We continue to find laughable errors in the state-by-state climate impact report released yesterday. Today we have this claim in the White House climate impact report for Georgia about coastline for the State of Georgia being threatened by sea level rise: (h/t Ryan Maue)
For comparison, California has 840 miles of coastline.
Map from NOAA US Tides and Currents website
According to the U.S. International Borders: Brief Facts”, by the Congressional Research Service, Table 3 lists the value for Georgia:
It took me about 20 seconds to locate this data. Georgia has 100 miles of coastline, not 707.
If you use the NOAA method, where they measure the outline of every estuary, inlet, peninsula, etc that touches water, we get a value for Georgia of 2344 miles:
Source: http://coastalmanagement.noaa.gov/mystate/ga.html
No matter which method you use, you can’t get 707 miles.
Add this to the list of laughable data claims already discovered, such as the claim that the president’s home state of Hawaii has 31 counties (it actually has 5), it seems to me that that the White House doesn’t know how to do basic research using a search engine.
Besides, Savannah, GA seems to not have disappeared in the face of its measured sea level rise:
Source: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8670870
Surely it must be embarrassing for the White House that a “flat earther” blogger like me has to point these factual errors out to them.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
A coastline should be measured from beginning to end, by averaging curves into lines.. Similar to how a coast hwy is measured. Some units will be 33 miles, and others will be 12 – (or 5 etc.) dependent on how the coast curves. I think any (a) hwy that runs along a (any) coast is a good reference to realistic distance between the beginning and the end of a coastline.
That aint nothing, the government of Nova Scotia claims to have 8500 miles of coastline. I kid you not.
Team Obama always has a tough job in echoing their boss’s claims.
After all, his climate initiative is like so many other policy initiatives he works on:
-Kick things off with a speech where he mis-states the issues, insults those who disagree
-Makes grand, fact-deficient claims that over states the situation
-Proposes insanely expensive solutions to a tiny problem
-That happen to profit his insiders and pals
-Then leaves town on a vacation or goes and plays a bunch of golf
-Hides the fact that the so-called solutions are mostly pain and very little gain at best
-Imposes huge costs on Americans
-Does not work as planned
-Requires finding ways to either trick Congress by way of insanely big, deceptively written bills
-Or simply goes around Congress and the Courts by claiming the issue is too important, and he is too special, for the pesky rules to apply to him.
-And then take another long vacation.
With his team left to impose this mess on the people, how can they bothered with little details like accuracy and facts?
Well the lead guy (the big zero) said there are 57 states. Why should the rest of his admin. be any less accurate?
Well, I guess the race is on. Germany’s leaders vs America’s leaders. Who will win “Dumbest Leader of the World”?
It looks like the 707 mile figure comes from the NOAA State of the Coast page http://stateofthecoast.noaa.gov/vulnerability/welcome.html. I don’t know what methodology they used to calculate the distance though. As discussed above, almost any number can be justified, so the problem isn’t so much that it is wrong, but rather uncommon. This would be less of an issue if a source had been cited in the original document, or if other coastline distances were listed for context, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. From what I have seen so far (I have checked most but not all coastal states), Georgia is the only state with a coastline distance listed, so it is not intuitively obvious that an alternate (and less common) measuring method was used. Even more bizarre is the fact that even according to the data in the source website, Georgia does not, relative to other southeastern states, have an appreciably large portion of its coast in the high risk category. So why single it out? It just further reinforces the idea that a bunch of seemingly random and/or disconnected facts were thrown together.
Daddyjames asked if a few factual errors invalidates the entire report. Of course not! It just demonstrates ineptness, which is not a good quality to have in the fry cook at McDonalds, much less the President of the United States.
The lengthy report is not invalidated by a few factual errors. It is invalidated by the defining of CO2 as a pollutant and the assumption that it is the primary driver of global climate change. Compared to these two grossly wrong principle statements, the smaller factual errors become almost realistic, or at least inconsequential.
No good can come from this report.
None of you understand. There were 2344 miles of coast land in GA, but our man made global warming has already eradicated all but 707 miles. We have to do something soon… for the children… and the polar bears.
More seriously, how does NOAA distinguish a rising sea level from techtonic plates sinking and earth core shrinkage? Back before radiation had been discovered many geologists believed that a cooling planetary core was causing the earth to shrink over time giving rise to mountains. Now that we can include the radiation component the difference is much slower, but it seems that a slight cooling from a 1 part in 6.5 billion decline in radiation activity per year might significantly contribute to a 1 part in 6 billion change in the average ocean level.
Is this on track at all?
“Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who is the head of Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and a member of a presidential science panel that has helped advise the White House on climate change, said he hoped the presidential speech would mark a turning point in the national debate on climate change.
“Everybody is waiting for action,” he said. “The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.””
Skeptics need to focus on the politics of AGW in conjunction with having “facts” on their side. It’s that lack of coordination which has advanced the junk-science movement along the way. Another standard of professionalism (science) is now in a generational gutter in our society. Skeptics should stop showing deference and respect in their presentations. The average scientist supporting the AGW movement is either a political zealot and self-admitted liar where the ends have justified the means. The ends being a Green fascist reality in line with their NYTimes/academic left cultures.
It’s interesting to note there is little public interest in Obama’s dictatorial coal directives. Schrag while scientifically ludicrous understands the sociology of the current mob and their hatred of capital interests and coal in particular. Scientists are now willful mob leaders and have been for sometime. Skeptics observe it and comment on it abstractly instead of what is needed. This is how the new Soviet is being formed.
Savannah is in little danger of rising sea levels.
The City of Savannah is built on a 40-50’ high bluff above the Savannah River, about 8 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Taking any of the routes east out of the city toward the barrier island one encounters the steep down-slope coming off the bluff. The bluff is also obvious at Factors’ Walk, which is a 4-story complex with offices at street level and warehouses at river level, and was originally built to serve cotton-shipping traffic on the River.
Facts are stubborn things – but they are routinely ignored by this administration (abomination), by today’s press, and by our sheep-like/sleep-walking electorate.
will someone please inform Mr. Obama of the benefits verified from his “carbon pollution” in a continent called Africa, for example, specifically the greening of savannas (poor chitas, I know, and poor elephants dizimated by man and formerly responsible for the vegetation behaving)
http://stateofthecoast.noaa.gov/vulnerability/
There’s the link. You can grab the data from the link at the bottom of the map. Georgia coast comes in right around 700 miles. So the “Obama number” or “White House number” or whatever you want to call it is from NOAA. It’s not wrong, it’s not a mistake, it’s not a failure to google at all. It’s one of a set of accepted numbers for the lenth of Georgia’s coast. There’s also a couple other floating out there besides the 100 miles and the 2,344 miles.
“REPLY: and it only took you how many hours of search (cuz your’re a troll on a mission)? When you are looking for the data, you don’t Google for specific numbers, you do it for the length of coastline. Strawman fail on your part.
For example: Go tell Wikipedia they are wrong on both counts – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_coastline
-Anthony”
To find it took about 10-15 minutes. Verifying that the 707 number comes from NOAA(or at least from the same source as NOAA, maybe USGS) took about 20 minutes because I did it on an ipad. When you’re looking for a specific value for a measurement that has an infinite number of correct values, you look for the value. I’m not suggesting that any of the numbers are wrong. You are the one telling your readers that the 707 number is a mistake when it clearly is not. Boasting about how the White House can’t use google when the error is yours is pretty funny, but I don’t think it really serves your reader’s interests. My only ” mission” here is to correct your obvious error so that people have good information going forward.
REPLY: Yeah sure, whatever. It doesn’t exist other than on a website designed to promote false alarm about sea level rise with a front page cherry picked highest rate number, “3.17 100-year projected local sea level rise (in feet) at Eugene Island, LA, the highest projected in the U.S.” which they don’t even give a unit for (I assume it is feet).
But that’s OK by your reasoning apparently, since it supports your views. The two accepted values, by the Congressional Research Service, and by the NOAA#2 method are established numbers. The 707 figure is an oddball. I’ll stick with the established values, thanks. The WH could have used an established value, but is seems clear they’d prefer to use a value that is inline with their alarmist view of sea level.
I’ll believe your stated “mission” when I see you lobbying the WH to fix all the other errors in these reports, such as the number of counties in Hawaii. But, I doubt you will, because you apparently believe the WH disinformation goal hook line and sinker. Your complaint is noted, but the established values stand. – Anthony
By way of an example of how “studies are conducted” i share this with you. I know an engineer who was part of the Carter Era mobile underground ICBM program. There was this pretty report on underground tracks that these transporters and their missiles would follow – and on command, stop at pre-determined points and launch their missiles. How did they come up with the locations? By placing rubber bands on maps and drawing ellipses with them. The engineers knew the proposals were not feasible and put as much effort into them as was warranted. I’m betting the “true believers” who built this report either took the lazy mans way out, were so rushed to meet the policy announcement, that they just threw something together.
Here is how a Virtual Tsunami Event might happen in Montana: In those years where GHG-driven extreme-weather patterns have caused unprecedented flooding in the Missouri-Mississippi river system, Fort Peck Dam might be breached as a consequence of a simultaneously-occurring 8.9 Richter Scale earthquake — causing the huge reservoir behind the dam to empty into the Missouri River, wiping out everything in its path in an event not unlike the Glacial Lake Missoula flood of fifteen thousand years ago. Predictably, the entire blame for this disaster would be assigned solely to the Republicans in Congress for blocking action on climate change.
“The WH could have used an established value.”
There’s no such thing as an “established value” for coastline measurements, lol. Like i said above there are more than just three values out there. The misquote about Hawaiian counties is from a USDA press release. I’m sure it will be corrected in time. But the difference is that the WH isn’t blabbing all over the net about how Anthony Watts can’t count counties. You are doing exactly that with coastal measurements, and it just makes everyone familiar with geography chuckle at you wading into another field where you don’t belong.
The WH used the value that came along with their %-threatened data. It would be silly to do otherwise.
Recently, Obama tweeted saying AGW skeptics are “deniers.” Besides being a crude and rude ad hominem attack it also shows he and his science advisers are very poorly informed about AGW. One of the most sophisticated and reasonable AGW proponents is Fred Pearce, who publishes often in New Scientist. He says that calling skeptics of AGW “deniers” is “foolish fundamentalism.”
-Pearce, F. Foolish fundamentalism. Available from: http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/10/warmist-fred-pearce-are-many-reasons.html accessed 10/3/2011.
“REPLY: Yeah sure, whatever.” [A-th-y in 8:30AM post]
GO, A-TH-Y! #[:)]
LOL. I think we know now who wrote that document! Poor ol’ Ryan is defending that piece of junk like his job depends on it.
Ryan, when you mess up (such as on that document), don’t stand up and wave your hands and stomp around and yell and tell everyone they are so stupid. LOL, it only makes it worse.
To excuse is to admit [responsibility].
george e. smith says:
June 27, 2013 at 2:33 pm
So why are Buckyballs, and grapheme, and nanotubes excluded from the Zhorgon list. Do you have some aversion to Buckyballs Mr. Zhorgon Any chance of mining those atmospheric diamonds ??
Well no, anything that is carbon as it was mentioned.
Carbon dioxide is not carbon. It contains about as much carbon in percentage as a tree does. It is a gas essential for life and does not cause asthma.
I like it when things are named by name as what they are.
Janice Moore says:
June 27, 2013 at 1:11 pm
Thank you Janice. Your spelling was spot on.
Regards,
Al (who has trouble spelling Allen , err Alan, err Alyn, err.. Allan, OK that’s it ! )
One thing I feel bad about is I think in ending the draft we ended an important institution.
Even Elvis got drafted. It was a melting pot of people.
It also meant we had a skin in the survival of out Country. A concept now very limited in society.
BTW – Was a Vietnam War volunteer (USN River Rats)
EW3 (Al) — when you look into the mirror (or, if you can’t see, PAT YOURSELF ON THE BACK, SAILOR!), that’s one fine man looking back at you. You are why America is a great nation. You loved your country enough to volunteer. We are so blessed to have had (and still do!) men and women like you, willing to lay down their lives “for a friend.”
**********************
River Rats, eh? I suppose you saw the back side of that super-rat John Kerry as he swiftly skidaddled away for his Christmas vacation. Must have been extra hard for you to watch that creep on TV in 2004.
I see what you mean about the draft, and yet, I wonder. I wonder if it is best to have an enthusiastic, motivated, volunteer U.S. Armed Forces. The draft worked when the average man loved his country and could be relied upon to work hard. Now, thinking of the indoctrinated, “we are the world,” teens (the earth hasn’t warmed in their entire LIFETIMES and yet they believe it has — headshake), I’m not so sure.
On the other hand, a two-year hitch in the U.S. Navy might be just the thing to make men out of those perpetual wii-playing (how can they stand to even say what they are doing!!), googling, twittering, pot-smoking, yutes.
The above should be a “point” in an enumerated list of Obama’s errors, to be published in the WSJ or Forbes. Another one is the idea that contrarians are denying that the temperature HAS risen and that CO2 has something to do with it–which we aren’t. Going forward, we don’t see much increase, because of the saturation of the CO2 absorbency spectrum. Obama has been misled by alarmist propaganda that INSINUATES those things. He doesn’t know what we really believe–just the caricature of it that the other side has fed him.
Other blunders are his “hottest 12 years in the last 15″ bad inference (which doesn’t disprove that the warming has stopped rising, contrary to predictions), his hottest year on record” in 2012 (not mentioning only in the US), and his attribution of weather events to AGW.
The title should be “Peeling Back the Onion” maybe.
PS: Four more points to object to:
Calling opponents deniers and flat-erathers. That just indicates he’s swallowed the caricature that contrarians don’t believe the earth has warmed or that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas.
Calling CO2 “carbon”–another debater’s trick intended to insinuate a falsehood.
Calling CO2 “pollution”, which connotes something poisonous, which it isn’t. If it were pollution, Coca Cola would have to be banned.
Saying in effect that We Must Act. If “We” doesn’t include Asia, acting will be futile feel-goodery.
Stephan Mosher & Tarran June 27, 10:33am\
Tarran — It all depends on how you measure it.
Mosher — Damn, you beat me to it.
So, of course, all the coastlines for all the states are being measured by one means? Obviously not. They must keep switching the means of measurement as they do each individual state. No standard of measurement. Obviously a climate scientist created these numbers for them.
Or maybe they had a measurement model that they used. They factored in the expansion of coastlines caused by increased CO2. warming.
Or perhaps when they went and got the original data they looked at the dates the measurements were taken. Those before a certain date were adjusted down. Those after the same date were all adjusted up.
Ok, we are all having some fun with this which is perfectly all right. After all, CO2 is the new laughing gas.
Eugene WR Gallun
“… Or maybe they had a measurement model…
CO2 is the new laughing gas.” [Eugene Gallun]
LOL. #[:)]
Here’s some “data” from the 1960’s that PROVES CO2 levels were quite high then.
Heh, heh, actually, it’s some of us WUWT commenters after re-reading a few of our beloved trolls’ hilarious attempts to defend the CAGW models.
I think my all-time favorite (so far) is: “Konrad says ‘blah, blah, blah.” by S.W. (don’t want to summon him by using his name!) LOL.