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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Skippy,
You’re a hoot. Following this thread has been like watching someone read Einstein’s explanation of E=MC^2, get to the end, and with a wave of the hand dismisses it with that ultimate of rebuttals:
DOES NOT!
I got my kids trained out of Does To! Does Not! long before grade 4.
Skip, Try This:
Fill up your bathtub to within 1/2 inch (1+cm) of overflowing.
Put some of your Play-Doh in the overflow drain to maintain the overfull level.
Mark the water level with one of your crayons.
Ask your big sister to borrow your Dad’s bowling ball.
Have her help you drop the bowling ball from ceiling height into the filled bath.
A mini-tsunami will form and spill over the lip of the tub onto the floor.
You can include your rubber ducky and toy boats for authenticity.
Collect the overflow into a measuring cup using a mop.
Refill the tub again to the crayon mark.
It may need a little extra water to compensate for the dent in the bottom of the tub caused by the bowling ball, but it should not affect the results.
Add one extra cup of water above the fill mark to represent the 17cm increase in sea level.
Ask your sis one more time to drop the bowling ball from ceiling height into the tub.
Again, collect the overflow from the second “enhanced tsunami” into another measuring cup.
I predict the difference in mini-tsunami water volumes will not be measurable.
You can re-use the Play-Doh to fill in the dents in the bottom of the tub caused by the bowling ball drops. (good re-cycling of play-doh)
Thank your sister, go finish your homework, have a glass of warm milk, and go to bed early.
Remember as they say:
“Early to bed and early to rise….makes a man…wise.”
Judging by your comments here, you can use a healthy dose of that…
Best regards, kbray.
I have to take a somewhat contrary point of view on this one. We should give credit to Dr. Pachauri for being at least partially correct as to what he said. “If sea level had been significantly lower…”, things really *would* have been much different. IF all of the structures, roads, etc. been built *in the same places in the same ways*, AND sea level had been 10 meters lower (He *said* significantly.) there really would have been hugely less damage. So, he almost has a point.
If, if, if, if….
There’s an old folk saying about IF. I have no idea where it came from. I only know it was told to me by my grandfather.
IF a frog had a glass ass, he wouldn’t hop but once. And, IF he had wings, he wouldn’t bust his ass every time he hops.
Maybe what Pachauri means, is much simpler:
Say, sea-shore is sloping at the rate of 100 cm per 1000 m. If the water wave is 100 cm high, it reaches 1000 m inland. If the wave is 117 cm, then it reaches 1170 m inland, etc. In his mind, the extra 17 cm was added by sea-raise over last 100 years – that’s why it reaches further inland to cause more damage! I would almost bet that what Pachauri is trying to say.
What he might have forgotten, though, is that the shoreline itself moved 170 m inland as the water kept rising over those 100 years…
ok, one of us is missing something again…..
==============================================
skip says:
March 23, 2011 at 4:12 pm
The height is what it is—and in this case its 17 cm higher what it was in 1900—however its width affects it. That is a massive volume of additional water to strike any fixed coastal location.
===============================================
skip, you really need to rethink this…..
The wave is exactly the same height, width, and volume as it would have been before or after a 17cm rise or fall.
Adding 17cm (which is not true anyway) to the height of sea level, did not affect the wave at all.
Anyone that has ever rang a call centre or actually been to India willbe shakingtheir heads at the thought of an Indian running anything. No offense but they are a race of indecisive head-wobblers (they can’t decide between shaking their heads or nodding)
There was a time when much of the world was worried about the possibility of a Nuclear Holocaust.
No one ever considered the possibility of a Stupidity Holocaust.
Pachauri is verifying that we are in fact in the middle of that Stupidity Holocaust.
The totality of the AGW “movement” involves a lot of the not so good human traits.
IMO, plain old stupidity has risen above them all. How is that?
On it’s face this latest Pachauri claim is so stupid he has apparently lost his mind entirely.
This level of stupidity has been spreading like a holocaust.
Where does it end?
17cm*
Could you not have said the same thing, for the same amount of time, since the end of the last ice age ?
@kbray: priceless!
Just wunderin’… is skip an English dumpster, as in, “Oy Nigel, toss that rubbish in the skip!” ?
Funny how all the previous tsunamis of yester year were less devestating; after all, sea level was lower by …. .17 m? 50 m?… Tell me the difference. If you are on the beach you are on the beach! WUWT?
Since Japan itself moved 8 feet the extra 7 inches must be important.
Steve Oregon;
This level of stupidity has been spreading like a holocaust.
Where does it end?>>>
Mighty strong words my friend. But I suggest you read a bit of history and pay close attention to cause and effect.
Hitler => stupidity => holocaust (8 million)
Stalin => stupidity => holocaust (20 million)
Pol Pot => stupidity => holocaust (5 million)
We are certainly witnessing wide spread stupidity, with people driven by Mass Systemic Misinformation (often call the MSM) being brainwashed into the most bizarre idiotic conclusions. There is no holocaust of stupidity. But don’t lose site of exactly what a holocaust is the result of:
Stupidity implemented.
A good primer for tsunami can be found at:
http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/tsunami/basics.html
The referenced site breaks down the tsunami into four stages. Here are some quotes from the that site:
1. Initiation “However, near the source of submarine earthquakes, the seafloor is “permanently” uplifted and down-dropped, pushing the entire water column up and down. The potential energy that results from pushing water above mean sea level is then transferred to horizontal propagation of the tsunami wave (kinetic energy).”
“ In the open ocean, the waves are at most several meters high spread over many tens to hundreds of kilometers in length.”
2. Split: “Within several minutes of the earthquake, the initial tsunami is split into a tsunami that travels out to the deep ocean (distant tsunami) and another tsunami that travels towards the nearby coast (local tsunami). The height above mean sea level of the two oppositely traveling tsunamis is approximately half that of the original tsunami.”
“The speed at which both tsunamis travel varies as the square root of the water depth. Therefore, the deep-ocean tsunami travels faster than the local tsunami near shore.”
3. Amplification: “Several things happen as the local tsunami travels over the continental slope. Most obvious is that the amplitude increases. In addition, the wavelength decreases. This results in steepening of the leading wave–an important control of wave runup at the coast (next panel). Note that the first part of the wave reaching the local shore is a trough, which will appear as the sea receding far from shore. “
4. Runup: “Tsunami runup occurs when a peak in the tsunami wave travels from the near-shore region onto shore. Runup is a measurement of the height of the water onshore observed above a reference sea level. Except for the largest tsunamis, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean event, most tsunamis do not result in giant breaking waves (like normal surf waves at the beach that curl over as they approach shore). Rather, they come in much like very strong and fast-moving tides (i.e., strong surges and rapid changes in sea level).”
========================================================
Note that in every quote above, the tsunami is referenced to “above mean sea level.” Therefore the fact that sea level has changed over the past 100 years makes no difference in the wave in the measurement of wave height. An additional 0.5 feet of water above the earthquake, will also make no practical difference in the initial water displaced in a depth of a hundred or more feet of water.
Maybe we’re all just a bunch of dumb hacks and we don’t know what we’re talking about…. Maybe we should ask Dr P. what he meant… Just an idea…
On seas that rise and fall.
Back when the ones of Spain came to the southwest. The horse came with them. We Apache stole this good thing from the ones of Spain. 400 or so years of not getting along later the last of the range gathering of the horse was done by my great grandfather in Eastern New Mexico and they marked them and drove them from there across Texas to just south of the Red River where the horses where rested and some time later a deal was made via the Comanche of Ft. Sill to sell them to the U.S. Army.
As they waited for the horses to gain back form and the price to get settled they did learn of the area where they grazed. It is now known as Rattle Snake Canyon and Lake Kickapoo is there too. Many old bones , very old bones were seen by those old Apache eyes and later when Dr. Romer came from Harvard to dig the bones my grandfather who knew the places of the bones helped them find the dinosaur bones.
Seems there was millions and millions years ago an inland sea shore there on the side of the up lift and an island where these old dinorsors fell into the edge of the sea where the bones where dug up in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
The inland seas comes and the inland seas go and never one thing to do with CO2 being up or down some seem to know.
To many of these CO2 cult people have never been outside in the real world to see what is at the edge of things.
Old Grump
The saying here is “if, ifs and ands were pots and pans, we’d never need any tinkers! (or for that matter any Patchouri stinkers!!)
The sky might fall…..
A little OT, but as long as we are talking about elevations, do we know if the “average” elevation of any of Japan’s islands has changed since this recent quake? What about tilt? It seems that with the lateral shift toward the east of around 8 feet as some have reported, a movement in the vertical direction may have also occurred.
To skip:
Rather than make unfounded suppositions regarding what you think occurs during a tsunami, I would suggest you actually do some research. Deeper water simply changes the point at which the wave breaks on the shore. Since you’re a self proclaimed expert at 4th grade math, i’d suggest you figure out the length along the shore 17 cm would create with perhaps a 10 degree slope… hint: 17/sin(10) = a/sin(90) for the hypotenuse, and 17/sin(10) = b/sin(80) for the horizontal distance.
The depths at which such tsunami are created are essentially infinite w.r.t 17 cm so the effect on the wavelength is zero. The waveheight at the shore being a function of the impinging wavelength implies no change in mass on-shore other than the corresponding pythagorean relationship as already noted. Since we can assume they chose to build above the sea level, which was, as noted, likely higher when the area was growing, it is a certainty that the impact would have been the same had sea levels been 20 m (yes, 2000 cm) lower and they built correspondingly further down the slope of the shore.
Next time you accuse people of not understanding, I would suggest checking the room to see if someone else understands more than you. This concept is easy to research on the web, btw. AAny idiot could have figured this out… leaving you.
Mark
If the sea levels were 17cm lower and there was an additional, say 5m down to the waterline then the coastal town would have been built 5m closer to the waterline too. Sea level rise would have made no difference.
A modest Easterly breeze in Japan would more effect on the sea level than the entire 20th century rise cited by Pachuri and Skip.
Thank you Anthony for this article. Skip’s attitude here is shocking. He posts from a total lack of knowledge of basic physics. First, Skip, it is not *mass* that does damage but *energy*. The earthquake released a specific amount of energy that would not be changed by trivial differences in the sea level. But set that to one side.
The key problem with tsunamis is that waves in water travel slower the shallower the water. The tsunami might have been only a few feet high in open sea, but as it moves towards shore, the rising sea bottom slows the wave and successive wave fronts squash up. So the same water must fit in a shorter horizontal distance, and so the wave height must rise. Therefore the tsunamis piles higher and causes terrible damage.
The amount of damage comes from the energy expended. But there is something else the energy could do – it could be reflected back into the open sea. Pretend for the moment that the coast of Japan were like a really big swimming pool: an abrupt edge and a vertical fall right down to the depth of the open sea. In this case the few-feet-high wave would still be travelling at full speed, would still be low, and would lap against the vertical edge, the entire energy of the wave being reflected back out to sea with no damage at all to the land.
What we learn from this is that the actual damage in real life depends critically on the features of the terrain of the sea bottom as the wave approaches land. What proportion will be reflected and what proportion absorbed by the land, thus causing damage? We don’t know unless we have a detailed terrain map and we simulate the physics of the approaching wave.
One thing that is perfectly possible (I don’t say it applies here because I don’t have any of the data I just mentioned) is that the extra 17cm depth results in a slightly faster wave, slightly lower height, slightly more energy reflected back to sea, and slightly less damage.
Only a detailed simulation could tell us the answer, but Pachauri and Skip demonstrate incredible arrogance by assuming they know the answer when they clearly know nothing about wave physics.
But let’s assume Pachauri is right. Then there is something yet worse about their argument: any change makes some difference. A child in the water at a beach in Chile might make some difference – a very small one, but some – to the damage in Japan by burping at the wrong instant. Some water molecules are now where they weren’t before, right? So claims by the likes of Pachauri that the damage is “worse” are impossible to argue against because, even if only to an extremely tiny degree, they may actually be true. So the honest and careful thinker cannot disagree no matter how trivial the extra damage might be. So claims like this are in fact just a nasty cheap shot, using the tragedy of those many lives lost for political purposes.
@Bob K.
“What he might have forgotten, though, is that the shoreline itself moved 170 m inland as the water kept rising over those 100 years…”
Actually I believe even Japan’s shore line has moved outward what with them building on so called reclaimed land, as in it once was the ocean floor, and such things can not happen, at least not cheap, if the shore line has moved inland.
[snip – read the post above – Anthony]
Pachauri, did you decide to leave out the beneficial effect of global warming in this case just to trumpet only the negative? Although since all the commenters here have so far also missed it, it might have been an oversight.
With all the global warming your IPCC says has happened, the water was warmer. Hypothermia kills. After the tsunami there were lots of wet people, including those frantically looking through drenched wreckage in flooded areas. And the warmer air temperatures helped too, especially afterwards when so many had little shelter and no heat.
Surely all that global warming must have saved at least as many lives as were taken by that extra 17cm you are complaining about!