UPDATE: Sunday 5/6/12 7PM PST – The FAIL occurred, with the predication hype not even close. Read here: Tuvalu flooding FAIL – no supermoon tide of any significance
Guest post by Andi Cockroft
The MSM down under are running with a story about the next close encounter with the moon due in the next day or so, a “super-moon”, and the likely impacts on the low-lying Tuvalu Island Nation.
With a population of just over 10,000, Tuvalu – formerly known as the Ellice Islands – is one of the smallest nations in the world, just ahead of the Vatican!
From Wikipedia:
At its highest, Tuvalu is only 4.6 metres (15 ft) above sea level, and Tuvaluan leaders have been concerned about the effects of rising sea levels for some years. Whether there are measurable changes in the sea level relative to the islands of Tuvalu is a contentious issue. There were problems associated with the pre-1993 sea level records from Funafuti which resulted in improvements in the recording technology to provide more reliable data for analysis. The degree of uncertainty as to estimates of sea level change relative to the islands of Tuvalu is reflected in the conclusions made in 2002 from the available data. The 2011 report of the Pacific Climate Change Science Program published by the Australian Government] concludes: “The sea-level rise near Tuvalu measured by satellite altimeters since 1993 is about 5 mm per year.”
A nearby neighbor are our friends over at Kiribati, who must be completely wetting themselves (but not by high tides) at the thought of all that wonderful UN monies due to head their way. A moon at perigee should be like Manna from Heaven.
But what if nothing significant happens? What then?
At perigee, the moon approaches its closet to earth, and this particular approach is being referred to as a “Super Moon”.
Video here:
According to website “Stuff”, the interactive arm of Fairfax media:-
A “super-moon” will be a novelty for New Zealanders on Sunday, but for the 12,000 people of Tuvalu it is a foreboding practice for a future where rising seas make their homeland uninhabitable.
On Monday and Tuesday super-moon king tides will leave much of the capital atoll of Funafuti virtually below sea-level.
On Sunday night the Moon will be 14 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter than any other full moon this year, the US space agency NASA says.
Known as a “perigee moon”, it occurs when the moon reaches its closest point to Earth.
The full moon will occur at 3.35pm on Sunday, New Zealand time, but will not be visible here until moonrise over New Zealand at 5.23pm.
With a clear sky, it guarantees Sunday night will be a bright one.
NASA says the super moon has a reputation for trouble, causing high tides, making dogs howl and keeping people awake.
The space agency says the best time to look at it is when the moon is near the horizon.
But what is the reality of a Moon at Perigee?
According to those folks over at NOAA, very little – see here.
An extract:
The moon is the primary source of the gravitational forces which cause the tides. The proximity of the moon in relation to the earth does have an effect on the range of the tides at any given time. In each of its 28-day elliptical orbits, the moon reaches a “perigee,” its closest point of approach to the earth. During these periods, there will be a slight increase in the average range of tides. The increases in the range of the tides is seen by a slightly higher than average high tide, as well as a slightly lower than average low tide. Additionally, twice each month, around the times of the new moon and full moon, when the earth, sun, and moon are nearly in line, there is an increase in the average range of the tides. These are called “spring tides.” Three or four times a year, the occurrence of a new or full moon will coincide with the “perigee” of the moon, which Mr. Wood has termed the “perigean spring tides”.
The difference between the “perigean spring tides” and the normal tidal ranges for all areas of the coast is small. In most cases the difference is only a couple of inches. The largest difference occurs in certain areas of the Alaska coast where the range of the tide was increased by approximately 6 inches. But considering that these areas have an average tidal range of more than 30 feet, the increase is but a small percentage of the whole (less than a 2% increase).
So, will Tuvalu vanish beneath the waves? Well unless it’s less than 2 inches above seal-level, then probably not – so no worries there then.
I really do feel a rather smug FAIL coming on – then again it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong – hence stopping gambling on the gee-gee’s.
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“will leave much of the capital atoll of Funafuti virtually below sea-level.”
Does that mean according to computer models or are they mixing the word “virtually” with “almost”?
“capital atoll of Funafuti virtually below sea-level.”
Virtually, like the climate is “virtually” warming. We should be virtually ready to give them some virtual money to help them with this virtual problem.
>>
The 2011 report of the Pacific Climate Change Science Program published by the Australian Government] concludes: “The sea-level rise near Tuvalu measured by satellite altimeters since 1993 is about 5 mm per year.”
>>
Perhaps the Aussie govt. should make that into a scientific statement by stating the accuracy of satellite altimetry. Last time I dug out the papers on that there were more adjustments going on than in half an hour of haggling a price at an arab street market.
First you need to know the height of the waves and the wind speed, radar tends to pick up the troughs, not the peaks, not the average. So your altimeter is only as good as knowledge of sea conditions when you got the radar blip.
Now with a modest 2m swell in the Pacific, how accurately to you imagine they can measure that from space? Well I can tell you they try to estimate from statistical variations in the signal. There are several models to choose from …
Then there’s the barometer correction because the ocean mean height is sucked up by low pressure. Then there’s the uncertainty of the satellite’s position (initial orbital position and orbital decay), which you don’t know to mm accuracy,
Don’t forget your computer model for the local tide variations.
Then there’s the land height. Now this starts to get really tricky. because we need to calculate mantle rebound, tectonic and volcanic movements etc.
If you come out of that with less than +/- 20 cm uncertainty you’ve probably done a bloody good job. To get a rate of change you need to take a difference of two such readings, hence adding yet more uncertainty.
Of course if you ask NOAA they’ll probably quote something silly like +/-0.4mm/yr but that is more like one std. dev of the straight line they fit they did on the graph, it is not the total uncertainty of the measurements.
Like everything else in climate pseudo science, the true error bars are bigger that the results we are supposed to panic over. We just forgot to mention it.
From: http://www.ridgenet.net/~do_while/sage/v2i2f.htm
One of the first things NASA did when Apollo 11 astronauts reached the Moon was to set up a laser reflector that allowed scientists to measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Over the 12-year period from 1969 to 1981, scientists found it to be increasing approximately 4 cm per year. The Earth and the Moon are coupled by gravitational forces… wound up like an old-fashioned watch mainspring, which is gradually unwinding. The Earth is spinning slower (and) the Moon is getting farther away and slowing down. Given enough time, they will eventually reach the point where the Earth is slowly turning, and the Moon is slowly orbiting the Earth with the same period. Then there will be no more tides, and the recession will stop.
In a billiion years or so the problem will take care of itself.
“The space agency says the best time to look at it is when the moon is near the horizon.”
Of course, that is when the Moon always looks larger.
More Propaganda to frighten the sheeple into willingly giving up their wealth, prosperity and freedom so our all knowing Politicians and bureaucrats can lead us to “Safety”
Truth has nothing to do with it only plausiblity (well sort of) and grabbing headlines. If it fails to happen there is another big headline just behind it to divert the sheeple who have a very short attention span.
@Bill Tuttle: You either forgot your /sarc tag or you haven’t dealt that much with NASA’s press office. They consider the general public to be 6 years old and invariably talk down to us. They simply forgot to add the key word “apparent” to their sentence because us 6 year-olds would get confused by the big words donchaknow..
L Michael Hohmann says:
May 4, 2012 at 3:21 am
what surprises me is that nobody worries about the Palm and other artificial island creations off Dubai – not any higher than Tuvalu above sea level?
Hey man , get up to speed.
Haven’t you heard they are building a giant goldfish bowl that will house their underwater parliament on Palm Island by 2020 ?!
The Maldives are a very poor nation and they can only afford scuba gear but the Arabs princes intend to do it in style , not in wet suits.
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 4, 2012 at 4:10 am
Thanks as always for bringing in some facts Willis. However you should be fair and note this graph contains predicted tide levels. In the accompanying text it states:
So the actual sea level (& therefore the number of Tuvaluans with wet feet) may have been higher (or lower) than the predicted levels shown in the graph.
Still, it seems the record sea level for Funafatu in the past 20 years was in 2006, and somehow the residents survived. I’m thinking we can cancel the evacuation floatilla of cruise ships …
Hexe Froschbein says:
May 4, 2012 at 3:14 am
Hexe, that’s lovely!
If the Minnesotans are reading, how about performing it?
As David Appel demonstrated so clearly, there is no reason to believe any claim from the AGW hype machine.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyfoI89hpOg&w=640&h=360]
It’s made from camembert. It’s rotten cheese!
At its highest, Tuvalu is only 4.6 metres (15 ft) above sea level,
========
Good grief….they are 4 ft higher than I am!
You can be sure that every weasily climate scientist or technician is producing papers in hopes of getting the chance to go to Rio.
Mr Green Genes says:
May 4, 2012 at 3:36 am
Alan the Brit says:
May 4, 2012 at 2:26 am
……………have I missed anything?
Plague of frogs, plague of boils, shower of herrings …
C’mon, the old crone’s not trying hard enough!!
Well, to be fair, she was in a bit of a hurry, we have some village family entertainment this afternoon. We’re dunking a known witch because she gave this fella a potion that cured his cold, & she is always very cheerful & smiles a lot (absolute dead giveaway) for half an hour until she’s nearly dead because we know the water rejects her evil wicked ways, then we’re going to burn her at the stake! At least we give a fair trial! She also forgot rising sea-levels & falling sea-levels 🙂
“But what if nothing significant happens?
The fearmongers will just move on to the latest scaaaaaary prediction and pretend they didn’t have anything to do with the most recent one. Business as usual.
hahahaha… priceless.
Each individual adult is responsible for their own survival. Yet it never fails to amaze me. People who live on atolls, sand spits, river banks, tree crowded wilderness areas, and sandy hill sides yell the loudest when disaster strikes. Those that build their houses upon stable bedrock and soil on cleared land take disasters in stride.
I don’t care one wit why seas rise. Move if you find your perch precarious.
These ” Supermoons” occur every 411 days due to the difference between the Moons sidereal orbital period (about 27.5 days) and its synodic period (29.5 days and what we base our calendar months on).
The last one was 19th March 2011 and there were dark warnings of major earthquakes (I kid you not). The next will be late July 2013 . Major hurricanes anyone ? Or how about a plague of Killer Spacebats ?
The closest supermoon since records began was January 1912…..hang on a minute…that was the year Titanic sank….wooh-ooh-woooh-oooh.
Even the Climate Change Cheerleader Phil Plait poo poos all over this: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/05/02/the-supermoon-stuff-again/
Money quote: “To be specific, according to Fourmilab, the Moon will be 356,953 kilometers from Earth when it’s full. However, last month, on April 7, when it was full it was about 358,313 km away. That’s a difference of 1400 km, less than 1%. . . . That hasn’t stopped some news venues touting this as a “Supermoon”. I’m seeing it on websites, on Twitter, and getting email about it, and like I said, it’s irritating (and I’ll add the idea for this whole as well as the term “Supermoon” were started by an astrologer, so draw your own conclusions there). I’m all for encouraging people to go out and look at the Moon, but it shouldn’t be under false pretenses.”
This, to me, is much like people worrying about a full moon in general. The moon is always “full”, and is overhead every single day, it just looks different. It affects tides every day, and drifts slightly from apogee to perigee, every day. I think they’re just trying to take advantage of a normal occurrence since it’s easily visible.
RE: At its highest, Tuvalu is only 4.6 metres (15 ft) above sea level, and Tuvaluan leaders have been concerned about the effects of rising sea levels for some years.
————————————–
4.6 meters –> 4,600mm
At the current rate of 2.5 mm per year…
4,600mm / 2 = 2,300mm (the 1/2 way point)
2,300mm / 2.5mm per year = about 920 years to reach the 1/2 way point
That assumes that we don’t enter into the next ice age by them.
I for one blame the United Nations – for admitting a “nation” whose highest point is only 15 feet above sea level. Simply a recipe for disaster from Day One. Even godforsaken Houston, Texas gets up to 125 feet, and we’re still awaiting a ruling whether it’s fit for human habitation…
Bob Diaz says:
May 4, 2012 at 8:02 am
At the current rate of 2.5 mm per year…
======================================
Bob, Tuvalu gauges have been showing sea levels falling…………….
I’m contacting the Tuvalu government today (May 4) and offering them $1,000 U.S. for the whole island chain. Since it’s going to be underwater this weekend, I think I’m giving the residents of Tuvalu a good deal.
Jay Davis