Guest essay by Bjørn Lomborg
Justin Gillis tells NPR how much sea levels will rise:
“experts believe sea levels will rise at least 3 feet in the next century, and that number could be as much as 6 feet.”
(91cm to 183cm, http://n.pr/ZOxRKF.)
The leaked upcoming UN Climate Panel report will likely increase its sea level rise estimates (leaked here: http://bit.ly/12ybRHI, the numbers are very similar to the new June leak of the summary for policy makers).
It estimates the average sea level rise over 95 years at 40-62cm (1.31-2.04ft, it is the average 1986-2005 till 2081-2100) Looking at the entirety of the likely ranges, the range could be as wide as 29-82cm (0.95-2.69ft).
So, Gillis tells us the one end of the spectrum is 3 feet and the highest 6 feet, while the the UN says 1 foot to 2.7 feet. His *lowest* estimate is higher than the *highest* of the UN Climate Panel’s new, higher estimate.
Yet, he justifies his numbers with “experts.” Justin Gillis seems to listen to an extremely skewed set of experts.
In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, Justin Gillis has clearly indicated that he writes about climate because he wants to push for action:
“the more I learned [about climate], the more I thought to myself, “This is the biggest problem we have—bigger than global poverty. Why am I not working on it?” From there, the question was, how do I get myself into a position to work on the problem?”
As Roger Pielke Jr. has demonstrated going through this interview and many of Gillis’ other articles: “The notion of “working on the problem” is a fine ambition, but is clearly much more aligned with advocacy for action rather than reporting a beat. Rather than informing his readers Gillis is in the business of making an argument.” (http://bit.ly/1dcslMJ)
Justin Gillis last year wrote what Roger Pielke called “worst piece of reporting I’ve ever seen in the Times on climate change.”
It is worth reading Pielke’s takedown here: http://bit.ly/14s4jrq.
**************
Just to be clear, there are many good environmental journalists on New York Times. But this clear example of severely skewed information is not worthy of the Newspaper of Record.
‘Temperature Rising’: Will Climate Change Bring More Extreme Weather? : NPR
The most believable data on sea level rise come from Chao, Yu and Li (Science April 11th 2008). They corrected available reports of sea level rise measurements for water held in storage by all dams built since 1900. When these corrections were applied the sea level curve became linear for the previous eighty years, with a slope of 2.46 millimeters per year. This works out to 24.6 cm per century, a little under 10 inches. Satellites have been reporting a rise of about 3 mm per year, quite close to Chao Yu & Li. I don’t know what corrections they applied, if any, for water held in storage. I don’t believe that single reading of sea level drop. It is probably an instrumental or software error because there is no record of anything like that for at least a century. I look forward to a centennial sea level rise of 24.6 centimeters, not that twenty feet of Al Gore’s he got from James Hansen, or any other number of feet.
According to Jim Hansen, the oceans are going to all boil away like they did on Venus… LOL!… so I wonder what the concern is about rising sea levels.
“………there are many good environmental journalists on New York Times”
Ok, just out of curiosity, name half a dozen (“many”) that I can trust. Or one, even.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
On the subject of poor and biased reporting. I just came across this example by the BBC. Describing the origin of the Norfolk Broads. They couldn’t bring themselves to say they were created by sea level rises a thousand years ago, and used the ridiculous phrase, ‘When tides began to rise’.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/norfolk/hi/people_and_places/nature/newsid_8200000/8200123.stm
“the more I learned [about climate], the more I thought to myself, This is the biggest problem we have—bigger than global poverty.”
—
So Mr. Gillis thinks that sea levels slowly encroaching on the beach homes of the rich is a bigger problem than global poverty. What does that tell us about him?
Anthony has recently posted re a couple of Alarmist papers (Last couple of weeks, I think ) where new papers claimed a climate sensitivity of 4+ and 5+C..
Now we are getting exagerated claims for sea level rise.
Excuse me for being synical, but this smells like a diliberate campaign. We have had a substancial number of recent papers showing a climate sensitivity of of between 1 & 2C. We have also seen recent papers showing sea level rise of between 15cm and 30 cm to 2100.
This looks, to me, to be a deliberate attempt to produce high ball values to counter the much lower values coming from good science, so that the IPCC report, when published, can claim to be the middle ground.
Yuk!
/ikh
Misattributed
Misattributed to Gobbles:
But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.
Actually from “War Propaganda”, in volume 1, chapter 6 of Mein Kampf (1925), by Adolf Hitler
Attributed to Goebbels in Publications Relating to Various Aspects of Communism (1946), by United States Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, Issues 1-15, p.19, no reliable source has been located, and this is probably simply a further variation of the Big Lie idea
Now the above has been lifted from Wiki. However, I must make an addition to help put things in perspective. Modern sedan automobilies, properly running, put out 99.7% CO2 and Water. They have enough excess oxygen to generally allow one to survive, breathing an auto exhaust (When I say 99.7 CO2 and Water, I mean as exhaust products. ALSO N2 and O2 come out. Because of TWO reasons, when asked, “What would happen to you if someone strapped a breathing mask on you and made you breath the output of a modern car…” About 90% of everyone says, “Oh, you’d die.” When quizzed why, they will say, Carbon Monoxide poisoning.” When you explain the real mixture of gasses, some people (who THINK they are quick and intelligent, but really..NOT..!) will say, “How do people commit suicide with their cars? I heard of a case..(fill in the blank) last month, week, year..etc.” Answer: They run the car in a closed garage. As the O2 is used up, the combustion shifts to CO and Water, but then engine runs long enough to make enough CO to kill a human. QED.
The point here is that it’s NOT JUST the repeating of these “enviromental myths” which engrains them in the “first level thinking” of the common person. It’s also the sad human tendancy to THINK WE KNOW MORE THAN WE REALLY DO. (I might add, sardonically, that since the advent of the air bags in cars, a LOT of these folks survive to reproduce…where in the past, they could have had a more deliberate choice to not contribute to the gene pool. Woe are we!)
If you accept the higher-end estimates for recent sea-level rise rates of 3mm/year, even the UN estimates mean that they believe there is less than a 2.5% chance these rates will hold steady or decline over the next century. According to the “experts” that Gillis quotes, there is less than a 2.5% chance these rates will only triple (on average!) or less over the next century.
So Gillis says we don’t know much about hurricanes. Perhaps he is lazy or doesn’t bother to check the NOAA site “Tropical Cyclone Climatology 1950-2011”, or the EOS (American Geophysical Union) report “Counting Atlantic Tropical Cyclones Back to 1900”. Makes one wonder about the rest of his evidence backing up his statements.
Leak, or a test release ?
JimS says:
August 24, 2013 at 2:17 pm
I heard that sea levels fell in 2020-2011, and it was because Australia absorbed in all.
http://iceagenow.info/2013/08/sea-levels-fell-2011-australia-soaked-water-sponge-scientist/
I had no idea that Australia would act as one great big sponge. Is Australia the savior of rising sea levels caused by climate change?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
As an Australian who has seen much of my country, I can tell you that it is entirely possible for this to have happened.
A great deal of central Australia is either semi desert or desert.
And we also have an odd geography where most of the rivers tend to flow towards the center instead of the coast. Decades can pass with no significant rainfall , followed by enough rain to turn huge areas green in a matter of weeks.
High rainfall on the coastal areas will flow into these areas. I have seen dry riverbeds that have become raging torrents in a matter of hours , all caused by rain hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of kilometers away.
I am not willing to say that this alone could explain a drop in ocean levels, not without a lot more research on the subject, but it could have been a contributing factor.
And on a slightly related note , if you are planning a visit, PLEASE do not camp in dry river beds, the water can come up so fast, you will never have a chance to get out of your tents before you are swept away.
Australia is beautiful yes, but can also be deadly if you are not aware of the dangers.
Simple really. Truth doesn’t sell newspapers. But exaggerated hyperbole does and the bigger the shock, horror, gasp factor the bigger the sales. I treat most newspapers now as works of barely literate and incomplete fiction, written by those who haven’t got the ability to write a full blown novel and as such are relegated to making up stuff and nonsense to confuse, confound and down right bullshit the readers. In Australia our press is controlled by two families so we only ever get two viewpoints on any subject, neither of which is true.
But you can darn well bet that GIllis keeps using carbon anyway!
If we can’t agree on such a basic measurement as sea level rise then how can we predict future temperature changes?
@moderator –
Yes, ABC also stands for Australian Broadcasting Corporation
@Speed –
About 200,000 children a year die from global warming – alarmism (the ethanol program’s diversion of grain from food).
Here is a link to an article by Nils-Alex Morner concerning sea level rise; he is an expert on the subject having studied it for over 35 years. Critics think he is a bit of a crackpot, but I have read enough of his 546 papers and 10 books to know that he is at least sane when it comes to sea level science. I have a sneaky feeling there is a smear campaign against him since he is outspoken in his criticism of the IPCC.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/MornerInterview.pdf
“I don’t really waste my time on something unless I’m reasonably confident I can get it onto page one. Then, it becomes a question of what’s the right framing to get it there and can I actually pull it off..”
Those University of Georgia Journalism degrees must be pretty good. Gillis gets 9 out of 10 onto the Times A1.
And he sees himself just doing “remedial education”.
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/qa_the_nyts_justin_gillis.php?page=all
JimS says:
“I heard that sea levels fell in 2020-2011, and it was because Australia absorbed in all.
http://iceagenow.info/2013/08/sea-levels-fell-2011-australia-soaked-water-sponge-scientist/
I had no idea that Australia would act as one great big sponge. Is Australia the savior of rising sea levels caused by climate change?”
The eastern half of Australia sits on top of the Great Artesian Basin, the biggest artesian water storage system on the planet. Many years of drought and water extraction for agriculture had severely depleted it. Perhaps the best way to look at it is that the seas rose so much earlier because the water from the Basin was extracted and ended up in the oceans?
David Ritson,
The following incident throws liight on Justiin Gillis’s mode of operation.
In his article on 5/14/13 on page 1 of Science Times Justin Gilles stated, relative to Svante Arrhenius’s work on carbon doubling, that in the 1900s Arrhenius had predicted that
“the average temperature of the earth would rise by something like nine degrees Fahrenheit” .
I wrote him that a correction would be in order stating that
“This is incorrect.Arrhenius subsequently amended the figure to 1.6 degrees Centigrade or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit.” and referred him to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius
While only of historic value Gillis had used Arrhenius’s high preliminary value to make a point that modern values were conservatively much lower. This seemed a trivial enough correction but the Times editor replied that Gillis had been fully aware of the later value but because of space limitations had simply not included it, and therefore no correction would be made.
Such selective quotation is of course just dishonest journalism and calibrates Gillis’s credibility.
@Ron House
Just for comparison…..
The Antarctic ice sheet is currently estimated as 24.7 cubic kilometers; melting of the entire ice sheet would raise sea level approximately 56.6 m.
The Greenland ice sheet is currently estimated as 2.9 cubic kilometers, and melting of the entire ice sheet would raise sea level approximately 7.3 m.
The Great Artesian Basin is estimated to contain 64,900 cubic kilometers.
Other_Andy,
You lost a few zeros there. Antarctic ice volume is 26.5 million cubic km.
Latitude says-
“oh good grief…go on and say it’s a 1000 ft and get it over with”
Already done. In meters, not feet. By guess who? Jim the jester jousting adjuster Hansen-
In 2005, James Hansen told Tim Radford of The Guardian that the current 1 W/m^2 energy imbalance will raise temperatures 0.6 C by 2100, and over 10,000 years would raise sea levels by 1000 meters.
JimS says-
“According to Jim Hansen, the oceans are going to all boil away like they did on Venus… LOL!”
But do I count this as a sea level rise of 4000 meters as the ocean vapors fill the lower troposphere, or do I count this as a sea level drop of 4000 meters?
@Other_Andy
I think you mean the Antarctic ice sheet is currently estimated as 27,700,000 cubic kilometers, and the Greenland ice sheet as 2,900,000 cubic kilometers; as compared to the Great Artesian Basin containing 64,900 cubic kilometers? If those ratios are correct, as compared to impact upon the sea levels, then the Great Artesian Basin would have a potential maximum impact of 15 centimetres on sea level? Therefore the claim that sea level dropped by 7 millimetres is well within the range, if that much water fell upon Australia for that 18 month period between 2010 and 2011. But did it?
I note that all the commenters on this post are quoting a long term past and expected future sea level rise averaging around 3 mms plus per year.
The satellite data is indicating a sea level rise of just 1.2 mms to 1.6 mms / year as per below.
The Satellite project below will be an attempt to base all sea level measurements on the geo centre of the mass of the Earth thus eliminating the effects and errors inherent in using tectonically affected tide gauges currently used in the GMSL measurements
To quote from the following;
‘The “Geodetic Reference Antenna in Space” (GRASP):
“A Mission to Enhance GNSS and the Terrestrial Reference Frame”
[ http://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/meetings/2011-06/bar-sever.pdf ]
From frame 3 of the above GRASP pdf.
>>>> “Impact of TRF [ Terrestrial Reference Frame ] on GMSL Record from Tide Gauges:
Competing approaches for TRF realization yield estimates for sea-level rise ranging from 1.2 to 1.6 mm / yr.
Desired accuracy for measuring global mean sea level (GMSL) rise is 0.1 mm/yr <<<<<
Note that current 1.3 mms / year to 1.6 mms / year rise in global sea levels relative to the earth's center of mass.
The GRASP satellite has a projected launch date of 2016 / 2017
There are now known to be very systematic errors in a lot of global satellite data due to inaccuracies in establishing the satellite's Reference Frames relative to their Terrestrial positions.
The GRASP project seeks to eliminate systematic satellite data positional errors so as to establish the satellite's positions to a sufficient accuracy now sought across a whole range of satellite data measurements .
Sea level measurements being just one such example where it is intended for GRASP as per PDF frame 3, to reduce the Reference Frame based sea level measurements errors relative to the Earth's center of mass, the Geocentric location, from 0.45 mms / year down to 0.1 mms / year
A further paper ; Global sea-level rise and its relation to the terrestrial reference frame"
[ http://sas2.elte.hu/tg/msc_gravi/collilieux_sealeverise.pdf ]
Also provides tables of the GMSL from many locations and that tide gauge data also shows that sea level rises have only been in the range of 1.3 mms / year to 1.6 mms / year.
Quote below from the paper indicating both the current error rate in sea level satellite measurements and the ranges of current sea level rises;
The preferred reference frames for scientific applications that require a very high degree of accuracy are the realizations of the International Terrestrial Reference System (ITRS) which are named International Terrestrial Reference Frames (ITRF).
The two latest, ITRF2000 and ITRF2005, are assumed to be expressed with respect to the Center of Mass(CM) of the entire Earth, including the oceans and atmosphere.
Both origins were constrained using Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) data, which is recognized as the most accurate technique for CM determination.
However, these two frames differ by 1.8± 0.3 mm/year for the drift in origin in the Z component, and 0.5± 0.3 mm/year (0.08 ± 0.05 ppb/year)for the radial scale change (Altamimi et al. 2007).
Such differences mostly explain the different rates of observed global sea-level rise obtained by Wöppelmann et al. (2007, 2009), 1.3± 0.3 and 1.6 ± 0.2 mm/year, respectively.
Improving our understanding of sea-level rise and variability, as well as reducing the uncertainties associated with the estimates of change, critically depend on our ability to realize a stable terrestrial reference frame.
The accuracy of the origin and scale rates of the frame is one of the main factors limiting the determination of geocentric sea level trends today.