Posted by John Goetz
Speculation abounds that the St Andrews golf course in Scotland will disappear by mid-century – a scant 42 years from now – due to global warming.
From theherald.co.uk.
Water hazard: how global warming could sink St Andrews Old Course
GRAEME SMITH
The world’s most famous golf course could crumble into the North Sea by the middle of this century, according to a climate change expert.
Professor Jan Bebbington, director of the St Andrews Sustainability Institute, visualises a town where locals remember with sorrow the last Open played on the Old Course, the home of golf.
She also foresees that Scotland will be a nation of car-sharing vegetarians and the declining population due to emigration will be offset by the allocation of 580,000 “climate change refugees”.
Does this mean we will never again see someone like David Duval whacking a golf ball against the side of a 17th hole pot bunker in futility?
UPDATE: Here is a Google Interactive map of St. Andrews Links, shown below. I assume the airport would fall victim to global warming also, though oddly there is no mention of it in the article.
Also, you can watch it “crumble into the sea” in real-time here with a choice of webcam views. Popcorn optional. – Anthony
At least 11 Tornados visible in that Google map of St Andrews. Must be Global Warming. Also a Lightning and a Phantom.
RAF Leuchars with lots of CO2 producing aeroplanes……….
And carbon dioxide is good for all golf course grasses/shrubs/trees…….
You have to remember that Ms Bebbington is also vice-chair (Scotland) for the Sustainable Development Commission, a UK Government funded NGO which wastes loads of money producing all sorts of crap about sustainable living (full of veggies, AGW alarmists and tree-huggers without a single notion about how the world really works). Unfortunately our government is full of the same type of people full of the same type of crap, and they lap up this sort of nonsense.
And of course the BBC predictably carry the report:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7666809.stm
Granted they have a let-out clause:- ‘ The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites’. Well of course not, but they are responsible for what they choose to post.
Here we go again ! Just yesterday we had a report in the UK about our most treasured coastal tourist spots about to be destroyed by “erosion and sea level rises caused by climate change” ! And what happens, the British press print this stuff almost verbatim and without question. Despite the knowledge that for the past 120 years, sea levels have risen on average between 1 and 2 mm per year, and that erosion has always been with us, nothing is said to counter these ludicrous claims.
As an englishman I am disgusted with the way the media acts purely as a P.R. vehicle.
Where are Bernstein and Woodward when you need them ??!
[…] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/13/st-andrews-doomed […]
Just reading through the post when I heard a story on the radio about a place in Alaska called Newtok.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/us/27newtok.html
‘Global warming’ is causing the permafrost to melt and the local river is eroding the land from beneath their feet. In that case global warming must have created the grand canyon.
Serves them right I say, chasing a silly little ball around & beating it with a stick every now & then, daftest game ever invented IMHO! When they say the Holy Grail of games (Rugby Union for all you sad people out there) is threatened then I might stop & pause for thought.
Anyway must go, I have to swim into town for a meeting treading water for an hour because the sea-level is so high over here in the south of England! I do hope Professor John Brignell at Number Watch adds this news to his oh so long list of all things caused by global warming!
PS Perhaps Professor Bebbington shoul team up with Dr Raj Pouhchori from IPCC as he is the wrolds leading climatre scienc expert a I am lead to believe, & he has PhDs in Industrial Engineering & Economics, perfectly qualified in my view for the task in hand!
A question for those in the know?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/satellite/index.html
Running the animation I see obvious white clouds and obvious dark areas (presumably no cloud). It’s an infrared image, I’d like to know if the more milky areas are indicative of cloud cover or something to do with the fact that the pictures are infrared. In Britain this weekend I could look up and see a brilliant clear blue sky, but looking back at the satelite images there was that apparent milky cloud cover over southern England.
Best piece of news i’ve had all day!!
Death to all golfers.
A blog post about a press report about a ‘speculative essay’. According to the foreward to the collection in which it appears
The essays in this volume are not forecasts. Forecasting is a truly hazardous art …Rather, these essays are an exercise in imagineering, a word coined in 1940s America and defined as ‘the fine art of deciding how we go from here’.
Jan Bebbington, an economist, was invited to contribute such an an essay to this collection imagining Scotland in 2050. The only reference to St Andrews Links is in an aside to the main text and runs …
We limited the effects of some of these impacts by banning building in high risk areas (some 20 years before the actual impacts
were felt), progressively investing in strengthening our infrastructure and making a managed retreat from vulnerable coastal locations. This was still a painful experience, especially as we lost many historical sites on coasts (for example, many of you will
remember the sorrow at the last British Open played in St Andrews).
Anyone interested in context can read the whole essay here . So I searched this non-forecast for the phrase ‘crumbling into the sea’ alas, in vain,
Sorry to spoil rather a fun headline.
Even if the sea level does rise by a foot, why exactly can’t they build a dyke?
A day in the life of Chicken Little
“The sea is rising! The sea is rising!”
“Oh, look it’s going down again.”
“The sea is rising! The sea is rising!”
“Oh, look it’s going down again.”
Rich
Ermmm.
Scotland is RISING!
The last ice age pressed Scotland down with the weight of the glaciers. Ever since Scotland has been slowly rising and still is.
Shouldn’t she be informed on this well known phenomenom?
What’s that on the end of the runway? A chalk representation of the Wickerman????
It’s a sign of the Animists I tells ya!… It’s a portent of what’s to commmme!
LOL.
Doooomed. Doooomed, we are. Damned for all eternity…. To play golf in the Gulf.
…. Ok. I’ll stop now….. 😉
Mike Nicholson “where are Bernstein and Woodward”? well Chris Booker and Chris Monckton (Lord Monckton is a Scottish peer) make an interesting pair in this respect, like Mac and Mac of Jolly Hockey Sticks (perhaps, now, Jolliffe’s Hockey Sticks, ie broken, if one looks properly).
My primer gets this line too “all the president’s men”. Somewhere Bernstein and Woodward must be waiting in the wings. I’d most like to see more DEBATES in public with good debaters and good publicity. Meanwhile, I’ve written “Climate Wars and Honourable Weapons” since I’ve been much challenged in myself, preparing to go hear Iain Stewart at Southampton next week.
Any of you U.K. residents a fan of the program Time Team?
Why is it that the archaeologists on that show always need to dig down a meter or so underneath the current top soil to find roads, remains of townships, buildings, camp fires etc, etc, etc. Always digging down … in some cases up to two meters to get down to the level of a two thousand year old Roman road bed. One metre to get to remnants only 500 years old. How did all this top layer get on top of the road?
Must have been a lot of climate change over the centuries.
When the spiders move in we are truly dooooomed:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7573530.stm
They may find it a little difficult to get through the coming winter though. Any takers on the media bemoaning their loss come March 2009?
here’s a headline I would like to see,
Mt Everest found to be rising 15 times faster than sea level!
Hope for human salvation from global warming!
Robin Williams on golf, raw language but funny and problaby true.
Todays climate scare story:
Black widows set to establish colonies in Britain as climate changes, “experts warn”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3194195/Black-widows-set-to-establish-colonies-in-Britain-as-climate-changes-experts-warn.html
Perhaps the flooding will drown the spiders?
Pamela Gray (22:18:42) :
Old Cape Cod is another great spot for erosion. Old is the wrong word – it is a terminal moraine leftover from the last Ice Age and the eastern side erodes on average a few feet per year, much more when a strong nor’easter (e.g. 1978) rolls by. Eroded sand is transported north and adds to the hook at the end of the cape.
http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/staffpages/boldale/capecod/
The remarkable decline in average wind speed at the Blue Hill Observatory reflects a general decrease in severe storms in this reagion. Feel free to “blame” it on AGW.
http://www.bluehill.org/annwind.gif
DocMartyn: “Another point is that Scotland is on the rise, and Southern England is sinking. During the last ice age a mile of so of ice sat on Scotland and it cause the British Isles to tip up, Scotland sank and England rose up. Since the ice has gone, Scotland has been on the rebound rising steadily, and Southern England is sinking.”
A good point – East Anglia is where I’m originally from, and I understand this area to be gradually sinking by a couple of millimetres or so a year, which is roughly the same rate at which sea levels have generally been rising during the last century. People have known about this for some time, without being unduly panicked about it.
Another point – despite glacial isostatic adjustment, sea levels appear to have been somewhat higher back in Roman times. The Norfolk coastline would have been very different, featuring a great estuary where there is dry land now. There was a recent news item about the place the Romans landed in England, down in Kent – again, quite a distance back from the sea now.
So southern England has been very gradually sinking, and sea levels have fallen and then very gradually risen in recent millennia, but all this has been happening at a rate that need not inspire anyone with panic for centuries to come, if ever.
So… Professor Babbington “visualises”, “foresees, “predicts”. Let’s see, I’m a bloke on the internet, almost as good as a director of a Sustainability Institute. Gazing into my crystal ball (computer monitor), I visualise, foresee and predict… the nation missing its stupid 80% CO2 reduction target and… the world not ending.
“Why is it that the archaeologists on that show always need to dig down a meter or so underneath the current top soil to find roads………….”
Ever tried digging up a meter above ground level!