Drowning in Sea Level Nonsense
http://iceagenow.info/2013/07/drowning-sea-level-nonsense/
Sea-level rise the thickness of a nickel
Drowning in Sea Level Nonsense
By Alan Caruba
New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D) and forty members of Congress believe the sea levels are rising, that a panel should be created to determine what should be done, and, of course, to throw billions of dollars at a problem that does not exist. Politicians were eager to scare the public with the discredited global warming hoax and now they have found a new one.
In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a $20 billion flood barrier system to protect the city from future hurricanes and rising sea levels. Well, hurricanes like tropical storm Sandy are real, but rare. Rising sea levels, however, represent no threat at all.
William Happer who researched ocean physics for the U.S. Air Force and is currently a physics professor at Princeton University notes that “The sea level has been rising since 1800, at the end of the ‘little ice age’”, a cooling cycle last from around 1300 to 1850. Far from heating up, the Earth entered a new cooling cycle around 1996 or so.
Harrison Schmitt, a former Apollo 17 astronaut, U.S. Senator, and a geologist, says “Predicting a sea level rise of seven feet over the next few thousand years would seem too risky a prediction on which to spend tax dollars” and that is surely an understatement. Wasting billons on “climate change”, however, is the new siren call of the Obama administration, but the National Research Council is warning, as Fox News reported, “that those kinds of subsidies are virtually useless at quelling greenhouse gases.”
In fact, as the amount of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas—alleged to “trap” heat—has risen and has had zero effect on the cooling cycle.
A recent article in the British newspaper, The Register, reported on a study by scientists in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, that was published in “Nature Geoscience” that concluded there was no “scientific consensus” to suggest the rate of the seas’ rise will accelerate dangerously.
The notion of the seas rising, swamping coastal cities, and creating havoc is the stuff of science fiction, not science. This is why spending millions or billions on the assertions of some who have a real stake in keeping the public frightened is a very bad idea.
At the center of the global warming scare campaign is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its most recent report said that “no long-term acceleration of sea level has been identified using 20th-century data alone” but that does not discourage the IPCC from forecasting an increase due to global warming. This organization should be disbanded and, if I were in charge, many of its leaders would be in jail right now for fraud.
Who can you believe? One such person is Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, the former chair of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is the past president (1999-2003) of the International Union for Quaternary Research Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution. He has been studying sea level and its effects on coastal areas for more than 35 years. I cited his credentials because others making predictions lack the same level of authority.
Dr. Morner acknowledges that “sea level was indeed rising from, let us say, 1850 to 1930-40. And that rise had a rate in the order of 1 millimeter per year. (Emphasis added). Get out your pocket ruler and look at what one millimeter represents. It is small. It is very small. Not surprisingly Dr. Morner is very critical of the IPCC and its headline-grabbing doomsday predictions. He scorns the IPCC’s claim to “know” that facts about sea level rise, noting that real scientists “are searching for the answer” by continuing to collect data “because we are field geologists; they are computer scientists. So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations. The observations don’t find it!”
A recent paper reviewed by CO2 Science finds that sea levels have risen from 2002-2011 at a rate of only 1.7 millimeters per year over the past 110 years, the equivalent of 6.7 inches per century. This is close to Dr. Morner’s assertion that, at most, there has been a rate of increase that tops out at 1.1 millimeter per year. The review concluded that there is no evidence of any human influence on sea levels.
Even so, in early July a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Josh Willis, told Fox News, that “There is no question that the time to prepare for sea level rise is now…We will definitely see seven feet of sea level rise—the only question is when.” And who funds NASA?
Between the scientists trying to gin up more government money for their agencies and departments and the politicians trying to find a new reason to spend more money, the public is left wondering if the oceans are rising and whether that represents something worth worrying about. The answer is (a) yes, sea levels are rising in infinitesimal amounts and (b) no, we need to stop spending money based on such claims.
It’s not the sea level rise you should worry about. It is the rising levels of national debt and the deficit.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Sea-level rise the thickness of a nickel
By Robert Felix
According to the above article, sea levels have been rising anywhere from one millimeter to 1.7 mm per year. How much is that in reality? Depending on which number you use, that ranges 3/64ths of an inch to 1/16th of an inch. That’s the thickness of a dime to, worst-case scenario, the thickness of a nickel.
That amount of sea-level rise is far below normal. BELOW normal!
Do the math. Sea levels stood about 370 feet lower at the end of the last ice age than they do today. Multiply 370 times 12 and you get 4,440 inches. Divide that by 11,500 years, and you get .39 inches (.99 cm) per year. That’s more than a third of an inch, the thickness of five nickels. That means that today’s sea-level rise is far below normal. (Which I would expect as we head into an ice age.)
Besides that, when we look at sea-level rise, why do we concentrate almost solely on melting ice?
What about the estimated three million underwater volcanoes (according to NASA) that are constantly pumping basalt into the seas? Wouldn’t that amount of basalt contribute to sea-level rise?
And what about erosion? What about the huge amounts of sediments that wash into the sea each year?
NASA estimates that the the Mississippi River dumps 550 million metric tons of sediment into the Gulf of Mexico each year, enough to to extend the coast of Louisiana 91 m (300 ft) each year.
And the Amazon River annually carries as much as 1,000 million tons of sediment into the oceans.
That’s just two rivers.
If you calculated the amount of sediments pouring into the seas from all of the world’s rivers, I wonder how that would affect the numbers?
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Exposing the global-warming con job.
Alan Caruba’s commentaries are posted daily at “Warning Signs” and shared on dozens of news and opinion websites. His blog recently passed more than two million page views. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. For information on his professional skills, Caruba Editorial Services is the place.
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