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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Terry46,
The ship didn’t sink, it remained stationary while the sea level (and the sea floor in this instance) raised 17cm.
I think we should cut Mr. P som slack, he’s probably confusing this with something from his next novel.
@Anthony. Please say wikipedia if that is what you are refering to. Wiki is the name of the software that wikipedia chose to use and from which it derives its name.
Wiki is wiki, not wikipedia.
regards.
http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.
REPLY: The link in the word is self explanatory for anyone who bothers to click on it – Anthony
This prat is either completely barking mad or a very sick guy! The very idea of using this terrible event as a means of scoring points is deplorable.
I emailed this to my daughter. She is in her second semester of an accelerated program to get a Master’s in Environmental Engineering with a minor in Petroleum Engineering in five years. Yes, she has a 4.0. Here is her reply.
“That is just completely stupid – sounds like something a 6-year-old would try to argue, NOT a doctor/scientist”
That is ONE BEAUTIFUL GRAPH!
The problem here is that Dr. Pachauri wasn’t really focused on the question he was asked. Instead, he was thinking about the next novel he’s writing, with his hand deep in his trouser pocket, when he was quoted as saying “My word! 17 centimeters, that would be huge!“
I can find only the one online news article reporting his comments.
Does anybody know if there is somewhere to find the entire text of his speech to confirm that the newspaper actually reported things accurately?
Did the earthquake lower or increase the land mass relative to sea level?
Let’s see a 1,400 cm wave hits Japan and he’s talking about it being 17 cm higher. That comes to an increase of around 1.2%.
To put it another way, you are about to be hit by a 100 ton train, be happy it wasn’t 101.2 tons!!!
‘Peter Ward says:
March 23, 2011 at 10:44 am
Leaving aside the apparent stupidity of the claim, is he correct that sea levels rose by 17cm in the 20th century?’
I too am interested in what the actual sea level rise was during the 20th century.
This isn’t making sense to me on either front.
Willis – assuming the significant factor was 17 cm higher water, you’d have to weigh the consequences of how much further inland the water would go. If the land slope is agressive, not much. If slope is low, perhaps much further.
Pachauri – 17 cm makes it worse? Put aside the height vs people, or if the ocean really is 17 cm higher for a moment. What causes the tsunami in the first place? Movement of the ocean floor. At what depth? I have no idea, but for sake of argument, let’s say 200 meters. The ocean floor shifts, moving the mass of water above it, causing a wave of perhaps 2 or 3 cm. At sea surface, the shift is small and spread out, more like a gentle rise. As the wave travels inland the rising sea floor tends to compress the wave from front to back causing it to increase in height. So the real question in my mind is this:
How high a wave would a tsunami caused by lifting a mass of watter 200 meters thick be in comparison to a mass of water 200.17 meters thick?
My Wild A** Guess rounded to 3 decimal places is 0.000%
The amount of damage a Tsunami does has everything to do with how high the wave is in comparison to normal sea level at the time of the wave, how fast it is moving, and how much energy and water it expends when it hits shore. I really don’t see the normal sea level at the time being 17 cm higher or lower having much to do with the major factors. Against a retaining wall I suppose you could make the argument for topping it or not. But other than that…0.000%.
You know, if Pachauri didn’t exist the IPCC would have had to invent him!
I wonder how the reclaimed land Japan has made figures into sea level rise around the islands.
Mr. Watts:
This is simply a silly response to Pachauri and a testament to the gullibility of yourself and your readership.
First of all, for any of you who doubt that the sea level rise was at least 17 centimeters in the 20th century there is this from the scientific literature:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p364381652174757/fulltext.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005GL024826.shtml
Fourth grade proficiency in math shows how the 17 cm derives from the observed yearly means. (No, I’m not giving any hints.)
But more important:
Does it even occur to any of you people that what the makes the tsunami more devastating is not the extra 17 inches of height per se, but the overall *mass* of water that strikes via tsunami because sea level is higher? Is this really that hard to understand?
Do you honestly think the point of concern is whether the Tsunami is too tall for the barrier walls or Japanese civilians?
I am not claiming to understand the precise physics of tsunamis, just the obvious fact that if you multiply 1.7 meters times the area a tsunami with its abnormally long wavelength covers from say, the latitudes touching Morioka and Sendai (the rough shoreline of the main tsunami strike), you’re talking about literally tens of *billions* of kilo*tons* of additional seawater in 2011 relative to 1900, all other things being equal. It’s the *mass* of water that kills and destroys, not the height.
Did you really not see and consider this simple, obvious counterargument, Mr. Watts?
Doesn’t the damage depend on the energy of the wave which depends on more than the height? Those waves were travelling at tremendous speed and horizontal propulsive energy with an incredibly large mass of water behind them
Imagine the earthquake happened at a much greater depth (which would be equivalent to a higher sea level). Wouldn’t the energy of the tsunami be less?
So essentially he took it right out of his book where the “hero” is laying in his bath tub when “something” suddenly arose and stretched itself up to the hight of 17 cm, and being an outdated engineer as Pachauri seem to be, of sketchy quality no less, he fumbled with the formulae for what happens to a body of water when a voluminous object is sprung from ones shorts displacing the same amount of water.
When Pachauri was talking about an increase of 17 cm (6 inches), was this in relation to sea levels, or to his red silk hanky episode?? Perhaps he has got the two confused.
.
The fact that this guy has made two comments trying to link the terrible events in Japan with AGW shows all too clearly the desperation in their movement.
What intrgues me though is the claim the sea levels are rising and have been on the move for a long time.
Last year I heard a radio presenter in the UK talk about a a trip to Portsmouth and from a measure they have on the sea wall there is no change in sea level whatsoever dating back many, many years.
Likwise I have visited Cornwall for the best part of 55 years and the low tide and high tide areas I am familiar with have also not changed.
Anthony…just what is going on?
Pauchari’s estimate of sea level rise isn’t necessarily true. However, if correct it is about 7 inches. The tsunami was 30 feet.
In my opinion, if the sea level does manage to increase 7 inches every hundred years, I think people can adjust to .07 inches per year. They can just move away from the ocean a couple of feet every decade or so.
So skip, I see your name refers to what you did in school.
The wave is the same height above sea level, whether sea level rose 17 cm or 17 meters. So there is no extra mass of water involved. The size of the earth movement determines the wave height.
In fact as davidmhoffer implies, if the sea level is 17 cm higher than the shore line is farther from the continental shelf and there is more gently sloped sea floor rise (as opposed to the abrubt jump of the continental shelf). More gentle slope means more energy expended before reaching the shore line and thus LESS energy when the wave hit.
[snip]
Seventeen centimeters is often enough to make the difference between drowning and survival.
Especially when the victims are children.
This outrageous smear should be Waterloo for the AGW cult, or at least for Pachauri. This is the most egregious bit of ambulance chasing I can think of right now, and that includes the verbal spewing from Romm and Gore. The man has sneakily accused us of killing some portion of those 20,000 lost souls. Well, how many Patches? How many did we kill with our SUV’s? Despicable. He should resign or be removed just for this slander. Unless something got lost in translation then I believe this is a very disturbed pathetic man. The desperation is now palpable. It won’t be long before some of them begin to crack, or pardon the pun, meltdown.
Did everyone catch this: “In the 20th century, sea-level rise was recorded at an average of 17 centimetres …”, he certainly cannot be a bona fide scientist since that statement implies that sea-level rise is 100% due to man’s presence here, a statement that is impossible. He is blaming us for natural inevitable occurrences! That level of critical thinking is on par with elementary school kids or brainwashed AGW fanatics. Such carelessness from ‘scientists’ about 100% of a measurement being attributable to humans is a reoccurring theme, for example: 1/2 deg temp rise in a dubious planetary average over a century, what fraction of that was ‘avoidable’? A quarter or eighth degree? I do hope they continue down this irresponsible road, it can only hasten their crumbling.
@Anthony, you should append the graphic to show on the far left another smaller blue block representing the miniscule sea-level rise that can safely be attributed to human influence, the so-called ‘avoidable’ part of sea-level rise. What would that be? 10cm, 5cm?
Now that was funny 🙂 And I seriously thank you for that because I was absolutely seething with rage from Pachauri diatribe, just scrolling through the thread, and when I got to your post you saved me a blood pressure incident or stroke. ROTFLMAO pretty much covers it. The cat wasn’t so lucky though nor was my leg which is now perforated.
You’re all forgetting about the positive feedbacks!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the tsunami height depends greatly on the degree of seafloor displacement. Equal magnitude Earthquakes can have very different tsunamis, because while shaking can be just as severe, seafloor displacement can be quite different between equal magnitude Earthquakes. Sea level rise during the 20th century is a much smaller variable.
It’s the *mass* of water that kills and destroys, not the height.
Did you really not see and consider this simple, obvious counterargument, Mr. Watts?
So it’s mass & not energy that causes destruction? I’m glad we have such smart ______ (I’m not sure who “skip” is, but I’m sure he can fill in the blank with quite a lot of 4th Grade Proficiency In Math degrees) to answer these difficult questions.