Guest essay by Eric Worrall
NASA’s Gavin Schmidt has provided some bizarre advice, for people building homes on the sea front, which might not be “sea level rise smart”.
According to the Vancouver Sun interview with Gavin;
Q: What is the future for waterfront cities like Vancouver?
A: You are going to have to put up with rising sea levels; they are not going to go down. But there’s a huge difference between a foot or two over 100 years and a metre or two metres. There’s a lot of waterfront development going on but is it sea-level-rise smart? I don’t know that it is. So don’t put stuff in the basement, have all your electrical equipment on the second floor or on the roof.
Just how rapidly is Gavin expecting that sea level rise to arrive? Even a metre or two per century, is not the same as the huge fictional tidal surge, in the blockbuster movie “The Day After Tomorrow“.
Lets forget for a moment, that predictions of accelerated sea level rise are not supported by observations, and consider the consequences of Gavin’s hypothetical 2m rise / century.
2 metres per century, is 20 centimetres per decade, or 2 centimetres per year.
You don’t go on permanent flood alert to defeat a 2cm per annum rise in sea level, you raise the floor a little.
Even assuming Gavin Schmidt’s rather wild 2m scenario, your property could be protected by lifting the floor 40cm (1ft 4 inches) every 2 decades. Obviously at some point, lifting the floor might become an engineering challenge – but even two lifts would preserve the viability of the property for 40 years.
Raising the floor of a house is a substantial renovation, but the technology used for raising the floor level of a house, is similar to the technology used for addressing ground subsidence – a relatively common problem.
If the sea level rise remains at a much more realistic 1ft / century, one of the owners of a near sea level property *might* have to lift the floor once.
The floor lift option does not even consider other possibilities, such as improved sea defences, or flood control pumping stations. The Dutch have been combating the sea for centuries. Much of Holland is reclaimed coastal peat bogs. Even with medieval technology, the Dutch defeated the sea.
In Venice, in Italy, people didn’t give up their houses, even when they sunk into the water. Instead they created one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Schmidt dont want homes built along the ocean
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Suzuki has a waterfront house in Vancouver worth over 8 million dollars, as well as another waterfront house on nearby Quadra Island worth over 1 million. Maybe he knows something about sea level rise that he isn’t telling us?
http://www.ottawasun.com/2013/10/10/david-suzuki-a-man-of-property
No, I think Suzuki knows nothing.
Literally nothing:
Or how about the waterfront house recently built in Vancouver?
http://bc.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.2170666.1420242634!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg
Lululemon founder’s $57.6M mansion is B.C.’s most expensive home
A waterfront property on Vancouver’s Point Grey Road is worth an eye-popping $57-million, according to B.C. Assessment. Jan. 2, 2015.
is that a moose on the roof? keeping his hooves high and dry
No, but I can see a camel toe from here.
Max, sometimes you need to see a hoof so close it hits you in the jaw.
Come on Pamela, your violent side is starting to show through. (And after I stood up for you?)
The Lululemon see-through-yoga-pants story was seen nationally as very amusing. The small town in which I live hosts an annual yoga festival that is very popular, and Lululemon jokes were cracked (as it were) by everyone, including — now hang on to your high elephant — women.
As my website’s byline says, “Lighten Up!”
In Canada, we refer to it as a “Moose knuckle”. 8^D
The moose is a nice touch. Is it made out of glass, or has the winter air afforded such a sculpture in ice. I think the neighbors across the street love thir new view as well.
Based on Gavin’s pre-science based ocean level beliefs and sophomoric alarm mongering, the following two premises are in need of testing and analysis.
Which of these two premises more likely to be valid?
Premise #1 – Gavin Schmidt’s public credibility is related to the public trust in NASA’s GISS (which is affiliated with Columbia University) as Dr. Mehmet Oz’s (Surgery Department Vice Chairman at Columbia University Medical School) public credibility is related to the public trust in Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Premise #2 – Gavin Schmidt’s public credibility is related to the public trust in NASA’s GISS as Rajendra Pachauri’s pubic credibility was related to the public trust in the IPCC.
John
If San Francisco could deal with a city sinking two inches a year back in 1898, I don’t think there will be much of a problem.
http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hgoe26.htm
Sea walls people, we need sea walls! and JOBS we need jobs! so lets hire everybody to fill biodegradable sand bags out of that environmentally friendly concrete reported on here a couple of days ago and place them to protect all our lowest civilization. We could have the villagers catch, cook and serve our new spiffy workforce those darn rabbits!!!
I want oceans of OPM to study sea water sequestration (SWS).
Note that when the Dutch wanted to drain the Schiphol Polder, within which the international airport is built, they used the Cruquius steam engine (mostly built in England). So despite the Dutch command of wind power, previous generations knew that only steam power had sufficient energy for the job. Why are our scientists and politicians going backwards, instead of forwards?
I’m soliciting research funds for a project to develop a unique new three dimensional computer model that will use a novel method that I predict will robustly challenge the predicted rates of sea level rise.
On April 14, at this website (WUWT), there was a posting concerning diners that will have to eliminate that old English staple of fish and chips due to declining fish stocks. I’ll quote from the report which was copied here:
‘From Fish and Chips to Just Chips: Some of the most traditional and cherished staples of the English diet may become scarce as a result of climate change, a new study finds. As North Sea waters continue to warm, haddock, the eponymous fish in “fish and chips,” is expected to decline, as well as plaice and lemon sole. Already, the North Sea has warmed four times faster than the global average over the past 40 years.’
What I seek to do is gather samples of haddock, plaice, and lemon sole; and measure representative fish body volumes down to 0.0000000000000000000001 milliliter accuracies – something that has never been attempted before. I will utilize special models to compensate for volume changes due to thermal expansion resulting from temperature differentials as little as 0.00000000000000000000001 degree Centigrade. I will also utilize special models (again) to compensate for pressure differentials the fish’s bodies are subjected to at different depths. Along with my associates (who I hope will be young tan college coeds that the sensible person in me should really recognize are not going to have one iota of interest in a wannabe youthful, but nevertheless aging old man that I am) I hope to count up every single haddock, plaice, and lemon sole in the sea.
Armed with this information I will, using super super super duper whooper computers, determine the amount of sea water displaced by all these fish, and how the absence of these fish (due to global warming) will actually lower sea levels.
I will then invite Gavin Schmidt out for a plate of fish and chips. (His treat of course because I won’t have any money because I don’t have a prayer of getting any research grants for the foregoing project even though it’s really not all that dissimilar from a lot of the AGW studies past and present.)
OK, just do not forget to mind your significant figures in your reported results, like all the other climate studies do…oh, wait…nevermind.
Vancouver’s maximum tidal range is about 15 feet in a single day. And Gavin would have us worry about a fraction of a millimeter change per year?
Is Gavin looking to drive down waterfront prices in Vancouver, to take advantage of the falling loonie to snap up some deals?
And so castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually.
Here is an awesome Hendrix remake …
The first time I saw him was at the Old Fillmore on Fillmore and Geary St. He was 3rd billing that night. It was his first performance at the Fillmore. I was going to say in 1966, but looking it up it was June 20 1967. I was 17 and worked at the Fillmore at the time. So I saw him 3 nights in a row.
I used to have a complete set of the posters back then, until my dad threw them away. They are worth some nice money now.
Gavin:
All those things are very positive and the B.C. carbon tax is one of the most progressive and far-reaching ideas — even though in practice it hasn’t made a huge difference yet.
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How wrong you are. Gasoline sales are off 15% in Vancouver.
Vancouver is less than 30 miles from the US border. Every week tens of thousands of Canadians cross the border to fill up with cheap Yankee gas. So, the carbon tax has has a huge effect on gasoline sales in Vancouver. Tax revenues are well down from expected. To the point where the government is looking for ways to raise provincial sales taxes for Vancouver.
http://oi57.tinypic.com/24v1uuo.jpg
The Law of Unintentional Consequences rules supreme.
So let’s say 20,000 Canadians are driving about 60 miles to the US and back every week, at about 30 mpg makes 40,000 gallons a week burned for nothing. The Americans sell this gas so one less reason for them to raise taxes. Even the Canadian civil “servants” who pushed this can’t be happy about it when driving to US gas stations themselves. Why are they called “servants” anyway? How many Canadian gas station owners are getting out of business due to this brilliant move? Undisclosed information, i suppose. People will never find out the damages incurred.
Not just Canadian gas stations, but probably many Canadian retailers as well. I’m betting that those Canadians making those trips to the States to buy gas aren’t just turning around and heading back. They are also staying to shop and buy things to take back with them. So it’s an even bigger drain on the local economy.
A pivotal moment in the whole climate donnybrook to me, was when Schmidt got up and left the set instead of taking on Dr. Spencer (whom I do not completely agree with on many things, which is as it should be).
It told me that Schmidt didn’t have the “toolbox” to discuss this issue with a peer, and more importantly, Schmidt revealed that Schmidt knew this as well.
yeah John Stossel. a highly uneducated ignorant [snip]. From what i remember from debates or sports is that when you forfeit, you lose.
So when Gavin Schmidt walked off stage rather than debate, he lost?
Yeah, I agree.
And Stoessel wasn’t the debater. But nice try at misdirection.
I was being sarcastical. John Stossel is a skeptic and I agree with him.
Sorry, in that case. That’s why a “/sarc” tag helps.
I wonder if Gav is confusing a foot or two and a metre or two in his models. Wasn’t the Mars orbiter lost because one NASA team was using imperial units and the other metric?
Could explain everything about this farce
As a resident of Bellingham, Washington, the destination of many of those Canadian gas purchasers, I can tell you how pleasant it is to suffer the effects of an eighty-cent loony, at least in the short term. Yesterday, I drove right up to the pump at Costco to buy some much-cheaper-then-last-year gas. Of course, the flip side of the coin is that with sales tax revenues from those hordes of Canadian shoppers down, local governments will have less to spend.
Of more concern than sea level rise to the residents of Vancouver might be the potential collapse of one of the greatest real estate bubbles in the world.
Enjoy the ride, guys.
Dave:
I’m still saving $30 – $40 in gas plus the difference in cheese, milk etc. One of these days, the dorks at customs will start letting bring eggs and chicken back again. In addition, I have the complete joy of knowing I’m not paying the stupid carbon tax. Now they are trying to put another 0.5 cent sales tax on to support mass transit. Idjiots.
BTW, I love your town. If I could live there and keep my job here, I’d do it in a flash. (No, I haven’t run that by my wife:)
Gavin must live in a cave, does he honestly think for a second there are not strict planning controls around floor levels in coastal areas and that engineers are not thinking about sea level rise???
Seriously? In the UK for example, houses MUST be built above the 1 in 200 yr tide level plus climate change (say 0.5m) plus a further amount of freeboard (typically 300-600mm depending on uncertainty). That applies to all new houses, so Gavin, you can sleep at night, the mitigation has been going on for years as no one ever seriously thought a carbon tax was going to stop the sea rising!
I studied engineering at the University of British Columbia around 50 years ago. At that time we dis a little field trip to look at geology of the area.
One of the things we learned was that the whole of the “North Shore” (West Vancouver and North Vancouver) are situated on a slip plane. With a bunch of rainfall combined with a good shaker, we were told that there is a good chance that much of the North Shore could end up in English Bay and Burrard Inlet. Same for that lump of clay that Simon Fraser University sits on. It is also slowly slipping into Burrard Inlet – and having designed a few things along the Barnett Highway between Burrard Inlet and Simon Fraser and a few other areas, I can attest to the “stability” of this area. A good shaker is going to sink a lot of places from Bellingham to Vancouver.
A small sea level in a place where sea level moves 5 metres between high and low is of minor concern Actually subsidence of the protective dykes along the Fraser and surrounding Richmond is much more of an issue that requires regular maintenance.
I’ll be long dead before sea level is a rise … but if a good shaker comes along there will be a lot of residential damage. (Industrial and municipal infrastructure has had significant earthquake resistance.)
Oh darn proof reading. “did a field trip”; “A small sea level rise in a place…”;
“I’ll be long dead before sea level rise is a problem… but if”
Gavin Schmidt, idiot savant, forgot to check with Al Gore on their waterfront property policy before he opened his mouth. Al might not like it if his new mansion drops in value…
I work in local government in the Vancouver area. I can tell you that our gullible provincial government buys into the climate change/sea level rise meme.
At the cost of billions of dollars they’re requiring local governments to design for 1m sea level rise in the next 100 years.
According to Bastiat’s Broken Window theorem that could make you the wealthiest people in the world.
I do not know if this is a factor in his scary announcements , but he has just published an article (with 35 co-authors!) entitled :
Future climate change under RCP emission scenarios with GISS ModelE2
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2014MS000403/full
It estimates max thermosteric ( no sea ice melt contribution ) sea level rises for 2300 of:
1.2-1.3m under RCP8.5 scenario
0.22-0.33m under RCP2.6 (controlled CO2 emission).
( compared to 1995-2006 mean)
Prediction are also made about the stopping of the NAO under RCP8.5 .
I cannot judge the validity of the modelling , but it seems some of the predictions in this possibly important paper are open to experimental checking already.
Anyway see what you think.
Okay I don’t have enough information to assess how real is the threat but if there is a good reason to expect that sea will be rising substantially in Vancouver (which might have nothing to do with global climate or temperature) in upcoming 100-200 years, then I would say Gavin’s recommendation is not completely wrong.
Quite opposite, I believe that moving your floors 20 centimeters up every 10 years is a stupid idea as it threatens stability of the house. Do what generations were doing before, just ‘demote’ your ground floor to (eventually flooded/filled) basement and continue living one floor higher, given your house will last that long. Venice is beautiful town but there was no electricity or other infrastructure that might suffer by getting under water when the town was founded. It’s much easier to give up a floor and move your stuff one floor up than if you have to rebuild parts of the house to continue functioning.
In the city where I live there are 500 years old houses with three levels of basements which used to be normal living floors but as material deposited during river floods piled up in streets they gradually ‘sunk’ under the ground.
Being ready for future changes and challenges regardless whether they are natural or human caused is a good plan. That’s what we should be doing rather than building expensive and inefficient replacements for our energy sources.
There is much more likely that Vancouver will be hit with “the big one” in 200 years than to see a 2 meter rise in sea level.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.htm?stnid=822-071
if there is a good reason to expect that sea will be rising substantially in Vancouver
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Less than 2 inches in the past 100 years, with no acceleration.
Kasuha,
Sir, it sounds like the houses you’re talking about were built out of stone.
I do not know about construction methods in Vancouver, but very few seaside houses in the US are built out of materials or with the construction methods that would allow you to just keep piling on additional floors.
Particularly with new construction, in the US houses are generally wood frame construction, sometimes with cement block elements, sometimes was stucco on the cement block, or stucco on plywood.
Nowadays, if stone is used, it is typically just a thin facade.
I grew up in a place with very old houses, and that the house I grew up in was over a hundred years old, and still in the condition that it was built. and their areas of the city with churches and houses hundreds of years old.
But when I watch how they build houses now a days, it doesn’t seem to me they’re going to last for hundreds of years or even a hundred years… I think they’re built to last 50 years tops.
All this is interesting, but the fact remains that Vancouver’s tide gauge shows a 2 millimeter rise in 102 years (1911-2013). http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.annual.data/175.rlrdata
In fact, tide gauge records for the entire west coast of North America show sea level decline since 1997, and sea level should be a decent proxy for temperature. Sea level has risen since the end of the Little Ice Age roughly 300 years ago, but overall has fallen since the end of the Holocene Climatic Optimum 6,000 years ago, with fluctuations around the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval warm periods, but nothing approaching its peak 6,000 years ago. Sea level was even higher during the Eemian interglacial 125,000 years ago, and so were global temperatures higher than any during the Holocene interglacial. Again, this demonstrates the efficacy of sea level as a proxy for temperature. It takes a lot of warming to melt a significant amount of ice, particularly since most of it is at an altitude where it is never above freezing.
MajorMike, I agree that large scale melting during a short framework of time is unlikely, that there is no evidence of it occurring, and that most remaining ice is in locations that are far below freezing, all the time.
But since this obvious fact seems destined to be forever denied by warmistas, pointing out other flaws in the logic of their stated goals seems worth doing.
By denying plainly obvious facts, the public perception of their arguments is shifting. Atmospheric physics is incomprehensible to many people, but the longevity of a modern home seems likely to be less so, as is the evidence for relatively stable sea levels.
No one can look at a photograph of a beach from 50 or 100 years ago and argue that it is not proof of where the sea was back then.
Well you can get hysterical if you forgot to bring tissues on a camping trip. I’m pretty sure you and many future generations will be ok though. This is not about natural climate change. This is about propaganda tactics for a political ruse. There is a saying in Central America when the clouds get dark and ominous in the afternoon. Es azúcar
Didnt have the time to read all the comments, I agree with the article to an extent. The only thing that NEEDS correcting is the following Statement: “In Venice, in Italy, people didn’t give up their houses, even when they sunk into the water. Instead they created one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” Venice has been built on stumps sunk in the mud, Venice was never on firm ground.
Anyone who elevates model outputs over measured data is not a scientist, full stop.
I’ve always sort of felt that people live up (or down) to their names. Perhaps it’s some sort of weird parental intuition kind of thing where they can look at their newborn and somehow know what that newborn will grow up to be all about.
For instance, I was born a Catholic (thankfully there’s no death penalty for apostasy in the Catholic Church), and my parents thought I was going to be a great thinker so they named me Tom after the great Catholic intellect, Saint Thomas Aquinas. And, I am pleased to say (and as any reader of my comments simply cannot deny), my parents were spot on in their assessment.
Um, there’s always a flaw in every theory, however. Thomas Aquinas claimed to have witnessed people levitating. I can safely say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody levitating.
Where am I going with this? Well, I looked up the name Gavin in Wikipedia. And here’s what they have to say: ‘Meaning White Hawk Gavin is a male given name. It is the late medieval form of the name Gawain, which in turn is believed to have originated from the Welsh name Gwalchgwn, meaning “White Hawk.” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an epic poem connected with King Arthur’s Round Table.’
Now, that’s a pretty hard act to follow (even harder than to find people who are levitating). More importantly, however, King Arthur is connected to … ready? … The Crusades! So an agency, NASA, that has a mandate for Muslim outreach as one of its important space missions has an employee who has a connection with King Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin, and …the Crusades.
But I’ll make a promise. If Gavin can levitate in front of me (something we may actually have to learn if sea levels rise), I promise to tell him that King Arthur is just a legend so he couldn’t have been involved in the Crusades.
And, maybe we can talk about other things that are just legends.
🙂 Great Gaelic name….as my son will attest.
Great story!
I have one regarding my naming.
When I was born, I was given the name Blaise (After the famous mathematician and philosopher). It was on the certificate and everything. But my paternal grandma (Irish Catholic) had an absolute fit when she heard what I was named, and so my parents relented and they renamed me…Nicholas.
True story.
[And how did your Polish ancestors feel about their new names sake: Nicholas Copernicus? .mod]
“And how did your Polish ancestors feel about their new names sake: Nicholas Copernicus?”
Not sure, I never heard that part of the story.
But I suppose maybe the “One take back per child” rule was in effect at that point, although they may have been thrilled.
As for Blaise, my mom is partly French, and my dad had been a Trappist monk before he met her and left the monastery. Dad always was a betting man.