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.
Gavin Schmidt never fails to disappoint.
Knowing that hydraulic fractures less than 2500 feet in depth tend to be horizontal, the sea level rise / subsidence problem can be cured by lifting the ground with hydraulic fracturing using concrete, gravel, or anything that can be pumped and used as a permanent propant.
This idea should make the day for a select few. It actually is not a new idea and has been used in the past such as the tower of Pisa.
So, we can grind up Californ-i-a and use it as grout to shore up Florida!
(Sorry Max)
Well I suspect Schmidt left high school and went to university and then he left university and got a government job. He’s never done anything remotely related to the real world in his life, so he wouldn’t be the first guy I would go to for home building advice, to be honest.
SCHMIDT is a traitor of humanity. Period
But no doubt a well paid traitor to humanity….and it continues.
Vancouver’s tide gauge was installed in 1911 and sea level then was measured at 7056mm. In 2013 it had surged to 7058mm, a leap of 2mm, or 0.08inches in 112 years. At that rate it will take over 500 centuries (50,000 years) for Vancouver sea level to rise one meter. The high point for Vancouver’s sea level was in 1983 at 7195mm, so it’s fallen 137mm (over five inches) in the past 30 years. Gavin should go to this link before he distributes his next round of sea level rise advice. http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.annual.data/175.rlrdata
De Cruquius is one of the three steam powered Dutch pumping stations that drained the Haarlemmermeer in the Netherlands in the 19th century.
Right and before these magnificent steam engines people relied on wind mills to do the job.
For the same reasons why wind power today is not a good option the clever Dutch of those day’s understood the principle for 24/7 continuous pumping capacity. Wonder where all those clever people have gone.
All we see today are the most stupid elements in society wrecking our civilization with their [trimmed] propaganda. They’re freaking Apparatchiks AKA, Green Nazi’s.
Watch your back.
[Please do not insult BS on this site by comparing it to climastrologists’ propaganda. BS has done its purpose; been processed, separated and served up its nutrition; and been productively expelled to be recycled later. Climastrologist propaganda will only promulgate itself to infinity and beyond. .mod]
I´ve been waiting for that sea level rise for some time now, it´s getting quite expensive nowadays keeping the water approximately where I want it! Having a summerhouse in the western archipelago in Finland(Where I truly enjoy life), I have had to buy a small excavator 2 years ago and a dredger this winter. This only for keeping some kind of a path for my boat with a 20 hp engine and some kind of flow of water around the small isle the summerhouse sits on. If i`d been one of the clueless and gullible ones that Gavin targets, i would have just sat back, drowning a couple of beers and enjoyed life. Now, thanks to WUWT, I have to think about the future for my family… All is not bad though, sitting in a excavator, working, drowning a few beers, in the summer sun…. Not bad!
Why is it that down through history so many of these predictions of catastrophes to come such as future catastrophic sea level rises, future searing temperatures from burning coal, future extinctions of everything except global warmers and greens are almost exclusively the prerogative of intelligent idiots?
Good question, that.
I seem to recall reading that language was invented when a guy needed a way to call into the kitchen “Honey, can you get me a beer while you are up?”
The next spoken words after that were “It’s the end of the world!”
Been going back and forth like that ever since.
A timely reflection on a ‘Heretic’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/john-harrisons-longitude-clock-sets-new-record–300-years-on-10187304.html
These fantastic sea level rise stories got started with Al Gore whose movie predicted that a twenty foot sea level rise would simply inundate the state of Florida. Since he is not a scientist the source of it must be James Hansen, his scientific adviser. It worked and he got a Nobel Prize for this pseudo-scientific fantasy. I went to the scientific literature and found that the sea level rise for the last 80 years before 2008 had been at the rate of 2.46 millimeters per year, or a little under ten inches and not 20 feet per century. Clearly anything that has been stable this long is not about to change anytime soon. I sent papers off to both Nature and to Science and was turned down by both, without even bothering with peer review. Nature now publicly admits that they do this with 40 percent of the papers submitted to them. No wonder you can’t get a paper in that is scientifically correct but questions the received wisdom they get from the global warming corporation.
It is just me, or have our resident trolls given up without a fight on this discussion?
Today is the first sliver of the New Moon. It is a time for rest and contemplation in the troll community.
So?
/sarc
Here is a graph of Vancouver, B.C. sea level rise:
It shows a best fit line from 1973 to 2013 annual data of 0.7 mm/year. The sea level in 2013 was actually lower than in 1973. Data from here
As I commented earlier, Vancouver’s sea level record began in 1911 at 7056mm, and in 2013 reached 7058mm, an increase of 2mm in 102 years, which gives a rate of just under 2mm per century. At that rate, it would take 500 centuries to increase Vancouver’s sea level one meter. The sea level in 2013 was an inch lower than in 1913, causing me to wonder what all the sea level excitement in Vancouver is about? (or aboot, as Canadians might say). Can’t they read their own tide gauge record?
We Californians are as bad or worse. San Francisco’s tide gauge was installed in 1855, and is the longest sea level record in the Western Hemisphere, yet goes unnoticed by California natural climate change deniers. It shows that San Francisco’s sea level rose over 4 inches from 1855 to 1941, and fell one-third of and inch from 1941 to 2013. i’ll type slowly so the alarmists can understand – sea level at San Francisco rose steadily as the Earth warmed following the end of the Little Ice Age, but has been level since 1941 while atmospheric CO2 increased steadily as warming oceans outgassed CO2. While San Francisco’s sea level has fallen dramatically since 1997 to its 1941 level, California government is working against an expected rise of five feet by 2050.
They must smoke a lot of our water-guzzling number one crop before they make their pronouncements, and Californians must do the same to believe such unsupported alarmism. Last year the San Francisco Chronicle did a news story about their historical tide gauge, yet somehow the reporter never got around to asking what its record showed.
2m a century is 20mm per year, the peak rate 15-20K years ago. Back then there was a million cubic km of ice sheet melting. Does Gavin expect all of Antarctica to melt?
Apparently, yes. And that’s the assumption in IPCCs worst, worst, worst case model RP 8.5 that has 1.5 to 6.6 m rise by year 2500.
He must, and in only 100 years. He needs to take a first year course on thermal physics.
I have a very simple mitigation plan to keep sea level from rising: Nuclear reactors on the coast of Antarctica powering huge pumps that pump water to the interior where, at 70 degrees below 0 centigrade average temperature, it will freeze and stay there for a very long time.
* If needed, which I doubt.
The Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level website has some great tools for checking out your local sea level and that of others such as Gavin’s. It takes its data from tide gauges. I don’t know if there is any tectonic correction applied. You will have to look for yourself.
I’ve checked the rate of rise for NZ. For the period 1900 – 2010, it was about 1.7mm per year on average.
(17mm or about 0.67 inches per decade. Wow. Be scared, be very scared. ) For the period 1955 – 2010 it was between 0.5 and 1.0 mm per year. So are sea level rises actually going backwards? Seems so for the Sappersiffick. (say it quickly with an NZ accent … )
Data is taken from the Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch tidal gauges.
Nice link, thanks for sharing.
I read a few of Pacific Institute’s publications recently, and was amazed by the projected sea level rise until I noticed that it was calculated using IPCC’s atmospheric temperature increase as a basis for thermal expansion. This is a very useful political tool, although I don’t know if it’s commonly used, but I’m keeping my eyes peeled for additional instances.
So are NASA worried about being flooded out and looking to relocate further inland and move out of Cape Canaveral.
Prime Florida Beech Front property .Lex Luther and the other greedy property sharks looking on with interest and soon swarm in putting up plenty of plush hotels ,tourist timeshares and retirement Condos nice somewhere for Gavin.
Pharrell Williams has an uber sick Gribb in Miami
So question does Gavin Schmit live on the coast?.How much is his pad worth?
average joe –
A lot can happen in 100 yrs.
Look at the last 100 yrs. Odds are that over the next 100 yrs there will be far more interesting things to worry about than climate or sea level.
One things for sure – I
won’t be here to worry about it!
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AJ – You won’t be here, Angela Merkel, Putin, Thatcher, Lagarde –
Pathet Lao won’t be here.
khmer rouge, bombed into live in the 70’s, won’t be here – lasted less than 10 years.
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but their very descendants, the /red/greens thrive 50 yrs on leading us into a new stone age.
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Hans