https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/06/27/guardian-peddles-latest-sea-rise-scare/
By Paul Homewood
Latest nonsense from the Grauniad:
In 1890, just over six thousand people lived in the damp lowlands of south Florida. Since then the wetlands that covered half the state have been largely drained, strip malls have replaced Seminole camps, and the population has increased a thousandfold. Over roughly the same amount of time the number of black college degree holders in the United States also increased a thousandfold, as did the speed at which we fly, the combined carbon emissions of the Middle East, and the entire population of Thailand.
About 60 of the region’s more than 6 million residents have gathered in the Cox Science Building at the University of Miami on a sunny Saturday morning in 2016 to hear Harold Wanless, or Hal, chair of the geology department, speak about sea level rise. “Only 7% of the heat being trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the atmosphere,” Hal begins. “Do you know where the other 93% lives?”
“In the ocean,” Hal continues. “That heat is expanding the ocean, which is contributing to sea level rise, and it is also, more importantly, creating the setting for something we really don’t want to have happen: rapid melt of ice.”
A real estate developer interrupts Hal to ask: “Is someone recording this?”
“Yes.” The cameraman coughs. “Besides,” Hal adds, “I say the same damn thing at least five times a week.” Hal, who is in his early seventies and has been studying sea level rise for over 40 years, pulls at his Burt Reynolds moustache, readjusts his taupe corduroy suit, and continues. On the screen above his head clips from a documentary on climate change show glacial tongues of ice the size of Manhattan tumbling into the sea. “The big story in Greenland and Antarctica is that the warming ocean is working its way in, deep under the ice sheets, causing the ice to collapse faster than anyone predicted, which in turn will cause sea levels to rise faster than anyone predicted.”
According to Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida, rising sea levels are uncertain, their connection to human activity tenuous. And yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects roughly two feet of rise by century’s end. The United Nations predicts three feet. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates an upper limit of six and a half feet.
Take the 6 million people who live in south Florida today and divide them into two groups: those who live less than six and a half feet above the current high tide line, and everybody else. The numbers slice nearly evenly. Heads or tails: call it in the air. If you live here, all you can do is hope that when you put down roots your choice was somehow prophetic.
But Hal says it doesn’t matter whether you live six feet above sea level or sixty-five, because he, like James Hansen, believes that all of these predictions are, to put it mildly, very, very low. “The rate of sea level rise is currently doubling every seven years, and if it were to continue in this manner, Ponzi scheme style, we would have 205 feet of sea level rise by 2095,” he says. “And while I don’t think we are going to get that much water by the end of the century, I do think we have to take seriously the possibility that we could have something like 15 feet by then.”
#
Climate analyst Paul Homewood responds to UK Guardian:
Meanwhile back in the real world, sea levels around Florida have been rising at 2.11mm/yr, or 8 inches per century. Of this, about a quarter of the rise is due to the fact that the land has been sinking since the end of the Ice Age.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8720030
There is no acceleration, as is falsely claimed. Indeed, sea levels were rising faster than now in the middle of the 20thC.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8720030
And Miami’s coast line looks little different now than in the 1930s:
http://casasemmiami.com.br/lummus-park-em-miami-beach/
Lummus Park, Miami Beach – The 1930s and now.
I sometimes wonder what Guardian readers have between their ears.
