Proof positive politicians can’t do simple math.
From the LA Times today:
Brown’s remarks came a day after the release of two studies finding that a slow-motion and irreversible collapse of a massive cluster of glaciers in Antarctica has begun and could cause sea levels to rise worldwide by four feet within 200 years.
“If that happens, the Los Angeles airport’s going to be underwater,” Brown told reporters at a presentation of his revised state budget proposal in Los Angeles. “So is the San Francisco airport.”
Source: http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-brown-sea-level-airports-20140513-story.html
Ok let’s do the math, first a look at the sea level rate from the Los Angeles tide gauge operated by NOAA:
![9410660[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/94106601.png?quality=75)
Source: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9410660
Assuming nothing changes in the rate of sea level rise, and the airport would still exist there in the future, here is the math.
LAX airport elevation is 125 feet ( Source: http://www.airnav.com/airport/KLAX )
125 feet = 38100mm
At the rate of 0.83mm/yr sea level rise seen at Los Angeles (from NOAA graph above) it would take 45903.6 years to reach 125 feet, we’d be in a new ice age by then and sea levels would be falling…never gonna happen.
So, at current rates, Brown’s claim is bogus.
But he’s saying it will be due to Antarctic’s western ice sheet melting.
OK, the claims is from news coverage of two papers, “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica“. This study is available here:
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/glacier-thwaites.pdf
NASA says of the paper “Sustained increase in ice discharge from the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica, from 1973 to 2013“. This study is available here:
http://www.ess.uci.edu/researchgrp/erignot/files/grl51433.pdf
Even as Rignot and colleagues suggest that loss of the Amundsen Sea embayment glaciers appears inevitable, it remains extremely difficult to predict exactly how this ice loss will unfold and how long it will take. A conservative estimate is that it could take several centuries.
The region contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 4 feet (1.2 meters).
Source: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/antarctic-ice-sheet-20140512/
4 feet, and LAX airport is 125 feet above sea level. SFO airport, also mentioned by Brown is Elevation: 13 ft. according to Airnav
NASA even calculates for the worst case scenario:
The Amundsen Sea region is only a fraction of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which if melted completely would raise global sea level by about 16 feet (5 meters).
So even 16 feet wouldn’t affect LAX airport, but might affect SFO …far in the future.
Governor Brown is in a gross error with his claims. You’d think his handlers would check this simple math before they allow him to beclown himself with unsupportable claims of doom that can’t possibly affect either airport enough to cause them to be moved.
Again all this assumes that SFO and LAX will still be there in 200 years. We might be driving antigrav personal flying vehicles by then. (Well, if you believe Popular Science).
Here is where I think Brown went wrong:
He listened to the Guardian’s Susanne Goldenberg, who conflated 4 feet to 4 METERS (13 feet), which would affect SFO airport, but not LAX.
And the error is still in her story, a day later.
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cont…
if you didn’t know better you wold blame it on global warming-
http://www.internationalrivers.org/dams-and-geology
“The beaches in a 90-kilometre long littoral cell north of San Diego were more than 300 metres wide in 1922. Today some have entirely disappeared. The beaches once protected cliffs from wave erosion; their disappearance has led to cliff collapses which caused millions of dollars of damage to property and roads during the 1980s”
Each dam stops sediment reaching the coastline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam
“By 1997, there were an estimated 800,000 dams worldwide, some 40,000 of them over 15 m (49 ft) high”
http://earth.esa.int/workshops/venice06/participants/1092/paper_venice06.pdf
“This study decomposed the satellite
data into Empirical Orthogonal Functions, and then
estimated the temporal history of the principal modes
using the tide gauge data. While an acceleration of
roughly the expected magnitude was detected, the
errors in this technique are thought to be quite large”
You’d think his handlers would check this simple math before they allow him to beclown himself with unsupportable claims of doom that can’t possibly
=========================================================
Nope. You are talking about progs — you have your facts and they have theirs, and theirs are right, even if they are wrong, because they want love and peace and you don’t and also because Bush.
Moonbeam was a disaster as a governor 40 years ago. What possessed Californians to think he had gotten any smarter after spending those years doing nothing constructive?
Maybe instead of “Moonbeam” we should call him “Chuckles”. The “moonbeam” moniker is old anyway, being coined in nearly 40 years ago by Mike Royko, who was later sorry he had.
Let’s be honest, in many ways we sceptics are winning (no warming for almost 18 years), but with the press we’re losing big time. Even Reuters yesterday had a headline, “Antarctic Melting” with a few lines that didn’t explain that it would take hundreds of years even if it’s true! So we’ve lost out with the media. Newspapers and TV just love catastrophe, and that’s why they won’t tell the truth. So if this twat of a Governor reads the press and repeats it (the Guardian!), then we shouldn’t be surprised.
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
May 14, 2014 at 4:01 am
Let’s be honest, in many ways we sceptics are winning (no warming for almost 18 years), but with the press we’re losing big time. Even Reuters yesterday had a headline, “Antarctic Melting”
—————
Skeptics are winning the comments war below the articles though not in the case of Reuters and Antarctic article.
Reuters comments 0
“This discussion is now closed. We welcome comments on our articles for a limited period after their publication”
It must have been very limited!
The bigger the claims of doom the less they are believed. Let them make huge claims of sea level rise and boiling oceans and doom and gloom and let them cry wolf.
It seems to me that the skeptics are the only ones dealing with real facts in this debate and are capable of doing actual math.
That is really the issue. We are trying to get facts and real data on the table and the science/media is peddling myths.
You would think, we will win in the long-run because humans eventually adopt fact and truth when they are finally exposed to it. But movements based on myth can last for thousands of years. So far, the myth-based climate science has got us to adopt inefficient energy sources and waste 0.5% of GDP per year (and economies need every 0.5% they can get their hands on right now).
Continue exposing more people to fact? More climategates? Make sure editors know when their news writers are getting the facts wrong? Get Nature and GRL to stop publishing pseudo-climate-science-fiction? Get the NCDC out of the temperature record management business? Stop the funding of myth-making in this field?
Long road to go.
Am I wrong in thinking that when an ice sheet pushes out to sea, from the land, that it does so under its own weight so to speak? I.E. something has got to land on the land end to push something out at the sea end. Obviously there comes a point when what lands at A comes out at B, so it suggests that no more will come out than gets trapped, albeit with a time lag. This meaning to me that nothing is really changing that much or will change that much – and that seems to be the case from the measurements.
Catastrophic Global Warming should be considered a religion because there is no credible science to support it. I feel the government is violating the concept of separation of church and state by promoting CGW and as a citizen I’m getting tired of it.
Sea level rise or subsidence in the Los Angeles basin and Santa Ana Basin
looks like subsidence to me.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs06903/images/p01f01.jpg
“Catastrophic Global Warming should be considered a religion because there is no credible science to support it.”
I would agree, and amplify it further by pointing out that anthropogenic global warming is believed, partially because any and all data that refutes it is denied credence. They basically take the stand that there is no data refuting global warming because there can’t be.
Can’t let inconvenient facts get in the way of their faith.
Ramsey and Moslow (1987) attribute 80% of the observed relative sea level rise in coastal
Louisiana to “compactional subsidence.”
Not withstanding the utter alarmist drivel from Goldenberg, she does appear in this case to be a little on the conservative side in her claims. She states that the loss of the whole of the Western Antarctic ice sheet will produce a 4m see level rise, whereas the NASA calculation is for a 5m rise.
So I don’t think that Goldenberg can be the source of Brown,s wild claims.
In a Democracy, The People Get The Government They Deserve
Did anyone consider this? “The West Antarctica ice sheet bed can extend to more than 2,500 m below sea level. Much of the land in this area would be seabed if the ice sheet were not there.”(this from Wikipedia) Now if I’m reading this correctly the ice in this sheet has already raised sea level all that it’s going to raise it as the ice is in the ocean now. It’s not supported by land so melt away, the only real difference would be a reduction of salinity of the ocean.
Sometimes you don’t know that your government is led by a math challenged imbecile, but let’s not be surprised, There’s a reason why the Koch Brothers are billionaires and not members of parliament.
I have to point out that we Engineers have tools for these sort of problems that (unlike CAGW), have proven efficacy and predictability, they are called sea-walls, levees, and landfill. He should read up on Kansai International Airport which used to be the bay, now THAT’S a problem – 4 ft in 200 hundred years – trivial.
Sometimes these idiots can’t see past their own navels.
@ur momisugly ffohnad
“How did it happen that the country is run by 2nd class minds?”
We haven’t launched the “B” ark yet.
Politicians should have to pass a basic math and science test before they are able to hold office.
Math is hard. That is why there’s Political Science, for the lesser among us to major in.
Jimmy Dell says:
May 14, 2014 at 5:58 am
Much of the ice cap is 2 miles high, so rest assured, it is capable of raising sea level, rebound notwithstanding. The ice started growing above sea level, but depressed the ground as it rose. The absurdity is that CO2 could be blamed for a long term irreversible trend, when we know that the RW and MW periods were warmer and longer than our piddling 30 years. Moreover, if there were any truth to this propaganda it would be good news, since a few feet of SLR are by far preferable to another LIA. –AGF
I need help with this folks. I have been trying to figure out how they arrived an ocean rise of 4m with the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I think the ice sheet is too small for that.
The West Antarctic Ice sheet contains only 2.2 million km3 of water. The worlds oceans contain 1.3 billion km3 of water, with margin of error +- 20 million km3. The margin of error is almost 20 times the water in the ice sheet.
The surface area of the worlds oceans is about 335 million km2, average depth is 3685 meters.
How did they arrive at 4 meters rise?
Sorry if people are irritated by me bringing this up again, but those who think all these ridiculous statements of doom with come back to haunt these people in the future – well, I think history tells us that just isn’t going to happen. This has been going on for almost 50 years now – starting with the population bomb lunatics. Currently, CAGW – excuse me, Climate Change – is just the latest way for the misanthropes of society – especially the haters of the undeveloped 3rd world – to attempt to implement massive social change, of which dramatic human population reduction is, and has always been, the real main objective. The real catastrophic polluter is not CO2, it’s US. If the CAGW movement eventually does go away, it will quickly get replaced by some other farce that also has human population reduction as its real, main, largely hidden-from-the-public cause. And all the lunatics like Brown and their proclamations of doom will not be mocked in the future, but they will all be actually rewarded for their efforts by the “powers-that-be” in trying to implement social change. I wish it was otherwise, by that is what a study of history tells me, anyway.
Also, Ferd Berple says:
“In a Democracy, The People Get The Government They Deserve”
I have to disagree with this as well. CAGW is massive misinformation and propaganda, and not just within one democratic society – its’ worldwide – well, at least among all the so-called “elite” powers. We are not “informed” voters, we are intentionally mislead/lied to voters. It’s hard to blame the populace at this point. This is really an “elite” group of people from all over the developed Western World who want to ram massive cultural change down our throats, by any means necessary. If CAGW doesn’t do the job, they will find something else to use as an excuse. And, the truth will again be optional.