By Steve Goddard
The World Cup was bad news for Holland, but that isn’t what I am talking about.
The world’s preeminent climatologist Dr. James Hansen (who is well known for quiet understatement) has forecast that Holland will drown in the next century. Looks like East Anglia is doomed too. Is that a bad thing?
If that isn’t bad enough, NASA’s Cape Canaveral, Key West, and Miami are toast!
Dr. Hansen says :
I find it almost inconceivable that “business as usual” climate change will not result in a rise in sea level measured in metres within a century.
According to the University of Colorado, sea level has been rising at 3.2 mm/yr since 1994, and has generally been slowing down over the last five years (except for the El Niño spike.)
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global_sm.jpg
That means it will only take 312 years to rise one metre. Which is not far off from what it has been doing for the last century.
It is imperative that we make plans to protect Holland. First step is to hire Hansen to put his finger in the dike. Second step is to teach their strikers how to kick the ball somewhere besides straight to the goalkeeper.
At least they didn’t lose a penalty shootout this year.
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Roy says: July 12, 2010 at 3:19 am
“Another advantage that Paul has over Dr. Hansen is that being an octopus he is …
Not as slimy.
I’ll sell any Dutch citizen an insurance policy reimbursing them for any loss. 100 Euro’s per month. Can be inherited under special conditions.
Yes and the chairman of IBM once said that he could envisage a world which might contain no less that 6 computers!
He was right of course!
From my own observations, another piece of “anecdotal” evidence. Sea level at Cowes IOW has risen at a rate in the range ~0-1mm/yr over the last 25 yrs. There is an old paved path round the base of Cowes Castle which just floods on the highest tides, if the wind is in the right direction, so it is highly sensitive to any change in level. I have walked it thousands of times over that period. Flooding frequency may be a little higher than it used to be, but the level cannot have gone up by more than an inch, or there would be occasions when it was flooded to a depth in excess of an inch. Two inches since just 1994 is impossible.
Britain is said to be dipping slightly in the east, rising in the west, but the Isle of Wight is near the axis of tilt, so this should not be a significant contributory factor.
Sea level has risen 100 meters in the last 15,000 years. That works out to 6.6 millimeters per year.
So how exactly is the current 3.2 mm/year not natural?
My house is 2 meters below Sealevel. Next year it will be 2.03 M. Don’t think that is gonna be a problem as long as we keep building stronger dikes and maintaine our dunes. Another problem is the pumping away of water from the ground below us.
You know, that view of Holland may happen sooner than Hansen’s entrails foretell. The EU’s ecotards ordered the Dutch to flood productive farmland families had owned for hundreds of years since they rescued it from the sea.
Yes, the bureaucrats will save the planet.
It may be too much of a project to undertake worldwide, but I’d be interested in knowing what has happened to the prices of oceanfront property in the US? Is
Martha’s Vineyard now declasse? Are the Kennedy’s quietly selling off? What about
the Florida Keys?
I would be interested in knowing how much this hysteria is affecting the pocketbooks
of Mr. and Mrs. Rich America and the extent to which they are panicked or waiting it all out, ho-hum and (outside the downside in property, in general) oceanfront estates cannot be picked up at pennies on the dollar. ….Lady in Red
Why does he find reality “inconceivable”?
Land is rising – well at least where I live … I have my summer house in an area with the highest rate of land rising on the Scandinavian penisula. The released pressure from the ice during the last ice age result in yearly land rise of 5-7 mm.
I patiently waiting for mr Hansens profecy to be reallity so I my property again will be at the seaside. If we can stop aprox at 2,5 m then we are back on the level of 1742 and I could build my self a boat house and watch the sea from my living room. 🙂
How to turn a 10cm sea level rise into 5 metres:
“As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for
the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095.”
Similarly, let’s say that the planet warms by 0.1 degrees from 2005 to 2015. If this doubles each decade, temperatures will rise 51.1 degrees by 2095, and over 100 degrees by 2105.
When exponential trends are the only way for these scary scenarios to work, i smell a rat.
tallbloke says:
July 12, 2010 at 2:26 am
“I’ll tell you an old-fashioned story
That Grandfather used to relate,
Of a joiner and building contractor;
‘Is name, it were Sam Oglethwaite…..
He he…:-))
Love the odd ode TB!
Here’s the start of The Lion and Albert, which also has a watery comment…
There’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool,
That’s noted for fresh air and fun,
And Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom
Went there with young Albert, their son.
A grand little lad was young Albert,
All dressed in his best; quite a swell
With a stick with an ‘orse’s ‘ead ‘andle,
The finest that Woolworth’s could sell.
They didn’t think much to the Ocean:
The waves, they were fiddlin’ and small,
There was no wrecks and nobody drownded,
Fact, nothing to laugh at at all….
Full text of this Marriott Edgar ode here…
http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/7686-Marriott-Edgar-The-Lion-and-Albert
Enjoy!
Rob Spooner: Alex Cull refers to the land sinking due to post glacial rebound. The rebound is causing land to rise. He is confusing this with the “post glacial adjustment”…
Yes, I think I was using an obsolete term for this. You’re right, the rebound is causing land to rise, but my understanding (such as it is) of the received wisdom is that while Scotland and the north west is rising, the south east of England is very slowly sinking, a bit like what happens when a heavy person gets off one end of a seesaw (but not quite as abrupt!).
It’s probably one of those pieces of information that has been told to us many times, but which could do with a bit of verification. At any rate, we are talking about processes that take millennia to unfold and are lost in the noise of short-term changes.
He’s drowned out the medieval cinque ports. Trouble is, since then they’ve all been stranded inland rather than drowned. The old cliff line’s just 1/2 mile down my hill. Great view for my grandkid’s if it comes back! Trouble is, unlike Hanson, I’m betting ‘$1000 to a doughnut’ that it’ll be even further inland.
The 1953 flood was a sea level rise of 2m + 4.9 m waves. That 2000mm + 5000 mm on top.
Looks like Jacksonville, FL is toast as well but the Lake Mary area, where I plan to retire is going to have ocean front property. Woot! Now, if we can only get those longevity genes isolated and activated.
“There is strong evidence that the Earth now is within 1 °C of its highest temperature in the past million years. Oxygen isotopes in the deep-ocean fossil plankton known as foraminifera reveal that the Earth was last 2 °C to 3 °C warmer around 3 million years ago, with carbon dioxide levels of perhaps 350 to 450 parts per million.”
What Jimmy “Death Trains” Hansen conveniently leaves out is the fact that we are in an interglacial period, the Holocene, which began 11,500 years ago. The warming from ice age conditions to near-present conditions, a jump of over 5C took less than a century, half of it occurring in as little as 15 years. C02 levels, as usual, began to rise in response to the warming. With his statement that we “were 2C to 3C warmer 3 million years ago, with carbon dioxide levels of perhaps 350 – 450 parts per million” he uses the old Warmists’ trick of implying that correlation = causation. He is of course, simply being dishonest. What else is new.
Jimmy clearly needs a vacation, preferably a good, long one.
If he keeps this up, I find it inconceivable that he won’t end up in a padded cell somewhere before the decade is out.
Going off on a tangent somewhat, an interesting picture of the extent to which the earth’s spin affects sea level :
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/what-would-earth-look-if-it-stopped-spinning
The only sea level that is catastrophically rising is the sea level of skepticism, as fig leaves of CAGW fall off.
In my lifetime the sea has risen 4″.
Wow.
I live in East Anglia, about 15 miles from the coast, my garden is full of pebbles and the soil is a sandy loam. I’m not a geologist but my best guess is that somewhere in the past my garden and house were in the sea, and it was only by a monumental effort of mankind in reducing CO2 emissions that the sea receded and some time later Italian prisoners of war (true!) were able to build my current house on the site the sea had once occupied.
The man is as nutty as a fruitcake.
I bought property in the middle of the English Channel so my Grand Kids can build a hotel when the sea level falls. The Florida Keys are a problem because all the people on Cuba will be walking to Florida one day!
If One can claim rising sea levels are possible then they need to realize the opposite is also possible based on historic evidence. We are currently about the mid range of long term sea levels. 800K years! 38 Million years of history shows that we are on the low side of sea level and the long term trend is falling.
We should be aware that J. a.k.a.”death trains”Hansen as far as 1986 began singing the Global Warming Mantra; so, careful researchers (or rather investigators), interested in knowing the actual origins of this scam must dig into the whole story about it.
It would be interesting to know how such a series of events developed afterwards (as for example the “trick”of convenient adjustments made on satellites measurements in 1989 and so on).
http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/eed.nsf/vwpsw/360796B06E48EA0485257601005982A1#video
Second step is to teach their strikers how to kick the ball somewhere besides straight to the goalkeeper.
Third step is to teach the referees how to see their star player being pulled from behind as he is trying to kick a goal.
Alex Cull
“a bit like what happens when a heavy person gets off one end of a seesaw ”
That’s a wicked good analogy. Mikey likes it!
There was no map showing what would happen to Al Gore’s mansion in Montecito.