The National Academy of Sciences Loses The Plot

Splendid again, Willis. Your restraint thunders to greater effect than the shrill shouts of the alarmists.

How on earth is the sea level supposed to rise off the California coast exclusively? Has water decided to congregate there to the exclusion of the rest of the planet? the only way this makes any sense at all is if California is going to sink a foot in the next twenty years, and that doesn’t make much sense either. Is there any such thing as localized permanent sea level rises?

Willis, You could easily get a graph like the NAS projection. Think what the sea level graphs for Sumatra or NE Japan look like….

There is a host of self-centred and greedy ulterior motives different people have for supporting the AGW paradigm.
1- For researchers, once a paradigm becomes popular and dominant, it is career limiting to oppose it.
2- If the climate is presented as something about which governments can make policies, then government money will flow for research. If climate is something that we cannot affect, funding is not going to be as forthcoming.
3- Plus of course it gives researchers a good feeling to imagine that they’re working to save the world instead of, say, developing a new scent for feminine hygiene products.
4- Environmentalists see carbon emission control as a means to reduce real pollutants like NOx, SO2, Hg, etc. as a side effect.
5- Luddites see carbon strangulation as a way of dismantling the industrial economies to force everyone to a much reduced subsistence.
6- ‘Personal isolationists’ try to use AGW as a way to eliminate big utility companies, with power generated at home from wind, solar, or even car batteries, and even sold to the local grid at retail (or higher) rates.
7- EU trade isolationists see carbon regulation as a way of increasing the energy cost, and thus decreasing the competitiveness, of North American economies _vis a vis_ EU ones.
8- Opportunities to use carbon emissions as pretexts to block or heavily tariff imports abound, thus degrading international trade even further.
9- Local trade isolationists like the idea of overseas products becoming more expensive, and if they can’t do that by punitive tariffs and quotas, they hope to do so by artificially driving up shipping costs.
10- Various people see Kyoto-type agreements as a way of transferring wealth from developed economies to lesser ones, as our one-time Liberal cabinet minister Stewart once claimed.
11- Some also envision carbon strangulation as a pretext for involving governments deeply into the economy, via direct and indirect subsidies for energy alternatives that can claim to be ‘green’. Naturally, those who are involved and invested in such industries have their own greed factor.
12- Believers in Big Government also love the idea of sending governments even more of our money under any pretext, and use carbon taxes as a way to transfer even more money to people in lower income levels.
13- Some politicians see taking ‘the west’ off oil as a means of removing the dependence the US in particular has on politically uncertain sources.
14- Other politicans see ‘cap & trade’ or other quota management as a way to direct corruption to their buddies and relatives.
15- Nuclear energy proponents see carbon strangulation as a way to promote nuclear power.
16- Some people imagine that energy cost reductions will magically pay for, and even squeeze profit from, expensive carbon control technologies whose payback times are actually measured (when they aren’t just dead costs) in decades.
17- Opportunistic “businessmen” see the panic of the masses as an opportunity to solicit donations to so-called “non-profit” organizations or to operate carbon credit companies in order to enrich themselves financially.
18- Financial trading corporations like Goldman Sachs see carbon trading as an opportunity to generate a new financial bubble out of an inexistant commodity (carbon credits) with which to justify huge profits and staggering executive bonuses.
19- In politics it is generally held far more important to be consistent than it is to be right. Lies and errors about warming are thus propagated further, instead of being squelched, in order to bolster the political optics.
20- Some people propose deliberately crushing economic growth to be an improvement over what they think will happen if we let growth proceed naturally.
21- And there are some who are actually sincere, who desperately want to believe that they can by sacrificing (or by forcing the rest of us to sacrifice) contribute to saving the world. But just because you make a sacrifice to superstition doesn’t mean that your AGW deity is going to come through for you.

At first I thought the projection was ridiculous, but then I noticed some of the peak years. It looks like around 1915 there was a peak, another around 1943, and another around 1984. Their high end projection looks right in line with those three peaks, and thus seems plausible for at least a temporary sea level rise. If global warming accelerates, it could be even higher.

HR says:
June 23, 2012 at 5:53 pm
“Opps thats global.
California’s range is 4 to 30 centimeters, How does that look?”
Like a fifty percent chance of rain.

HR, from looking at the graph, a 4 cm rise would fit in just fine. But to include a 30 cm rise in an estimation is ridiculous — as Willis’s graph so nicely shows. Well done Willis!
I wonder if anyone has any sound theories on why there seemed to be a steep rise in the 1870s and 1930s, why there was an actual significant drop from 1885 to 1905 and why the rise from 1995ish to 2012 has been almost nonexistent. It could be “natural random variation” but the general uniformity between 1940 and 2000 argues against such variations.
– MJM