From this article in The Hindu: (h/t to WUWT reader Adam Gallon)
“In the 20th century, sea-level rise was recorded at an average of 17 centimetres. If the sea-level was significantly lower, clearly the same tsunami would have had a less devastating effect. Therefore, sea-level rise is a kind of multiplier of the kinds of threats and negative impacts that will take place anyway,”
It seems to me that clearly Dr. Pachauri can’t mentally manage the concept of scale. Here’s the NOAA wave height graphic that was flashed around the world on news media shortly after the Tsunami Warning was issued, while the tsunami was still traveling across the Pacific:
Source: NOAA Center for Tsunami Research and NOAA Scientific Visualization Lab
Note the inset I added, now here’s that inset area magnified with the color key added and the 17cm Pachauri mentions marked:
Hmmm, for the people of Japan in the hardest hit areas, I don’t think it would matter much. But let’s compare the numbers and find out.
We can describe it another way in the scale of familiar human experience. Wiki gives this 2006 value for the average height of the Japanese people, the left figure is male, the right is female:
| Japan | 1.715 m (5 ft 7 1⁄2 in) | 1.580 m (5 ft 2 in) |
Let’s look at some other things:
Bonsai trees reach an average height of two feet (61cm)
Read more: Why Is the Bonsai Tree Passed Down Within the Family? | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/facts_6744566_bonsai-passed-down-within-family_.html#ixzz1HR1GULDU
From Wiki, the height of the sea wall at the Fukushima reactor site:
“The plant was protected by a sea wall and designed to withstand a tsunami of 5.7 [570cm] meters…”
The actual height of the Tsunami wave there:
…but the tsunami had a height of about 14 meters [1400 cm] and topped this sea wall
OK let’s make some scale imagery to help visualize these values:
Now let’s insert the image above into the image which shows the height of the Tsunami as reported at the Fukushima reactor complex:
Click the above image to present it at the actual 1 pixel = 1 centimeter scale on your monitor.
That 17 centimeters that Dr. Pachauri speaks of makes all the difference, doesn’t it?
Note to other bloggers: feel free to use these graphics under “fair use” terms, but please provide a link back to this article at:
UPDATE: I had noted the actual sea level trend near the north coast of Japan as measured by satellites, but figured I need not mention it since the story stood well enough on its own.
Commenter “Skip” however seemed to think otherwise, so I had to bring it up. See below:
Works out negative with the correction applied too: http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib.jpg
Note the negative trend in sea level for Japan’s north coast, which makes Pachy’s 17cm worries totally pointless. Doesn’t he have Internet access?
UPDATE2: This report of sea level trends in Japan from the Japan Meteorological agency shows the current SL lower than in 1950 by about 20mm. That certainly doesn’t square with AGW theory well, and again makes Pachy’s 17cm value for the area pointless. See: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10897163/National-Report-of-Japan
h/t to WUWT reader “An Inquirer” for the report
Bonsai trees reach an average height of two feet
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Skip: if you really are the father of newborn twins…
then you likely have sleep deprivation.
It adversely affects the brain and cognitive function.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation
Try some earplugs. Your clarity will slowly improve.
Good luck with your progeny!
skip says:
March 23, 2011 at 4:12 pm
*But you have already been told a number of times that sea level around Japan has been falling for a considerable time.* –Dave Andrews
Where? As calculated how? That’s crucial. Upward shifts of submarine plates do not count as “falling sea level”.
Wow! You gotta go tell the AGWa team that, Skip.
I would tend to agree, but as is evident in the graph above, that ain’t how they like to do it. How can sea level fall around Japan and yet rise around the Soloman Islands? It’s obviously not the ocean, it’s the crust that’s changing. But it’s crucial they find a way to blame it on anthro-catastrophic CO2.
skip says: (March 24, 2011 at 10:36 pm)
“But, its impact on land will be greater if its 17 cm higher–which AW stipulated in his dismissal of Pauchari (this is key!)–than *it would have been* without sea level rise. ”
If I was surrounded by 100 bees, all attacking me at once, would the attack be “greater than it would have been” had there been only 99 bees? One could argue yes but what’s the real difference? It’s about scale, Skippy, scale.
*How can sea level fall around Japan and yet rise around the Soloman Islands?*
Because crustal uplift–and myriad other factors–affect different regions differently??? What is the point of this question? Are you inferring that I am saying crustal uplift is uniform?
Mr. Watts, it is comments like the above from your readers that bother me so much.
But more to the point:
I am sorry, but the illicit drug analogy suffers from the same malady as the engorged elephant analogy you brought up earlier:
An elephant would flatten your house whether it ate prior to its attack or not. It’s flattened . . . If you’re caught with drugs it doesn’t matter if its a 1000 grams or 1017 grams. You’re still busted . . . If a tsunami is 14 or 14.17 meters you’re still struck by a tsunami.
If fully understand the analogies and their application but they are simply *wrong*. Damage from a tsunami strike is not a binary measure; it is a function of the size and strength of the tsunami.
A far better version of the drug analogy would focus on the potential extent of the human damage associated with my crime. (Although for adults I would argue drugs are by and large a ‘victimless’ crime but that is another and complex matter.) If I am dealing drugs to schoolchildren, I am a more menacing drug dealer if I sell 1017 grams of crack then if I am dealing only 1000. And to make the analogy even better–because again the wavelength of a tsunami can reach hundreds of kilometers–if I deal drugs at this rate (1017 versus 1000) for month after month after month, the accumulated additional damage of my narcotics distribution begins to mount in real, tangible, and quite horrific human terms. (I am a proponent of drug decriminalization but I fully acknowledge that drug dealers are scum, but that is again another issue.)
Its not just a question of whether I’m dealing or not (binary measure); its a question of the *extent* of harm done (continuous measure). More dealing to children means more harm. More water in a tsunami–as you again stipulated in your thought experiment when mocking Pauchari–means more harm associated with the tsunami against a fixed coastal location.
Are you willing to say with confidence that the additional 17 cm (which is a gross oversimplification of which we are both guilty but serves as a talking point) would cause *no* additional human and material damage over the course of the tsunami strike? If so that seems extremely bold–as it was extremely dismissive and cavalier to mock Pauchari’s speculation, which is why I have been attacking your post.
There are number other tangential issues. Sea levels in Japan are a function of many things *in addition* to overall ocean volume, such as ENSO patterns, tectonic shifts, lunar influences, and so on. But holding all those things equal except increased oceanic volume from thermal expansion and glacial runoff, it strongly suggests there *was* more water available for this earthquake to move *relative to 1900*. Furthermore the rising amplitude and shortening wavelength of a tsunami as it breaks land means any additional water mass would not be the exact “17 cm” stipulated; it would be much, much higher. These issues by no means help your case but they are not my main point, which is that you mocked Pauchari, who was making a far more reasonable speculation than you initially allowed, and attracted a clamor of supporting jeers from your readers, not one of whom bothered to think about the lacuna in your logic.
REPLY: Sounds like a perfect synopsis to apply for a government grant, and still your point is irrelevant. You brought the jeers on yourself with your opening insults, stop whining about that which you reap from what you sowed. – Anthony
Tom, by restricting your analogy to one victim of the bee attack you’re committing the same fallacy of of viewing “damage” as binary that AW is committing with his engorged elephant and drug bust examples.
If a swarm of aggressive bees attacks a *group*, that one extra bee might nail someone with a deadly allergy. It might be “just one more” sting, but that I suspect will be of little consolation to the poor sod dying of cardiac arrest.
Skip’s argument reminds me of the default play by alarmists who often try and make their case by pointing out that many/most skeptics admit that CO2 emissions are contributing to the “greenhouse” effect and therefore impacting climate.
There again the magnitude of likely impact is ignored.
The meaningless 17 CM of sea rise impacted the tsunami just as the minuscule amount of human produced CO2 emissions impacts the atmosphere and climate.
But Skip et al insist level of impact doesn’t matter.
That we need the massive efforts to reduce them regardless of how meaningless the level is. In fact they don’t want to talk about the level.
If they can hypothesize any impact drastic action must be taken.
How stupid is that?
Take it to any problem in any arena and it’s equally stupid.
Legislatures are forever falling into this foolishness in producing legislation.
We don’t need their remedies for problems that exist only by their irrational pandemonium and dishonest advocacy.
And their demanding and devouring countless millions in funding themselves must stop.
“Pauchari, who was making a far more reasonable speculation”
Oh just BS, Skip.
His “speculation” was just another ridiculous and dishonest AGW stunt used to pile more on top of the mountain of observations falsely attributed (in some ginned up way) to AGW.
The ease at which these dishonest lunatics attribute all things seen and imagined to AGW, along with their convenient presumption that skeptics must then prove them wrong is maddening.
Your lame attempt to apply reasonable lipstick to this latest stunt FAILED and amounted to no more than the usual, “well there could have been be an impact from the maybe 17 cm”, so therefore, Pachauri was reasonable.
It’s amazing that so many of you lofty perchers can’t recognize the egregious nature of it all.
* . . . still your point is irrelevant.* –AW
That is again a very bold statement. I wonder if you or any of your readers are willing to venture the certitude that *no* additional damage–in material and human terms–would have been generated by an extra 17 cm in sea level (as your graph stipulated) or in the case of this particular tsunami, *whatever* the contribution of 20th MSL rise was to its mass. If I were in your shoes I wouldn’t. That’s real “skepticism”, and none of the contributors her that I have read yet have shown it in regarding your belittling of Pauchari.
*You brought the jeers on yourself with your opening insults, stop whining about that which you reap from what you sowed* — AW
Jeer at me all you want. I’m a big boy. The jeers to which I referred were the remarks about Pauchari that followed your post. Your readership delighted in this mockery of him, never considering the crucial gap in your height comparison, and that his speculation was far more plausible than you initially allowed. (Compounding the misleading visual comparison of trees and people was the width of the wave in your visual. True you are restricted by screen size, but if that wave was truly to “scale”, as the caption posits, how far *latterly* to the right of the screen would it have extended? More to the point, had you even *considered* that when ridiculing Pachari over the 17 cm figure? [“Look how wee the people and trees already are? What’s another 17 cm?”] I have my doubts.)
And this brings up a larger and probably final point. This is a tactic I see AGW disputants use with great frequency: Attempted decapitation strikes: Find something apparently ridiculous or flawed about a prominent individual person who promotes the AGW hypothesis (Gore, Hansen, Pauchari), and then revel in this as if it were somehow of crucial relevance in assessing the scientific case for AGW. I of course do not know for certain whether Pauchari’s speculation will pan out; it might well not. My acceptance of the theory has nothing to do with *him*, but that of course, is a much larger and very different story.
REPLY: Oh, puhleeze. The scale and the objects are pixel accurate, note the size of the image (and the objects) corresponds vertically to pixels= centimeters, which you can see in the image info, if you know how to do that, but I’m guessing you don’t from your fractured understanding. Get a bigger monitor or learn how to work zoomed, and count the pixels. At least we have the courage to put our name to our words and claims. As I’ve always said those who snipe from the comfort of anonymity are simply cowards, and if they feel their words are important, they should stand behind them. But, think whatever you want “skip”, no amount of logic can penetrate your thought process. We’re going in circles, so we’re done. Go back to criminal justice where you may actually do some good in things you hopefully understand. Here, all you are doing is wasting everybody’s time (including the time of your state funded University employer) arguing for an argument that only you agree with. Your point remains irrelevant. – Anthony
I think a better analogy might be if a 300km diameter meteor were to hit earth, vs. a 317km diameter meteor. Obviously, the 317km meteor would cause MORE damage than the 300km meteor. But the difference, given the scale of the event, would be relatively misiscule – small enough to be irrelevant.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd understood:
Blue on black, tears on a river
Push on a shove, it don’t mean much
Joker on jack, match on a fire
Cold on ice, a dead man’s touch
Whisper on a scream, doesn’t change a thing
The extra 17cm is nothing more than ‘tears on a river’
You might regard me as a coward, but it has no bearing on the dispute.
* . . . the image (and the objects) corresponds vertically to pixels= centimeters, which you can see in the image info, if you know how to do that . . . *
It is telling that you do not understand my point at all. To *horizontal* scale, the tsunami would extend a city block off your screen. This is what makes the extra 17 cm stipulated so much more meaningful in absolute terms than your graphic suggests. Your statement above bolsters my suspicion that you had not considered this aspect of tsunami dynamics when mocking Pauchari, and neither had your readers.
Most of my posts on your forum have been made after working hours, and right now I am on lunch.
REPLY:Actually your inability to put your name to your words says a lot. Now you are just being disingenuous, the issue was vertical height, the 17 cm, quoted from Pachauri, not horizontal breadth. You can’t change the argument to a different dimension simply because you lost the vertical argument. What next to try to salvage your still irrelevant argument? As I said before, I’m not going to waste any more time on this. You’ve lost, get over it. Waste time elsewhere, you’ve worn out your welcome with this comment. – Anthony
skip says: (March 25, 2011 at 7:58 am)
“Tom, by restricting your analogy to one victim of the bee attack you’re committing the same fallacy of of viewing “damage” as binary that AW is committing with his engorged elephant and drug bust examples.
If a swarm of aggressive bees attacks a *group*, that one extra bee might nail someone with a deadly allergy. It might be “just one more” sting, but that I suspect will be of little consolation to the poor sod dying of cardiac arrest.”
No, the analogy stands. Take the entire area of destruction as one victim. A minuscule bit more or less water spread over that area would not have made any difference.
From reading “Skip’s” comments on this thread,
and trying to follow his illogical “logic”,
and knowing that he is a professor teaching at a state university…
is frightening… I pray he doesn’t yet have tenure.
If he does lose tenure, maybe he can find employment at his local water treatment plant where he can learn a lot about water levels, waves, and debris. Skip’s “illogical arguments” would blend in well there because just like the treatment plant, they really stink !
Skip treats this 17cm water layer like it is a separate independent killer monster with an agenda…
Strangely, this image comes to my mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Attack_of_the_Killer_Tomatoes.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Killer_Tomatoes
All fantasy.
skip, you have shifted from originally arguing how the extra 17cm could make the tsunami “more devastating” to trying to wring out an admission that the purported 17cm caused some extra damage, or as you specifically recently worded it:
Actually, it can be argued the extra 17cm may have yielded less damage. Open your braincase a bit and let in a consideration of the chaotic nature of the event. You wish to argue the extra mass and force of the 17cm made a difference? That could be enough to break through some feature of the landscape, from a man-made wall to a ridge line, which would lead the water to be directed to a low-lying feature where it will cause less damage. Likewise water that is rushing in a channel could break through the banks and spread out over a larger area, dissipating the force of the flow. Such behavior is routinely noted in even common seasonal flooding.
For the longest time now, you’ve been basically arguing (when you have the numbers right) about how much more damage a 10.17 megaton nuclear bomb makes versus a 10.00 megaton nuclear bomb. You’ve shifted to fishing for a concession that the difference would make any extra damage. As far as this tsunami is concerned, given the possibilities inherent in the situation, you’re not even getting that.
Let’s put a rational end to this discussion by distinguishing between two different things: 1) the dynamics of the tsunami waves and 2) the reach of run-up on dry land. A 17cm difference in sea-level has NO practical effect upon the wave heights generated, thus upon the power of the waves, which comes from the vertical displacement of the entire water column offshore. It does, as would a similar increment in tidal stand, raise the maximum run-up level by ~17cm, which MAY make some practical difference at some marginal locations.
Now everybody can enjoy a good week-end!
[snip -off color]
I have to make a concession/apology to Mr. Watts and this forum.
I reviewed all the comments to make sure that no one else hadn’t spotted the error I now realized in my own critique so as to give credit where credit was due. I did not locate any such argument after a cursory review/recollection of the comments so if I am failing to credit someone I apologize to them in particular.
I was treating the extreme wavelength of a tsunami as if that figure could be used as a simple multiplier to determine the additional mass of water striking a fixed land location. This of course cannot be correct. (I had this epiphany when watching ripples when dropping something in the dishwater and then pondering the matter when changing a diaper.)
The crucial factor is more likely the outer surface area of the *crest*–whatever that is in the case of a tsunami, but it is certainly less than the wavelength. (My confidence in my assessments of wave dynamics is shaken so I won’t even state this much adamantly.) No doubt this still adds substantial destructive force, and thus it could still be argued that AW’s graphic is both misleading and dismissive, but not for the reason *I* presumed. I suspect the surface areas of the tsunami crests are *much* larger than AW depicted in his graph, that the additional destructive force is still much greater than the mere addition of 17cm would suggest, and that Pauchari’s speculation is not the sideshow AW made it out to be. Just because my critique was wrong does not make AW right, of course.
But that was not my initial argument and I acknowledge that, so it would be classless to try to save face with a different one.
I hope my concession, retraction of insulting comments, and apology are all well taken, and I promise, if allowed to contribute to this forum, to be a little more thoughtful. There is still *much* to be intelligently critiqued here, even if I personally scotched this one.
Adieu
Wording correction on the above: please read “crest” as “cresting wave”.
Skip, but the extra 6 inches doesn’t actually exist, as we’ve all pointed out.
1) The energy of the wave is determined by the earthquake, not tiny changes in sea level.
2) Sea levels hadn’t increased in the area of Japan struck by the tsunami.
3) Even if local sea levels had changed, you can’t just add the change in sea level to the height of the tsunami to make a bigger wave, or else the hundred meter sea level rise since the ice age would mean that waves as small as the SS Minnow’s wake would create hundred meter waves that could wipe out all of Hawaii.
4) The hundred year change in average sea levels is a tenth as large as the tides at Sendai (which is a famous surf spot). If the tsunami had struck at a slightly higher tide level would Pachauri be demanding that we nuke the moon?
But let us imagine that Pachauri and the AGW alarmists had their way. What would the likely effects be?
1) The Japanese would’ve been almost totally dependent on electric trains for transport. Those that were already on a trains would’ve died on the train (Japan lost four trains in the tsunami), and many of the rest would’ve died waiting on the trains because other transportation options would be limited or non-existent.
2) Personal transportation would’ve been by small electric vehicles, and those don’t float even a little bit. Remaining vehicles (which would average a half a charge) wouldn’t have had the range to get the fleeing survivors out. Rescue operations would likewise depend on electric vehicles (zero emissions!), and since the area’s electric grid is still down, rescuers would be trying to deliver relief supplies on foot or with bicycles.
3) Japan would have no flood walls at all, nor many concrete buildings able to stand up to a tsunami, because making concrete emits tremendous amounts of CO2. Japan likewise wouldn’t have elevated roadways or bridges, so even fewer people would’ve escaped the danger zone when the tsunami warning sounded (most would’ve died waiting on the electric trains, which don’t like magnitude 9 earthquakes).
In Pachauri’s eco-utopia, the Japanese people would’ve been no more able to cope with the disaster than impoverished third world countries like Bangladesh.
“Skip, but the extra 6 inches doesn’t actually exist, as we’ve all pointed out.”
In that case this whole article has become obsolete, because it’s primary goal was to argue against the scale of the extra damage caused by the average global six inch rise in sea-levels, as opposed to the damage which would have been caused had the sea-levels not changed.
Whether or not this rise actually took place, is beside the point, as the argumentation by AW is flawed. For instance, I don’t see the link between the height of a bonsai tree, an average Japanese man and the additional 170 L/m² of water caused by a 17cm rise in see levels.
The point is, that 170L/m² translates into 170000000 L/km², and we can’t assume that the earthquake efficiently transferred all of it’s energy into propelling the water away from the epicenter.
For all we know some of the energy might have been “wasted”, which otherwise could have been used by an extra few billion liters of water.
Skip, you do ofcourse understand that a wave caused by the breaking of surface tension such as “ripples when dropping something in the dishwater”, has a completely different dynamic than that of a tsunami wave…?
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2011/03/27/japan.kesennuma.flooding.cnn?hpt=C2
Here’s a new video showing how the tsunami hit in a Japanese coast city. Please notice how you don’t have *anything* like AW’s little roller. Thing about the distance from the front and back of the cresting wave as it reaches landfall and what an extra 17 cm means in terms of volume/mass/destructive force of water.
Again I do *not* say this to mitigate my own mistake; I still acknowledge it fully. This is only to show that AW’s mockery of Pauchari was unfounded. If you presume the additional 17 cm (which AW did in his graphic) the additional damage inflicted is very, very tangible.
skip,
Interesting video, but it shows the effect of the tsunami, not the tsunami itself. You’re just making a conjecture that another 17 cm is significant, but the video isn’t evidence of anything of the sort.
And you’re fixated on Anthony for some strange reason. Only you know what that reason is, but one thing is certain: it’s not because of his comments about Pachauri. Others including me have made much stronger criticisms of that self-serving, incompetent, mendacious IPCC clown. Do an archive search for “Pachauri” and you’ll see.
The effects of the tsunami versus the tsunami itself? That’s an argument? Did I *say* the video showed there was an extra 17cm?
Smokey, you have never understood my argument, have you? AW *stipulated* the extra 17 cm in order to ridicule Pauchari. I don’t think you’ve ever grasped this or why said stipulation is the basis of my critique.
And I knew that would happen eventually: The what-is-your-fixation? argument.
Smokey–you who were one of those duped by AW’s clear mistake from the beginning–any fixation I have is on the *issue*, not the individual forwarding it.
I could just as easily make the same empty rhetorical drive-by. To wit:
*that self-serving, incompetent, mendacious IPCC clown.*
Its obvious that, you’re “fixated on [Pauchari] for some strange reason. Only you know what that reason is, but one thing is certain: it’s not because of his comments about [the effects of AGW].”
You see, Smokey? Anyone can throw out such vacuous blather anytime anyone criticizes anybody.
From skip on March 27, 2011 at 8:38 am:
Which merely takes you back to where you’re fishing for that concession that the extra 17cm would have done *any* extra damage, when it’s actually possible it could have done *less* damage. It also reveals you have a serious problem with understanding the limits of death and destruction. The extra 17cm would not make the dead even deader. A building that is utterly destroyed is not more utterly destroyed by having one more brick knocked loose.
And you’re complaining about the depiction of the tsunami wave in the graphic? Please, be consistent, and complain how the people weren’t anatomically correct as well!