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.
I did see a small beach in Dominican Rep. that got scoured out by Hurricane Thomas a few years back, but the nearby beaches seemed fine. Indeed, it this was a problem, there would be a lot of buzz about it in the Caribbean. The only buzz I’ve heard is straws reaching the bottom of pina colada’s on the beaches
“can cause more damage to beaches on the East Coast over the course of a year than a powerful hurricane making landfall”
These people need some marketing training. They should say “more damage than 4 Hiroshima bombs.”
These would not happen to be the same beaches that are manicured and reshaped by heavy equipment, and augmented with many tons of new sand, each season and during the beach season as well, would they?
They figured out a way to say that normal weather is the result of climate change.
So, beaches have always been immutable? Sounds unnatural.
I watched tens of yards of beach disappear from Fire Island in five years. Back in the 1970s before the recent warming. Hideous land management caused entire sections of the beach to be destroyed. It used to take 10 seconds running at full tilt to reach the water. Takes about three now.
RE: “Larry Geiger says:
August 13, 2014 at 3:57 am
Sand moves.”
You said it all with two words.
The ocean has risen nearly 400 feet since the ice age. A lot of land on the Grand Banks was dry. Fishermen dredge up all sorts of interesting stuff, including the skulls of land-dwelling creatures.
What would be interesting is to live a midst is a time when the sea level was falling 400 feet. Likely you would notice little year to year, but old men would tell you, “I can remember…”
The changes in beaches and barrier islands after big hurricanes and nor’easters is amazing, and equally amazing is how swiftly people rebuild. I drove south of Myrtle Beach after Hurricane Hugo, and the damage was worse every mile you went further south. I recall one lone house standing midst pilings where all the other houses were smashed inland through other houses a block or two back from the sea. The reason that lone house survived was because the fellow paid extra to put it on pilings 14 feet tall rather than the normal 12. Now I think the entire area has been re-developed, with all the pilings 14 feet tall. (Murrill’s Inlet)
Even in the course of an ordinary year the beaches retreat in the winter and advance during the summer. One thing I highly recommend for people in the northeast USA is to go to their favorite beach around the first of March, and see how much sand is gone. (Dress warmly.) (A lot of sand shifts out to build a seasonal winter-sandbar that protects the beach from further erosion, and then washes back towards shore in the spring.) Because so much sand is gone, you may find the keel of a beached ship exposed, among other things.
When I was young, boys in Boston used to skip school after the first nor’easter of the fall, because a summer’s worth of loose change would be exposed on the beaches. (That was before metal detectors, when the dimes and quarters were made of real silver, buffed by the swirling sand, polished free of all tarnish and shining in the sun.)
On one beach I was walking during a very low tide, and came across a sort of shelf of peat extending along the shoreline. That peat had formed when there was a salt march where the beach was, and the beach’s dunes was some distance further east. Like Gary says, “Sand moves”.
@Caleb – When you were a young boy in Boston, Change was real money. As in you could use it to buy things without having to use a pocketful!
We use to collect pop bottles to redeem for the 3 cent deposit. Then buy ice cream with the 20-30 cents we earned.
King tides vs Atlantis?
Far greater than king tides or global warming is the impact of natural super volcanoes. e.g., the “Atlantis” eruption 3600 years ago at Santorini
“Atlantis” Eruption Twice as Big as Previously Believed, Study Suggests
Thatk you, David, for adding tsunamis to the mix. They are foreseeable, but unpredictable, and far more devastating than any of the other listed causes. For the enlightenment of the self-centered Metro-ineffectuals who consider NYC (and the US East Coast) the most important part of the world, there is an island in the Atlantic (La Palma) with a volcano (Cumbre Vieja) standing poised to erupt, possibly unleashing a tsunami that estimates have as up to 49 m high by the time it reaches the American east coast – from Portland ME to Venezuela.
Check out these maps From – A New Mapp of Carolina ’1698′ – http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/ncmaps&CISOPTR=115&CISOBOX=1&REC=5
And – An Accurate Map of North and South Carolina With Their Indian Frontiers, Shewing in a distinct manner all the Mountains, Rivers, Swamps, Marshes, Bays, Creeks, Harbours, Sandbanks and Soundings on the Coasts, ’1775′ – http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/ncmaps&CISOPTR=125&CISOBOX=1&REC=15
Both from NC Map
Compare with google maps – with Abermarle Sound, NC
With 300 years you can still see the same features.
The worst hurricanes…via XKCD
http://xkcd.com/1407/
Lots of dates back to the start of the 20th century, before the CO2 scare !
DDMore – Thanks for the link to the 1775 map of SC. I’m learning a lot from studying it.
How about conflating sea level, heat, PDO and ENSO all in a few paragraphs of gloriously polished spin? Trenberth at his best:
http://norwegian.wunderground.com/news/no-hiatus-pause-global-warming-climate-change-heres-why-20140109
Every individual statement is true but is implicitly loading the next statement with spurious significance. It’s all about sequencing your statements so that, by implication, they are linked when in fact they are not. When called out, you can always jump behind that fig leaf and say you didn’t explicitly make those links- only the reader did. Impressive stuff.
“Rhoda R says:
August 12, 2014 at 10:51 pm
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.”
The Weather Channel gave a rather confused explanation of the “Goldilocks and the Three Planets” phenomenon.
This is the complete carbon cycle: rainwater removes CO2 from the atmosphere and puts it in the crust, and volcanic action releases CO2 from the crust and puts it back in the atmosphere. When the earth warms up, there is presumably more rain, washing CO2 out of the atmosphere. When the earth cools down, there is presumably less rain, and CO2 from volcanoes and other plate tectonic acton continues to build up- warming the earth . This effect doesn’t work on Venus because the oceans there have disappeard, so rainfall cannot wash CO2 out of the atmosphere and cool it off. On Mars, plate tectonics have stopped, so no CO2 is released into the atmosphere to warm it up again.
I suppose there is also the factor that more rain implies more clouds, reflecting away more sunlight, less rain leads to less clouds, and more sunlight absorbed by the surface.
I suspect that the H20 effect vastly outweighs the CO2 effect in the “Goldilocks” phenomenon.
Once traveling has been sufficiently hampered by hiking energy prices, a biting air travel regulator http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/12/southampton-university-we-need-a-air-travel-regulator-with-teeth/ etc, who cares really? The minority with millions tied up in a seafront villa will continue to bathe in their heated swimming pools.
This posting is accurate in that the storm Sandy caused so much damage because the NJ coast was already under an extreme, lingering NE Atlantic storm for several days before Sandy arrived and much of the coast was already in flooding conditions. Although Sandy was not at hurricane force, the confluence of Sandy and the NE storm resulted in abnormal flooding along the coast. The media ignores this fact. NE storms themselves can cause extreme flooding.
Interesting.
Indeed – ‘Sand moves’ – Thank you to
Larry Geiger (who) says:
August 13, 2014 at 3:57 am
Sand moves.
Absolutely.
Well, having spend some of a lengthy maritime career much in and around the North Sea (Mer du Nord; Nordzee), NW Europe, I can affirm that that is true of sand on beaches, on barrier islands – and also in the undersea dunes that we poor bum-boaties call sand waves.
They march up and down the southern North Sea [perhaps further North, too, but I traded mostly in the south, and the great Storegga Slide [See – e.g. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide ] may give some of the variation, I gather].
Storms and tides and currents, and weather generally are surely amongst their influences.
In the south, this can mean depths varying by several metres over a year at a particular position. And this has been a feature of the area since the early Seventies (at least, that was when I first made my living on the ‘foaming billow’).
I would be much more than mildly astonished [flipping flyingly flabbergasted fails to feel faintly funicularly feasible] if the sea floor had, after aeons of stasis, started this necessarily (truly) unprecedented behaviour just a few months before I went to sea!
[Litotes, good folk; not /Sarc]
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Building high rises along the beaches do more damage than anything natural. These high rises change onshore wind patterns causing side drifting waters that scour the sand away from the beaches. Beaches in areas without these high rise buildings, such as Manasota Key Beach, constantly lose sand which is in turn replaced by wave action. I have lived near by for 12 years and frequent this beach often. I have seen lots of erosion after a bad storm only to have it come back to normal within a couple of weeks. Being Shark Week I can also say I have never seen a shark there either.