From the “not a verifiable forecast” department, and the “auxiliary department of funding acquisition worry” comes this headline from USGS today. Some other 100 year headlines follow.
Study Shows Sea Level Rise to Threaten West Coast Tidal Wetlands Over the Next 100 Years
CORVALLIS, Oregon – The U.S. Geological Survey and Oregon State University released a report this week examining Pacific Northwest tidal wetland vulnerability to sea level rise. Scientists found that, while vulnerability varies from marsh to marsh, most wetlands would likely be resilient to rising sea levels over the next 50-70 years. Beyond that time, however, most wetlands might convert to intertidal mudflats as sea level rise outpaces the capacity of tidal marshes to adapt.
“This study provides critical scientific findings to help natural resource managers develop and implement conservation and adaptation actions as the coastal areas of Oregon and Washington prepare for rising sea levels,” said the Department of the Interior’s Northwest Climate Science Center director, Gustavo Bisbal. “Delivering robust science with practical management application is of focal significance to our science program.”
Coastal wetlands provide economic and recreational benefits to local communities by creating critical habitat for important local fisheries. They also support a wealth of ecosystem services such as water purification and flood protection. Until now, the vulnerability of these critical habitats to rising sea levels had been poorly understood, leaving resource managers with little information for coastal adaptation planning or strategies.
“This information is timely and at the scale needed to help coastal resource managers plan for climate change,” said USGS project lead, Karen Thorne. “One clear result is that wetlands are more vulnerable to sea level rise in areas with higher human impacts to the local ecosystems.”
The research aims to inform tidal marsh management of vulnerabilities along Washington and Oregon coasts and is part of a larger effort to examine tidal marshes from Washington down to the border with Mexico. Scientists took a thorough snapshot of current conditions at nine tidal marshes, measuring elevation and current range of low and high tides, and mapping plant life and current and historic rates of sedimentation. The group then used models of sea level rise to calculate vulnerability for each marsh, testing whether vulnerability varies from north to south or among wetlands. Two coastal National Wildlife Refuges, Grays Harbor and Willapa Bay in Washington, appear to have the most resilience, persisting as low marsh for at least the next 100 years. But sea level rise will eventually outpace marsh growth and drown most high and mid-marsh habitats by 2110.
The study was a partnership of the USGS, Oregon State University and the University of California, Los Angeles. The work was supported by the DOI Northwest Climate Science Center, which is managed by the USGS National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center. The center is one of eight that provides scientific information to help natural resource managers respond effectively to climate change.
The final report is available online. Additional project information can be found at the USGS Western Ecological Research Center.
USGS provides science for a changing world. Visit USGS.gov, and follow us on Twitter @USGS and our other social media channels.
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Links and contacts within this release are valid at the time of publication.
- Over the next 100 years, we might see a devastating asteroid impact on Earth.
- Over the next 100 years, wind and solar power might replace every other electricity source.
- Over the next 100 years, only the elite will be able to afford electricity.
- Over the next 100 years, rising temperatures on Earth will make it uninhabitable, and we’ll have to flee to another planet.
- Over the next 100 years, the Arctic ice cap will be gone, oh wait, that was last year.
- Over the next 100 years, Michael Mann might become a hero to the world for warning us about global warming by beating it into our heads with a stick.
- Over the next 100 years, former IPCC chairman Rajenda Pacharuri’s record might be expunged to make it look like (in Mark Steyn’s words) he’s not a “sex fiend”.
- Over the next 100 years, we might finally get those flying cars we’ve been promised.
- Over the next 100 years, everyone reading this will likely be dead.
Coos Bay is one of the study locations in the report. Let’s look a the nearest “mean sea level trend’ from NOAA. Just around the corner is the Charleston, OR tide gauge. Here’s the linear plot:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9432780
A whopping
The mean sea level trend is 0.84 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.86 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1970 to 2014 which is equivalent to a change of 0.27 feet in 100 years.
That’s 3 1/4 in/100. Also easy to see that SL here, like most of the Western coast of the US – has not been rising for quite some time.
It’s been some 65 years since the birth of AGW (that’s the consensus view – right?)
If it’s not started by now . . . wake me up when something starts trending upwards.
I rest my case.
Talk about the noise exceeding the signal! There are three months of high tides that stand out above all the rest…none are in this millennium.
oregon and washington coastline are also rising due to uplifting tectonics of the subduction zone off shore. That masks some of the real SLR on the tidal record.
That’s a given. But SLR along the entire West Coast pales to most places. Still, when it breaks loose – the coastline will fall back like a rock.
“The mean sea level trend is 0.84 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.86 mm/yr…”
I would call this no measurable change.
I do like Anthony’s introduction paragraph on this one: superbly worded.
So, they start by saying …
“University released a report … ”
= grant money from the Great Global Warming Gravy Train.
“Scientists found that …”
= Gustavo Bisbal, aided by a permanent latrine orderly who may or not be a scientist.
“Delivering robust science …”
= misusing nice little phrases which sound impressive but are really smoke & mirrors.
“these critical habitats …” (there is no such thing: a habitat is what it is, or not).
” this information is poorly understood” (by whom ?).
“This information is timely and at the scale needed to help coastal resource managers plan for climate change, …”
= This DIS-information keeps us well funded but we don’t ever tell you that.
“Scientists took a thorough snapshot … ”
= both our students borrowed an old camera but they couldn’t really figure it out.
“The group then used models of sea level rise … ” (See Bruce’s comment at 10.37a.m.)
“The center is one of eight that provides scientific information to help … ”
= The center is one of eight that provides information like a twenty dollar whore, solely for the purpose of cashing in on very large amounts of your hard-earned tax-dollars and all with the approval of the EPA.. We’ll suck it dry as long as we can.
Given the active tectonic setting of coastal Oregon and Washington state, one would have thought that a bunch of geologists would be the first to appreciate the relative and tenuous nature of the term ‘sea level’ in this instance. They might have boned up on the coastal effects of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake and then consulted with colleagues in Indonesia and Japan on their thoughts on phenomena such as tsunami, before releasing such infantile claptrap for ridicule.
Meanwhile . . while we’re sweating bullets worrying about a couple inches of SL rise over the next 100 years . . something else is brewing that should be on the front burner. Something you can taste.
The Cascadia fault along the Pacific Northwest, is due to “really” past due. Estimates are in the range of 9.0, and note: this is a thrust fault. The resulting ( from recent Atlantic article) “tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.”
Will do wonders to the “coastal wetlands.” FEMA estimates that the destruction will extend all the way to Interstate 5.
But that’s not all. Just before that 100 foot wall of ocean arrives . .
A 2004 study conducted by the Geological Society of America analyzed the potential for land subsidence along the Cascadia subduction zone. It postulated that several towns and cities on the west coast of Vancouver Island, such as Tofino and Ucluelet, are at risk for a sudden, earthquake initiated, 1–2 m subsidence.
So . . first, you drop 3 to 6 feet, and face that wall of water coming in . . and then the big one comes at you.
Everything in the wetlands will be instantly destroyed – every plant uprooted. Every creature pushed miles inland. What wasn’t pulverized on the way in, will be shredded on the way out.
But somehow, the media is going to be more frightened about the 100 year prediction of a couple of inches of SL rise, than that which will destroy the region in only a few minutes time.
There will be a lot of mostly overweight dead people in that five story tsunami. Those things hurt!
Sea levels have been rising for the last 400 years. How is it that there are any wetlands left?
Well this obviously cannot be correct; controlled fusion power is only ten years away.. or was it fifteen? Or so we are told quite often.
😉
The real danger of sea level rise in the Pacific Northwest has nothing to do with melting ice caps and glaciers. It has everything to do with the Cascadia Subduction Zone under the Pacific Ocean.
The Juan de Fuca plate has been trying to subduct under the North American plate for 315 years, but has been locked. In that time the northwest coast has been uplifted under the stress. That fault ruptures on average of every 243 years. When Cascadia lets go, it releases a great quake. When that happens the continent falls back down below the current sea level by many feet. Then it gets washed over by a large tsunami.
Now that’s a real sea level rise problem!!
Yeah but the problem is that it is hard to blame people for plates and faults. A “Juan de Fuca plate Tax” is a hard sell as a tax and impossible as a consumption tax.
That is the beauty of CO2, it is an easy resource to apply a consumption tax to.
Global Warming should be more accurately called “Global Use Tax”.
Aries: your 100 year outlook. In 2115 Jupiter will be crossing the path of Uranus meaning you will feel very old and constipated. I think this is a good summery of the science
By then, they will have changed the name to Urectum.
Join the club,
My city Christchurch New Zealand has caught the bug real and truly.
See http://resources.ccc.govt.nz/files/policiesreportsstrategies/dpr-stage3-infosheet-naturalhazards.pdf
See P2. “What we are proposing” column 2 “ “FLFMA rules” “These areas are almost the same as FLFMAs (and already have FLFMA rules). The new rules assume a one metre sea level rise within the next 100 years.”
What are FLFMA rules? http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/10723747/Flood-plan-will-increase-cost-of-rebuild
Of course I cannot get my hands on a copy of the FLFMA rules.
The new rule seems to be consistent with
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter13_FINAL.pdf
13.3.3 Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets
“Observations indicate that the Greenland contribution to GMSL has very likely increased from 0.09 [–0.02 to 0.20] mm yr–1 for 1992–2001 to 0.59 [0.43 to 0.76] mm yr–1 for 2002–2011 (Section 4.4.3, Figure 13.4). The average rate of the Antarctica contribution to sea level rise likely increased from 0.08 [–0.10 to 0.27] mm yr–1 for 1992–2001 to 0.40 [0.20 to 0.61] mm yr–1 for 2002–2011 (Section 4.4.3). For the budget period 1993–2010, the combined contribution of the ice sheets is 0.60 [0.42 to 0.78] mm yr–1. For comparison, the AR4’s assessment for the period 1993–2003 was 0.21 ± 0.07 mm yr–1 for Greenland and 0.21 ± 0.35 mm yr–1 for Antarctica.
Typical NZ local government flexing its new found powers bequeathed to them by the previous socialist prime minister who is incidentally now No.3 in the United Nations.
Suggest everyone check their own local government rules, no matter where you may be.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
I think in 100 years the sceptics will be saying no global warming in 118 years. NOAA will be adding 3 degrees to the temperature readings and the EPA will be saying do not debate climate change.
The skeptics will all be dead. Their offspring will have been indoctrinated into the AGW cult by the education system. They will be living in a socialist Utopia with most of the population gainfully employed for the common good, cleaning solar panels and servicing windmills.
Of all the forecasts I’ve seen of climate, that would appear to be the most likely one to come true
Do you ever get the feeling these loons never go outside?
Would you?
It’s scary out there! And getting scarier by the minute, week, year, decade and century.
In many cases, it got scarier already and we didn’t even know it.
(A) Sea level rise? He seems to believe what Al the Gore proclaimed….
(B) That poor fellow is telling us to work against Mother Nature no matter what it costs. If Al the Gore were right, there is absolutely no reason to bother about wetlands or marshes, he’d then bother about the seabed. He never seemed to have heard that adaptation is the key to his grief and despair. It’s less troublesome and definitely cheaper.
Just noticed that it should read “…adaptation is the only key to his grief and despair.”
On such small things life turns. If the Yellowstone Caldera erupts, if the San Andreas does the inevitable and if fracking in Lancashire, England, causes the ‘Blackpool Tower’ to topple…no one envisaged the 2007 Tsunami. Life is nasty, brutish and short but the sight of latter day King Canute’s predicting the outcome of the halting of the tide seems totally spurious and has the effect of offering celebrity to people who just do not have the bearing to carry it. As Parliament was once referred to as “show business for ugly people”, so climate science is that of activists and the third age. People who want the world to survive by their efforts. Some task, but no lack of egos, no shortage of the messianic.
Today in Britain we hear the weather men on our public media service, the BBC, promising their audience that ‘tomorrow’ will be warmer and inevitably their faces and voices carry that world-weary expression of resignation (because Britain, outside the south east, has not been warm. You could not plan a barbecue here, as anyone watching the golf Open Championship on the television this year would be fully aware) while last night, in the Glens of Scotland, many places experienced frosts . Britain, a place whose northern tip is nearly on the same line of latitude as the southern tip of Greenland, has the most unpredictable weather imaginable. As a child, I was taught that the path of depressions affecting our weather in summer was over Iceland yet, in recent years, the path of summer depressions is more likely to be through the Scottish Midlands.
You have to bear in mind that the BBC has banned climate scepticism yet the forecasters it employs are all too well of aware of the prevailing conditions and make a charade of circumstances by proposing a warming future while pandering to their audience with the hope of warmth. Who are the deniers? We would be better off employing soothsayers as our entire world is taken up with portents and necromancy. This is the sceptical and inevitable reaction to science its promise of illumination and security unfulfilled. No matter what science may unveil the human condition prevails. We are innately gloomy and insecure, nothing we have made or envisaged has made us happier. In some respects, the less we knew the more control we had over our existences and the more thankful we were for our being. The ancient Egyptians put their trust in the living god, the Pharaoh, and were lost, Christians put their trust in a benign God and with the decline in faith have turned to predictors, necromancers, casters of runes, people looking into entrails who, through their divine power, hold the rest in thrall.
I remember the good old days when the fine people at the US Geological Survey used to go out into the field and study Geology.
Here’s another prediction:
Over the next 100 years, we will actually have a consistent and meaningful definition of sea level and global temperature.
Well that may take 200 years.
What rate of sea level rise they are calculating with?
Facts:
1. Global rate of sea level rise is less than 3 mm/year since the end of 1992 as observed by satellites (GIA adjusted rate is 3.28 mm/year, adjustment is 0.3 mm/year).
2. There is no acceleration in global sea level rise since the end of 1992 (observed deceleration is -83 mm/century squared).
3. In the US west coast observed rate of sea level rise is substantially less than global average (~0.5 mm/year), probably because of a rising coastline.
I wonder how 2 inches of sea level rise could drown most high and mid-marsh habitats.
Here is the most likely source.
I do not vouch for its accuracy and neither should governments vouch for its authority.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter13_FINAL.pdf
“13.3.3 Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets
“Observations indicate that the Greenland contribution to GMSL has very likely increased from 0.09 [–0.02 to 0.20] mm yr–1 for 1992–2001 to 0.59 [0.43 to 0.76] mm yr–1 for 2002–2011 (Section 4.4.3, Figure 13.4). The average rate of the Antarctica contribution to sea level rise likely increased from 0.08 [–0.10 to 0.27] mm yr–1 for 1992–2001 to 0.40 [0.20 to 0.61] mm yr–1 for 2002–2011 (Section 4.4.3). For the budget period 1993–2010, the combined contribution of the ice sheets is 0.60 [0.42 to 0.78] mm yr–1. For comparison, the AR4’s assessment for the period 1993–2003 was 0.21 ± 0.07 mm yr–1 for Greenland and 0.21 ± 0.35 mm yr–1 for Antarctica.”
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
I’m thinking of cryogenic preservation when I die. My instructions will be to revive me, not when they have found the cure for whatever bumped me off, but when flying cars are in nearly every garage.
*Sigh* I’ll probably never get thawed out.
[Snip. Fake email address. ~mod.]
Simple third or fourth grade experiment or it was when I went to school!
Put come ice cubes in a glass and mark it above the ice with some tape, next fill it with water up to the tape and watch until all the ice melts. Does the level of the water in the glass rise as the ice melts? Answer; it won’t it will stay at the same level after all the ice melted.
And what would you expect me to infer from your “simple third or fourth grade experiment?”
Try this one…put an ice cube on a dry plate. Measure the water depth. Wait for the ice cube to melt. Measure the water depth.
Sea level creeping up? Remind us when it’s as high as the first century AD…then we can put the ports where the Romans had them, way inland.
The relative sea level is falling along the west coast of Vancouver Island and northern Olympic Peninsula. But not only is the shoreline rising, it is being compressed eastward.
http://www.nickdoe.ca/pdfs/Webp222c.pdf
Uh-oh.
“Delivering robust science with practical management application is of focal significance to our science program.”
Techno-babble! There is nothing robust about their ‘science’, It is delectably Impractical, and focal significance is meaningless. Absolutely NO commponsense.