaia, the cooperative system of all life on Earth that regulates the conditions it needs to survive.

We must switch now to efficiency, solar, wind, low-meat local organic permaculture and reforest the world while equalizing our incomes and impacts, globally at a comfortablem (sic) sufficient level for all. This would still lead to a drastically reduced impact for humanity as a whole and would allow us to survive long enough to reduce population (the work of centuries) and heal psychologically.”

My reaction to this ringing manifesto began: "Gristers of the World, Unite!" Throughout my comments I reviewed the natural climate change history during many distant and recent periods, showing cycles of regular cooling and warming that have marched evenly through the past 900,000 years, and six cycles of cooling and diminishing warming during the past 10,000 years. I used charts of temperatures, sea level rise, hurricane and tornado frequency and strength, wildfire trends showing we are experiencing the lowest for 3,000 years, glacier retreat, agricultural productivity for warmer weather and higher CO2, and a lot more. Many of their response began by noting that I was dumb, idiotic, a fool, bent upon the destruction of humanity, and on the payroll of oil companies. If I was being paid by Big Oil, I wonder why they would want me to exterminate their customers, and I also wonder where are they sending my checks?

(click to enlarge)

To my embattled Grist opponents, please heed the words of Mark Twain: “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.”

Corporate Personhood is Not

Last month at the Gualala Municipal Advisory Council (GMAC), I demonstrated that natural climate change has existed for the Earth’s 4.54 billion-year life. GMAC was largely unmoved by the facts, but I considered it my civic duty to update GMAC on this topic of interest. At their last meeting I documented the lack of rapid sea level rise. The 158-year San Francisco tide gauge record shows average sea level rising 3.5 inches per century, about one-quarter of the lowest estimate of global warming alarmists.

However, GMAC was impatient to address other consequential matters, such as supporting the Mendocino County Measure F advisory-only vote to abolish so-called corporate personhood.  I sensed eagerness to endorse Measure F immediately, but GMAC reluctantly placed it on their November agenda.

Measure F is nonsensical political posturing. The Supreme Court Citizens United ruling was not based on corporate personhood, but on First and Fourteenth Amendment individual rights; corporations do not forfeit rights enjoyed by other organizations.

“Corporate personhood is the legal concept that a corporation may sue and be sued in court in the same way as natural persons or unincorporated associations of persons. This doctrine in turn forms the basis for legal recognition that corporations, as groups of people, may hold and exercise certain rights under the common law and the U.S. Constitution. The doctrine does not hold that corporations are ‘people’ in the most common usage of the word, nor does it grant to corporations all of the rights of citizens.”

Corporations can enter into contracts, be taxed and regulated, hire and fire employees, buy and dispose of property, etc., but corporations cannot claim constitutional protections not otherwise available to persons acting as a group.

These inconvenient facts should prevent the irrational Measure F from passing. Unfortunately, facts always lose to uninformed opinions in Mendocino County. 

"Don't Miss" TV - Al Gore's 24 Hours of Reality

“Don’t miss” TV! Al Gore’s "24 hours of Reality" scheduled for September 14 and 15. Al says his Climate Reality Project “will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events and manmade pollution.” Alice and I just left the East Coast days before it was hit by a heat wave (relax, Al, 39 states’ heat records were set over 50 years ago) and I can see why, since the entire case of manmade global warming has collapsed around him, that he would take his movement into extreme weather because this is a much easier emotional case for him to make.


Al, everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.

They can’t - climate change is natural.

At any rate, global climate has slightly cooled for the past 15 years. A recent study says that this is because China has increased aerosols that block sunlight by burning huge quantities of coal (the very thing that increases atmospheric CO2 and supposedly global warming). However, since these aerosols were released in the Northern Hemisphere and there is little atmospheric mixing between hemispheres, it’s strange that there is slight warming in the Northern Hemisphere where the aerosols supposedly cause cooling, and cooling in the Southern Hemisphere without benefit of aerosols. Of course, other studies indicate overall aerosol levels haven’t increased for several decades, so the whole thing becomes warmist alarmists taking a fishing trip to a wading pool desperate to catch something to correlate to the lack of warming.

Still, even without warming, Al Gore and His Acolytes continue to point to every flood, drought, heat wave, snow storm, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, &etc. as proof of the evils of warming, even as they explain why there is no warming.

Hurricane Al Gore

When Al Gore is faced with reports of numbing cold and record snow, he says "Weather is not climate."

However, when Katrina hit, or Australia suffered drought, or fires burned out of control in Russia, Al said these are signs of global warming.

Come to think of it, now Al claims that any unusual weather is proof of global warming.

In that regard, so does Dr. Kevin Trenberth.

Desperation is rampant in the camps of the true believers in anthropogenic global warming.

They are dying for Nature to throw them a crumb.

The latest direct hit they are taking is a study that shows warming reduces the strongest winds. That is part of the explanation of why hurricanes and tornados have been so quiet for several years. That plus normal cyclical variations that track well to a natural 30-year cycle of increasing and decreasing storm energy.



Of interest in the study was a photo of the cover of Gore's book "Our Choice - How We Can Solve The Climate Crisis (Young Reader's Edition)." In keeping with Al's hurricane obsession, it shows three northern hemisphere hurricanes. Two are rotating counter-clockwise, and one clockwise. That is definitely a first for northern hemisphere hurricanes. Prior to Al and his expertise, they all rotated the same direction.

Quick, Al! What's the right direction for northern hemisphere hurricanes?

That's right, Al, counter-clockwise.

Two out of three, or 67%, is about what one would expect from the mediocre student Al was in his collegiate days.

Having a U S Senator for a father really helps when your grades are too low to get you into Harvard,  doesn't it Al?

Which is the Old, and which is the New? James Cameron shows Arnold "The Way"

James Cameron Brings Arnold Schwarzenegger to Amazon to See Firsthand a Battle Between Old and New Energy

I guess Cameron thinks wind and solar are new, and hydro is old. Actually, wind, solar, and hydro are all old. Each has huge environmental and societal liabilities. Hydro floods useful land and displaces its inhabitants, and wind and solar use huge amounts of scarce resources - including useful land - degrade the environment, don't produce energy cost effectively, relaibly, or efficiently, and produce nothing at all without government subsidies at the beginning and throughout the life of the wind and solar installations. Among the three, hydro makes the most sense because it is reliable, dispatchable, and controllable, and is generally cost effective. It also provides what developing nations need most, abundant energy to fuel their economic growth.

What can the world learn from our former California Governor Schwarzenegger?

As a Californian, and a one-time supporter of his election to governor, I am well qualified to answer my own question.

Governor Schwarzenegger was a total failure as governor of California. Among many fundamental errors he made was his mindless pursuit of green-energy jobs. They weren't created, and California had one of the highest rates of unemployment at over 12% in the United States. When the number of job seekers who dropped out of seeking employment because of frustration are counted, the actual unemployment rate doubled.

California's wind and solar farms are expensive, taxpayer subsidized, inefficient, and ineffective. They show no sign of ever being better than their current level of abject failure.

I lived within view of the wind farm at Altamont Pass for nine years. Besides not producing enough energy, even at highly subsidized rates, to avoid bankruptcies of their owners, the only thing the wind turbines did on the rare occasions their blades were turning was to kill rare eagles, raptors, and bats. And to be a much too visible eyesore on what should have been pristine views of rolling hills.

Only desperate fools seek guidance from the "Governator," whose only claim to fame is how he made California even worse than he found it.

Global Warming Causes Earthquakes? Really?

Several "scientists" have been quoted saying that the number and size of recent earthquakes is due to anthropogenic global warming. Click this link to go to one of them.

These studies and the articles about them are such consumate pieces of pseudoscience, it's impossible to pay them serious attention, but I'll force myself. Persons who pay any credence to them have no concept of plate tectonics, geological time frames, and the comparative masses of earth, air, and water (here is a link to a great site by a Czech physicist who explains it clearly and fully). Don't they know most of the Earth's ice melted away over 15,000 years ago as the last Ice Age ended?

Apparently coincidence is now causation. Since the last Ice Age ended 15,000 years ago, research such as of Greenland ice cores shows at least six periods of greater warming than present, with warming diminishing since the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago. As for the intervening periods, they have been getting cooler, with the Little Ice Age 1150 to 1850 AD the coldest so far.

Along comes a bit of warming, a natural rebound from Little Ice Age cooling, and it is matched with increasing atmospheric CO2. Suddenly coincidence becomes cause, and research is launched with the charter of showing a theory based on the non-existent greenhouse effect as being driven by change in the trace gas, CO2. Oddly enough, flawed research based on tree rings as proxy for temperature - ignoring water, nutrients, competition for sunlight, disease, and other components of tree growth - research that strains to look back 1,000 years, and portions of which today show cooling when they should reflect warming - high jacked UN IPCC climate science (and Al Gore) on a wild-climate change goose chase.

It appears now that the inherent weakness in the CO2 caused warming effect is becoming obvious, so every effect is now in search of an anthropogenic global warming cause. Science is turned on its head, and where there once was a head, other body parts prevail.

The Answer is not Blowing in the Wind - The Futility of Wind Power

For nine years Alice and I lived on a small ranch east of Livermore, California. Two of my closest neighbors were the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and the Altamont Pass wind farm. I could only see a hint of the sprawling Livermore Lab campus, but from my backyard I could watch many of the wind turbines at Altamont not doing much.

On two occasions recently I drove through the Altamont Pass on Highway 580 and both times did not see even one wind turbine turning. The first time was understandable; it was just after noon on a desultory summer day. The second time, however, was during a driving rain storm.

Aside from their demonic ability to kill Eagles and raptors during their rare periods of operation, Altamont Pass should be viewed as a living laboratory of the futility of wind power. (For a very clear exposition of this point, click on this link to an excellent Master Resource blog post)

Its near neighbor, the Livermore Lab, is another matter. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle reported: "Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported Thursday they have taken a major step toward harnessing the forces that power the sun in an effort to create unlimited energy on Earth."

There it is in a nutshell. On the one hand, the supposed scientifically enlightened pursue a very limited, costly, and as common sense demonstrates, futile method of meeting burgeoning energy needs. On the other hand, science is just taking baby steps to develop nuclear power production, which assuredly will one day become the means of satisfying mankind's ever increasing energy needs. One direction leads nowhere while fueling the cry that what must be done is for mankind to stop economic progress. The other direction unleashes the potential for mankind to achieve economic security for all, thereby reducing the need for politicians and their acolytes to preside over the division of shrinking resources.

We know which road politicians will choose, so common sense (and science) will lead us to choose the other.

Global Warming – Last Place and Falling Fast

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press published its annual assessment of the public’s – our – priorities for 2010. Unlike the Obama Administration, we the people seem to have arranged our priorities by common sense rather than liberal ideology. The economy, jobs, terrorism – makes sense to me.

Last and falling steadily, global warming.

Interestingly, this steady decline in our concern about global warming preceded the disclosures of the chicanery and incompetence practiced by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). After recent disclosures (slowly gaining traction in the news against the main stream media’s attempts to ignore them) concerning misrepresenting and suppressing skeptical studies of global warming, making unsupported alarmist claims of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 and of ocean acidification in a decade, and using articles from advocacy organizations like the World Wildlife Fund as if they were peer-reviewed science studies, the next Pew review shouldn’t even include global warming on its list of public priorities.

Wikipedia - The Heavy Hand of William M. Connolley Distorts Global Warming

Every article concerning climate change in Wikipedia seems to have been edited by William M. Connolley to the detriment of neutrality and balance. Mr. Connolley has edited 5,428 Wikipedia articles, and controlled the editing process of many of them (his editing privileges may have been rescinded. Now how will the damage he's done be undone?). Until recently (circa 2007) He was a member of RealClimate and contributed to their unabashed promotion of anthropogenic global warming.

For instance, Wikipedia has a page: Description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in IPCC reports .

The opening paragraphs of this page are below:

The description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in IPCC reports has changed since the first report in 1990 as scientific understanding of the temperature record of the past 1000 years has improved. The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) are the best-known temperature fluctuations in the last millennium.

Critics of the "hockey stick graph" of later reports have claimed that the record of the MWP and LIA were suppressed in the IPCC Third Assessment Report, although every report has discussed the phenomena.

When the various links above are followed, what is found are one-sided expositions of the Mann et all “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction of the past 1,000 years – which wrote off the Medieval Warm Period – and dismissal of the criticism by Steve McIntyre and the total ignoring of Soon et al finding that the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon and was warmer than the present period. It also has no mention that the tree-ring proxy reconstructions of temperatures do not show warming after 1960, casting doubt on their ability to show prior warming (i.e., Medieval Warm Period warming).

The assertion that the "scientific understanding of the temperature record of the past 1,000 years has improved" is unsupported by any by any reference to what caused the improvement, and in what way it was improved.

The statement concerning suppression of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, that "every report has addressed the phenomena" can only be considered accurate to the extent that some contained a brief mention without discussion, and others contained brief, broad dismissals of them.

From the first progress report of the IPCC from 1990 on page 202, the above is graphics 7c [12], in which the Medieval Warm Period was portrayed as clearly warmer than the present.

Any claim by Wikipedia of fairness and neutrality in their pages concerning climate change are therefore subverted by the heavy-handed editing of William M. Connolley, who selectively includes or omits information and sources on the basis of whether they are in accord with anthropogenic global warming.

Apparently Mr. Connolley thinks he can simulate fairness by adhering to the strict title of this Wikipedia page, that it is about the description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in IPCC reports without going into the criticisms of the IPCC description.

I could do the same by making a post describing how God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, and only allowing items in the post concerning God’s creative accomplishments. I could dismiss criticisms by noting that many theologians are on board with my post, and have been for thousands of years.

I don’t understand why Wikipedia allows the pursuit of knowledge to be hijacked by an advocate of a point of view. Then again, the Church did the same with Galileo, lost credibility, and opened the way for the Reformation.

Wikipedia, reform thyself!

Climategate - FactCheck.Org is Clueless

I have previously doubted the neutrality of FactCheck.Org, and their "fact checking" of Climategate added to my doubts. Rather than demonstrating a "nose" for facts, they mischaracterized the position of man-caused global warming skeptics, and then proceeded to knock their strawman down.

They said: "Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming."

That's not what the skeptics say. We say that the scientific misconduct raises doubts about the science of man-made global warming. It's unprofessional of FactCheck.Org to charge skeptics with thinking that information about a segment of the science is proof of its complete fabrication. Just as we skeptics believe that the rise in CO2 since 1950, and the fluctuations in cooling and warming in that period, invalidate alarmists claims that CO2 drives global temperatures.

The following is my reply to FactCheck.Org: (with some minor alterations for grammar and to add a dig about Al Gore lying about the emails)

As you possibly don’t know, or are taking pains to not know, the point is that the science underlying the validity of reconstructing global temperatures by means of tree-ring and other proxies has been placed in doubt by the actions of Drs. Jones, Mann, Briffa et al. The tree-rings post 1960 show cooling or no warming when compared to instrumental records. This divergence led Mann, Briffa, and others to drop the tree-ring temperatures and replace them with instrument readings without disclosing their divergence. The point in challenging this is quite simple: if current tree-ring temperatures don’t agree with current instrument temperatures, why is there any confidence that tree rings were good proxies for temperature in the preceding 1000 or 2000 years?

This question has far-reaching implications. Mann et al say that current warming is unprecedented. Al Gore showed Mann’s hockey stick in “An Inconvenient Truth” to make this very point. The hockey stick obliterated the warming of the Medieval Warm Period, and the cooling of the Little Ice Age, just as tree rings now don’t show recent warming.

If the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the present, as evidence of vineyards in England and pastures and farming in Viking Greenland show – and a Harvard/Smithsonian study by Soon et al of 240 climate studies worldwide show it was warmer then than now – then the positive feedback from increased water vapor trapping heat in the troposphere, thereby causing runaway warming, should have happened 1,000 years ago, and the runaway warming forecasted for this century should be part of our historical record.

Of course if its effects were as dangerous as forecasted, we wouldn’t be here to read the record.

Catastrophic warming didn’t happen then, and it didn’t in the very warm Roman Warm Period or in the earlier, even warmer Holocene Climate Optimum. What did happen naturally was that the Ice Age ended, sea levels rose over 400 feet in the past 10,000 years – an average of over four feet a century compared to the eight inches sea levels rose in the past century – and that humankind progressed and prospered during the warm periods and suffered famine, violent storms, and pestilence during the intervening cold periods.

All of these dramatic climate changes happened naturally. In the past two centuries 30-year periods of warming have alternated with 30-year periods of cooling, possibly caused by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. NASA records show that the United States had warming from 1915 to 1945 equal to or greater than the recent warming, and that the cooling 1945 to 1975 spurred predictions of catastrophic global cooling even as atmospheric carbon dioxide increased steadily and rapidly.

Glaciers were in retreat during the 1800’s, long before the rapid industrialization beginning around 1950 started the rapid rise of CO2. Mount Kilimanjaro, contrary to Al Gore’s posturing, lost most of its ice cap prior to 1953 from sublimation - which turns ice directly into water vapor at below-freezing temperatures - not warming, since at the elevation of Kilimanjaro’s ice cap the temperature hardly ever of never rises above freezing.

One climate alarmist is on record in the Climategate emails stating that it is a “travesty” that the lack of warming during the past decade can’t be explained. Al Gore denigrates the emails, saying that they are all over ten years old, even though many are recent.

It’s a travesty that your fact checking missed the critical points the exposed emails uncovered. I would have expected better from an unbiased pursuit of the truth.

Al Gore's Twenty Feet-In-Mouth Problem

Going shopping with Al.


Some things are so obvious they're hard to see.

For example, the most dramatic part of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" was the scenes of flooded city streets and the ominous prediction of a 20-foot rise in sea levels by 2100. According to Al, this was the most damaging aspect of global warming, and the reason that "Something must be done, and it must be done now!"

Al continues to beat the panic drum, now comparing inaction on stopping global warming to inaction on stopping Nazi Germany. And the reason we must do it now, of course, is that awful flooding is eminent.

What else could make us join his march to save the world at great expense and loss of economic progress? The threat that the growing season will be longer? That crops will grow better and make better use of water resources? That the thundering herds that voted for global warming with their feet by moving south won't have to move as far now? That the world may become as warm as during the Holocene Climate Optimum of 5,000 to 9,000 years ago, when civilization began and thrived?

Maybe Al intends to rally us to the cry, "Turn back the Industrial Revolution!" He wants us to repudiate the mastery of energy that enabled us to transition from man power, t0 animal power, then wind and water power, and now to the unlimited, inexhaustible power of the atom.

To do that, Al knows that he has only one threat capable of generating unthinking panic. Just as in the Bible God sent The Deluge, Al has invoked The Sea Rise. And just as God had to get the deed done quickly - make it rain for forty days and forty nights - so Al too must make the future bleak, if not for ourselves then for our grandchildren.

A twenty-foot rise in a hundred years should do the trick.

However, Al has a problem, the snowline altitude.

The snowline altitude is the altitude of the lowest elevation interval in which minimum annual snow cover exceeds 50%. This ranges from about 5,500 metres above sea-level at the equator down to sea level at about 70° N&S latitude, depending on regional temperature amelioration effects. Permafrost then appears at sea level and extends deeper below sea level polewards.

As most of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lie above the snowline and/or base of the permafrost zone, they cannot melt in a timeframe much less than several millennia; therefore it is likely that they will not, through melting, contribute significantly to sea level rise in the coming century. They can, however, do so through acceleration in flow and enhanced iceberg calving.

The fact that the Antarctica and Greenland snowlines will prevent rapid ice cap melt for thousands of years is so obvious that it is easy to overlook. Right, Al?



Without the rapid and massive melting of these ice caps, sea level increases will largely be limited to the thermal expansion of the oceans. As any fool soon learns from comparing the volume of the oceans to the solar energy necessary to drive expansion, this too is a long, slow process.

This is not to deny that sea levels rise during warming, since it has been often mentioned in my previous blog posts that they have risen over 400 feet in the past 18,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, an average of two feet per century. My point in constantly revisiting this is that previous greater warming of much greater ice sheets did not produce the sea level increases predicted by Apolcalyptic Al.

If not then, why now, Al?

Global Climate Change in United States - Don’t look at the man behind the curtain!

The Washington Post highlighted the work of government scientists: Climate Change Already Affecting U.S., by David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post Staff Writer, June 16, 2009. The government report the Post examined, "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States," covers much of the same ground as previous analyses from U.S. and United Nations science panels. It finds that greenhouse-gas emissions are "primarily" responsible for global warming and that rapid action is needed to avert catastrophic shifts in water, heat and natural life.”

In other words, it’s nothing new, except the Democrats need something to help them pass their mammoth bill to impose a cap on emissions, and government scientists and the Washington Post are eager to help.

An excerpt from the report concerning sea level rise caught my attention, since Al Gore has predicted that sea levels will rise twenty feet by 2100.

Sea levels have been rising along most of the U.S. coast over the past 50 years, increasing up to eight inches in some places. That trend is expected to continue as warmer temperatures melt glaciers and cause the ocean to expand like a wooden door on a hot day. Some of the worst-hit areas are expected to be along the East Coast, owing to a confluence of rising seas and subsiding land. Seas might rise 2.3 feet near New York City and 2.9 feet in Hampton Roads.

I found it interesting that in the past 50 years sea levels increased “up to eight inches in some places.” Why “in some places,” instead of in all places? Could the answer be found in the “subsiding land?”

As all should know, but apparently few do, sea level rise is natural, not unusual. Since the end of the last Ice Age, a mere 18,000 years ago, sea levels have risen over 400 feet, or an average of over two feet per century. Since the end of the Little Ice Ages in 1850, the average increase has been seven inches per century. If the trend “in some places” in the past 50 years continues, that would be about 16 inches for a century. How much of that is sea levels rising, and how much is subsidence?

I delved into the underlying report for an answer and found this:

Significant sea-level rise and storm surge will adversely affect coastal cities and ecosystems around the nation; low-lying and subsiding areas are most vulnerable.

High rates of relative sea-level rise have already resulted in the loss of 1,900 square miles of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands during the past century, weakening their capacity to absorb the storm surge of hurricanes such as Katrina. Shoreline retreat is occurring along most of the nation’s exposed shores. Recent estimates of global sea-level rise are 3 to 4 feet in this century, with higher relative sea-level rise in areas where the land is subsiding (sinking), including most of the Atlantic Coast and Gulf Coast of the United States.

There it is! Look to Louisiana for proof! So let’s do just that.

At “Wetland Loss In Louisiana,” we find that global warming is not the problem, and that the problem began over 200 years ago as “wetlands in the United States have been drained, dredged, filled, leveled and flooded for urban, agricultural, and residential development (Mitsch and Gosselink 1993). Because of these activities, 22 states have lost 50% or more of their original wetlands. The problem in Louisiana is somewhat different–wetland growth and deterioration have been naturally occurring here for thousands of years.”

Simply stated, the sediment deposited on the Mississippi River delta naturally compacts under its own weight and subsides. Before channels were straightened and confined with levies, newly added layers of sediment compensated for compaction and subsidence. However, manmade alterations stopped this natural process long before the specter of global warming was raised.

The same process has been identified in other deltas, such as Bangladesh, where efforts to control flooding have caused flooding problems to worsen as natural compaction and subsidence expose low-lying shores to storm surges. The storms are no stronger or frequent, and the sea level increases are normal and natural, but the natural storm barriers are not being replenished.

This apocalyptic government scientist report trumpeted by the Washington Post takes an effect – sea level increases – and assigns it an erroneous cause – manmade global warming. Sea levels are rising naturally, and have been at varying rates for the past 18,000 years. The current rate of rising sea levels has not increased, even though natural climate change has caused the United States temperature to increase about one degree Fahrenheit in the last century.

The rest of the report displays the usual unwarranted alarmism about normal climate change. It’s like the government scientists and Washington Post reporter and editors were born yesterday, and their only instructor about weather was Al Gore.