From AGU blogs:
By Alexandra Branscombe
WASHINGTON, DC – Unforeseen, short-term increases in sea level caused by strong winds, pressure changes and fluctuating ocean currents can cause more damage to beaches on the East Coast over the course of a year than a powerful hurricane making landfall, according to a new study. The new research suggests that these sea-level anomalies could be more of a threat to coastal homes and businesses than previously thought, and could become higher and more frequent as a result of climate change.
The new study found that unexpected increases in water level of a few centimeters (inches) to a half a meter (almost two feet) above the predicted high tide correlated with the loss of more than half a meter (almost two feet) of beach height on a North Carolina barrier island during 2009 and 2010. This was similar to the amount of erosion in 2010 to 2011 when Hurricane Irene – a category one hurricane with a storm surge of two meters (almost seven feet) high – swept away about a third of a meter (just over a foot) of sediment from the same beaches, according to a new study published last week in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
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You can read the rest here. Basically this looks like a lame attempt to make king tides look like they are enhanced significantly by sea level, and make sea level an elevated issue so they can argue with North Carolina to re-enact the sea level laws they gutted this in 2012.
And it is a single island. It reminds me of the wailing over this sand bar that disappeared.
Their comparison is to a category one hurricane. Even if they could stop the sea from rising, what do they plan to do to stop hurricanes greater than category one from ever again hitting the East Coast?
The trouble with CAGW alarmism is that you can’t sell it unless you deliberately ignore the “Context” that scientific evidence provides.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#mediaviewer/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
When it comes to sea level rise the scientific context says that at the end of the last glaciation ~15,000 years ago sea levels rose at a rate of > 1 meter per century. Then about 8,000 years ago the rate of rise dropped to ~0.3 meters per century. This rate of rise is of natural origin and will not be affected significantly even if the human race becomes extinct tomorrow.
Another example of the failure to provide “Context” is the absurd alarmism over the decline of global ice volume. According to the IPCC’s AR5 report global ice is declining at a rate of 300 Giga-tonnes a year. That sounds scary unless you are aware that the global ice inventory is 3,000,000 Giga-tonnes. Even in the unlikely event that the current rate of ice loss is maintained it will take 10,000 years to melt it all.
I thought obama issued an executive order that the seas shall not rise.
completely off topic but i could not help myself
JESSE JACKSON ADDRESSES THE SHOOTING IN FERGUSON, MISSOURI
Jesse Jackson: There Is A Ferguson Near You
….inadequate investment being made in our infrastructure with roads crumbling, bridges falling down and an outdated public transportation system, a failure to address climate change ….
How about just saying — don’t push a cop into his car and try to grab his gun.
So for Jackson this sad death all comes down to is creating a bigger trough for him to shove his face into.
Remember Jackson was once the young man who smeared something red on his shirt and went out and told the public that Martin Luther King had died in his arms when he wasn’t even in the room.
Eugene WR Gallun
[And, it is almost best to leave off-topics, off the topic. .mod]
I recently read an article in National Geographic that claimed the outer banks in North Carolina are being destroyed by global warming. But the true reason given in the meat of the article was land use. The barrier Island is only shrinking because human land use is preventing the Island from moving westward. If humans would let nature do its thing then the east coast would get washed away and the west coast of the Island would build up. Man though has intervened and kept the west coast from building up by infilling the inlets created by storms from the east that bring the sand needed in the west. Had nothing to do with global warming but they still blamed it.
Also OT but relevant: The Weather Channel is running a show that has identified CO2 as being necessary for life but they still hold by the global warming nonsense. BUT, you’ll be happy to know that a thermostat exists – it seems that volcanoes erupt to put more CO2 into the air if the planet needs to warm up while the oceans and atmospheric water absorb CO2 to cause rocks to erode when the planet needs to cool down. No joke – volcanoes happen to regulate CO2 directly and temperature indirectly. Lemarkian.
All-purpose Climate Worry Science Form 10-10
The new research suggests that these ____________ anomalies could be more of a threat to ____________ than previously thought, and could become higher and more frequent as a result of climate change.
Keeping things in perspective–where I live, the daily tidal range is up to 8 feet and sea level is rising at about 7 1/2 inches per century (0.7 inches per decade), so if we have a big storm, the critical issue is where the tide is at the height of the storm. With an 8 foot tidal range, if the storm peaks at low tide, not much happens at the shoreline, but if it hits at high tide the water is 8 feet higher plus the height of the storm surge and a lot of damage can occur. Sea level rise of 0.7 inches per decade is really not a factor.
Storm damage to coral islands is mainly caused by coastal erosion from storm surges, not from rising sea level. Sea level rise at most of the tide gauge stations around the world suggests a rate of about 7 1/2 inches a century in most places, so although the tidal range is much less than Puget Sound, 0.7 inches per decade is not an important factor. It doesn’t add enough to storm surges to make any significant difference.
“Their comparison is to a category one hurricane. Even if they could stop the sea from rising, what do they plan to do to stop hurricanes greater than category one from ever again hitting the East Coast?”
Of we act now we will have less and weaker hurricanes?
“… can harm beaches worse than hurricane …”
Wow! now beaches can be ‘harmed’? … as opposed to merely eroded or else deposited upon … nope, objective disinterest is out, now we must strive to emotivate zah wordery to maximum palpitative tawdry and unsolicited cranial gropery!
Marine Transgressions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_transgression
Sequence Stratigraphy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_stratigraphy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Sea_Level.png
So it’s really not the end of the world, much of Eastern Australia and coastal New Zealand were constructed in the same sequence-stratigraphy of hundreds of marine transgression and regressions in almost uninterrupted succession. This is what Earth tends to do, irrespective of the presence or absence of primates and the “harm” those nasty little jerks incite in perfectly indifferent lumps of spherical rock, ruthlessly blown out the butt of some unimpressed stellar orb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Sea_Level.png
Just to point out that +/- 100 meters (330 feet) of change in sea level is the noise level for Earth within that graph. The long-term sea level change signal is in the region of +/- 200 meters. So getting on to nearly 700 feet of sea level change is the natural global variability level.
I’m not going to get too bent out of shape about a few centimeters and harm to beaches. If we want to get that silly the UN may as well go ahead and pass a resolution to ban the oceans for their heartless crimes against beachery.
Barrier Islands are by their nature transient phenomena. Few are older than 8,000 years and most much newer. Three things are needed to form them.
1. A sufficient supply of sediment.
2. Rising sea levels
3. Winds and waves with sufficient energy to move the sediment around.
No sea level rise – no barrier islands. Changes to local tides and currents are as likely to destroy barrier islands as cause them to exist and humans have radically altered coastlines in the last thousand years causing just such changes. CO2 is neither necessary nor likely as a major factor.
Keith
Anthony
In May 1974, Sydney’s beaches were hit with a 1-100 year massive coastal storm. It tore many local sandy beaches apart and even in Sydney Harbour destroyed the huge promenade at Manly Harbour Pool – a local tourist mecca – where it had enclosed a large pool since 1931.
There has been no storm like it since.
Please refer to the cover page of Climate Change: Truth or Propaganda (Google or WordPress) showing the utter devastation of our beautiful Bilgola Beach and homes, where (not just 1 metre of beach) a 5-metre high stretch of beachfront was washed back into the sea, together with in-ground swimming pools overlooking the beach.
As a member of an inspection group, we pulled open the oven door on the ground level of one home and found the grilling tray full of sand: That was an indication of the extent of the storm surge.
But here’s the rub: Page 65 shows that same beach as it is today, completely restored with bathers and sun lovers all over it.
What are these people on about?
Sand Engines, the artificial Barrier Islands made by the Dutch, and they do work quite well actually.
Having said that, strong winds, pressure changes and fluctuating ocean currents and add spring-tide to that and we usually call that a storm. Like the one that flooded a part of the Netherlands in february 1953 wich was a unfortunate collection of events, spring-tide, a once in a 10.000 year north-western storm at the northsea moving south-east, inadequate sea defences, all circumstances that on their own could not have caused this catastrophy.
Normal storms do cause damages to our coast, we as Dutch need to maintain our coast, if you suggest that anything else like going green by reducing your CO2-emissions is solving that coastal erosion problem (wich is of all times) than your are criminally misleading the public.
On and on the spin goes – I feel eroded.
Could, might maybe… my dog could learn to ttalk too, probably won’t but “could”. When these papers say WILL then I’ll bother reading them
I pointed out that nor’easters wind up causing more damage than the relatively rare hurricanes that get so much mind share. Then there are the individual storms that hang around for multiple high tides that put many hurricanes to shame.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/06/50-years-ago-the-great-atlantic-storm-of-1962/
Another “blah-blah-blah is worse by climate change report”. They are little more than fill in the blank pro-forma bits of rent seeking by grant writers who have learned how to get funding. Sort of like that phonied up counter-factual lobster study from a few months ago.
Sand moves.
What is more damaging to beaches is the planting of dune stabilization shrubs/plants. They prevent the natural rolling of the dunes and the ocean eats all the way up to the vegetation resulting in significant beach loss over time.
I knew they’d have to come up with something else considering the declining incedence of hurricanes in recent years.
Your slipping Mr. Watt.
Your usually all over these fraudsters before their press release.
Our cyclone season in Australia was such a dud, the were claiming cyclones as “ours” even though they were in Indonesia.
“…and could become higher and more frequent as a result of climate change.
Do they copy and paste this into every study, or do they have a standard form for their abstracts where this line populates automatically? Sheesh!!!
The actual revelation in the paper is the undetected anomalies, not the effects. The effects are QED. The anomalies are the explanation. Now they have to figure out how to predict them so they can plan for them.
” Unforeseen, short-term increases in sea level caused by strong winds, pressure changes and fluctuating ocean currents can cause more damage to beaches on the East Coast over the course of a year than a powerful hurricane making landfall, according to a new study. “
Perhaps that is true. However, can they show that these “unforeseen, short-term increases in sea level” have been anything unusual over the period of the study or that this phenomenon is anything unusual?
Wonder if anyone has old National Geographics and can find the article back in the 1970’s (if I recall correctly) that warned that the NC barrier islands would mostly be gone in 30 years?
They mention Onslow Beach, NC:
Check out the Wikipedia article on Onslow Beach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onslow_Beach
Wonder if all those Marine Corps vehicles have any effect?
Steve Oregon says:
August 12, 2014 at 10:56 pm
All-purpose Climate Worry Science Form 10-10
The new research suggests that these ____________ anomalies could be more of a threat to ____________ than previously thought, and could become higher and more frequent as a result of climate change.
Sorry Steve. I saw you post after I added my snark.