Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I had to go to town yesterday, and so I was glad it was Friday, because it’s Science Friday on the local Public Broadcasting System station and I can listen on my truck radio. In general I enjoy Science Friday, because the host, Ira Flatow, has interesting people on the show and he usually asks interesting questions … except when it’s about climate change. In that case his scientific training goes out the window, and he merely parrots the alarmist line.
In any case I was listening to Science Friday yesterday, and Ira referred to some recent pictures of flooding in Miami, Florida, as evidence that climate change is real and is already affecting Florida. It was the radio so no pictures, but he was referring to photos like this that have been in the news …
He was talking with a young woman, a Chicana climate activist. He and the activist agreed that this was clear evidence of anthropogenic climate change. In response to his question, she said that she was definitely using the Miami flooding to drive home the message that people should be very afraid of human-caused climate change, and that we’re already seeing the effects. I was depressed thinking of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that such false claims would cause.
I fear that both of them have been taken in by what I call a “scientific urban legend”. It’s easy enough to do. It happened to me a lot a while back … not so much lately, my urban legend detector works pretty well these days.
In this case, the urban legend is the false claim that warming over the last century has accelerated the rate of sea level rise. There is no sign of this claimed acceleration.
From the beginning of the climate alarmism in the 1980s, the long-predicted acceleration in the rate of sea level rise has been … well … the kindest description might be “late to the party”, because the predicted acceleration still hasn’t arrived. James Hansen famously predicted back in 1988 that in forty years the West Side Highway in New York City would be underwater. From the 1988 levels, to swamp the West Side Highway would require about a 3 metre (10 foot) sea level rise.
We’re now 27 years into his prediction, two-thirds of the way there, and instead of two-thirds of three metres of sea level rise, the sea level rise in NYC since his prediction has been … wait for it …
Three inches. 7.5 cm.
And from this point to make his prediction come true, we’d need ~ 9.9 feet of sea level rise in 13 years … that’s three quarters of a foot (225 mm) each and every year for the next thirteen years. Never happen. His prediction, like the overwhelming majority of climate alarmist predictions, is total nonsense. Here’s the data, from the PSMSL.
Note the lack of any evidence of acceleration in the New York record … but we were talking Florida, not New York. Unfortunately, the Miami record is short, truncated, and intermittent. There are records from the thirties to the fifties, then a five-year gap, then the record stops abruptly in the eighties, with the last few years missing data. As a result, it’s useless for looking at acceleration of sea level rise. However, there are a couple of long-term stations in the vicinity. Here are the two longest continuous tide station records in Florida:
Key West Note the lack of any acceleration. Here are the 50-year trends for Key West, with the trend values located at the center of the 50-year interval.
Now, look at the error bars (vertical “whiskers” with horizontal lines top/bottom). If the error bars of two trends overlap, the difference between them is NOT statistically significant. And in this record, every single error bar overlaps every other single error bar … meaning there is NOT any acceleration of sea level rise over the period 1915-2015.
Next, the corresponding graphs for Pensacola, Florida, only slightly shorter:
Again we see the same thing. All of the error bars overlap. No acceleration.
Now, in case you mistakenly think this lack of acceleration of sea level rise is unique to Florida or New York, let me point you to and quote from an article in the Journal of Coastal Research. The authors sum up their study as follows (emphasis mine):
Conclusion:
Our analyses do not indicate acceleration in sea level in U.S. tide gauge records during the 20th century. Instead, for each time period we consider, the records show small decelerations that are consistent with a number of earlier studies of worldwide-gauge records. The decelerations that we obtain are opposite in sign and one to two orders of magnitude less than the +0.07 to +0.28 mm/y2 accelerations that are required to reach sea levels predicted for 2100 by Vermeer and Rahmsdorf (2009), Jevrejeva, Moore, and Grinsted (2010), and Grinsted, Moore, and Jevrejeva (2010). Bindoff et al. (2007) note an increase in worldwide temperature from 1906 to 2005 of 0.74uC.
It is essential that investigations continue to address why this worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years, and indeed why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.
Note that the “sea levels predicted for 2100 by Vermeer and Rahmsdorf (2009), Jevrejeva, Moore, and Grinsted (2010), and Grinsted, Moore, and Jevrejeva (2010)” are the standard alarmist predictions of sea level rise. The study says that not only is there no acceleration in the record, sea level rise has possibly slowed very slightly over the last eighty years … go figure.
So like I said, this is an opportunity for Dr. Flatow (he has a couple of honorary PhDs …) to abjure his mistaken ways. I’m posting this here, and I’m also sending a copy to him, as well as to other PBS addresses … we’ll see how it plays out. I’d be most happy if he were to post a reply here stating something like ‘If the data changes I change my mind … what do you do?’, but that may be too much to hope for.
All the best,
w.
AS USUAL: If you disagree with someone, please QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU OBJECT TO. This lets everyone know both who and what you find incorrect.
TIDAL DATA: PSMSL
FLORIDA DATA: NOAA Tides and Currents
Thanks, Willis. Very good article.
It seems to me that according to the official data around ~3mm/year is what the global sea level is rising.
I’m not sure what is “official” but the Jevrejeva graph above goes from about -120 to 190 from 1860 to 2010. That close to 2mm/year aveage over that period, with a miniscule acceleration which is smaller than the data uncertainty.
That is to say that sea level IS rising but there is no sign it has anything at all to do with the supposed impact of massively increased GHG since 1960.
Obviously the current situation in Miami is more to do with storm swell plus a perigee, full moon ( Sept 28 ) at an eclipse configuration but you can count on alarmists to miss real cause. Headless chickens are notoriously bad a science subjects.
Working for NPR, Flatow has no choice on his climate change coverage. The NPR news Chief is Michael Oreskes, brother of Naomi Oreskes. No doubt if anyone working for NPR were to deviate from NPR’s diktat, they would be fired. It is interesting to note that NPR has not considered the brother/sister relationship a potential conflict of interest that should be disclosed. Now I dont agree with my brother on many things, but I dont see how they could possible consider non-disclosure as reasonable. Heck, you cant even win prizes from radio stations if your close relatives work there.
This may be a distinction without a difference but I believe Science Friday is independently produced and public radio stations buy the syndicated broadcast. Nonetheless, NPR climate coverage is not exactly fair and balanced.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/about-science-friday.html
Like Willis, we also spent many years sailing around the world in a small boat.
What I found most interesting were the charts of the remote Pacific islands drawn the better part of 250 years ago by the likes of Cook, Bligh, and Vancouver.
These charts are remarkable works of precision. Most of these areas have never been resurveyed. The original charts are all we have.
Yet, when one looks at these charts one notices something quite startling. These charts are all drawn to 1 foot precision for water depths less than 1 fathom (6 feet).
And in the 250 years since these charts were drawn, there has been virtually NO difference in the 1 foot measurements as compared to today. None that can be detected by eyeball.
The shoreline is still where it was drawn, centuries ago. The drying rocks are still where they were drawn, centuries ago.
So it sea level rise is happening, how can this be possible? None of these charts have “global sea level rise” corrections on their datum. In point of fact, no ocean chart I’ve see ever shows “global sea level rise” corrections on their datum, yet we do see WGS84 datum correction, which is the satellite (GPS) correction.
So how is it that ocean charts don’t show a correction for sea level rise? Millions of lives and billions of dollars rely on these charts, yet they don’t have a datum correction for something we are told over and over again by academia is real.
Or could it be that “global sea level rise” is only happening in Academia, not on the oceans?
Fascinating. Has anyone conducted a study comparing Cook’s charts to modern coastlines?
I suggested just such a study to the real scientists on the real climate web-site. There was zero interest. Which makes sense if you are trying to prove your theory right. Why look for contrary evidence?
However, the thousands of sailors that rely on the modern charts drawn from the old charts are conducting just such a study every day of the year.
What gets added to the new charts are the location of wrecks. As well, what gets added is the location of hidden rocks that we missed in the original surveys.
But what we don’t see is drying rocks from hundreds of years ago disappearing under the ocean. If the chart shows a drying rock, then you can be sure that it will still be drying at low tide hundreds of years later.
So don’t go trying to drive your boat over a reef marked hundreds of years ago on the chart, trusting that sea level rise has now made it safe. It is only safe in Academia. On the Ocean the reef will still rip the bottom out of your boat, no matter how much correction has been made for post ice age rebound.
I think a lot of people are also ignorant of the inverse barometer effect. It only takes a high pressure area of 1043hPa (30.8 in Hg) to reduce depths by one foot. Similarly, a low pressure in a hurricane, say 923 hPa (27.3 in Hg), will raise sea level three feet, even without the waves.
As an ocean sailor I agree with that. But there’s more accurate stuff than that for general observation; in Australia and I am sure in the US more so there are many, many housing canal estates close to the sea where the canal walls were always built to king tide levels. Many of these estates are ~ 70 years old, built after WW2 and there are none that I have found where there is ANY sign of SLR.
There are many where SLs are falling.
SLR is a bit like justice; it must not just happen, it must be seen to happen.
Check out sea levels for Canada for example. Hugh coastline, Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic. If there was a true trend in sea level rise, it would show up in the Canadian tidal data.
Look at the stations. There is no trend. Some are increasing, some are decreasing, some are the same.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_country.htm?gid=1257
Canadian trends:
http://oi59.tinypic.com/mhumq8.jpg
http://oi61.tinypic.com/4vr8d2.jpg
http://oi58.tinypic.com/5o6w6g.jpg
http://oi58.tinypic.com/qyb85z.jpg
http://oi61.tinypic.com/xqb6aa.jpg
http://oi60.tinypic.com/o7r0b8.jpg
http://oi57.tinypic.com/28qxljn.jpg
http://oi62.tinypic.com/k37tsj.jpg
http://oi57.tinypic.com/2vs20ci.jpg
http://oi58.tinypic.com/1z3ndah.jpg
http://oi57.tinypic.com/110j8n4.jpg
i believe these differing trends in separate areas are purely down to various oceanic current cycles and the shifting weather patterns that go along with them ferd. various causeways and rocks named by fishermen of old would also suggest sea level has not being doing much out of the ordinary for a few centuries.
Gotta say, this is laughably thin. You can’t ‘falsify’ global sea level rise WRT to US data only, which is what Houston & Dean present. And that’s presuming that everything they concluded was correct–a highly dubious assumption:
http://jcronline.org/doi/abs/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-11A-00008.1
Doc, what is “laughably thin” is your identification of what it is that you think is “laughably thin”. I can’t tell from your comment just what it is that you object to. Are you objecting to what is in your link? Objecting to what I said? Objecting to someone else?
Please pay more attention. I specifically asked:
And as usual, some fool ignores my request and goes off on a rant about something that only they can identify …
In any case, from your link:
w.
You can’t ‘falsify’ global sea level rise WRT to US data only
============
Of course you can:
the oceans are interconnected, so if it is rising in one place it must be rising in all places. conversely, if it not rising in one place, then it cannot be rising in any other place.
thus, if sea levels are not rising in the US (or Canada as well as shown by the graphics), then the rise is not global. It is only regional. which is impossible because water seeks the lowest level. so what you are seeing cannot be global sea level rise. it must be something else that is being measured and mistakenly called global sea level rise.
No, ferd. The ocean is not a bathtub, it’s a dynamic system, and SLR rates are not homogenous. Didn’t you read your Lomborg when he talks about the ‘geoid’? That, and other effects, are discussed here:
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_secret_of_sea_level_rise_it_will_vary_greatly_by_region/2255/
By the way, note the matter of isostasy, which definitely affects the Northern Canadian data you mentioned above. Land there is still rising due to post-glacial rebound.
Bottom line: rates of sea level rise vary a lot by location, and it matters for diagnosing the presence (or not) of SLR acceleration.
Just for one example, here’s a Steve Goddard post which uses an Aviso map illustrating Jason-1 SLR trends, 2002-2011. You’ll see some drastic rises (mostly in the western Pacific), a lot of more modest ones, and some areas where trends are actually negative–notably the Central Pacific, but also, interestingly for present purposes, off a chunk of the central US East Coast.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/record-sea-level-rise-rates/
“…dynamic…”
This animation of satellite altimeter data shows what I meant by that adjective:
http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/node/430
Quite a ‘light show’.
Doc Snow October 4, 2015 at 11:07 am
Again, I encourage you to read. We discussed above how you need, not one month, not one year, not one decade, but about fifty years to get an accurate sea level trend.
And you point to a MONTHLY map of sea level and go ooooh … shiny ….
Fifty.
Years.
w.
Doc Snow October 4, 2015 at 10:32 am Edit
Did you actually read that link? More weasel words than you could ever want. Lots and lots of “may” and “might” and “could” and the like. Yes, changes in winds or ocean currents MAY affect sea levels. But if you’ve looked at as many sea level records as I have, you’d know that you don’t see the kind of jumps in the record that the author is intimating.
Also, the idea that the change in the polar ice caps MAY affect the sea height levels through changes in the gravity caused by the melting of the ice cap is a joke. As the author says:
So the author admits it won’t happen any time soon … have you ever calculated how long it would take to completely melt the WAIS? THOUSANDS OF YEARS! And you think he’s making sense?
Anyone who thinks that changing gravity will affect sea levels in our lifetime needs to go back to school. Even the author doesn’t claim that … although he hints darkly, in the best alarmist fashion, about a slight change in glacier movement.
Look, Doc, if that kind of thing actually affected sea levels, we’d see it in every record around the world, some stronger, some weaker, because winds and current change constantly.
But we don’t see that. Instead, we see things like the 120-year New York tidal record … with nothing of the sort.
w.
Doc Snow October 4, 2015 at 10:32 am
Yes, of course there are all kinds of short term ups and downs … which is why you need 50 years of tidal data to get an accurate rate of sea level rise. You link to nine years of data … is there some part of “50 years” that seems unclear?
w.
Willis writes
I wouldn’t mind betting that a long timescale like 50 years was required for a single data point too. In the same way you established the data required to observe surface temperature changes was longer than 30 years for a single data point.
Reply to ferdberple ==> What an odd idea!
The level of the ocean surface from the center of the Earth (or conversely, down from the satellite) has been being measured for years with a high degree of accuracy.
It goes up and down, not evenly, based on factors that we have not yet accurately defined or understood.
As another commenter points out – The Ocean is not a bathtub.
Like Global Surface Air Temperature, Global Sea Level is a thought experiment that does not reflect an actuality.
welcome to the layman’s gallery Fred – here’s a short & easy & fun video explaining how sea level is measured – and why it doesn’t quite work the way you think – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q65O3qA0-n4
Kip Hansen October 4, 2015 at 11:56 am
Thanks, Kip. No, ocean surface levels have not been “measured for years with a high degree of accuracy”. That’s only true since 1992, and that’s less than half of the 50-year tidal cycle that you need to get accurate trends. Less. Than. Half.
Say what? We have very accurate tide tables for all parts of the planet. How could we predict future sea level heights so accurately if we did not understand the vertical motions of the ocean?
Yet, as you say, we can measure sea level with a “high degree of accuracy” … so are we measuring an imaginary thing? And if we average those highly accurate measurements, why would we not get a global average sea level? What am I missing here?
w.
Reply to w. ==> Thank you for pointing out that we have been measuring sea level with satellites for 23 years (which certainly qualifies as “years”).
You have provided the link to the PSMSL site which shows graphically that the sea level rises in some places while falling in others, over the same time period. That changes over time as well (use the slider on the main graphic) — which places see a rise and which a fall. It is important to admit that we do not truly understand the causes behind these differences — we have only some guesses which may be right.
And, finally, the sea is not a bathtub — it is a dynamic system whose intricacies we only pretend to understand.
“What am I missing here?” — my only point is that “global average sea level” may not represent an actuality — a real attribute — of the natural system we call “the seas”. It is certainly something that clever statisticians and other numberists can create out of various data sets with lots of adjustments, kriging, homogenization, gridding and other tricks of the trade — the resultant number may just not represent anything useful to science and humanity.
Thus, yes, if people think they are “measuring” Global Average Sea Level — they are in fact really deriving an imaginary number which does not represent anything that can be experienced except accidentally.
There may be some utility to knowing that, in general, sea levels have been rising in single digit millimeters (~ 1.7 to 3.2 mm) per year for a long long time, and are likely to continue to do so.
See my review of sea levels at the Battery at New York in this post.
Yes, I think that 1 meter line slips past many. One meter is several times the amount of rise in 100 years in most locations.
It is an interesting little video, that is for sure.
Oops, the above in reply to Kip Hansen, below.
Maybe this is what the man was talking about:
https://youtu.be/q65O3qA0-n4
Reply to Menicholas ==> I like it! Note to those worried about 1.7 mm rise per year. The geodists only claim an accuracy of +/- 1 meter to their gravity adjusted sea level model which equals an inaccuracy of 500 times the generally accepted annual average sea level rise.
i don’t know if the NY Daily News has a bias on the AGW debate – but i like the way they presented the Miami flooding news – “Blame it on the supermoon!” is the lead line – at the end they add “what many believe is the rising sea levels due to global warming” – Anthony would have said “what many claim” – either way – the skeptic and the alarmist can interpret that anyway they want
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/high-tides-flooding-miami-gallery-1.2378955
If you Google the title
“Why has an acceleration of sea level rise not been observed during the altimeter era”
you will find a presentation from Steve Nerem of Colorado University’s Sea Level Research Group that discusses the fact that since 1992 when satellite measurement of sea level began, acceleration in the rate of sea level rise has been negative.
It is easy to download the text file of data at CU’s Web site for sea level and use Microsoft’s Excel to calculate the rate of acceleration for your self.
When you are promoting a fairy-tale like the link between flooding, ‘climate change’ and man-made CO2, you must neglect no opportunity to repeat the meme, so that people have it hammered into their sub-conscious, and stop them realizing that it is a fantasy.
Ira Flatow’s comments on recent flooding in Miami, Florida, as evidence of climate change, is a good example of this. All hands to help the Party.
TO IRA FLATOW –
There are tens of thousands of people who are reading this blog. Please reply, we would like to know your thoughts on this.
Hah!
He is hiding under his desk and whimpering at the thought!
don’t be mean….keep the moral high ground.
he is either misinformed or he is lying, and i expect that it is the former.
this is an excellent forum for him to present why he believes what he does, and debate it rationally and fairly.
It is interesting to see (for the first time as far as I’m aware) some posts in which confidence intervals for a fitted line are given and illustrated. The line in question is of course a straight one, and the fit is known as “simple regression”. It is easy to compute the confidence intervals for the slope of such a line, though few people who post on this (most excellent) blog do, or equivalently compute the t statistic for the slope, and to consult the critical values of t for the appropriate degrees of freedom. The t value is the ratio of the slope to its standard error, which any stats software should report. There are some qualifications due to the often considerable serial correlations of the residuals from a time series analysis, but with large amounts of data these are largely academic. The software that I use automatically produces the confidence for the fitted line, as shown in RD50’s post of 3 Oct at 6.59, but also the equivalent CIs for an individual future observation, which are invariably very much wider in the climate world.
The obvious way to investigate (statistically) possible acceleration in the parameter – which is manifested by a change of slope – is to fit a second order model to the data, and to test the t value of the quadratic coefficient against critical t values. My experience so far has been that the second order terms are trivial relative to the scatter in the observations and never approach a significance threshold.
Unfortunately I don’t know how to post graphics, otherwise I’d incorporate some. Sorry!
You were listening to NPR, not PBS. NPR is radio. PBS is television.
True ‘dat … my bad.
w.
Warning about “Simon” …the “wrestling with pigs” analogy. Beware.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
–
If you worry about sea level rise, please take a few minutes to read the insights of a genius farmboy who has spent much time at sea.
Read and understand this very understandable article. Review what he said, and check his calculations.
The fact of the matter is that sea level rise rate has been about the same for all of the history of human civilization and our interactions with the sea. It is not accelerating. In fact, is seems to be decelerating, which just might mean we are headed into the next glaciation phase. Maybe not, but maybe. It will take centuries, hopefully, if we are sliding into that next glaciation. While it will take many thousands of years before Manhattan is under a mile of ice again, it could be only a few decades before global crop failures resemble the worst of the little ice age, and it would be downhill from there.
Please understand, cold kills. Warmer is better.
AGW policy reach is shaping up to be the greatest lie detector test ever devised. Among scientists and science reporters its accuracy is even more refined because they should know better and be more inclined toward fact checking and caution. Ira flunks the test and so does his organization.
Good luck!
Jan Kjetil Andersen October 5, 2015 at 7:14 am Edit
Numbers are your friend. If your claim is that those are the wrong numbers because they are too small, flapping your lips does nothing. Quote and point out for us the larger EPA numbers from that same analysis quantifying the larger losses you claim I have “misunderstood”.
Thanks,
w.
Willis, I answered to this in the original thread above
Jan
Jan Kjetil Andersen October 5, 2015 at 7:14 am Edit
Jan Kjetil Andersen October 5, 2015 at 12:43 pm Edit
So you proudly claim my numbers are wrong and that I’ve “misunderstood the table” … but then when called on it, you have no numbers at all? Pathetic. No, I didn’t “misunderstand the table”, I understood it perfectly.
And yes, mercury has effects on those things you mention … but HOW MUCH will be changed by this regulation? You seem happy to grunt something akin to “Mercury Bad! Mercury Bad!”. Yes, it’s bad, but how much will these regulations affect that? That’s the part you are missing.
You are a very useful dupe for these folks, spreading their disinformation. According to the law, the EPA can’t regulate MERCURY unless it can demonstrate that the benefits of regulating MERCURY exceed the costs of regulating MERCURY.
They tried to cover it up by pointing to the supposed benefits from PM and SOx, and you are stupid enough to parrot them even after they were caught by the courts. It’s not about PM and SOx, duh. It’s about MERCURY cost/benefit, and their claimed benefits are pathetically small.
w.
The impact is huge Willis
We know that mercury can damage the brain, small children and unborn are especially vulnerable. Surveys shows that approximately 2.3 percent of women in reproductive ages have blood mercury concentrations that may increase the risk of learning disabilities in their unborn children. http://www.epa.gov/mercury/exposure.htm#Martin2012
That means that approximately 75 000 American children are born with less abilities than they could have had, and it will follow them their entire life.
Approximately half of the U.S. mercury pollution comes from power plants, and the MATS regulation would reduce that amount by 90 percent.
http://www3.epa.gov/mats/powerplants.html
I think it is more naive to trust the claims from the coal industry than independent scientist and institutions.
/Jan
Jan Kjetil Andersen October 5, 2015 at 10:40 pm
Yes, mercury can damage the brain, duh. Since it appears you have reading comprehension problems, I’ll merely repeat what I said above:
Finally, I don’t care in the slightest what the EPA claims. As I pointed out above, they have been repeatedly shown to be in the pocket of the green lobby, and their interest is in extending their regulatory reach. So OF COURSE they might claim things like that “2.3 percent of women in reproductive ages have blood mercury concentrations that may increase the risk of learning disabilities in their unborn children”.
“May increase”? Will they increase the risk or won’t they? I have no clue what that claim means.
In addition, the link you gave (to the Martin paper) contains 71 pages, and mentions mercury exactly zero times. Assuming that you are referring to the adjacent EPA mercury document, it contains 69 pages, and mentions “learning disabilities” exactly zero times. So I have to assume you’ve been taking lessons from the EPA and as a result … you’re just making things up.
That document also says that the methyl mercury levels in US women 16-49 have FALLEN to a third of the 1999-2000 value. Which brings me back to my question:
How much will the proposed regulations decrease that number? You see, that is exactly the value that the EPA placed a value of $20,000 on, mercury damage to the children of pregnant women … so if you disagree with that value, please point out why.
w.
My fault, I made a pasting error in the first link, I meant to link to this:
http://www.epa.gov/mercury/exposure.htm
And the relevant text there says:
That 75 000 infants are born with less abilities than they could have had, and they will carry this burden their entire lives.
These are high stakes Willis; do not take easy on it.
The MATS regulation will cut 40 to 50 percent of the mercury pollution in the US. No other single regulation can do that much.
Are you really that sure that the mercury pollution in the US is risk free? Do you take the chance that you are right and all the experts who work on this are wrong?
/Jan
The expression “the risk may increase” may sound like a double precaution since we talk about probabilities in both “may” and “risk”, but that is how the realities sometimes are.
You know as well as I that the result of exposure cannot be predicted with certainty.
If the pregnant women smoke 20 cigarettes and drinks two drinks, alcohol a day you cannot tell with certainty that it will affect the baby.
We know with certainty that heavy drinking increase the risk, but is there a safe threshold? Almost all experts say that no such threshold exist for alcohol and cigarettes. Pregnant women should not drink, and no one at all should smoke.
With Mercury, we know for certain that the risk for damages increases dramatically with high doses, but is it a safe threshold there? Well, most experts say that no such threshold exist for Mercury either, but we cannot know for sure.
That is why they use this double precaution, but I would not bet against the experts there.
Do we have to wait until they can say with 100 percent certainty how many lives the toxins will ruin before we regulate it?
/Jan
Jan Kjetil Andersen October 6, 2015 at 5:54 am
Hogwash. To start with, the overwhelming majority of the mercury in the US comes from the OCEAN, not from power plants. Here’s where there is mercury in the water:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/fish_tissue_mercury_concentrations.jpg?w=720
The idea that any power plant regulation will “cut 40 to 50 percent of the mercury pollution in the US” is bull-goose looney. I live in one of the areas of the US which has the highest mercury deposition rates, and there is not a power plant in sight. Cutting power plant emissions will not change anything for any pregnant woman living where I live. In fact, the high-mercury areas are not where the power plants are, so for those areas the regulations will do zip. Nada. Nothing. Read my post, Mercury the Trickster God, and get up to speed. You are babbling inanities.
Worse, you are arguing against yourself. The REDUCTION in mercury levels is the critical figure, and the EPA says that FOR THE VERY RISK YOU MENTION, mental retardation of children whose mothers have high mercury levels, the benefit of this regulation is about $20,000 per year for the entire US.
You, on the other hand, seem to think that there will be some huge reduction, because Mercury Bad! Mercury Bad!
So it is you that is claiming that the EPA is wrong … only you’re trying to do it by assertion.
Come back when you have numbers. And don’t play stupid again and give us numbers about total mercury damage or how many pregnant women have high levels. It just makes you look devious and sneaky. I’ve asked you three times, come back with numbers about the REDUCTION in those mercury levels that you expect from the regulations, and the dollar value OF THE REDUCTIONS.
w.
PS—you need to learn that any document that says that population X MAY have an increased risk of Y is nothing but propaganda. If they could quantify the risk they would. Yes, man-in-the-moon marigolds MAY be affected by gamma rays, and CO2 MAY affect the temperature, that is absolutely true … BUT ARE THEY ACTUALLY DOING SO?
It is important because the mercury levels are so low that we can’t even say if there is damage occurring, just that it MAY occur.
In this case, we have good epidemiological data about the women living downwind of the power plants. If a bunch of brain-damaged children were living downwind of the plants, we’d know about it, because we’ve monitored it.
But we don’t find that, despite you and a bunch of other ascientific heavy breathers grunting Mercury Bad! Mercury bad! That was the reason I first got interested in mercury, the lack of evidence that the power plants were causing problems downwind.
So how about you come back with some real numbers, not guesses about what MAY happen.
Looking at you map, I don’t find it so convincing that most mercury comes from the ocean. Considering the prevailing western wind pattern, I would have expected much more mercury all along the west coast. In this map the inland states like Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin have high concentrations. They are all far from the coast but close to power plants.
Anyway, this is not about where the mercury has entered the atmosphere, the more interesting aspect is how much of the mercury comes from human emissions and how much comes from natural sources. To answer this we have to look at sediments and compare pre-industrial levels with current levels.
Lamborg & Al. 2002 show that the mercury in sediments in Canada and New Zealand has increased fivefold and threefold respectively since 1900:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2001GB001847/full
This show that most of the mercury pollution in these areas comes from human sources.
The problem with your article http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/01/mercury-the-trickster-god/
Is that you claim that figure two show natural mercury in the desert cropland. You have no basis for the claim that it is natural.
I you go to the National Atmospheric Deposition Program you can find Mercury deposition maps from each year since 1999. And the maps show variations from one year to another. This indicates that the mercury content in the soil is caused by external sources.
You make a point of the fact that we see no “hot spots” of mercury concentration around the power plants, but that only prove that most of the mercury is drifting a long way.
/Jan
Jan Kjetil Andersen October 6, 2015 at 1:42 pm says:
… lots of blah, blah, blah, but no numbers.
Jan, you’ve claimed my quote of the EPA numbers regarding the reductions in childhood retardation from the proposed regulations was wrong, wrong, wrong.
In response to this specious claim, I have asked you repeatedly for evidence that my quote of the numbers was wrong. You know, asking for whatever you think is the basis for your claim about benefits of mercury reductions from this proposed regulation.
Instead of any discussion of the reductions from this proposed regulation, I get endless boring monologues about how bad mercury is, and blood levels of mercury, and where mercury is coming from, and where it is going, and how bad it is in some other way, and how I should pay attention to it, and a million other things, anything under the sun … well, anything except evidence to back up your claim.
I’m tired of waiting, Jan. You can go try your misdirection skills on someone else. A man like you, who repeatedly refuses to answer a direct question while pretending to answer it, is contemptible. You pretend to be carrying on a scientific conversation, when really you are running from the hard questions like a cockroach from the light.
I’m done with you. Go bother someone else with your endless whining about mercury. Not interested.
w.
Veering wildly from the TOPIC, I do recall (Willis) that one of the great “Mercury Myths” is the accumulation of (trace) Mercury in fish. Unfortunately about 20 years ago, dried/frozen fish (for food) was found in the huts of one of the famous South Pole explorer’s. Someone had the presence of mind to take these “pre-industrial” samples and check them for their Mercury content. Same sort of levels found in modern fish! (Indicating natural sources.) It works like this. In the 1970’s there was NO mercury in the waters of Lake Superior. By the end of the ’80’s there were TONS of Mercury in Lake Superior! What happened? The sensitivity of analytical procedures to test had gone from the parts per million (or fractions thereof) to the parts per billion and trillion realm. There is so much water in Lake Superior, that even at say, 2 Parts per Billion, you still have “tons of dissolved mercury” in Lake Superior. There because of the actions of man? Perhaps not.
Christopher Keating October 6, 2015 at 9:57 am
Thanks, Christopher. Let’s start with a few quotes. Here’s the claim:
and here is a further quote:
So we have the FIRST global measurements, and they say that levels have tripled …
Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell us how the FIRST measurements can possibly show that the levels have tripled?
Here’s their procedure.
Same question … if these are the first measurements, how can they possibly know what the levels were in 1750?
No, they weren’t. And in any case, why are they quoting some random scientist making that bogus claim?
Instead of “looking back in time”, they noted that the amount of mercury at deeper levels is lower at deeper levels, and immediately claimed that it is humans that are causing it.
However, consider a situation where there is a constant level of mercury being added to the ocean from volcanoes, forest fires, rivers, and ordinary dust … where would you expect to find the highest concentrations of mercury?
That’s right … at the surface. Now, perhaps you can tell us how can we distinguish between that situation, and a man-made situation?
Just more BS alarmism from Nature mag, no surprise there …
w.
Christopher Keating October 6, 2015 at 10:31 am
Thanks, Christopher. Since there are “down welling flows” everywhere, some large and some microscopic, some constant and some intermittent, I fear your question is too theoretical for me. There are thermal-driven downwelling flows, there are salinity driven downwelling flows, there are wind-driven downwelling flows, there are ice-melt driven downwelling flows, there are silt-driven downwelling flows at the mouths of rivers, there are current-driven downwelling flows, there are diffusion-driven downwelling flows, there are geostrophic downwelling flows … you see the problem?
However, if there are no downwelling flows at all as your question postulates, like say if the oceans froze solid, the answer is obviously “never”. And freezing the ocean solid is the only way I can think of that would stop all downwelling flows.
With that out of the way, I notice that rather than answer my questions in my comment, you ignored them and asked me a question. Fine, now I’ve played your little game … are you going to answer my questions? Because if not, this conversation is over.
w.
Willis answered your question, in detail.
If you have a better answer, post it here.
No, Willis I would expect to find it mixed all over. Perhaps even a higher concentration in the deep sea because the heavy metal would gradually sink.
Where do you think the mercury added to the surface would go?
Can anyone here imagine a continues mass flow where mercury is added to the top of the ocean and the concentration would not spread to the deep water?
/Jan
Keating has no credibility, as anyone can see here and here.
Keating is a nasty über-troll who makes pretend challenges, in which he styles himself as the self-appointed arbiter who determines if a skeptic has met his challenge, and will be paid. What do you think, folks? Is Keating sincere? Is he honest? Would he pay, even if glaciers a mile thick descended on Chicago again? As if.
“Unethical” doesn’t begin to describe him, as we see in the comments below the linked articles.
No, it is classic welshing on an offer. Read the linked comments. The ‘consensus’ is overwhelming: you reneged.
Thanks, db. So this is the artfully clueless Keating, is it? The one who said:
… provided that he gets to be prosecutor, judge, and jury on whether the “proof” has been offered?
That Keating?
Gotta say, Christopher, that offer is crazy on so many counts that it’s not even wrong.
First, and most important, nobody can ever prove anything in science. Can’t be done. You can falsify the claim that “All cougarillas are gray” by producing a black cougarilla, but you can never prove that they are all gray. There might be a white cougarilla hiding somewhere. So your challenge to prove anything at all “via the scientific method” merely reveals that you have absolutely no understanding of the scientific method.
Next, you have not defined what you are calling “man-made climate change”. Virtually every climate scientist I’ve ever read or spoken to agrees that humans have or could be having an effect on the climate. That’s never been in question. So you are making an offer that no serious climate scientist would even consider.
Next, there are, and always have been, two serious questions in this discussion:
• What exact changes, both in time and space, has man imposed on the climate, and
• By what mechanisms are those purported changes being effected (e.g land cover change, black soot, deforestation, CO2, etc.).
Me, I say we can affect the climate locally via say deforestation. And we can affect the Arctic climate through black carbon (soot) emissions. However, I also say that none of man’s actions have much effect on the global climate, because of the emergent climate phenomena that act to keep the global temperature within a very narrow range (e.g. ± 0.3°C over the entire 20th century). As an example of just one of these emergent phenomena, when the tropical ocean is hot, clouds cut down the incoming sunshine, and balance is restored. When the tropical ocean is cold, lack of clouds increases the incoming sunshine, and balance is restored.
Next, you are asking people to prove a negative, that “man-made climate change” (whatever that might be) is NOT occurring … again, can’t be done. In general, you can’t prove a negative.
Finally, did you seriously think that anyone would be dumb enough to make a bet about anything where his opponent gets to be judge, jury, and executioner as to who won the bet? Perhaps you did think someone would be that dumb … possible, I suppose, given your general cluelessness about science …
But in my opinion, it is much, much more likely that even you realized that nobody would dream of accepting a bet where the other guy gets to decide who won the bet.
Which makes your proposition just a cynical ploy to advance your climate alarmist cause and to bid for internet notoriety.
Well, you’ve achieved your aim. You are now notorious, although not for the reasons you might have hoped. You have firmly established a reputation as a cynical, devious person willing to advance global warming claims by pretending to offer a bet you know will be refused, solely for the publicity value and to advance your cause.
And that means that you’ve cancelled your own vote.
So … given that you are that Charles Keating, I’m not surprised in the least that you didn’t answer my questions. You’ve poisoned your own well. Let me offer you some insight from Megan McArdle:
Hey, you’ve convinced me …
w.
Keating, wake up. That conversation is over. Willis just started another one, and it’s no wonder you’re deflecting.
This is as much my business as yours. Isn’t it?
Christopher keating says “Classic ad-hominem argument you’ve posted.”
Is the pot calling the kettle black, Christopher? I notice you forgot to call out the “D” word.
Sure, OK, I retract that. Now stop welshing and pay up.