That is the gist of a story today at CNN by Sally Kohn titled:
The imminent threat to the U.S. that gets ignored.
Of course, it is a puff piece designed to dovetail with the NYC Climate March, they use the Statue of Liberty as an example of something imminently threatened by climate change.
h/t to CTM
She writes:
As thousands of people are expected to join the People’s Climate March this Sunday, September 21, in New York City — calling on world leaders and businesses to take serous and urgent steps to reduce global warming — the threat that climate change poses to the United States is both direct and undeniable.
The rise in mega-storms like Superstorm Sandy is already hurting coastal towns and our economy, while the rise in temperatures is causing droughts in the Great Plains and Southwest. Scientists have shown these effects will only increase.
Meanwhile, though American intelligence agencies continue to emphasize that they have not detected any imminent threat nor specific planning by ISIS to attack US soil, we are nonetheless marshaling our full political will and military muscle to “denigrate and destroy” this enemy.
Why aren’t we attacking climate change?
…
Unlike ISIS, where the possibility of a future threat was enough to justify action, we absolutely know that climate change will strike America — and that, unaddressed, the severity of that threat will only grow. It’s a crisis we absolutely can solve –but first we have to acknowledge there is a crisis and act accordingly.
Really? While Kohn wrings her hands over future landmark inundations,, this New York Times opinion piece Climate Realities admits that:
“climate change is essentially unobservable by the public”
In the case of using New York to freak out about sea level rise and the Statue of Liberty, I’ve already shot down this lamest of lame arguments:
Even if we believe that sea level will accelerate to 2 or 3 times that rate (as some proponents would have us believe), we are still looking at thousands of years into the future. At a 3x rate, we are looking at 7846 years into the future.
Imminent threat? I think not.
Of course the whole freak out in NYC seems to be a common theme with alarmists, as I’ve said before:
Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history
Based on the 2.77 millimeters per year (call it 3 mm) of current sea level rise as shown by that Battery Tide gauge, in the 344 years (1660-2004) the sea level would have risen by:
344 years x 3 millimeters/year = 1032 millimeters or 1.032 meters.
Clearly, New Yorkers have been able to stay well ahead of that 1 meter rise since the city was founded.
But, what about that “imminent threat’, which is greater?
For me, worrying about some ISIS fanatic lopping off heads is a far more clear and present issue than worrying about some fanatic telling me climate induced sea level rise is going to take away the Statue of Liberty in my lifetime.
Your priorities, Ms. Kohn, are skewed and irrational.
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What Ms. Kohn has to also deal with is another reality. DECELERATION of the rate of sea level rise in the face of global ice spiral meltdown.
Exactly! Why worry about ISIS? Because our leaders refuse to do the one thing that will keep us safe – SEVERELY limit visas for persons from certain threat countries, or for persons who have travelled to those countries. Instead of dropping million dollar bombs on tents we need to focus on climate change. Above all BOYCOTT Communist China goods, recycle EVERYTHING and think for yourselves – think independently.
To be fair, it included this:
Here’s a link to the article.
If it doesn’t agree with their view, why include it. CNN is very scripted in this regard and thus probably does agree with what they believe. Thanks for posting this or I would have missed it not being a viewer of any of the national opinion broadcasts.
Deduct Groundwater extraction for irrigation.
Groundwater abstraction is about “one fourth of the current rate of sea level rise of 3.3 mm per year.”
Here is the paper’s abstract
If that groundwater extraction claim was anywhere near true then all of the rivers would be running bank full and higher.
Consider California, check many of their rivers where they reach the sea. Instead of high rivers they are either dry river beds (Los Angeles) or under pressure to release sufficient reserves to maintain river flow for fishes.
No matter where groundwater is extracted, there is zero signs of it running to the sea. Another fool ‘estimate’ based on someone’s imagination and extrapolation without direct observations or measurements.
But some are. The Missouri River at through Kansas City has a slowly rising bottom due to channelizing caused by the attempts to manage the river through dredging and the construction of levies. The Missouri is managed, in part, in order to have enough dept so that barges can be used to move grain and other large bulk commodities. Indeed, most rivers are managed through the use of large impoundments, diversion to human use and hydropower. Flow metrics at the point where a river empties into the ocean contains zero useful information about the climate.
Not if most extracted groundwater is used for agriculture, because such would evaporate instead of going to a river. And the amount that goes into rivers wouldn’t necessarily raise them by a great amount even if they were raising the sea level by a small amount. That’s just a SWAG on your part.
Very good, that is something I have wondered about for years. I once calculated that all the irrigation water we use, if it went directly into the oceans would account for 2+mm/year SL increase.
All the water injected in the formation for Hydraulic Fracturing either remains in the formation or is re-injected into deep saltwater disposal wells.
So if it weren’t for Fracking we’d all be living in a ‘water world’ right now. Thank Goodness for Fracking. /sarc
Channelization, sedimentation but not increased water flow. I lived near the bank in New Orleans for years; water flowing to the sea is not discernibly different nor are levels or water tracked by the Army Corps of Engineers rising.
For groundwater extraction to increase sea level that water must reach the sea. Humans draining drainage systems dry or near dry also do not help increase sea levels.
As I mentioned before; groundwater extraction raising sea levels are back of the envelope estimates without direct observations or verifiable evidence.
As rogerknights says, most of the the water extracted by irrigation methods evaporates. The water cycle is not as simplistic as you seem to think. The water that is extracted through irrigation is absorbed into the atmosphere and falls as precipitation somewhere else in the world.
The recharge rate of groundwater is very slow, in the order of 1 mm/year, and the abstraction rate far exceeds the recharge rate – that’s why wells run dry. Land subsistence in the southwest US is in excess of 1 to 3 meters – this happens because the water in the soil and substrate helps support the surface and when it is removed the surface subsides. A drop of 1 meter for an area of 1 hectare is representative of a loss of 1 cubic kilometer of groundwater. This movement of groundwater is the equivalent of 1.1 cubic kilometers of ice melting in Greenland, Antarctica or the glaciers in the Himalayas. This excess moisture either is taken up in the production of carbohydrates by plants, and returned to the atmosphere as water vapour after it is consumed, or it evaporates into the atmosphere (5 – 50% depending on the irrigation method). Either way it gets into the atmosphere returns to the surface as precipitation. Any way you look at it this excess water returns to the ocean through the hydrological cycle. Eventually, as seawater recharges the groundwater, the water table returns to equilibrium, but this can take in excess of 1 million years, depending on the porosity of the substrate.
Mike Tremblay,
A hectare is 100 metres square, so ten thousand square metres.
A drop of one metre, I suggest, is an indication that something like ten thousand cubic metres has gone.
A cubic kilometre is a thousand metres cubed, so a thousand million cubic metres.
Pesky things those swarms of zeroes!
I agree that most of the extracted water evaporates, exactly as you say.
I have no idea about ground water recovery time-spans; they may be many hundreds of thousands of years, as you say. I simply don’t know.
Auto
In response to Sally Kohn, I’ll say, you’re kidding right?
Seeing into the mind of a “climate activist” is a glimpse into insanity.
Maybe three options here: Insanity, naivety or good old greed.
When you’re talking about a hard-core “climate activist”, insanity is not far from the truth. Once I sat beside a “climate activist” on a flight from Vancouver to Houston. She claimed to have never met someone who didn’t believe the AGW dogma. I reminded her that if she only associates with people of like views, what should she expect.
Just last year we had this bit of sea level rise disaster. It really is worse than we thought.
WUWT – 3 July 2013
New study using GRACE data shows global sea levels rising less than 7 inches per century
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/03/new-study-using-grace-data-shows-global-sea-levels-rising-less-than-7-inches-per-century/#comment-1353166
Why aren’t we attacking climate change?
– With the slightest bit of common sense, the answer to this question becomes quite obvious …
Please, someone, get aerial photography of these rallies for positive proof of their failure.
Here’s one… looks like maybe 500 people?
https://twitter.com/ANIMALNewYork/status/513709107581575169/photo/1
There must be lumps developing in the oceans and seas, as here in Sydney Harbour and down in Tasmania, tide gauges cut into the sandstone in the 1820 and 1840’s are still useable today. After 200 years, the water seems to have got absolutely nowhere.
Forget the “could be rising”..,,,,,,,, “could”, that sound reliably sciency !
The rate of sea level rise at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour is 0.65mm/year.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.shtml?stnid=680-140
There are lunar cycles of various periods up to about 1500 years that change the distributionof water on the planet. Without truely complete and Very Long Term water depth everywhere on the planet (including the middle of the oceans…) we cannot say “sea level is rising” and say “water is just redistributing”. It is the same “averaging” problem as temperatures, really. Too little data and too sparse a sample area to know what is happening. So take a few rising areas of tides (maybe even over hundreds of years) and you get a rising sea level. Just ignore the places that are not rising, or falling.
The lumps are in the brains of those who swallow the fabricated SL rise. The NYC tidal gauge records subsidence, not a general rise in world sea level.
When will the news media stop misleading the public about climate change like this?
When?
Rhetorical question, I’m sure, but this won’t stop until the forces of evil that are promoting this garbage are driven out. I’m guessing over the next 2 – 3 generations when people start putting more value on accuracy than on emotion.
Well, I can dream, right?
I have hope for the near future machine intelligences un-learning all the nonsense humans learn in K-12 and college. Every complex close-coupled non-linear phenomenon is currently “explained” in the media and in education with absurd linear thinking. Climate and economics both suffer from the same “experts” spouting utterly flawed theories and “facts” that cannot be validated using the scientific method. When climate science is based on computational fluid dynamics and hard empirical evidence, not proxies … it might be considered actual science. We’re a long way from that quality level.
Only when sheeple stop responding to the articles, which would require an increase in relative intelligence of the readership.
In other words…ain’t gonna happen…at least not in my lifetime.
When people stop believing that tripe
The irony is that exactly by allowing Western oil companies to be nationalized by savage cultures in Arabia, and now fed money due to such protests shutting down nuclear, fracking and coal, they get more money to fund jihad. The correlation is direct.
She’s generally right but specifically wrong. It’s global cooling and the start of the mini ice age that will start killing people this winter before ISIS crosses the southern border next summer.
Perhaps her name is really Sally Con. Although can showing your ignorance be labeled as a con or just ignorance?
A con is always based on ignorance and greed.
Ignorance on the part of the mark, and greed on the part of the con.
“The rise in mega-storms like Superstorm Sandy… blah blah….”
The only reason that called it a Superstorm, was because it wasn’t strong enough to be called a hurricane !
Sandy was the coincidental combination of 2 separate events. An ordinary continental storm and a late season minor hurricane combined to tear up the affected region rather well.
Period.
“An ordinary continental storm and a late season minor hurricane combined to tear up the affected region rather well.
Period.”
Again, as in the 1950s
“… marshaling our full political will and military muscle to “denigrate and destroy” this enemy.”
Sally should borrow a dictionary and look up ‘denigrate.’
Obama’s phrase was ‘degrade and destroy,’ inane enough without being misquoted.
A good verbal ‘denigration’ evidently works in academia and the media. Perhaps she is simply projecting the usual tactics that she deploys vs. her usual ideological opponents.
For 20000 years the earth has been coming out of an Ice Age and the sea has been rising with at least 4 rapid unexplained spurts. The most extreme of these occurred some 14000 years ago when the sea came up 50 feet in just 250 years a rate 20 times what we see today and when CO2 was at most 250ppm. The evil vile haters of man kind that are members of the climate change religion are perhaps a greater threat than ISIS but only if they are successful pushing their insane political agenda. They must be stopped.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
Documenting.
No need to get all violent and attack global warming. Let’s just give Sally the Global Thermostat and she can dial it to whatever the temperature needs to be. I’ll trust her to set the global temperature at something nice and cozy with gentle rain every 3-4 days, no more nasty superstorms, just the right amount of ice at the poles for polar bears and penguins, and barbeque summers for all. Oh, and 4 inches of snow during the week before and after Christmas.
Wait… what? We can’t do darn thing about global temperature? There is no Global Thermostat she can fiddle with? Sorry Sally. I guess we’ll just have to live with what we get.
P.S. The Canadians are going to be really sore and possibly might even say something impolite when they find out Sally can’t get a little Global Warming going for them. They’ve been waiting a long time for some Global Warming.
P.P.S. What a maroon!
It’s true, we in Canada would welcome some warming. And while Canadians are rarely impolite, I think we could muster up a strongly worded email. And if she doesn’t change her ways, why, we could send another.
You make me smile. Let’s all send her one.
LOL that reminded me of one of my favorite red green show segments
http://www.theconservativevoices.com/media/cat/humorous/canadians-are-weird-r723
Would that be mustang Sally or muskeg Sally ?
Funnily I was just talking about young British jihadists fighting battles abroad and then returning to the UK with anger to terrify & stoke up fear in the general population.
– Yet the BBC gives them a platform on the airwaves to spread terror and also refuse to air anyone challenging them.
– I was talking about the Eco-jihadists on their New York climate demonstrations… and the BBC’s policy of none-false-balance which means skeptics are excluded.
(they know the concept of none-false-balance is a logical fallacy cos paradoxically when the police say an incidence of child balance didn’t occur the BBC don’t say “an authority has given it’s view, so it shouldn’t be challenged by outsiders”, rather they do allow the concerns of the public to be addressed)
How long will it take before the divergence between reality and climate predictions become so great that the whole catastrophe meme is tossed into the trash can of failures? I’m becoming ever more pessimistic.
The lack of warming and many other failures don’t even exist in the minds of these ideologues. They apparently inhabit a parallel world where sea levels are rising at an ever increasing rate (false), temperatures are continuing to rise (false), storm Sandy was a “superstorm” of unprecedented violence (she didn’t even qualify as a hurricane at landfall), Do the checks and balances built into the system even work any more? Certainly, the media aren’t doing their job, but neither are law makers.
How can the checks and balances built into science work when there is collusion, bullying, suppression and intimidation on a massive scale? How can it work when half the world is in thrall to this ludicrous meme? To come out against it is like being against mom and apple pie, to be marginalised as someone who is against all that is good and noble. No wonder the human races marches on in deluded step.
And it’s not just a problem with science either. The founding fathers thought that having separate institutions for legislation and the executive would allow a balance of power where neither one could gain dominance over the other, while an independent judiciary would ensure the rule of law and the constitution are respected.
But the whole system only works if the people in these posts do the jobs they were supposed to do. But what if the legislature allow excessive power by the executive due to some misguided beliefs, or the judges don’t strike down breaches of the constitution. How can these checks and balances then work as intended? The answer is they can’t.
It is the people who are the weakest links. It is the people who ensure failure of supposedly robust systems. That’s why nothing will change.
You identify why the UN WMO sponsored the Weather reports from 2050. They picked a time far enough out, to get beyond the negative ocean phases, whereby temps might be rising again. Plus in 2050, they figure no one alive then, will be bothered to ridicule them if they are wrong.
Why don’t we take up a collection so we can send Ms. Kohn to Iraq and evangelize ISIS with her gospel of climate salvation?
Thread win
That’s an empty-headed idea.
or…
She’d probably lose her head with that idea.
Oops…
I don’t think what CNN broadcasts is of any importance. Almost nobody is watching, except the people stuck in airports or hospital waiting rooms.
For example:
Live + Same Day Cable News Daily Ratings for Thursday, September 18, 2014
Total Day P2+ (000s) 25-54 (000s) 35-64 (000s)
FOXN 1,163 236 461
CNN 361 94 148
MSNBC 299 61 126
CNBC 143 37 49
FBN 43 13 20
HLN 197 73 112
http:/
/tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/09/19/cable-news-ratings-for-thursday-september-18-2014/305000/
oops typo : “incidence of child balance” I meant “incidence of child abuse”
I note also that these eco-jihadists are dogmatic fundamentalists who hold the rest of the world to hostage, usurp democracy and try to demean & disempower anyone who dares challenge their point of view
“while the rise in temperatures”
What rise?
It’s just more propaganda, brock.
From CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/21/opinion/climate-change-march-avaaz/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
“…time is short. The world is rushing towards a series of potentially catastrophic feedback loops and tipping points in the climate system, which could see the support system of life itself irrecoverably disrupted. From the release of gigantic amounts of arctic methane gas, to the rapid carbon acidification of our oceans, to apocalyptic flooding, the continued warming of our planet is the greatest challenge our species has faced…
“The stakes seem too gargantuan to grasp, but it’s this leap in consciousness that’s required for our survival. Our civilization is built on a fragile, delicately interdependent, and unsustainable relationship with the natural world. We can’t afford to underestimate the massive footprint that humans have on this planet. One quarter of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere came from our industries. Our oceans are acidifying 10 times faster than at any point in earth’s history. We are stretching the limits of this world…
“…Getting to 100% clean will require a massive battle against the oil and coal industry and their pocket politicians whose subsidies, profits and influence are all at stake. But this change is possible – we now have the alternative energy technology we need to replace fossil fuels. In May, Denmark published a plan to get to 100% clean by 2050, at a cost of less than 20 Euros per Dane per year. Countries as diverse as Norway and Uruguay are already nearly at 100% clean. Even China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, is rolling out renewables faster than anywhere else on Earth.
“The question is not whether we will make this breakthrough, but whether we do so before it is too late. The clock is ticking, the increase in temperature rising steadily towards the 2 degrees Celsius mark – the red line that both scientists and governments have said poses unacceptable risk of the unthinkable…”
Three points to note: (brackets are mine)
1. Ricken Patel is (a respected climate scientist and) the founding Executive Director of Avaaz (the respected PR agency and haven of climate science), one of the organizers of the People’s Climate March. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely his.
2. No comments are allowed on this article.
3. Sally Kohn has no scientific credentials whatsoever and (unlike her fellow journalists) has never had the “imminent threat” of a jihadist’s knife at her throat.
You can contact CNN here
http://edition.cnn.com/feedback/
Call it in: 404.827.1500 option 1
Feedback for CNN.com Home Page:
http://edition.cnn.com/feedback/show/?s=cnnhomepage
How do they get away with saying such insanity even though their own bible (IPCC reports) explicitly rules out these exact things? There is no runaway feedback loop in the pipeline, there is no gargantuan outcome. Is the IPCC a skeptic group now to? 😉
…. and ransom money is funelled to them via the renewables subsidy mafia