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 Los Angeles Kings DID win Lord Stanley’s Cup this year, so now they have an official hockey stick to go with it!
@WIllis:
Like the graph, nicely done…
BTW, over on the v1 vs v3 thread somone left a comment aimed at you.
Does anyone have a record of the LAND rise / fall at San Francisco? We can have feet of uplift of subsidence in any one earthquake.
Then there is that small issue that 30 years ago, everyone was all upset because the bay was going away… Honest! (I’ll bet you remember….) Large chunks of the present bay coastline used to be dozens of yards out “to sea”… Heck, go down to th “Port Of Alviso” that is now a large reed bed / marsh on the way to becoming a meadow…
How quickly folks forget… It was just a couple of decades back that Government Money was spent putting in nice new docks and facilities. Now basically landlocked. You’d think with all the “sea level rise” it would be getting wetter, not dryer…
IIRC, the quake that caused the Tsunami in Indonesia moved the sea bed by about 9 FEET or 3 METERS. Similar subduction bending / release happens all around the Pacific. It is the notion that the land is constant elevation or that the sea bottom volume is a constant that is broken. It’s all dynamic.
Oh Well…
I have this pet muse, that in the ancient times you got power and money by being a cleric of rank in a strong religion, then time passed and you got money and power in modern times by having a college degree (while religion fell out of favor) so a whole lot of folks with the right attitudes to be Priests or Bishops or Cardinals instead went into science majors… but didn’t have the non-advocate mindset that it takes…. Time passes and we’ve now got a flood of the Post Normal folks with a need to “make a difference” and not a lot of real interest in the drudge work of analysis So we get that kind of “Advocacy Press Release” that passes for science, but is more like a religion…
Amazing, satellite gps has been taking sea level measurements since 1992, and on the graph is when the rise flatlined then dropped. SF tide gauge is on a wooden pier in shallow water near a sandbar just east of the Golden Gate bridge in the Presidio.
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/sea_level.html
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&gs_mss=presidio+fil&pq=presidio+land+fill&cp=13&gs_id=118&xhr=t&q=presidio+fill&aq=f&aqi=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=879&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
Some report that sea level along the bay have dropped since 1980.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/us/06bcshort.html?_r=1
Before 1980 gps was not available to determine if sea level rise or fall was a result of land deformation. SF is known for sinking in places at certain times for various reasons.
This all leaves me to wonder just how much actual sea level rise since 1850 really has taken place, if any, and whether there has been some adjusting going on in later years to create the appearance of a rise.
Citation:
” For the California coast south of Cape Mendocino, the committee projected that sea level will rise 4 to 30 centimeters by 2030, 12 to 61 centimeters by 2050, and 42 to 167 centimeters by 2100. For the Washington, Oregon, and California coast north of Cape Mendocino, sea level is projected to change between FALLING 4 centimeters to rising 23 centimeters by 2030, FALLING 3 centimeters to rising 48 centimeters by 2050, and rising between 10 to 143 centimeters by 2100. The committee noted that as the projection period lengthens, uncertainties, and thus ranges, increase. ”
What is your problem with that? NAS predicts FALLING sea-levels in CA.
NAS calls EARTHQUAKES – not AGW! – the main cause for the possible sea level change in CA.
May be read the press release before criticizing it?
@Chuck Nolan. Where did the California get a half-a-million dollars?
CA says: when in doubt, spend, and spend some more. There’s no end to CA lunacy, as sales taxes are already through the roof, and now they’re asking to raise it higher still, and, just to reinforce their reputation as the most anti-business / anti-success state, slap the “rich” job-creators with additional punitive taxes. Probably 75% of CA’s spending could be just slashed right off the barrel, as the public unions are taking dollars by the truckload, and the mess of inane govt agencies just spends $ like it’s water. Here’s a list of CA agencies, it’s insane (remember, we also have federal agencies, and local govt, this is just CA state): http://www.centerforsmallgovernment.com/small-government-news/california-state-government-agencies/
There’s an initiative to raise taxes further that is being put to a public vote. It’s time the public stands up and says “enough is enough,” they can’t threaten funding for public schools if they don’t get more taxes; instead, just go to the link that I provided, and cut out half those agencies, or the bloated unaccountable funding for them, and cut the public unions.
Surely they are educated enough to see that San Francisco is no use anyway as a global indicator. It sits in a narrow strait hence the bridge even us Brits have heard of, so the sea level will rise and fall considerably more than the natural amount based on long term current shifts and wind patterns. This is made worse by the fact it sits in a very broad bay that will also funnel sea levels to exaggerate them.
This effect can be seen in the UK quite spectacularly in the river Severn for tidal changes but happens just the same in its quiet way wherever there is that format of shoreline. It was just this sort of effect of wind patterns through the narrowing of the English channel on top of the tidal range that caused the 1953 floods in East Anglia to be abnormally severe.
there are A LOT of people out there not believing anything they teach in colleges. They mostly stay quiet unfortunately.
This is hardly surprising given one of our customer’s engineering computer modelling groups was staffed almost entirely with a group of ex climate scientists who could not get funding because they did not toe the AGW line. They dared to point out that the error was twice the so called warming figure and that the sea anomaly plots showed clearly that hot spots popped up and dissipated in a way totally inconsistent with AGW theories. Seeing the NASA quicktime movies since 2002 when they first put froward the idea makes their earlier work seem so obviously worth serious study one wonders about the integrity of those that persist in pushing AGW now.
Omno, good idea on the bet, but I can tell you from long experience you’ll get no takers. I’ve got at least 20 public challenges out on the web and in newspapers letters columns to various officials, legislators, and antismoking groups to legally put their pocketbooks where their mouths are when they get bans passed with promises of “no economic harms.”
The main activists and researchers in both areas who believe that they are working “for the greater good” know they’re lying and don’t feel a single twinge of conscience about it because they believe the end justifies the means. That’s why it’s never worth wasting energy trying to change their minds: your main appeal always has to be to the mass of “passersby” — those who have simply taken their opinions from the “facts” presented by the media on the issue without having examined the question of the motivation behind or the solidity of the underpinnings of those “facts.”
The key is in finding the simplest and most blatant of their lies and concentrating on exposing just those weak spots: things like Willis did above in his graph of the Hockey Stick On Steroids: an uneducated “passerby” may not know much about math, stats, or climate science, but he or she can see there’s obviously something wrong with that prediction when it produces a curve like that.
That’s also what Crichton did in “State of Fear” and what I’ve done in some of my simpler writings. People always tend to be highly impressed by “the established authorities” and in awe of their “science.” They’re also aware that they themselves don’t really know enough to challenge the established science. Sooo… they generally go with “the authorities” because it’s a safer bet than going with the skeptics. The only way to knock them out of that birdhouse is to throw such rock-solid rocks at them that they can’t deny their reality.
As soon as you make arguments that go much above high school level you’ll lose most people simply because they’ll feel they’re not competent to make a judgment on such information. And, knowing that they lack that competence, they just stick with what’s safe.
– MJM
Who, particularly, is responsible for NAS losing the plot?
Matt says:
June 23, 2012 at 6:54 pm
You are right. The Old Media just reported that “Climate Change is progressing even faster than we thought” because of higher CO2 emissions from China, which doesn’t make sense, because the right conclusion would obviously have been that climate sensitivity is even lower than anybody estimated.
So, the journalists of the Old Media do not understant causality; which way it goes; how it relates to correlation or to probability or to error bars and the scientists in the institutions know this and exploit it, seeding the predictable alarmist headlines by including some unlikely number.
Willis, I am going to plagiarise this line: “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.”
It is a beauty.
alex says:
June 23, 2012 at 11:58 pm
What is your problem with that? NAS predicts FALLING sea-levels in CA.
Sorry, your emphasis was on the wrong part of each phrase. Corrected for emphasis:
“For the California coast south of Cape Mendocino, the committee projected that sea level will rise 4 to 30 centimeters by 2030, 12 to 61 centimeters by 2050, and 42 to 167 centimeters by 2100. For the Washington, Oregon, and California coast north of Cape Mendocino, sea level is projected to change [from] falling 4 centimeters to rising 23 centimeters by 2030, [change from] falling 3 centimeters to rising 48 centimeters by 2050, and rising between 10 to 143 centimeters by 2100. The committee noted that as the projection period lengthens, uncertainties, and thus ranges, increase.”
%$#@ur momisugly! Used “you’re” for “your” in the final edit.
That’s what I get for commenting before I’ve finished my third pot of coffee…
[Fixed. -w.]
It is important to read claims carefully, especially in newspapers. What is being claimed here?
“In 20 years, sea level off state to rise up to 1 foot”
The key words here, cleverly hidden in this headline, are ‘up to’.
And so, omnologos, if you choose to wager a bet, you are going to lose. Unless of course, by some miracle, the sea level rise actually exceeds 1 foot. When looking at predictions of climate catastrophe always look out for ‘could be’, ‘might be’, ‘may be’ and in this case ‘up to’. Often what is claimed is simply not testable and therefore worthless.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
June 23, 2012 at 11:26 pm
…well, the Los Angeles Kings DID win Lord Stanley’s Cup this year, so now they have an official hockey stick to go with it!
…and by checking the rings on the Tartarean treemometers, we can confirm that hell has indeed frozen over…
OH ffs. It says 4cm to 30cm. I’m betting that they will be right, it will rise between 4 & 30cm.
It turns out that Florida is utterly doomed.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/22/2864586/rising-seas-mean-shrinking-south.html#morer
I read a manuscript recently in which the author claims tautologically that their ‘approach was consistent with “evidence-based science.” Is the NAS projection of sea level rise based on ‘political science’?
Assume a spherical cow……well, assume the globe is warming. Some of the extra moisture in the air will find its way to Antarctica where irregardless of how much the globe warms, the place is still well below freezing. That moisture will get trapped there as ice, literally forever removed from the equation.
Global sea level fall.
OH ffs. It says 4cm to 30cm. I’m betting that they will be right, it will rise between 4 & 30cm.
If a politician comes out and says a war might result in “up to” a million deaths and the actual death toll is 2, do you give them a free pass too? Of course not.
The 30 cm part is bogus, and they know it. It’s there because it allows a calculated escalation:
1. Predict a range with ridiculously extreme high end,
2. Apply the “Precautionary Principle”, which says we must take the extreme value seriously,
3. Protest and otherwise apply moral force to a, supposedly scientific, argument
4. Enact legislation to do whatever you wanted to do in the first place, but couldn’t justify otherwise.
Incidentally, they may be wrong about the 4 cm. Odds are it won’t even make that.
There was an article here a week or two ago about the gradual loss of atmosheric pressure by the earth. Could the gradual rise of sea level be connected with this loss of pressure?
Water is essentially incompressible and so no. The variations in atmospheric pressure push the water around but overall don’t cause change in global sea level.
If subsidence is at work, and it is leveling off, I wonder if that was the shape of the graph leading into 1906? Willis’ graph might be right, but too smooth?
For the California coast south of Cape Mendocino, the committee projected that sea level will rise 4 to 30 centimeters by 2030.”.
And that’s relative to 2000 levels. The committee spawned by California Executive Order S-13-08 is playing entirely on the safe side. In other words they say sea level rise there can be as small as 40 mm there in 30 years. That’s 1.3 mm/year, a reasonable estimate. Their upper bound (10 mm/year) is of course ridiculous, especially because there is only 18 years left until 2030 and sea level has not risen there in the last 12 years. So for the rest of the period it would mean some 17 mm/year, which is a preposterous exaggeration at best. It is clearly meant for the press release only.
But their error bounds are so large they can’t possibly be wrong, can they? Probably some younger members of that committee do not expect to finish their career and retire by 2030, so they had to come to a compromise.
30 centimeters is 12 inches which is also a foot.
Good thinking Willis. – How these people can blame “Sea level behaviour” on human behaviour is far beyond my comprehension. But then again it is obvious to me that those who are always obsessed by averages are necessarily always ignoring whatever lies above and below what I call, “The Zero Line” (TZL). –
There are places in the world which as a result of recovering from the last “Ice Age”, are to this day still rising up further out of the sea, i.e. the heavy blanket of ice that once weighted them down has vanished. A certain island on the Baltic coast of Sweden has a coastline that is some 300 meters below where it was some 9600 years ago.
Well, that may be just one extreme, but sea levels around the Scandinavian coasts are not shown to be rising.
However, one may say the displacement of water which must take place as the land rises may be miniscule in the grand scheme of things or in most scientists’ minds – but no land can rise out of the sea without taking the bottom of the ocean in which it is located with it.
So, – where are all the sea-level gauges traditionally placed? – Close to the coast I should imagine, as they must be connected to the sea floor as well as the sea surface to be of any use at all, but whether the sea surface is rising or the ocean floor is sinking is probably a bit “tricky” to establish. – And I must admit I do not know how they do it – and keep track over many (100 or more?) years.
Some years ago we all knew that the Maldives and other islands in that particular volcanic Pacific Island group were sinking. They even had worked out the “Life-span” of those islands from their formation to their demise – and re-formation.