Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
A man who has a daughter is a pretty pathetic specimen, ruled by the vicissitudes of hormones and hairspray. So when my daughter told me this morning “Hey, Dad, I put the newspaper on your desk, you’re gonna like it a lot!”, I knew my blood pressure was in deep trouble.
When I finished my shower and got to my desk I saw that the very first story, above the fold, had the headline:
In 20 years, sea level off state to rise up to 1 foot
I figured that it was some rogue alarmist making the usual warnings of impending doom … but no, it was a report from the National Academy of Sciences.
Now, I’ve spent a good chunk of my life at sea, and living in California the sea level rise is of great interest to me, so I knew immediately that the report was unmitigated nonsense. To see why, first let me show you the actual sea level record from San Francisco:
Figure 1. 160 years of sea level observations in San Francisco, California. Source: PSMSL
San Francisco has one of the longest continuous sea level records in the US. As you can see, there’s nothing too remarkable about the record. It is worth noting, however, that over the last 160 years the sea level in San Francisco has gone up by about 8 inches (20 cm) … and there are 12 inches in a foot (30 cm). It is also worth noting that during the last couple of decades it has hardly risen at all.
So what does the National Academy of Sciences projection of a one foot rise by 2030 look like?
Well … it looks like this:
Figure 2. High end projection of the National Academy of Sciences for the 2030 sea level in San Francisco.
Now, people are always saying to me things like “Willis, why don’t you believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming? After all, the National Academy of Sciences says it is real and about to happen.”
And indeed, there is a whole cottage industry these days dedicated to figuring out why the American public doesn’t believe what the climate scientists and people like the NAS folks are saying. Some people studying the question say it’s because the scientists aren’t getting the message across. Others say it’s because the public doesn’t understand science. Another group ascribes it to political affiliation. And there’s even a group that says it is a psychological pathology.
I hold a different view. I say that both I and a large sample of the American public doesn’t believe what the folks in the white lab coats at the National Academy of Science are saying because far too often it is a joke. Not only is it a joke, it’s a joke that doesn’t pass the laugh test. It is risible, unbelievable, way outside the boundaries of the historical record, beyond anything that common sense would say is possible, ludicrous, out of this world. I mean seriously, folks … is there anyone out there who actually believes that the sea level rise shown in Figure 2 will actually happen by 2030? Well, they believe it over at the National Academy of Sciences.
So the next time someone trots out the pathetic claim that catastrophic AGW must be real because the most prestigious and highly respected National Academy of Sciences says so … point them to this post.
The NAS press release, with a link to the actual paper, is here.
w.
PS—While this is a comedy, it is also a tragedy. It is a measure of how blinded and blinkered the climate science establishment has become. It is a tragedy because in an uncertain time, science should be our pole star, the one fixed thing in a spinning sky … but instead, it has become a joke, and that is a tragedy indeed.
Well the australian GOV’T believes the sea level will rise but they believe in anything they can put a tax on it
Another group ascribes it to political affiliation.
That’s OK, even good to make that point, as the left – right divide on AGW signifies something very significant, and it’s not that conservatives are idiots. En masse we have rejected the baloney. Only 19% of Repubs in a recent Pew poll believe in man-made gwarming, and now a poll finds that only 17% of conservative Canadians (voted for the Tories) “are concerned” about global warming. Why do conservatives reject it, while most liberals go along with it? From my previous comment:
It’s OK, and in fact desirable to trumpet the ideological divide, because it shows that this isn’t about science, and when we explain the basis of the divide as I just did, it makes the warmists look horrible. Further, the conservative bloc now is not going to fold, ever; it will only go stronger, especially as we work to point out the existence of this left – right divide. Nevertheless…we can expect those in the center and center left to start to move our way, soon.
MindBuilder says:
June 23, 2012 at 6:12 pm
I hardly think that NAS was talking about a temporary spike in sea level. After all, daily tides well exceed the scarey one foot rise.
You say:
“If global warming accelerates, it could be even higher.”
And where is the evidence of even the possibility of global warming accelerating considering the flat-lining global temperatures in this century? Is the possibility of a linear increase in global temperatures not evocative enough. Sorry to doubt, though. Now I recall Romm’s hypothesis of supercalifragilisticexponentialalidocious warming. I understand that it is really quite atrocious.
“I knew my blood pressure was in deep trouble.
When I finished my shower and got to my desk I saw that the very first story, above the fold, had the headline:
In 20 years, sea level off state to rise up to 1 foot
I figured that it was some rogue alarmist making the usual warnings of impending doom … but no, it was a report from the National Academy of Sciences.”
Actually nearly my first thought was excellent. For false doomsaying on anything, the cardinal rule is to set predictions far enough out that the inevitable mismatch with reality won’t be widely noticed until too late to matter. Of course, there is a balance between that and keeping timeframes soon enough to scare people, but usually the sweet spot is 2050 – 2100 A.D. (Thus, for example, most claims of activists for major CAGW effects are similar to the timeframes for most for their claims on topics as unrelated as imaginarily running out of soil or uranium, despite being totally different matters, in what is far from just coincidence; notice how we never suffer doom or run out of anything 190 years from now or 850 years from now, also never 4 or 9 years from now but rather more in the sweet spot of a few decades from now).
2032 A.D. is a sloppy choice here, too soon. Over time, guys like these can get increasingly isolated, self-reinforcing in groupthink, and, drunk on past success, be overconfident in their ability to get away with anything, leading to more sloppiness. (In a separate but related topic from current news, the IPCC’s switch towards grey literature of random claims made up by activist groups without even the pretense of peer review — which was a mediocre but partial moderator —, so they can make more extreme predictions, is going to backfire on them in the end).
Bookmark this claim, so to speak. Even before the full 20 years, like even a dozen years from now, it will be increasingly blatantly ludicrous, so it will be usable as a great illustration to attempt to break worship of the supposed trustworthy authority of groups with leadership corrupted by activists rising to the top and by the vested interests of the political class.
Unfortunately, they partially covered their rear ends by the range of scenarios, but still this is a good illustration. As both they and we know, it leads in practice to media reports like the “in 20 years, sea level off state to rise up to 1 foot” headline which can be used as examples in turn.
While they will try data “adjustments” as always, 1 foot is starting to get into the range where one can do photographic illustrations, such as of beaches before and after the time period, like this:
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/lajolla18712b.gif?w=510&h=262
Moreover, at some point, people start to realize what they see with their own eyes, such as if they live by the shore for decades, does not match up.
The story is getting fairly little play and little discussion on the website. The Marin IJ had the story featured on its front page in bold headlines.
Here is a part of the article as published in today’s SF Chronicle. While it is unfortunate that the NAS put the story out the way it did, it seems the media did its usual hatchet job to make matters worse. But does anyone believe this stuff anymore?
“The report estimates that California’s sea-level rise south of Cape Mendocino could range between a mere 1.5 inches to a full foot by 2030; the rise could range between 4.5 inches and 2 feet by 2050 and between 16 inches and 4.5 feet by the start of the next century.
“However,” the report’s scientists warned, “an earthquake of magnitude 8 or larger in this region could cause sea level to rise suddenly by an additional meter (3 feet) or more” beyond those estimates.
The estimates of future sea-level rise are so broad, the scientists said, because of all the uncertainties and knowledge gaps involved in this kind of forecasting.
The sea-level forecast for California below Cape Mendocino is substantially higher than projections for Mendocino north along the coasts of Oregon and Washington because of the great differences in the nature of the Earth’s crust between the two regions, the scientists noted.”
That is the SF Chron website as mentioned above…
The list of professors at the end reminds of Rahmstorf’s sea level paper, perhaps one of the worst papers ever in climate since, but coauthored by who-is-who in climate science. It remains completely obscure what any of the coauthors contributed except their names.
It also reminds me of other “critiques” well covered in the climategate emails.
Those critiques were incredibly bad in content but impressive in underwriters and climategate exposes nicely how they had been organized and produced.
In one instance Rahmstorf formed a group to trash Shaviv’s cosmic ray paper. How do you find such prominent coauthors in climate science ? Well, you start with politics, of course.
http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/1981.txt
Geologists guesstimate this stuff all the time usually while arm waving over a coffee or beer, perhaps more then a few, most of us are careful not to publish those guesstimates. They are surely wrong and likely to bite you.
HR: How does the full range look on your graph?
It looks like this.
H.R. wrote, “Looks like that gives the NAS plausible deniability and they can lay the alarmism on the reporters, knowing they will choose the sensational number over the boring, most likely number.”
Yep. Same game I’ve seen played for years by the Antismokers… ALL the time. “Smoke levels in an automobile can be 72x those measured in a bar.” Of course they don’t mention that it’s four experimental chain smokers in the car with the windows rolled up versus a tavern with no one in it. The propaganda tools are always the same it seems: until visiting WUWT I hadn’t realized just how true that is. ::sigh:: Remember the commercials with the little girl standing on the train tracks and the big evil Global Warming Train rushing to hit her? “Save The Children” — always effective as a propaganda tool.
A problem the Warmers have though is that they lack a truly unified bad guy. If it was ONLY “Big Coal” or “Big Oil” or “Big Auto” they’d have a better shot at slamming down the skeptics as simply being the “front groups, friends and allies” of The Single Great Evil. As it is, they can’t dismiss you that easily, though they DO try to play the “corporate funding blame game” when a group when groups like Heartland speak up.
The basic propaganda tools for manipulation of public opinion work all the time.
– MJM
Tragedy indeed! The more one delves into climate history, the more apparent it becomes that it is incredibly important to learn what really happened in the YD, what really happened in the ridiculous isotopic excursions, what really caused the extinctions…
These ideologues are wasting bandwidth and resources.
Whatever, historically real science has not been conducted by government employees. We will just have to figure it out ourselves.
David Pridgen says:
June 23, 2012 at 7:41 pm
The NAS was paid $500,000 by the state of California for that study, so of course they will report whatever the customer wants to hear.
————-
Where did the California get a half-a-million dollars?
What dummy would loan them money?
Oh yeah, me the taxpayer.
If any one is interested you can download the report at the link. In the report, first 10 pages you can see who was on the committee and that Peter Gleick was one of the reviewers. Other fervent AGW promoters litter the list of panel members and reviewers. Link: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13389
One can register as a guest and give any email address to allow for the download. The data and the stats and the equations are supposedly available for outside checking.
I mean seriously, folks … is there anyone out there who actually believes that the sea level rise shown in Figure 2 will actually happen by 2030? Well, they believe it over at the National Academy of Sciences.
Do they actually believe it, or are they parrotting the party line to keep their jobs? Given the present political climate in the government sector, speaking out is hazardous to your continued employability.
Chao, Yu, and Li published a global sea level curve (Science, April 11th, 2008) corrected for water held in storage by all dams built since the year 1900. They found that this correction made the curve linear for more than 80 years, with a slope of 2.46 mm/year. That is 24.6 cm/century, or a little under ten inches. In my opinion something that has been linear this long is not about to change anytime soon, hence that is the most likely sea level rise to expect. It is safe to say that the NAS projection of five feet per century is just as unreal as Al Gore’s twenty feet per century, and both are nothing more than products of the pseudoscience that goes by the name of climate science today.
Bill Tuttle says:
“Do they actually believe it, or are they parrotting the party line to keep their jobs?”
They are parroting the Party line to keep their jobs. Simple as that. They are not fools. We would probably do the same, because we have the same priorities: our families come before government propaganda. Thus, the government’s Elmer Gantrys have learned how to game the system.
We get the straight skinny from retired scientists, who can speak out without fear of retribution. And the retired scientists overwhelmingly disagree with this NAS crapola. Just ask them.
http://www.thedailybell.com/4014/Leading-Global-Warming-Advocate-Recants-Models-Fail-Dramatically-
The ‘plot’ is not the only thing they are losing. Another one has jumped ship. Apologies if noted before.
regards from steamy, wet Zhuhai.
Willis,
Around 1988, the spike appears to be about 7 inches of sea level rise – that itself seems quite amazing. What might have caused such an aberration, some local phenomenon – or maybe a screwed up gauge . . .? I don’t see any ‘jump’ like that on other sea level charts . . ? Any info you can provide would be appreciated. Thanks
Curiousgeorge says:
June 23, 2012 at 7:31 pm
As in a very minor tsunami. Big deal.
True, but remember that some of those crust blocks also rotate as they slide past each other. The right quake can cause a permanent rise or fall. Tsunami… the potential is not quite as phenomenal as TLC/DSC programs make them out to be. Up on the Cascadia, yeah, but not down in SoCal.
Well, they believe it over at the National Academy of Sciences.
The cottage industry should be in investigating why and how groups respond to challenges to their core beliefs, assumptions and conclusions. With climate science as the chosen field of study.
Having been an iconoclast in the past, I can tell you the pattern is, emotional (and intellectually flawed) attacks on the dissenter, circling of the wagons, making sure all the group participate in the defence, and ostracism of the dissenter. This can and does extend to getting the dissenter dismissed from their position if the group has the power.
The original point of academic tenure was to protect the individual from this and allow them to be an iconoclast.
Here is a graph of the average of the 10 tide gauges on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada with near continuous monthly data from 1973 through 2011.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Sea_Level_Canada_West.jpg
from
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Climate_Change_Science.html#Sea_Level
The black line is the linear best fit to the data. Over the period 1973 to 2011 the average sea level has declined at 0.5 mm/year.
British Columbia consumers are subject to a carbon tax that increases every year. Any warming would be of great benefit to Canadians, but the carbon tax is in place because of fear over sea level rise, which is actually falling. Almost no one knows that the tide gauges show falling sea levels. Most of the coast has steep slopes, so a sea level rise would have no consequence. The land area of river deltas are growing due to sediments being deposited.
Well … it looks like this: A most excellent graphic display, Willis! That is what I think of every time we have these predictions that keep getting delayed, implying the slope to get to the peak of catastrophe within the specified time frame, is ever steeper and ever the more unlikely.
“I mean seriously, folks … is there anyone out there who actually believes that the sea level rise shown in Figure 2 will actually happen by 2030? Well, they believe it over at the National Academy of Sciences.”
Chemistry and physics are still intact, as is mathematics. No, they didn’t speak out against AGW. They were busy. That’s my read on it. New kids on the block are figuring out graphene and crazy cool stem cell culture media (shout out to biology too). They weren’t pacifists. Just dorks.
time to wage a bet? why don’t we do it collectively, pool a considerable amount and see if any among the Learned is willing to stick to their claims?
a bet like “$1M sea level in SF won’t rise by more than 10cm by 2030”.
We all know that models can NEVER be wrong.
That’s why the problems with the San Onofre reactor heat exchangers can not be real.
The models said they would be fine.
And models are never wrong.