Edward Mendel – Chicago Historical Society
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Huffington Post has predicted a dystopian Mad Max / Hunger Games future, if we don’t mend our wicked ways – because they think nobody will be able to cope with rising seas. History says they are wrong – even if the sea does rise, flooding problems have been defeated many times, including in America.
With Global Warming the World Will Be a Much Poorer Place
Sky Garden Cities, The Dome, AquaCities: these fanciful names are attached to renderings of cities that will optimistically tower above threatening seas.
Getting to the business of climate adaptation should be on everyone’s mind. Recently German climate scientists estimated that sea levels are rising faster than the most conservative estimates. The bright fact: climate change is an uncontrolled experiment we triggered on the planetary systems on which our species depend for survival.
…
When sea level rise ramps up, who is going to pay for all the claims? Insurance companies? No. Taxpayers? Definitely not. In Florida, one federally funded taxpayer agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, is working day and night, up and down the coastline, with bulldozers, tractors, and sand from the Bahamas and Mexico to reinforce tourist-friendly beaches against sea level rise. How long will Americans fund beach protection once sea level rise infiltrates trillions of dollars of urban infrastructure in coastal cities?
Dr. Harold Wanless, chair of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami and respected spokesperson on sea level rise, says taxpayers should be funding, now, for a rainy day when property owners will have to abandon coastal real estate in a mass migration from the coastlines. At least in the U.S., there is no indication that such common sense measures will materialize any time soon: nearly every member of the Republican controlled US Senate voted last week against acknowledging global warming is caused by humans.
I am beginning to believe that science fiction movie scenarios of the future are not so far off: some amalgam of Hunger Games, Sector 9, and Mad Max but with low-rent production values. As for gorgeous, highly-engineered futuristic cities deploying costly technologies to elevate taxpayers above rising seas? Methinks, not so much.
As WUWT reported in “Raising Chicago – how the City of Chicago defeated flooding in the 1850s”, the ancestors of today’s Americans, with 1850s technology, jacked up the entire city of Chicago to lift it out of the mud, including one building which weighed 27,000 tons.
Chicago wasn’t the only American city saved from the floods. At least one other city, the City of Seattle, the street level was raised by an entire floor to defeat flooding (h/t Harrowsceptic & commieBob).
Why does Huff Post think what Americans did in the 1800s could not be done today? Perhaps the HuffPost vision is of a future of feeble intermittent renewables and medieval deprivation. My vision is a little different.
From the first short powered flight in 1903, Americans reached the moon in 1969. Progress hasn’t stopped since that achievement – marvels like modern smart phones, which were impossible even a few years ago, are now ubiquitous. So my vision of the future contains artificial intelligence, nuclear power, vast industrial robots and an almost unimaginable capacity for engineering our world.
Of course, different regions of the world rise and fall. The HuffPost dystopia could become our reality, at least in the West, if we let it. Russia, Asia, even Africa, are ready and eager to pick up and carry the torch of progress, if we fall, if we listen to the voices of despair – if we talk ourselves into retreating, from the marvels and opportunities our ingenuity has created.
There is no evidence HuffPo spends any waking moments in thought on any subject.
The piece does end with an apt confession from the author:
They made a punctuation mistake. It should have read “Methinks? Not so much.”
“Methinks” does not mean and never has meant “I think”. It means “it seems to me”. (http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/117553?redirectedFrom=methinks#eid) You don’t have to do any thinking for something to seem to you. What depresses me is statements like “German scientists” without troubling to NAME them; this is fact-free reporting. Oh, and “faster than the most conservative estimates” without any numbers. Still fact-free. Since the most conservative estimates are “business as usual”, i.e., “maybe 30 cm by the end of the century”, 31 cm would count as “faster than the most conservative estimates.” Probably the reporter meant “faster than the most outrageous estimates”, in which case I am getting very cross with this reporter. I wonder how close to sea level the reporter’s dwelling is? Dr Wanless was warning about accelerating sea level rise in Florida five years ago; if he’s still in Miami I can only suppose that he doesn’t take it seriously any more.
If sea levels rise, there will be more water and more space for fish to thrive in. Since nature has a way of filling every niche with living things, there will be more food for humans to consume. Huff, try to look on the positive side of things. Every cloud has a silver lining. Buy shares in a fish processing plant and basically, get a life.
They Huff and they Puff and one day their house of straw will fall down! Consider the source.
What in hell is “Sector 9”? Maybe that was supposed to mean “District 9”?
We know that global warming alarmism is a piece of science fiction, but at least they should hire authors that *know* science fiction to write those pieces.
+10
Global environmental devastation is a plot device for so many science fiction stories and it seems like (as with Orwell’s 1984) some people confuse fiction for reality.
Ive read two recently, after the flood and the waterknife
I reviewed them as comedy/farce for the local librarian ..who doesnt read many books:-)
waiting for the printed reviews in the local paper:-)
Give it three more minutes before they link the Zika virus to CAGW. This rare disease has been known about for over 40 years in South America, but suddenly became a “thing” for the WHO to clutch its pearls about because some rich American chick from Hawaii came down with it. Notice when it was all poor natives nobody considered it a “problem.” ‘Nuff to make you retch at the silly, overblown hype. Whole thing could have been taken care of with a travel advisory.
I know several otherwise great sci-fi books recently that take place in the next hundred years have included a New York that’s abandoned and flooded with 10’s of meters of water. Nothing jars quite like hard Sci Fi with biblical flooding.
But no reputable authors on the subject would write such tripe!
But District 9 wasn’t a dystopia. It was just Johannesburg with desperately poor aliens instead of desperately poor Africans. Maybe Sector 9 is a book series like hunger games that hasn’t been made into a movie yet. There are sure a lot of them lately.
I,m looking forward to the sequel.
Maybe it was the third sequel of the fictional “Sector 6” sci-fi fantasy starring Brad Pitt & Catherine ZetaJones. The movie that spawned the famous “Sector 6” cigarrette brand. From the movie….
Jeff Megall: [Discussing a futuristic sci-fi movie] Brad Pitt Catherine Zeta-Jones they’ve just finished ravishing each other’s body for the first time they lie naked suspended in air underneath the heavens Pitt lights up and starts blowing smoke rings around her naked flawless body as the galaxies go whizzing by other the glass dome ceiling, now tell me that doesn’t work for you?
Nick Naylor: I’d see that movie
Jeff Megall: I’d buy the god damn DVD if the Academy didn’t send them to for free, you guys ought to think about designing a cigarette to be released simultaneous with the movie
Nick Naylor: Sector Sixes
Jeff Megall: No one’s ever done it with a cigarette
Mad Max, lions, tigers and bears?
At least it seems they should support the second amendment by default…..
Mr. Worrall…..I appreciate the last paragraph.
People constantly underestimate Africa, which IMO in the next decade or two will burst onto the world stage in a big way.
Back in 2012, an American study noticed a substantial and growing migration from Portugal to Botswana, young people looking for jobs, escaping destitution in Europe, for a better life in Africa.
http://www.cityam.com/article/it-s-time-supporters-single-currency-apologise
Sorry, Angola and Mozambique, not Botswana.
I am not so sure Eric, would be nice to see, but there is simply too much corruption and tribal tensions. I would migrate there in an instant, specifically Kenya, if I could find work.
“Africa, which IMO in the next decade or two will burst onto the world stage in a big way”
Or at least they may if they can stop relying on the rest of the world to feed their people.
Yes but that had more t do with the dire economic situation in Portugal than the wonderful life on offer in Angola and Mozambique. Portugal then was in same place Greece is today. The European Central Bank imposed swinging cuts on expenditure, taxes were raised and the unemployment rate hit 18% in 2013.
As someone in contact with several people in a range of african countries the last many years in regards to alternative agriculture I must concur. Not saying it will definitely happen, but they definitely have a portion of the population in many countries looking towards a brighter future. I certainly do not think they have more roadblocks then the west is currently constructing for itself.
Eric,
They are idiots.
They should read their history books.
Portugal was the worst European coloniser and was ignominiously booted out of its colonies, including Angola, Mocambique and East Timor.
It is true schadeenfreude that the ex-colonies have now economically overtaken the old European master state.
Ed
In that race to the bottom, Portugal is competitive with Italy (Ethiopia, Libya) but is far behind Belgium’s King Leopold in the Euro class. For true staying power, the Muslim’s local tribal rulers/slave-dealers long ago won the marathon of true evil overlords for longevity (7th century – 21st century), area controlled (all of northwest Africa, north Africa, northeast east Africa, east Africa, and most of the slave coast), and dogmatic depravity.
from Portugal to Botswana
================
out of the frying pan into the fire. very tough economic conditions in Portugal were the driving force for emigration. if you can’t afford the rent, better to be living in the tropics than Europe. At least you can stay warm in winter.
Unfortunately Africa will again be held back from developing, this time by the Paris Climate deal, which will prevent development of Africa’s coal resources in the name of “saving the planet”. As Obama said, we cannot have African’s owning cars or air-conditioning, as the planet will “boil over”.
The sort of colonial attitude drives the US dominated World Bank, which controls much of the development in Africa. Without funding to develop coal-fired power stations, the coal will stay in the ground, or be sold at fire-sale prices to the Chinese for their own industries.
Slavery for non-Muslim prisoners of war and for children of slaves is allowed under Islam.
Saudi Arabia and Yemen only abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman followed suit in 1970, and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007. However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented presently in the predominantly Islamic countries of Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, and Sudan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_views_on_slavery
In those countries, slavery is no longer legally supported.
I seriously doubt it has been “abolished” in actuality.
“I am not so sure Eric, would be nice to see, but there is simply too much corruption and tribal tensions. I would migrate there in an instant, specifically Kenya, if I could find work.”
Not to mention superstition.
I guess no one ever considers what the Netherlands has done for some time now.
Quite right, FJS, I’m sure we could handle it with today’s technology.
But I doubt that much is happening anyway.
As a builder of sea-front infrastructure all my life I have many benchmarks going back to WW2 that show that there has been no SLR since then in my NOTW. King tide predictions are generally lower than they were in 1946 in this geodetically stable area.
Has there been, does anyone know, a complete geodetic audit of the world’s tide gauges to show the true state of world-wide sea level rise?
Yes there has been no discernible sea level rise. Just ask Nils-Axel Mörner – sea level data expert.
.
IIRC even Morner acknowledges some sea level rise although he thinks it is overestimated. I wouldn’t argue with him on that myself.
Some sea level rise makes sense BTW, No one doubts the planet has warmed in the past 200 years. It was kind of nippy in higher latitudes in the early 1800s. Warmer water takes more space than colder water.
It should also be noted that in many places the land is rising or sinking from tectonic forces faster than sea level is rising, and that measuring that change is very difficult since all your local reference points are rising and sinking at more or less the same rate. (GPS can do it … maybe … but not easily). So some places have no perceptible sea level rise. Some have considerable. A few, like New Orleans and Norfolk, VA have a real, acknowledged, problem. Not that anyone is actually doing anything much about it.
Not that big a deal short term BTW. AR5 puts 21st century sea level rise at 1 to 3 feet (30-100cm) and that’s based on climate scenarios that are running way hot. Not that anyone actually reads the IPCC assessment reprots.
But sea level rise really should be a consideration if one is building infrastructure that will be around hundreds or thousands of years. Best evidence is that the highstand of the last interglacial was more than 5 meters (15feet roughly) above current.
Has there been, does anyone know, a complete geodetic audit of the world’s tide gauges to show the true state of world-wide sea level rise?
===============================
Most of the naval charts of the world are drawn from the British Admiralty charts drawn for surveys 200-300 years ago. There has been very little resurvey since that time due to the costs involved.
Every chart has on it a legend showing datum corrections. Basically how much the chart is offset from reality. So you will for example see a WGS84 correction for latitude and longitude, bringing the chart into line with modern GPS readings. But none of these charts have a datum correction for sea level rise!
So, why are they not corrected for sea level rise if it is actually happening? tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives depend on these charts.
What is remarkable about the datum corrections is how accurate these old charts were. Using the sextant and newly invented marine chronometer, ships sailed to the other side or the earth, and routinely calculated their position within 1 mile of modern GPS readings. This sort of accuracy is hard to achieve even today with a sextant, using radio synchronize chronometers.
Yet given this accuracy, why does it not extend to sea level rise? The obvious answer is because there has not been any for the past 200-300 years.
ferdberple: “The obvious answer is because there has not been any for the past 200-300 years.”
I suspect you are right. At some tide gauges they have installed a geodetic chip and the net result seems to point to no SLR. Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour has had 65mm [2.6 inches] of SLR over the last 100 years but the site is sinking by a similar amount. IOW nothing happening.
There is an organisation called International Geodetic Surveys which seem to be doing this at tide gauges but I haven’t been able to find out much detail.
In The Netherlands they now also build floating houses and neighborhoods. Not so much out of fear for rising sea levels – although that is one of the selling slogans of course – but because open water is cheaper than dry land and there is a lot of open water here. There are also projects running now in other pats of the world.
How did people adapt in Venice where land subsidence over many hundreds of years (and presumably rising seas) resulted in streets replaced by canals and horses with gondolas?… By becoming very wealthy via the benefits of tourism etc.
How did people adapt in Venice where subsidence over many hundreds of years (and presumably rising seas) resulted in streets replaced by canals and horses with gondolas?… By becoming very wealthy via the benefits of tourism etc.
Venice wasn’t built on land with streets or horses. It was built on islands in a lagoon. There has been building subsidence, but there never was any real “land” around or between the building foundations. It’s always been a “water” city.
http://www.localhistories.org/venice.html
Actually Alphan Venice was not built on islands. The houses were built on wooden platforms on swampy lagoon which were supported by stakes. The water city has seen subsidence and sea level rise for many hundreds of years and has coped. But you are correct – only sea horses and no roads.
Genetic engineering. Grow gills. Problem solved.
Yes, but my wife refuses to let me do genetic experiments on the pets… 🙂
[Just tell her they are only normal, routine, run of the male, generic boy and gill experiments. .mod]
She said “don’t play doctor with the fish…” 🙂
Eric
Women are like that. No sense of adventure. The nurturing gene
I have the same problem
I am forever banned form doing any quantum physics experiments with the ether the pet cat or the microwave.
I keep saying the cat will be fine 50% of the time.
Whats a mad scientist to do.
NOW I have a nice big steep garage…. here kitty kitty.
michael
Oh and the cat thinks I’m the perfect pillow… sigh
Sigh, mad scientists don’t need to spell check. Keep that in mind.
michael
mike the moorlock.
Eat her
No they don’t believe that. None of the Climate Alarmists believe anything of the alarming stuff they say, else they would be demanding complete shutdown of all industrial economies. If they really sincerely believed that human civilization will end in the next few generations due to mankind’s output of CO2, they would be determinedly and demonstratively demanding measures that immediately halt CO2 production.
Instead they’re fooling around with carbon market fantasies and taxpayer-looting subsidies for an assortment of Green projects. Lame, politically-motivated nonsense, in other words, and not the demands one would expect from people who genuinely fear for humanity.
All they’re doing is hitching their brains to a secular “cause” that provides them with faux “virtue” replacing traditional religious belief. You can see the same thing with the vegans, the anti-GMO’s, extreme fitness loons, and animal “rights” fanatics. Put solar panels on your roof and eat only celery smoothies, you’ll have big PC cred with the trendy liberal class–all 4% of them.
I agree with Goldrider. I describe it as a virtue-cult. There are all the mechanisms of a cult, except being one of the virtuous few is not attained by adopting some religious axiomatic system, but by adopting some ethical or moral axiomatic system. Same apocalypse, same good/evil story line, etc.
Show me a famous Climate Alarmist that doesn’t own seaside property and I’ll show you a person who MIGHT believe their own hype. Tell me they also promote Nuclear and I’ll accept they DO believe it.
Of course, that still doesn’t make them right, just not a hypocrite.
Hansen Support nuclear.
Let’s wait till we can at least drag a canoe to where the Romans came ashore in Britain in 43AD. Or where fleets could be moored at Ephesus and Old Ostia. Or where even the Norman invasion could land a whole bloody fleet at Pevensey Castle. 1066 and all that.
Right now, it’s still a bit of a walk. Quite a long walk, actually.
mosomoso January 28, 2016 at 8:10 pm
Tsk tsk, These were invasions with huge numbers of heavily armored and armed troops. Their extra weight in the boats caused them to displace an unbelievable amount of water. Hence at least locally sea level rise.
There now do you understand. Heavens the simplest things, must I do everyone thinking?
Now back to to my cheap wine.
Do I need a tag?
michael
Thanks for the laugh, and if that is what it takes? Stick to the cheap stuff ( btw the expensive stuff gives the same headache).
Don’t need a tag, but you’re gonna need an aspirin in the morning.
“The bright fact: climate change is an uncontrolled experiment we triggered on the planetary systems on which our species depend for survival.”
Where is the evidence that humans have caused the Earth’s climate to change? Methinks the Huffington Post and a lot of other people assume too much.
There would have to be unprecedented heat in the atmosphere/oceans to produce unprecedented weather, and the Earth’s atmosphere is not experiencing unprecedented heat right now, despite what the advocates of the global warming/climate change theory say.
When it gets hotter than 1934, was, let me know. There were some pretty severe weather outbreaks worldwide during the very hot decade of the 1930’s: lots of droughts; lots of massive heat waves; lots of hurricanes and tornados; and lots of melting glaciers. Kind of like the scenarios the advocates claim we are facing today, in our current environment.
But we are not there yet, by any credible measurement. We are not hot enough to duplicate the 1930’s weather. How do I know? Well, have you seen “lots of droughts; lots of massive heat waves; lots of hurricanes and tornados; and lots of melting glaciers” worldwide since the beginning of the 21st Century?
And humans didn’t cause the extreme overheating in the 1930’s. It was all natural.
People who assume we are experiencing unprecedented heat in the atmosphere today, are assuming too much. Most of them are assuming too much because they believe the climate science charlatans at NASA, NOAA and the IPCC, who have fooled them into believing a lie by showing them phony, doctored surface temperature charts.
TA
“… the City of Seattle, the street level was raised by an entire floor to defeat flooding ”
The street was raised. Not the building. Think of the surface of a waffle. Sidewalks and streets on the ridges, building foundations and ground-level in the depression. The problem was from building on fill flushed from the local hills. See:
Sluicing the hillsides
Much of the metro-region is built on sand, silt, clay, and gravel. In the region there is frequent flooding, with nothing to do with sea level.
The streets were definitely raised. Many of the old street level store fronts are still down there and there are tours you can take to see them.
http://www.undergroundtour.com/
A lot of Seattle was terraformed to be the place it is today using water streams to flatten the city core. Quite a bit of it was already glacial til. Tunneling under Seattle is a crapshoot because there is so much variation in soils in close proximity. When they were building the bus tunnel they found they’d removed all the soil above the tunnel and they could see the bottom of the asphalt street overhead. The soil simply collapsed as the digging proceeded. You’d think they’d know better, but dig they must. They desperately want a water front cash cow district and they don’t care who’s pocket they pick to get it.
http://www.manufacturing.net/news/2016/01/seattle-tunnel-machine-begins-drilling-after-two-year-break
A picture is worth 1000 words.
http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/sites/report/files/images/web-large/Figure-2.25-hi.jpg
Luke….so is that picture that’s worth a thousand words showing that there has been less than 10 inches rise in a millennium or that there’s been 8 inches rise/subsidence in the last 250 years at the coast in North Carolina? It looks to me like that graph might need to have a thousand words to tell us what it describes from some source one would assume.
funny that not a single naval chart has any datum correction for sea level rise over the past 200-300 years. maybe the map makers know more about sea level than do the climate scientists?
could it be that naval map makers understand that if they say that sea level is rising, and thus the water is actually deeper than what the charts shows, that there might just be some trouble if ships start running aground all over the earth? There a plenty of places where large ships transit with 1 food of clearance. Where they time their passage to match the tidal depth precisely, to save many thousands of dollars in time and fuel by choosing the shorter route through shallow waters.
“funny that not a single naval chart has any datum correction for sea level rise over the past 200-300 years. maybe the map makers know more about sea level than do the climate scientists?”
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/hydro.html
Do you really believe that water level data for nautical charts hasn’t been updated in 300 years?
So do a lot of rich people Ferdberple, I could name one very rich film star who owns an island which he is developing into a rich mans resort and recently flew on a private jet plane to a far off city in the mountains to preach global warming to a bunch of sponging bludgers.
Did you cherry-pick by any chance?
source?
That’s a seriously POXY proxy !
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.htm?stnid=170-011
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.htm?stnid=170-001
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.htm?stnid=010-001
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.htm?stnid=010-001
north carolina.. 2.1mm/year which is 0.8″/decade of totally scare SLR
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8658120
Just above the HORRENDOUS global sea levels rise of around 1.5mm/year
NO acceleration, and not that Luke’s little farce starts climbing at this rate around 1800…
…. so one has to wonder what the little child is trying to say.
There has been and still is so much erosion and deposition along the N.Carolina coast, and that’s without the occasional killer storm, that tide guages from years ago are either high and dry in the dunes or are submerged. I’d seriously question any SLR figures based on what’s been happening along the coast. Maybe in the sounds (Albemarle, Pamlico etc) there’s a real record but I wouldn’t bet on it
chris moffatt
The GA, SC, and NC coasts “travel” as the sand and muck are pushed by tides and the off-shore currents continuously north: inlets need to be continuously dredged (before, they would be storm and flood swept clear) and the coastline itself evolves. Further north, the rocks provide some permanent features, but there are no hard “features” between FL’s Cape Canaveral and Hatteras. The tide gages in this area are sticks in the mud (literally) because they can only record where the tidal mud used to be in past years.
CA’s beaches are sandy coves, separated by rocky outcroppings. But, where the San Andreus fault crosses the shoreline, a similar failure-of-gauges could be generated to make any fairy story the mythmaker wants to create.
1.5 mm? That’s like 2 of my horse’s tail hairs. How do you even MEASURE that, since the ocean doesn’t exactly stand still? /sarc
Isn’t N. Carolina one of the areas that is subsiding from glacial rebound?
I can only assume its yet another piece of climate propaganda that has misfired.
Re: Luke’s graph:
Note that the rates shown are for the proxies (whatever they are) not the data ((wherever that’s from. Slope of data is (somewhat) linear, proxy exponential. It’s hard to see that because of his flat proxy tail – another “Mann trick” by “Luke boy”.
What a massive surprise!! Yet another proxy which tells us that during the past – nothing ever happened.
Even though we know that it did. Even though we know that just 20,000 years ago, there was no Persian Gulf AT ALL. That the North Sea contained a large area of land that featured hills, once the ice had retreated – all now under water. And that a one mile thick ice sheet covered Manhattan.
But – all these lovely cherry-picked proxies show a nice zero trend for everything for the years prior to industrialization.
Living in deni@l must get tough sometimes. Go and look up some facts about the last 20K years of climate history – it may come as a real shock. Shit happened. And it happened over a geologically short time scale.
And most of us were taught about it in the 3rd grade.
Ah; so that is why the old lifeboat station at Oregon Inlet is a quarter mile inland from the beach. Sea level rise! And I thought they just wanted the extra exercise of dragging their lifeboats a quarter mile over the dunes to get them launched. Science, it’s wonderful.
“By 1988, the station was completely abandoned when the southward migration of the Oregon Inlet threatened to swallow it”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Inlet
Luke’s Rise begins in 1800. It is worse than we thought! Go solar!
That’s about as reliable as the temperature data from the ground based network.
In other words, worthless.
It’s dystopian because the left can’t create anything but dystopias. They can’t create wealth, a seawall, new technology or anything else. Well their policies do create poverty so ok they can create one thing.
Yep, Every time there is a scheme to take more money from people, chances are its been birthed from someone who has never been a part of wealth creation. There’s a lot of ignorance out there but economic ignorance is perhaps the most threatening to our way of life.
When you use your own money to buy votes, they call it bribery.
When you use other people’s money to buy votes, they call it socialism.
Actually, they’re excellent at creating victimhood, dependency, new categories of pseudo-disease, new genders, and fads like Spandex-clad contortionism and really revolting things to eat. That’s about it . . . oh, and Outrage. Lots and LOTS of High Dudgeon and Moral Outrage. 😉
Several posters here keep going on and on about how taking money from those who have earned it and giving it to those who want it, creates freedom.
Not unlike claims that a carbon tax will ruin the economy and send us back to the Stone Age. Similar imagery, opposite spin, partisan politics at its best.
Depends on what you mean by ruin the economy.
Carbon pricing does a lot of harm to employment. Even the green EU has been forced to acknowledge that jobs are being driven off shore by carbon pricing. Their policy response is to give lots of freebies to affected industries, in the hope they’ll stay – an exercise which would be utterly unnecessary, if they hadn’t imposed carbon pricing in the first place.
http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/cap/leakage/index_en.htm
Eric Worrall,
It’s not my argument, but I take your meaning.
I think it’s interesting that the world’s largest “offshore” economy leads the world in renewable investment:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2014/06/17/china-leads-in-renewable-investment-again/#12805c4246a9
http://www.ibtimes.com/china-leads-16-jump-global-clean-energy-investments-solar-wind-sectors-grow-1778744
They’re ramping nukes as well.
Here in the US we’ve been shipping jobs overseas for decades, sans carbon taxes. We like cheap labour [1] and cheap fuel it seems. Oh, and cheap plastic sh!t so long as it’s not coated with lead-based paint.
Your logic is of course unassailable. How their partisans would answer you, I cannot say.
—————
[1] Just not inside our own borders.
Renewable ‘Investments’ are scams, plane and simple. None of them could survive without massive government handouts. If you’re really surprised that China leads in scamming the West, then you’re not as smart as I gave you credit for.
Now if you’re in on the scam…
schitzree,
I think it’s a stretch to call the heavily subsidized US Interstate Highway system a scam, and would I also think it would be a gross interpretation of reality to assert that it doesn’t greatly facilitate commerce. One might also reasonably conclude that the reason heavy rail — which is more efficient — is so heavily subsidized is because Interstate freight is faster and more flexible.
Counter-point; it doesn’t take gummint to run a good scam. See Bernie Madoff. Less clear, but more impactful, the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, with the main scam being how so many bad loans were securitized into supposedly less risky bonds.
You really don’t get it that the massive Chinese investments into renewables are for their own domestic use, do you.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Why pay attention how the Chinese are kicking a$$ economically when you can just make up crap about the motives of people who point it out to you.
Sometimes I wonder just how much of prior US economic success has been a total and complete accident of fate.
Well, carbon tax that would be high enough to have an effect on atmospheric CO2, WOULD ruin the world economy. Stone age maybe too much, but for some people the results would be pretty equal. There are millions of people who live in stoneagish conditions even when we are using coal and oil.
* * *
“When sea level rise ramps up, who is going to pay for all the claims?”
Estate owners. You buy seaside, you pay for the downside. Insurances are for short term accidents.
Hugs,
Here’s something I can claim with confidence: if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the world economy would tank. If the US replaced all coal- and gas-fired electricity plants with nuclear by 2050, I think the US economy would fare better than tanking.
Yup.
Wasn’t directed at me, but I do have a comment: you don’t want ocean-side property owners getting wiped out. Bad for the economy.
Perhaps some political partisan would explain to us how artificial and high increases in the prices of food and fuel and everything else is going to help the poor, which is what those same partisans are always claiming to be their goal?
Alan Robertson,
Details vary by which partisan you ask, but as taxation is often used for wealth redistribution that tends to be a common theme.
Taxing air.
Remind me why this is not sheer madness?
Future generations will look back on this whole CAGW farce and laugh their socks off. It will become the stuff of comedy legend.
David Smith,
Taxing a combustion product.
Chemistry and physics.
I love the way Brandon has to lie about what other people say in order to once again try to de-rail the conversation.
It’s the level of taxes that matter, even a brain dead liberal should be able to figure that out.
PS, the stated goal of those who push carbon taxes is the elimination of fossil fuels, and that will send us back to the stone age.
MarkW,
I chose the mildest generalization I could think of, and invoked the replacement strategy I’m most dubious of being workable. I love how you consider me expressing a topical counter-point an attempt to “de-rail the conversation.”
lol, I wouldn’t be too sure of that. Brain dead is brain dead regardless of political alignment. Speaking of:
Compare: I am beginning to believe that science fiction movie scenarios of the future are not so far off: some amalgam of Hunger Games, Sector 9, and Mad Max but with low-rent production values.
Oh BTW, since fossil fuels are a finite resource, how have you not just destined the human race to return to the Stone Age when we run out?
Ah yes, the dreaded coming of the ‘end of oil’.
That reminds me. For Christmas my sister gave me a new printing of a game I used to play all the time as a kid, CAR WARS. It took place 50 years in the future after the oil ran out and civilization had collapsed and partially rebuilt. Of course, this was back in the mid 80’s, so it took place in the 20 30’s and the oil ran out around 2000. >¿<
So care to place your bets on when peek oil will finally come, Gates? Just be aware that so far everyone else who's played has lost.
Brandon Gates
January 29, 2016 at 10:45 am
“Oh BTW, since fossil fuels are a finite resource, how have you not just destined the human race to return to the Stone Age when we run out?”
————————–
Since you’ve aligned your thinking with those who support the ideas that too many humans exist and populations must be reduced by billions and who also advocate the end of fossil fuel use, which would undeniably kill off vast numbers of humans, how is your advocacy for the deaths of billions of people and the end of civilization, going to ensure that any humans at all, survive into your dark, distant future?
schitzree,
I don’t know about dread, but a less loaded term is “concern”:
MarkW
January 29, 2016 at 10:01 am
[…]
PS, the stated goal of those who push carbon taxes is the elimination of fossil fuels, and that will send us back to the stone age.
I remember it. Never played it though. Cool-looking game.
Peak oil production is different from depletion. And no, I don’t care to place a bet on either — the uncertainty there is part of my point.
Implicitly concluding infinite supply from those failures would also be folly, especially in the face of ever increasing demand. I don’t think it’s any accident that the Chinese lead the world in renewables, nor that they’re also ramping their nuclear power program. Just the sort of thing I’d expect shrewd, intelligent, forward-looking business people to be doing.
Alan Robertson,
You’re making this too easy; I’m not sure you understand who it is that is writing the dystopian science fiction.
Compare: I am beginning to believe that science fiction movie scenarios of the future are not so far off: some amalgam of Hunger Games, Sector 9, and Mad Max but with low-rent production values.
Any more insinuating comments about whose thoughts are in alignment here, or do you have enough straw left to build another one?
Like I said, partisan politics at its best.
Brandon, Seriously… Compare: I directly quoted you, for which you claimed my commentary (certainly political,) was a strawman, for which you gave as evidence, a comment not germaine, made by someone else, i.e., a strawman.
You are correct when you speak of politics in the question of climate change, as the whole topic is rife with politics. How else would one describe perhaps the most common meme provided for mass consumption, “… warmest year ever recorded” as anything but political? A neutral scientific statement would certainly not be made in such terms.
Alan Robertson,
Not germane? Did you answer my question of MarkW directly? Here it is again:
Oh BTW, since fossil fuels are a finite resource, how have you not just destined the human race to return to the Stone Age when we run out?
I believe the record shows that you did not.
That’s what happens when scientific findings about the planet have global policy implications.
That depends on the context of its usage, which you did not specify.
“Neutral” is a subjective qualifier of “scientific statement”. If there’s anything I’m certain of, it’s that there is no “certainty” in subjectivity.
Brandon says in answer to:
“How else would one describe perhaps the most common meme provided for mass consumption, “… warmest year ever recorded” as anything but political?”
—————-
“That depends on the context of its usage, which you did not specify.”
Even though you stripped my previous sentence from your quote, the context should still have been plain enough, and I have no doubt that the context was plain enough for you, but still, you deploy semantic deflection away from my point that the phrase …”warmest year ever recorded” is propaganda.
I’ll make the context clear:
When climate alarmists like Gavin Schmidt and others of his stripe make the claim that “2015 was the warmest year in the record, going back to the mid 19th century, by far.”, then the phrase is being used as propaganda in support of the global warming meme. Schmidt is using a well- understood propaganda technique of using half- truths, lying with facts, or cherry- pickin’, if you will. The problem is, facts are not truth, but only facets of the whole truth. Schmidt is a scientist in a position of power and influence and he chooses to lie with facts, to be a propagandist. If he were truly a scientist untainted by political agendas, then he would tell the whole truth, but he is not neutral in his pronouncements, for whatever reasons.
The rhetoric issuing from the climate fearosphere is filled with such half- truths presented as truth. If Schmidt’s science could stand the light of truth shone upon it, there would be no need for such propaganda, but his brand of science does not bear close scrutiny. Many here stand up for the truth and against such rhetorical machinations as Schmidt’s deceptive artifice employed to control the lives of others.
Alan Robertson,
No, Alan, I don’t agree with your opinion. Is that clear enough for you?
It should also be clear from context that I was talking about the context in which the phrase “… warmest year ever recorded” is used by others, NOT how you used it in context. Your previous sentence was:
You are correct when you speak of politics in the question of climate change, as the whole topic is rife with politics.
To which I tacitly agreed by saying: That’s what happens when scientific findings about the planet have global policy implications.
Ok, good.
You present all of the above as if it were unambiguously factual:
“How else would one describe perhaps the most common meme provided for mass consumption, “… warmest year ever recorded” as anything but political?”
… which in this post has morphed into …
… ”warmest year ever recorded” is propaganda.
… a term which is arguably more loaded than “political”, and yet you cite zero evidence to substantiate any of your claims. Not even a direct quote, in context, with a proper citation — a best practice, the benefits of which I really shouldn’t have to explain to you. Looking less like science and more like partisan politics to me.
By the way, what’s this “whole truth” stuff? You don’t expect him to rattle off the entire known history of every single facet of the climate system in every press conference or published paper, do you?
Brandon Gates
January 30, 2016 at 6:34 pm
When climate alarmists like Gavin Schmidt and others of his stripe make the claim that “2015 was the warmest year in the record, going back to the mid 19th century, by far.”, then the phrase is being used as propaganda in support of the global warming meme. Schmidt is using a well- understood propaganda technique of using half- truths, lying with facts, or cherry- pickin’, if you will. The problem is, facts are not truth, but only facets of the whole truth. Schmidt is a scientist in a position of power and influence and he chooses to lie with facts, to be a propagandist. If he were truly a scientist untainted by political agendas, then he would tell the whole truth, but he is not neutral in his pronouncements, for whatever reasons.
You present all of the above as if it were unambiguously factual:
“How else would one describe perhaps the most common meme provided for mass consumption, “… warmest year ever recorded” as anything but political?”
… which in this post has morphed into …
… ”warmest year ever recorded” is propaganda.
… a term which is arguably more loaded than “political”, and yet you cite zero evidence to substantiate any of your claims. Not even a direct quote, in context, with a proper citation — a best practice, the benefits of which I really shouldn’t have to explain to you. Looking less like science and more like partisan politics to me.
Brandon,
You said: “You present all of the above as if it were unambiguously factual:”
—— Yes. It is factual and the truth as far as I can see. Presenting half- truths as if they were the full truth, in order to promote a political agenda is propaganda. The quote I attributed to GS was made by him recently in an interview with NPR. I think it was during last month’s full moon, as that’s a good time to listen to government radio (NPR) as it gives me a chance to yell at the radio. Get the YaYas out and all that. There’s a link on youtube. That was an enlightening interview as Schmidt et al, twisted events and data to their purpose, but gave astute listeners an earful of evidence of skullduggery from those who should be held to account for their mendacity.
———————-
“By the way, what’s this “whole truth” stuff? “You don’t expect him to rattle off the entire known history of every single facet of the climate system in every press conference or published paper, do you?”
——————-
Should I start by asking: Isn’t the whole truth worth pursuing, for you?
———-
“You don’t expect him to rattle off the entire known history of every single facet of the climate system in every press conference or published paper, do you?”
———– Not even that thin veneer of rationalization can hide the fact that Schmidt and company, in fact the entire climate fear team, never cite the history or any other facet (fact) of the climate system when they claim “warmest year ever recorded.” That is their default position, from which they never deviate into inconvenient facts (facets) like: “warmest year ever recorded” since the Little Ice Age, but not as warm as the Holocene Optimum, or as warm as the Roman Warm Period, or…”. They somehow never seem to mention those facets of the shining diamond of truth, because they aren’t interested in truth, just the promotion of their agenda, by only speaking half truths- propaganda. They are liars, bent on changing civilization, doing whatever it takes to achieve their goal. For them, the end justifies the means. I have no use for them.
Alan Robertson,
But what you … me, we … “see” in other people is limited. Neither of us are in Gavin Schmidt’s head. Either of us making suppositions about what he does when he’s not giving press conferences and why is strictly opinion on our part. Which is fine. I don’t mind people expressing opinions. I do mind people presenting opinion as fact.
I agree with your definition. I don’t agree with its application to Gavin Schmidt because “propaganda” is such a loaded word, carrying connotations that want actual evidence of malfeasance, not just personal opinion. He and I both are protected by US laws which prevail on the concept of “innocent until proven guilty”, and I’m suggesting to you that that’s something you really don’t want to erode by making unsubstantiated allegations of fraudulent misconduct. If you’re looking for a road to dystopia, that kind of rhetoric is part of the paving of it. Am I getting through yet?
Before you explicitly subbed “propaganda” in for “political” I thought you had a better point. It would be the acme of foolishness for me to believe that Dr. Schmidt has no political views, and that they don’t bias his research and public comments. I think your argument about “neutrality” is weak. It’s well known to science that scientists are not immune to cognitive biases, it’s why the peer-review process is such an important step to publication. Even that fails, obviously, and not just in climate science but all sciences. The real world I live in is not perfect, and I personally don’t want to pretend it’s possible for other human beings to be perfectly dispassionate and objective observers of the natural world by insisting, in a debate, that someone isn’t a good scientist because they’re not “netural”.
One thing I certainly can’t fault you for is passion, especially since I don’t lack my own on this topic. But passionate personal testimonials don’t convince me. Logic, reason and evidence do. Demagoguery is something I find especially offputting, but if you’re looking to nail me for being a hypocrite, that’s a promising avenue for you to explore because I’ll be the first to admit that engaging in it can feel really damn good.
Of course it is, but it’s also something I consider my own responsibility to attempt to obtain. Won’t happen in my lifetime on this or any topic, too much to know.
That’s just pure and unadulterated BS, Alan. Good grief. Anyone who reads the press releases knows how easily falsifiable that claim is. We just talked about this on David Whitehouse’s piece. You were there. My very first post on that thread …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/23/2015-global-temp-or-how-some-scientists-deliberately-mistook-weather-for-climate/#comment-2127478
… completely demolishes your statement, “… Schmidt and company, in fact the entire climate fear team, never cite the history or any other facet (fact) of the climate system when they claim ‘warmest year ever recorded.'”
“Never” is a really strong word. You should never use it in an argument when one example is sufficient to disprove it.
Right, this is getting back to my earlier point that I think it’s a bit unreasonable to expect Schmidt et al. to cover …
… 500 million years of temperature change and …
… 500 million years of CO2 levels when the topic of the press conference is what’s most relevant to post-industrial society and the 7.125 billion people TODAY who are dependent on the biosphere for FOOD not going t!ts up unexpectedly some time in the next century. Your accusation here is especially whacky, because … how else is it in holy Hades you know that “climate is always changing” save for the fact that these same mendacious obfuscatory lying sacks of bull excrement climatologists were the ones to do the research and publish it in the first place?!
Wake up.
Why don’t the wholly fabricated observations better match the completely useless models, Alan? Pretty inept conspiracy that can’t even get that one correct, if you ask me.
Brandon Gates January 30, 2016 at 10:48 pm
“That’s just pure and unadulterated BS…”
——————
That’s certainly the product that Schmidt, et cie provide for public consumption, every time they speak.
Sooner or later, someone in the press is going to get a clue and/or grow a pair and ask them what they mean by “warmest ever recorded” in the context of human history during the entire Holocene.
Until then,, the loudest mouths in the climate fearosphere will continue to rely on their fellow lying propagandists to provide cover for them.
Brandon Gates January 30, 2016 at 10:48 pm
“…if you’re looking to nail me for being a hypocrite, that’s a promising avenue for you to explore because I’ll be the first to admit that engaging in it can feel really damn good.”
——————–
I had no intent to point out your hypocrisy, since most (all?) regulars at WUWT are familiar with your tactics. Thanks for bringing any new readers up to speed.
Alan Robertson,
Repeating the same argument over and over does not make it any more true. Repeating it as a response to my showing it to be demonstrably false is simply bizarre.
One of these days, one hopes you will get a clue and realize that context has already been provided in literature, say Marcott et al. (2013):
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
2013 instrumental temps dead even with the max upper bound of the 1-sigma uncertainty of the reconstruction. More importantly, look at the rate of the instrumental. The context is there. The questions you say are not being asked have already been answered. I’m beginning to think you simply don’t like answers, and frankly, I cannot fault you for that because I don’t much care for them either.
Disingenuity combined with appeal to popularity, all rolled up in a nice pretty ad hominem wrapper. Partisan propaganda at its finest.
Thanks for playing, cheers.
Brandon Gates
January 31, 2016 at 11:38 am
Alan Robertson,
“That’s certainly the product that Schmidt, et cie provide for public consumption, every time they speak.”
—-
B: “Repeating the same argument over and over does not make it any more true. Repeating it as a response to my showing it to be demonstrably false is simply bizarre.”
—————-
Except that you haven’t shown my statement to be demonstrably false. You set up a straw man and flailed away at that. Ineptly.
If you REALLY want to debunk my words and meaning, then try this: simply find (and report here,) one single instance of any public speech by Oreskes, Schmidt, Hansen or any of the prominent mouthpieces which promote the CAGW meme, which shows them speaking to the public about modern temps, in the context of man’s history in the Holocene. Just one instance is all you’ll need.
I’m not sure if it’s laughable, or pathetic that you tried to use Marcotte et al, 2013 as some sort of authority in this conversation.
Here’s a graph for you, which demonstrates exactly the temp record of the Holocene vis a vis current temps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greenland_Gisp2_Temperature.svg
Ps If there was any ad hom about your hypocrisy, it was entirely of your own making, since you outed yourself. What were you trying to do, set some sort of rhetorical trap?
Here’s another GISTEMP plot:
http://snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
Alan Robertson,
Here’s your argument, verbatim: Not even that thin veneer of rationalization can hide the fact that Schmidt and company, in fact the entire climate fear team, never cite the history or any other facet (fact) of the climate system when they claim “warmest year ever recorded.”
Notice the word “never” which I emphasized in bold text. All I have to do to falsify your entire statement is to provide one, and only one, example of that statement being untrue. Here’s a post I wrote recently: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/23/2015-global-temp-or-how-some-scientists-deliberately-mistook-weather-for-climate/#comment-2127478
In that post I link to this press release:
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-analyses-reveal-record-shattering-global-warm-temperatures-in-2015
Here’s the lede paragraph:
Earth’s 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Further down in the same release we read:
Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with 15 of the 16 warmest years on record occurring since 2001. Last year was the first time the global average temperatures were 1 degree Celsius or more above the 1880-1899 average.
Phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña, which warm or cool the tropical Pacific Ocean, can contribute to short-term variations in global average temperature. A warming El Niño was in effect for most of 2015.
“2015 was remarkable even in the context of the ongoing El Niño,” said GISS Director Gavin Schmidt. “Last year’s temperatures had an assist from El Niño, but it is the cumulative effect of the long-term trend that has resulted in the record warming that we are seeing.
Your statement as written above is demonstrably false. I have proven it wrong. Your position, as written above, is demolished. Your very own words above as written do not match reality. Am I getting through to you yet?
I gave you one instance above. Not the first time I’ve done it. Now you’ve introduced the qualifier of the entire Holocene. How many more times are you going to move the goalposts? How much climate history does Gavin Schmidt need to talk about in each and every press conference before you are personally satisfied?
Climate and weather are sufficiently complex that even discussing “all” aspects of it in a single paper, speech, press release or press conference is NOT feasible, even if the scope of the history of the system is limited to the modern instrumental period (which is most relevant to NOW), to say nothing of climate over the past 4.543 billion years — I repeat, 4.543 billion years — of the planet’s entire existence.
As such, you are ALWAYS going to be able to point out something that someone “left out”, and from that insinuate that they have some “agenda” for doing so.
I consider that to be a bad faith debate tactic, an a silly game. Worse, it’s NOT the way to learn anything. Honest and intelligent people who want to learn about the Holocene from Gavin Schmidt only need to use google and read the third link that pops up: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/MannetalGRL09.pdf
A few more links down and I find a RealClimate post authored by him: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/03/can-we-make-better-graphs-of-global-temperature-history/
Is that publically accessible enough for you? It contains this image:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png
That far enough back for you? It contains another example I’ve already posted in this thread:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/All_palaeotemps.png/1600px-All_palaeotemps.png
It’s not Gavin Schmidt’s duty to spoon-feed you. It’s not my duty to spoon-feed you. It’s YOUR responsibility to learn about the details of climate, and its history, and it’s really not all that hard to find an overwhelming amount of information from people you laughably claim are attempting to suppress it — the whole reason you know that “climate is always changing and always have” is because they are the ones doing the research in the first place.
Wake up and stop being ridiculous.
Alan Robertson,
I’m not sure if it’s laughable or pathetic that you think Alley (2000) “rebuts” Marcott (2013), or that Alley is any more of an authority than Marcott. The real howler is that you think Alley (2000) has anything to say about “current temps”.
Here’s the link to the data file: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
Here are the first few lines of data:
DATA: 1. Temperature in central Greenland Column 1: Age (thousand years before present) Column 2: Temperature in central Greenland (degrees C) Age Temperature (C) 0.0951409 -31.5913 0.10713 -31.622 0.113149 -31.6026 0.119205 -31.6002 0.119205 -31.598 0.125451 -31.6656 0.132407 -31.7235 0.138807 -31.7583 0.145126 -31.8098 0.152263 -31.8415Unless otherwise specified, “years before present” means “years before 1950” by convention. So …
1950 – 0.0951409 * 1000 = 1854.8591
… which is not exactly “current”.
Ah, I see your point. I actually read what you wrote this time and you are correct. That statement of mine used imprecise language and was therefore untrue. As you may be aware, you have made similarly untrue- through- imprecision statements in this post, but let’s not go there, let’s not belabor those issues. Everyone, even (especially?) scientists, can make mistakes while trying to communicate their ideas and while that is not the main point, is a valid and vital point of this entire discussion.
I am only a layman but strive for the best understanding that I can reach on scientific topics, which is an effort to get as close to the truth as I can get. That effort, in my understanding of the principles of science, is the goal of science, as well.
With that goal in mind, I think that one simple question will cut through the fog of this topic and get us closer to the truth:
Which of the following statements comes closest to the truth?
A) 2015 was the warmest year ever recorded.
B) 2015 was the warmest year in recorded human history.
By the way, that simple A or B question requires only a simple A or B answer, si’l vous plait.
Alan Robertson,
We’ve made progress, thank you.
I am aware that humans make error, that I am human, and that I err. I would prefer you to point to a specific example you think is a similar error in precision than make a generalization … which in itself is an imprecise statement.
Sure. I’ve already written that it would be folly for me to presume that Dr. Schmidt et al. don’t have political/ideological views, and that those don’t color the nature of their research and public communications. There is call for skepticism of any scientific finding for the very reason that all humans have cognitive biases to some degree. It’s not lost on me that there being so many major policy decisions riding on AGW theory warrants exceptional scrutiny.
What I don’t agree with are statements like, “they’re politically motivated, their conclusions are irredeemably tainted, should be disregarded, and they should be condemned for abusing their position to spread false conclusions.” You didn’t exactly write those words; however, be I right or wrong, that’s what I was reading into them.
Ditto for me.
(B) is my answer.
Closed-ended questions, especially binary ones, are not generally the kind that lead to further understanding of any truth. Asking them IS a common rhetorical tactic designed to pin down one’s interlocutor into an indefensible position, which you have just done here — both statements as worded are false according to my understanding (read: belief) of reality.
“Closed-ended questions, especially binary ones, are not generally the kind that lead to further understanding of any truth. Asking them IS a common rhetorical tactic designed to pin down one’s interlocutor into an indefensible position, which you have just done here — both statements as worded are false according to my understanding (read: belief) of reality.”
Brandon, why do you go to such lengths to prove you like to insinuate and assume things about people? It only makes you look paranoid and irrational, especially when the person you are speaking to already gave you his motivation FREELY:
“With that goal in mind, I think that one simple question will cut through the fog of this topic and get us closer to the truth:
Rather than stating your own personal opinion about his motivation, which is obviously different from the one he offered to you, why didn’t you just say “I don’t like either choice because….”? Because what you did ALSO looks “designed to pin down your interlocutor into an indefensible position” and does not “generally lead to further understanding of any truth.”
Trying to find ONE point of agreement in a debate is a smart and effective tactic that leads to clarity, not pigeonholing. It gives both sides a jumping off spot that eliminates a lot of assumption, insinuation, and other rhetorical wastes of time. I believe Alan asked you to simply choose A or B, in order to prevent you FROM doing exactly what you just did, complicate the discussion more by adding unnecessary and counter intuitive insinuations.
Aphan,
I explained that to him already, in the bit you directly quoted in the beginning of your post:
“Closed-ended questions, especially binary ones, are not generally the kind that lead to further understanding of any truth. Asking them IS a common rhetorical tactic designed to pin down one’s interlocutor into an indefensible position, which you have just done here — both statements as worded are false according to my understanding (read: belief) of reality.”
Was my meaning unclear to you? Do you disagree with it? Why or why not?
Aphan, why do you go to such lengths to prove you like to insinuate and assume things about people? It only makes you look paranoid and irrational, especially when the person you are speaking to already gave you his motivation FREELY:
“Closed-ended questions, especially binary ones, are not generally the kind that lead to further understanding of any truth. Asking them IS a common rhetorical tactic designed to pin down one’s interlocutor into an indefensible position, which you have just done here — both statements as worded are false according to my understanding (read: belief) of reality.”
Ok, let’s test these principles. The first instance of “… warmest year ever recorded” in this subthread is Alan’s post dated January 30, 2016 at 6:38 am:
Brandon, Seriously… Compare: I directly quoted you, for which you claimed my commentary (certainly political,) was a strawman, for which you gave as evidence, a comment not germaine, made by someone else, i.e., a strawman.
You are correct when you speak of politics in the question of climate change, as the whole topic is rife with politics. How else would one describe perhaps the most common meme provided for mass consumption, “… warmest year ever recorded” as anything but political? A neutral scientific statement would certainly not be made in such terms.
My post dated January 30, 2016 at 1:17 pm reads in part:
[quoting Alan]: How else would one describe perhaps the most common meme provided for mass consumption, “… warmest year ever recorded” as anything but political?
[Me responding]: That depends on the context of its usage, which you did not specify.
Has Alan provided a single specific context for the paraphrase “… warmest year ever recorded”?
Is a single specific example enough to draw conclusions about the “whole truth” of the motives and actions of “Oreskes, Schmidt, Hansen or any of the prominent mouthpieces which promote the CAGW meme”?
By the way, those simple yes or no questions require only simple yes or no answers, s’il vous plaît. I’m just trying to find two points of agreement with you so that we can eliminate a lot of assumption, insinuation and other rhetorical wastes of time.
Hello Aphan,
I had the briefest flicker of an urge to caution you about this engagement, but you need no warning from anyone. You have a well- established pattern of commentary here at WUWT which reveals that you are exceedingly astute, tough- minded and honest, albeit somewhat of a target for “Texan joakes”, since you married one. (Being from Oklahoma, I can’t help it.)
Engaging in extended dialogue establishes a pattern of thought and action which reveals who we are to others (and ourselves,) to the extent of the awareness and understanding of both the listener and speaker and to the extent of modifiers to our understanding such as veracity and intent, often upwelling from depths and layers of hidden agendas and convolutions of ethic and psyche, but which do gradually reveal themselves, even though and especially if, the speaker is particularly adept with the techniques of deception. This is really a whole other topic, as none of us has anywhere close to perfect perception of ourselves or others, peering as we are through the miasma of our own misunderstandings, but however apropos to this thread, back to the topic at hand.
This discussion has underscored the general primacy of patterns over single instances of speech and has established the need for context, in order to further our understanding. But more importantly, this thread underscores the certainty that the enhancement of a listener’s understanding is often far from the intent of the speaker, for the simple reason that if others more fully understand the topic, then the speaker’s agenda is undermined.
“Has Alan provided a single specific context for the paraphrase “… warmest year ever recorded”?
In the context of this post, this thread, this site and the worldwide discussion of anthropogenic climate catastrophe entire, that single sentence becomes utterly specious and profoundly revelatory.
[Excuse me, those of us from Texas reserve the term JaOKers for those north of the border. .mod]
Alan Robertson,
Speaking of profound revelations in a single sentence (but not really), I begin to understand your difficulty correctly parsing more global realities …
Has Alan provided a single specific context for the paraphrase “… warmest year ever recorded”?
Is a single specific example enough to draw conclusions about the “whole truth” of the motives and actions of “Oreskes, Schmidt, Hansen or any of the prominent mouthpieces which promote the CAGW meme”?
… because apparently you struggle to evaluate them more than one sentence at a time. Emphasis added to hopefully help you overcome your increasingly obvious selective reading disability.
Well done, Brandon!
That’s about as hilarious of a display of twisted logic as one can ever hope to see, but you even topped that off with yet another of your little retreats to your default hidey- hole, the ad hominem attack.
Has it ever occurred to you that others happily engage with you here because you expose yourself, every time you speak?
Alan Robertson,
I wish I could say your antics are more than mildly amusing.
It’s occurred to me that people who lack self-awareness AND evidence think that’s what they’re doing to me. In the meantime, the careful and honest reader will note that your various charges against Gavin Schmidt et al. have never included a direct quotation or direct citation:
—————
January 30, 2016 at 6:38 am: How else would one describe perhaps the most common meme provided for mass consumption, “… warmest year ever recorded” as anything but political? A neutral scientific statement would certainly not be made in such terms.
—————
January 30, 2016 at 4:38 pm: Even though you stripped my previous sentence from your quote, the context should still have been plain enough, and I have no doubt that the context was plain enough for you, but still, you deploy semantic deflection away from my point that the phrase …”warmest year ever recorded” is propaganda.
I’ll make the context clear:
When climate alarmists like Gavin Schmidt and others of his stripe make the claim that “2015 was the warmest year in the record, going back to the mid 19th century, by far.”, then the phrase is being used as propaganda in support of the global warming meme. Schmidt is using a well- understood propaganda technique of using half- truths, lying with facts, or cherry- pickin’, if you will. The problem is, facts are not truth, but only facets of the whole truth. Schmidt is a scientist in a position of power and influence and he chooses to lie with facts, to be a propagandist. If he were truly a scientist untainted by political agendas, then he would tell the whole truth, but he is not neutral in his pronouncements, for whatever reasons.
The rhetoric issuing from the climate fearosphere is filled with such half- truths presented as truth. If Schmidt’s science could stand the light of truth shone upon it, there would be no need for such propaganda, but his brand of science does not bear close scrutiny. Many here stand up for the truth and against such rhetorical machinations as Schmidt’s deceptive artifice employed to control the lives of others.
—————
January 30, 2016 at 8:56 pm: Yes. It is factual and the truth as far as I can see. Presenting half- truths as if they were the full truth, in order to promote a political agenda is propaganda. The quote I attributed to GS was made by him recently in an interview with NPR. I think it was during last month’s full moon, as that’s a good time to listen to government radio (NPR) as it gives me a chance to yell at the radio. Get the YaYas out and all that. There’s a link on youtube. That was an enlightening interview as Schmidt et al, twisted events and data to their purpose, but gave astute listeners an earful of evidence of skullduggery from those who should be held to account for their mendacity.
—————
January 31, 2016 at 6:38 am: Sooner or later, someone in the press is going to get a clue and/or grow a pair and ask them what they mean by “warmest ever recorded” in the context of human history during the entire Holocene.
Until then,, the loudest mouths in the climate fearosphere will continue to rely on their fellow lying propagandists to provide cover for them.
—————
That’s a TON of insinuation, allegation and accusation based on a single paraphrase of ”warmest year ever recorded” from a single NPR interview you simply can’t be bothered to quote directly, much less properly cite. You need a lot more evidence than that to demonstrate a persistent pattern of intent. You’ve failed to produce anything but hearsay.
And now you bizarrely whine to me about my “default hidey- hole, the ad hominem attack”. Brother, you’ve barely left it this entire exchange, and had your central argument soundly refuted several times: the only reason you know anything about temperatures in the Holocene or further back is because the people you laughably claim are suppressing that information are the ones doing the research and publishing it to begin with.
Wake up.
Australia has been in an economic disaster since the WBCT – unemployment soared at 100 year high commodity prices and peaked the month of the repeal.
In other examples, Spain and Greece had carbon prices and renewables subsidies. How are they going?
[WBCT = ?? .mod]
While I have no doubt humans will overcome any gradual danger from flooding, lifting the buildings in Chicago today is a very different task than the buildings of 1850. No doubt we’d overcome the difficulty, but I doubt we’ll jack up skyscrapers. More cost effective to backfill the lower floor(s) with concrete and add at the top I’ll bet.
[Chicago is not at sea level,
and no city needs that kind of movement at sea level. .mod]
But, but, but… in the 19th century there was no Occupational Safety and Health Administration or Building Code enforcement bureaus! We may be drowned by the time they work out the bureaucracy to let us do what’s required!
Zactly. Things were accomplished in the ages before government started helping.
Notice, by the way, the tunnel is below sea level and in an earthquake zone proving people are the craziest monkeys. The tunnel is slated to replace the double deck viaduct seen having the wobblies in this Plan 9 from Space inspired video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dtjGmrPKSI and note that the subduction and liquifaction is happening exactly where the tunnel is being bored. What can go wrong?
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/About/followbertha
Quote
one federally funded taxpayer agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, is working day and night, up and down the coastline, with bulldozers, tractors, and sand from the Bahamas and Mexico to reinforce tourist-friendly beaches against sea level rise.
Unquote
Is that the lie? Why is nobody addressing that?????
which part is the lie? The Corps of Engineers is working day and night? They certainly spend plenty of money on things like pumps for New Orleans that fail to meet specifications until the engineers adjust the specs to meet what has been sold to them. So IF they were supplying sand it would not be out of the question that it might originate in Mexico as that would be the most expensive possible sand. You see Grey you don’t want to get people started on the lies about the Corps of Engineers!
One of the great learning experiences that I have had was the reading of this book.
Dams and Other Disasters: A Century of the Army Corps of Engineers in Civil Works, by Arthur E. Morgan
At the time I was working toward a degree in Civil Eng. Of all the books on Political Philosophy that I have read since then, only Hannah Arendt, has been his equal. Adaptation to the environmental and political systems of the day is where the human excels. These leftists are only responding to the demands of the system that feeds and clothes them, without regard to testable truth. After all the game is to acquire the almighty pension, and a little fib here and there is harmless,,
the katrina problem was recognized and treated lightly from the 1930s onward, until the inevitable happened.
If they are bulldozing sand, they’re doing it the hard way.
I’ve lived near the sea all my life. Beach sand behaves like a flowing river, if you want to build up the sand on a beach, you don’t bulldoze more sand onto the beach, you interrupt and slow the flow of seawater, so it drops its load of sand where you want your beach to be built up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groyne
Eric, I’d guess that they are mostly dredging their fill material, not bulldozing it.
Maybe groynes work in your area, but along the Southern California coast, they were tried in the mid-20th century they worked poorly, Mostly they served to create hazards for late night partiers on moonless nights who didn’t always survive that first big step off the (usually rusty) edge injury free.
The sea level rise at the mouth of the Mississippi is mostly due to subsidence. Same as Venice and many other cities built on river deltas. The weight in the soil in the deltas compress the earth below, and sinks.
Much more subsidence than SLR.
.
Since we have to keep repeating this seemingly very simple explanation – I can only assume that the concept is just beyond comprehension to the libtards in MSM. Idiocracy is here.
“You say ground going down. Me no understand. Me say sea coming up. Yes?”
Fort Lauderdale is currently undergoing a long overdue beach restoration. This is necessary for two reasons. First, the beach is built. Covered with condo buildings, Roadway AIA,… Whichncreates a fixed line. Beaches don’t do fixed lines, they like to move around. Second, we cut many inlets to the intercoastal waterway. Each inlet prevents natural southward sand migration. So beaches widen hugely on inlet north sides, and disappear on inlet south sides. The work is being done by a private contractor. The 865,000 cubic yards of sand is being trucked from a sand mine in LaBelle ( just west of Okeechobee, about 110 miles away). Total cost $55 million, 2/3 state county, 1/3 federal. All info on line at http://www.Broward.org/beachrenourishment
It would have been preferable to simply dredge sand from offshore borrow pits, but environmentalists prevented that out of concern for our offshore coral reefs. That fight caused the decade delay in beach replenishment.
No Corps of Engineers, no sand from Mexico, no relationship to sea level rise whatsoever.
I grew up in Pompano Beach and in the late 60s/early 70s we would go to the beach just where A1A becomes Miracle Mile where the dredged reefs were being pumped onto the beach, standing in the sand/water mixture coming out of the pipes hoping to find a conch shell etc. I was young, so I’m not claiming any support for any theory in my observations, but as I recall there was opposition to dredging because it was destroying the inner reef. I vaguely recall my old man telling me the dredging was being done by the Corps of Engineers. Later, as a surfer in Deerfield Beach (not much surf to boast about) I spent just about every day at the beach. We all knew about the strong southerly current along the shore – rock piles had been placed at intervals to counter the southward erosion, but as you say, sand built up on the northern side and basins formed on the southern side. Further up, in Boca Raton I believe, there were groins and the same thing happened, only worse. South of Deerfield condos were built stupidly close to the high tide line and in places the beach had virtually disappeared. I only make these remarks because the article above says they’re countering sea level rise, whereas beach restoration has been going on for ages because of erosion from southward currents.
O/T but quite strange … this article showed up in The Guardian of all places …
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/29/modern-european-summers-are-warmest-since-roman-times-study-finds
The Guardian might have wanted to think twice before publishing it.. 🙂
…OMG…1.3 degree temperature rise in 2,000 years ?? We are all going to die,,,someday !
Galveston Tx was raised by 16 feet, if I recall correctly. When a similar hurricane to the 1900 storm came through (Alicia) the city survived. My brothers slept on pool tables in a pub, but except for hangovers, came through unscathed.
We can adapt.
In the average scenario – climbing onto a pool table allows a person to compensate for over 300years of sea level rise at the current highest (most alarmist) estimate of the average rate.
Unfortunately this technique is not permitted in the UK’s version of pool – snooker.
Since there is a rule that one foot must be kept on the floor at all times.
“Huffpost thinks a few inches of sea will cause Civilisation to Collapse”
Methinks that the vacuum between their ears has caused their little brains to collapse.
Oh come on now, your ASSUMING someone at the Huffy has a brain cell to collapse ! That’s really pushing the odds !
Touche!
Seems the Huffington Post thinks its countrymen are less capable than the Dutch who recovered most of their country from the sea with little more than hand tools and windmills. They then were hired in England where they drained the Fens of East Anglia turning malarial swamps into some of the most productive land in the country.
If I was a US citizen I would be insulted.
Last year’s Tour de France repeated the tradition of beginning in another country – this time Holland, with a ride across area that, without efforts to counter the sea, would have required a boat, rather than the thin-tired roadbikes that can barely handle cobbles. Millions watched, so this is no secret.
See? The windmills really CAN do anything!
…From the first short powered flight in 1903, Americans reached the moon in 1969….
I never tire of explaining to Americans that this is simplistic to the point of being incorrect.
First human flight – Montgolfier in 1783 (French)
First controlled flight – Henri Giffard in 1852 (French)
First heavier-than-air flight – Cayley in 1853 (British)
First heavier-than-air powered flight – Felix du Temple in 1874 (French)
First heavier-than-air powered flight with unaided take-off – Clement Ader in 1890 (French)
First heavier-than-air controlled flight – Otto Lilienthal in 1893 (German)
First heavier-than-air powered controlled flight – Richard Pearse in March 1903 (New Zealander) OR Orville Wright in Dec 1903 (American) (depending on what balance you give which to what historical data)
..Jumping off a cliff while flapping your arms DOES NOT count as a powered, controlled flight !!
I think the Wrights’ defenders have claimed that the NZ flight wasn’t as controlled as the Wrights’ sophisticated wing warping technique.
First heavier-than-air powered flight was John Stringfellow 1848 (English)
Yes – though that was a model, and I am thinking of human-carrying. In fact, small toy model helicopter-like machines, with feathers for blades were a toy known to the ancient Egyptians, so you could say that heavier-than-air flight preceded lighter-than-air flight, in about 2000 BC….
The reason for all this nit-picking is that the Wrights tried to make their fortune out of patents, and to do this they made grandiose claims to have discovered ‘the secret of flight’, and to have been ‘first’. To do this they had to hedge their claim around with qualifications, and later countrymen of theirs have forgotten these.
I suppose that if you want to specify these qualifications, they have a claim to have created the ‘first man-carrying heavier-than-air machine to achieve sustained repeatable controlled flight using a power source totally enclosed in the airframe.’ You also have to ignore take-off requirements – Santos Dumont took off under his own power on wheels, while the Wrights used a catapult/ramp launch into strong wind, and dropped the take-off dolly when airborne. But once in the air, there is no doubt that the Wright Flyer was the most competent aeroplane by 1906, when Dumont’s 14-bis first flew. Equally, by 1907, Dumont’s ‘Demoiselle’ was unquestionably a better aircraft, and was the forerunner of modern aviation. Dumont made his plans freely available – if you want you can even build one today. Here is a Practical Mechanics plan of 1910 – http://web.archive.org/web/20091026211607/http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/9260/demoisel.htm
Incidentally, the Wright wing-warping technique was not ‘more sophisticated’ than ailerons – in fact, ailerons are more sophisticated than wing warping, and scale a lot better. The Wright’s sophistication lay in running innumerable experiments which optimised their control system to the point where it would fly. Unfortunately, the control system they chose, wing warping and forward elevator, was a poor one from the design point of view, and you needed to be an expert to keep the craft in the air. A rear tail and flapped control surfaces are much better and more practical – they are the ones we use nowadays. There is no thread of modern aircraft design which owes its inception to the Wrights.
I didn’t say it was “‘more sophisticated’ than ailerons.” Those were invented after 1903, AFAIK. and were promoted by Curtis and others. Here’s what I wrote:
My implication was—obviously—only that the Wrights’ technique was sophisticated compared to whatever was used in NZ in 1903.
@RogerKnights
..My implication was—obviously—only that the Wrights’ technique was sophisticated compared to whatever was used in NZ in 1903…
Hmmm… there is some confusion going on here – possibly with the use of the word ‘sophisticated’. Ailerons were actually invented in the 1860s, and the Pearse aircraft used them. They are an inherently better design than wing-warping.
Claims of ‘First!’ can be made by pretty much all the early aviation pioneers, depending on which features of their aircraft you find to be important. The Pearce aircraft had far less development time spent on it that the Wrights, but in 1903 it made 4 witnessed flights in March and May 1903 – the first one a straight flight of around 350 yards – the last a flight of around 1000 yards, demonstrating both left and right turns. By contrast, the Wrights made 4 witnessed flights in December 1903 – all straight and none longer than 250 yards. They then made a new aircraft in 1904 which flew better but was still unsatisfactory – though it could turn. Finally, by Oct 1905 their third aircraft proved controllable enough to undertake long distance flights – around 20 miles.
There seems to be a tendency for people to take the performance of the Flyer-3 as applying to the Flyer-1, which is, of course, not the case. In terms of ‘hops’ and short-distance flights there were several pioneers who matched or surpassed the Wrights’ achievements in 1903, but the 1905 Flyer-3 (as modified by the end of the year) was almost certainly the best-performing aircraft at that time. By 1908, it (and the new Wright Model A) were being out-performed by Santos-Dumont’s Demoiselle No. 20.
I think that the Flyer-3 was the first usable aeroplane, in the sense that if you had one it would not be an experiment to go up for a flight in it. But the Demoiselle had wheels, and was able to fly to a destination, land, and then later take off and fly back. The Flyer-3 needed a launch rail and catapult…
If it isn’t powered AND controlled, then it isn’t human flight. It’s falling… With style!
“Dodgy Geezer
January 29, 2016 at 1:57 am
First heavier-than-air powered controlled flight – Richard Pearse in March 1903 (New Zealander)”
They claim it but in no way would his machine get in to the air by itself, it was launched off of a hill. Look at the propeller!! No way! Anyone with the slightest bit of aeronautical knowledge would know that. I have seen a full sized model of his craft and I say it didn’t fly as is defined today. It “cushioned” a crash in to a bush with its wings.
Any species unable to adapt to slowly rising sea level (with ~100 year warning) deserves to become extinct. I suggest phased withdrawal of government support and liability of near-coast properties, perhaps for one foot above sea level every 20 years.
Hopefully someday, liberalism ( insanity ) will become extinct….
Liberalism will only become extinct when we stop giving Everyone a Trophy.
Liberalism won’t go extinct until greed and jealousy go extinct.
Dr. Harold Wanless, chair of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami and respected spokesperson on sea level rise, says taxpayers should be funding, now, for a rainy day when property owners will have to abandon coastal real estate in a mass migration from the coastlines.
What? You mean they haven’t been abandoned already? For back in 1986, experts predicted a one foot rise in sea level (a modest amount by Hansen standards, I think).
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/doc/290910186.html?
I was sorry to learn the US is sinking. Did global warming do that?
“I was sorry to learn the US is sinking. Did global warming do that?”
Nahhh… It’s the obesity epidemic, Charlie, where all Americans are going hungry and it will require $12 billion for lunches this summer to keep all of the children from starving. (That’s how America fights obesity.)
The US would stop sinking if we all lost a couple of pounds.
” The US would stop sinking if we all lost a couple of pounds.”
.. and a few million liberals !!
Be careful with the people. We do not want nations to capsize. http://r.duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DzNZczIgVXjg
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/where-s-dad-bod-ken-men-react-to-barbie-s-new-look-with-body-demands-of-their-own-1.3424119
The dystopian Mad Max / Hunger Games future is what Progressives (like those at Huffpo) are building because their goals run counter to human nature, so they must remove individual rights and liberties, subjugating everyone to the collectivist state. And no matter how many times such schemes fail and end in mass destruction and death, such people always try again.
Regarding technology, it’s a blessing if people have rights and liberties but a curse in the Utopia they’re building. People are seriously dreaming of a world in which the human race are forcibly engineered into beings that are small, nocturnal creatures with larger brains, the idea being that such alien-like creatures would have less impact on the Earth goddess. WUWT reported on this last year.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/01/bizarre-idea-turning-us-into-dwarves-with-night-vision-will-save-us-from-climate-change/
Others are seriously proposing the extinction of the human race to stop Global Warming. They’re mad.
http://youtu.be/ir5RhjnSRF0
” Others are seriously proposing the extinction of the human race to stop Global Warming. They’re mad.”…..
Yes, we use to put liberals in the nut house house, NOW we have to live beside them !
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
The true silliness in all of this is the idea that if it is happening then we can do anything to stop it.
Correct, because the “we” the alarmists imagine doesn’t exist worldwide–not remotely.
“Huffpost thinks a few inches of sea will cause Civilization to Collapse”
I, on the other hand, think that Huffpost may well cause civilization to collapse!
I’m more inclined to regard the Huffpost as evidence that civilization has already collapsed.
Good point. 🙂
“When sea level rise ramps up, …”
Sea level shows no sign of ramping up. The only ramping up is done by “scientists” manipulating and rewriting the historical data:
http://oi67.tinypic.com/ojdn6h.jpg
Precisely – all 20th-21st century “ramping up” depicted in memes shared on the web and in MSM overlooks the simple fact that two very different methodologies are conjoined in order to produce an apparent acceleration.
The second is usually an interpretation of GRACE data which is heavily influenced by Glacial Isostatic Adjustment.
And the adjustment is not intended to tell us how much the sea has risen but to give an indication of sea volume expansion – which is not necessarily sea level rise.
In truth it’s not really a sea level rise measurement at all.
Something which most Huff readers and Facebook users will never possibly understand.
In fact they don’t want to understand this – because they like to be served daily bullshit.
And they like their bullshit kept simple and alarming.
It’s a con-trick, pure and simple.
As far as I can discern.
I can’t think of a better name for it.
Lex Luthor had an affinity for BeachfrontProperty and told General Zod he wanted Australia
Melting ice caps rising sea levels blah blah
So a good story to scare off the locals and the Property Sharks move in.
@Marcus
…..Jumping off a cliff while flapping your arms DOES NOT count as a powered, controlled flight !!..
Quite true. if it did, I would have been saying “First powered controlled flight – Eilmer of Malmesbury 1005 (English) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury
@RogerKnights
I think the Wrights’ defenders have claimed that the NZ flight wasn’t as controlled as the Wrights’ sophisticated wing warping technique.
Indeed. Pearse’s flight is not well documented anyway, and never led to the development of further aircraft, so it is reasonable to celebrate the Wright’s achievement. The point I was trying to make is that flight was not a thing that the Wrights ‘invented’ – they simply made one further step on a path that was already well-trodden. If anyone can be said to have ‘invented’ flight, it was probably Sir George Cayley, who was the first to quantify the forces scientifically and then develop a working machine from theory.
The Wrights had the advantage that they were working as improved petrol engine technology dropped the weight of the motors to a practical level – many other inventors shortly before them had developed flying machines which worked, but not well, due to the engine weights. They did not invent the idea of lateral control – Matthew Boulton, for example, patented ailerons in 1868, and many other inventors were working with similar ideas between then and 1903. What the Wrights did was put existing ideas together with the latest technology, at the time when the technology was just beginning to be able to achieve sustained level flight.
That was one achievement. They also publicised the idea of flight strongly, which was another achievement. The design of their aircraft was actually a poor one for aviation development – neither wing warping nor canard tails were widely practical, and Santos Dumont’s designs in Europe were the way ahead – in particular the Demoiselle, which was the world’s first series production aircraft.
Their other achievement was negative – it consisted of suppressing the early US aviation industry with a patent war as the Wrights tried to make their fortune by requiring royalties from every American developer – quite the opposite of Santos-Dumont, who provided his discoveries to the world for free. The result of this was that the Americans entered WW1 with no practical military aircraft, and had to use French or British designs…
Prime Minister Diefenbaker was under pressure from the US to join their defence plan by acquiring the American Bomarc missiles. Faced with the skyrocketing costs, and the inability to sell the Arrow to Europe or the US, Diefenbaker cancelled the project on February 20,1959. An angry A.V. Roe immediately fired his 14,000 employees, and the government ordered all plans and prototypes destroyed. The CF-105, or Avro Arrow as it was known, was a supersonic jet interceptor developed by A.V. Roe of Canada. Faster and more advanced than any other comparable aircraft, the Arrow was designed to carry air-to-air nuclear-tipped missiles to destroy Soviet bomb attacks over the Canadian North.
Whenever this topic comes up in social media – then please send the target libtard alarmist dimwit this link/jpg. I’m pretty sure that they must be oblivious to the information here depicted.
And perhaps point out to the target lib-tard that 16,000 years ago was not the age of the dinosaurs.
It was the beginning of the age of the emergence of civilization.
Honestly, I thought that libtards read the Nat Geo. But recent interaction have convinced me that they only subscribed out of social obligation…
http://i.imgur.com/TqD24c3.jpg
[When were the last Neandertals living? .mod]
[When were the last Neandertals living? .mod]
We’re still here!
A large chunk of our DNA is derived from “Neanderthals”. Basically “we”, as in the bible, we went about begetting pretty much everything!
Yeah, the Neanderthals still walk amonst us. Has nobody watched French versus Welsh rugby?
That’s a very good map. Where do you think the English, or the “Angles”, came from? What is now northern Germany.
Perhaps the HuffPost vision is of a future of feeble intermittent renewables and medieval deprivation. My vision is a little different.It’s worse than that, there’s a genuine disconnect from reality.
The Huffpost vision is a future of massive, muscular and graceful, lovingly tended fields of renewables that reach beyond the horizon built on lands seized in the common interest from Kulaks that are intermittent but have been augmented with Beefy Batteries Of Uncertain Nature. It is imagined that if a rock star can crowd-surf without injury supported by a few hands and fingers, energy will obey the law of My Own Special Needs and there will always by a wind turbine spinning somewhere that will keep it all going.
If they are pressed to admit that the lone wind turbine might not be able to keep it all going, they change tactics midstream and begin to vilify what they consider to be ‘wasteful’ industrial users of energy, such as large factories that make wind turbines.
Energy intensive infrastructure essential to modern survival is Simply Not Mentioned, such as 24/7 municipal water and sewage treatment, pressurized water distribution, street and highway lighting, pharmaceuticals, concrete and gravel, Every discussion on grid energy is drawn down a deep well into the bogus and trite, where everyone can let city-wide tap water disinfection and treatment go to hell while they discuss My Little Solar House and how we take solar showers and can spend a part of the day slightly off the grid after investing $30k which we’ll get back some day from the Bad Power Company because the lease-to-own company says we will.
These are the people who think that other peoples’ idle Teslas plugged into the garages are going to keep the power grid energized overnight. But not mine, they think coyly, it has to draw off the grid because I have to get to work in the morning. But I’m just one person… so it will work anyway.
AND OF COURSE they’d believe that an inch of sea level rise would destroy civilization, because everything has been dumbed down to contrived opressor-victim scenarios, where Big Something-or-other has done this to us. Poor us! Pity us! Never mind that we are descended from intelligent peoples who took a few steps back from the flood zone or built walls or raised buildings or accepted the consequences.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4600963&cid=45805629
But if there’s one thing I really hate it’s generalizing about people. So I hate these people all the more for forcing my hand.
Huffpoo has pulled a fast one and is telling porkies. Again. The entire piece is based on the lie of CAGW. Whether or not we have the ingenuity, the money, or willpower to “overcome” something which is a total fiction is a big fat juicy red herring.
Who writes this drivel? The most conservative estimate is the smallest one. Zero. And I’m sure someone somewhere estimates that sea levels will actually fall. So German scientists estimated sea levels will fall less quickly than the most extreme, absurd claim about falling sea levels. Well WHAT a SURPRISE!
They just write word soup and feed it to morons.
“faster than the most conservative estimates”
That’s practically a truism. Reality will almost always fall somewhere between the lowest and the highest estimate.
‘Recently German climate scientists estimated that sea levels are rising faster than the most conservative estimates.’
Clever phrase. Are sea levels rising faster than average estimates?
‘Respected spokesperson on sea level rise’
SLR has a spokesperson? Respected by whom?
‘taxpayers should be funding, now, for a rainy day when property owners will have to abandon coastal real estate in a mass migration from the coastlines.’
We should be borrowing more from the Chinese? The good doctor is unaware of finance, and net-present-value. Additionally, the taxpayers have no duty to owners of coastal real estate.
‘there is no indication that such common sense measures will materialize any time soon’
It’s not common sense. It is wrong on multiple levels. Huffpo says their ideas are smart; your ideas are dumb. Playground stuff.
Yes, a union is needed at HuffPo to protect the workers from daily exposure to the toil of extremist messaging and other dangers of manufactured stories.
If mankind and our infrastructure adapted to this…
Figure 2. Northern Hemisphere temperature, atmospheric CO2 and sea level since 1700 AD.
We can adapt to this without breaking a sweat…
Figure 3. Projected sea level rise through 2100 AD.
Particularly since sea level rose just as fast from 1931-1960 as it has risen since 1985…
Figure 4. Paracyclical sea level rise since 1931.
Anyone threatened by 6-12 inches of sea level rise over the next 85 years is already being flooded by high tides and/or storm surges. The red areas on this EPA map would be threatened by 1.5 meters of sea level rise.
Figure 5. Coastal areas threatened by 1.5 meters of sea level rise along US Gulf Coast (US EPA).
Bear in mind the fact that it would take an average rate of sea level rise nearly twice that of the Holocene Transgression for sea level to rise more than 1.5 meters (~5 feet) over the remainder of this century. This caused sea level.to rise by ~10 mm/yr for about10,000 years…
Figure 6. Animatiion of Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene deglaciation (Illinois State Museum).
Approximately 52 million cubic kilometers of ice melted during that 10,000 year period.
The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were recently estimated to be losing ~213 gigatonnes of ice mass per year (Shepherd et al., 2012).. This is equivalent to 213 km^3/yr.
Polar ice sheets are currently melting at about 1/24th the rate of the Holocene Transgression, if they are actually melting.
We not only “adapted” to rise, we laughed at it in the past – http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/boston/sequ_ani.gif
I LOVE the estimates that prior worst case estimates aren’t bad enough concept here. It’s a tacit admission that their scare tactics were ignored so they have to amp them up.
They are becoming apoplectic at HuffPo as it is anyway so I enjoy throwing grenades like this at them http://www.moralcaseforfossilfuels.com/data/
.. now that they are circling their broken wagons – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/otto-toth/were-moving-the-conversation_b_5423675.html “This is far from an an end to conversation; it’s the start of conversation where you want to have it …”
I predict that Huffpo will be gone in under 2 years.
No doubt they will get govt to fund it. Much like Planned Parenthood.
“I am beginning to believe that science fiction movie scenarios of the future are not so far off:”
In this case the movie “Idiocracy” comes to mind.
Yes, we need to create an alarmist global stupidification scare and an urgent call to action.
The current rise in stupidity is “unprecedented” or for many people, “unpresidented”.
And for others, “it’s totally like sum shit what we’ve not seen before”.
All that we need to do to demonstrate this is to erase the Medieval Stupidification Period.
For those who think they couldn’t live under a ‘loopy’ Trump administration, I would say with the world gone this crazy, he is probably absolutely essential to put in there. These unbelievable useful fools in academia and the enabling institutions need a big adjustment! I like Cruz okay, but with Trump, nothing is too big to fail, nothing that’s done can’t be undone. That has been America’s way and America’s gift to the world.
To keep the stuff that has been done to the country and the world because it’s too big to fail, means another miserable step in the footsteps of a Europe gone insanely into a permanent, ever-darkening twilight using the same thinking that has been inoculated into US elitists. This gradualism is part of the New World Order – give them the medicine in small, incremental doses.
I remember the condescending attitude and shock among the ‘people that matter’ when Reagan ran for the presidency. This untamed upstart gave pride and self esteem back to a dispirited nation. And if that wasn’t enough, he took down the iron curtain as an encore! Oh revisionists point out that the USSR was going to fail anyway, but that was true for the previous 75 years. A system like that and the one the EU has built have failure built into the foundation. Reagan scared the hell out of them and they believed him….like they would have believed a guy like Trump.
I just hope Cruz will be Trumps VP.
If you really like Cruz, don’t you think we would be better off if he were the Senate Majority Leader working to get things passed in the Senate and on to the President’s desk for signing?
The big, huge difference between Reagan and Trump is that first of all Reagan had been a Governor. Second and more importantly is that Reagan was a true conservative Republican who respected the Constitution. Donald Trump is none of the above and nothing more that a narcissist supreme who has no regard for the constitutional process or anyone that disagrees with him. Trump is at heart a liberal. Isn’t bad enough that we have had that type of President for the last 7 years. We do not need another.
Reagan had spent years honing his conservative philosophy.
Trump has spent years honing his ability to use other people’s money and his own political influence, to make himself rich.
I think one thing Reagan and Trump have in common is they are both optimistic about the future, and they project that optimism, and a can-do spirit, to the people they are speaking to, and make them feel it.
As for:
“Donald Trump is none of the above and nothing more that a narcissist supreme who has no regard for the constitutional process or anyone that disagrees with him.”
One positive thing about electing Trump to the presidency is, if he violates the U.S. Constitution, the way Obama has done (I don’t think he will), it will be very easy to impeach and remove Trump from Office. All the Democrats will be eager to vote him out, and if Trump gets enough Republicans mad at him, they will join in.
It’s not like President Obama. President Obama is immune from removal from Office because not enough Democrats would vote against him, and no Republican would push such an impeachment move for fear of being called a racist. So Obama gets a blank check from the political opposition. That wouldn’t be the case with Trump.
One thing about Trump: I think his ego is such, that if he promises to do something, he will give his all, to get it done, rather than have to suffer the humiliation of failing. And Trump’s *all* is quite formidable.
Trump is focused on the right problem: Our wide open borders and millions of people we don’t know, pouring across them. That’s why, IMO, Trump is going to win the election for president. I think a lot of Americans, of all stripes, are worried about this problem and are going to get onboard his bandwagon. Especially after watching the horror stories coming out of Europe over the Muslim refugee crisis. We don’t want that stuff going on here.
TA
TA January 29, 2016 at 12:31 pm
So it’s damn the Constitution, full speed ahead? Aren’t you sick of that approach yet?
Remember, a benevolent dictator is still a dictator, and Trump is certainly not benevolent.
Tom in Florida – this is the campaign time. When Trump gets into office, he will seek the advice of wiser people on the details. I recall that Central Park had a dysfunctional ice rink that had been gerry-rigged from time to time by New York to work for a little while and then fail. He said he would fix it properly and he was hated by the snival slurvants for succeeding. How did this guy do it? The answer should put you at ease regarding Trump as president. He asked NHL guys who the best rink builder in the world was and they replied that it was a fellow who designed and managed the rink for the Toronto Maple Leafs. He got the guy down to look at CP rink and immediately saw the lousiness of the design. He was engaged to rebuild it and it is perhaps one of the finest outdoor rinks in the world – You don’t have to be an expert, you have to seek to find the experts you need.
At 1.5mm per year, it will be quite some time before my property in Pittsburgh will be expensive coastal waterfront. I figure the next ice age will be upon us before that, so maybe I should hold out for selling my property as a luxurious local near the ski slopes instead.
Kevin Costner can teach us how to sprout gills!
Downtown Sacramento was raised one story in 1868 due to seasonal flooding of the Sacramento and American Rivers,which join near downtown.
Thanks, Eric Worrall,
I’ll keep watching the local tide gauge for any sign of sea level rise, I’ll keep watching the beach at high and low tides. I’ll keep watching the garage in our building, built at mean high tide level in 1971; it has always flooded less than 1/2 inches at New Moon or Full Moon when the Moon is near perigee.
The have been supporting the cleaning of drains and repairing the drain pipes.
No reason for panic, not even concern, if you don’t believe the doomsday forecasts.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html looks like a good tool.
[“They have been ..” or “The ___ have been..” ? .mod]
I should have written: “The neighbors have been supporting”.
“In Florida, one federally funded taxpayer agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, is working day and night, up and down the coastline, with bulldozers, tractors, and sand from the Bahamas and Mexico to reinforce tourist-friendly beaches against sea level rise. ”
That’s hogwash. Every replenishment effort if have witnessed was done with sand pumped from the bottom just off shore or from nearby shoals. Notice the word “replenishment”. Moving sand back onto beaches has nothing to do with sea level rise, it has to do with putting sand back that was eroded by storms. The use of bulldozers is to smooth out and grade the beach after the sand has been pumped onto it.
I suggest you check some of your local papers, sand is being brought in from other sources as the local sand from offshore is running out and/or is the wrong color. Sand from mines in central Florida is being used for example.
Phil, don’t know where you are in FL, I am in Venice on the Gulf side. Plenty of off shore sand here and I have never seen it being brought in, it is always pumped.
But again, it is replenishment because of erosion from storms not protection from sea level rise.
On the atlantic coast there are cases of local supplies running out and using mined sand is one of the options used. There is talk about using Bahamian sand, offshore sand is often darker, whereas the local beaches want white sand.
This has happened many times since. Currently, Swedish town of Kiruna is on the move. And there’s no natural disaster behind it. Mining company just needs more space to operate. People find ways.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/kiruna-the-swedish-town-which-must-move-or-disappear-into-the-ground-10163607.html
The meme now being pushed is that the rise will greatly accelerate over the next 10 – 15 years. Totttttttal disasterrrrrrrrrr by 2030!
The meme is unchanging.
Nuclear fusion and global climate catastrophe…
Only ten years away.
And always ten years away.
So keep tipping in the public funding and by 2050, they will be only ten years away.
Don’t you wish that everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen?
Those diabolical and wily Dutch. Having built their nation already one-third below sea level, they will rule the world with another couple of inches sea-level rise. Bwahahahaha.
What Alan Farago has achieved is being a self-proclaimed environmental activist who emulates the White Queen,
John
Historically civilizations have fallen mostly because the political elite have, in their greed, overtaxed the masses – simply because they could.
“Huffpost thinks a few inches of sea will cause Civilisation to Collapse”, but it is more likely that the eventual realisation by people in general, that sea level rise is a non-problem will cause the Puffington Host itself to collapse.
I laughed, too. You can’t get a federal employee to work at night.
psssst, I’m “working” right now.
Beach replenishment of tourist beaches in Florida and elsewhere has (almost) nothing to do with sea level rise. It is a cure for the destruction of the natural beach environment consisting of dunes, sea oats, brush, and other vegetation that helped the beaches resist storm damage and rebuild themselves. On the barrier island that is now Cape Canaveral south to Melbourne Beach, the dunes have been covered with condo-high-rise apartment buildings and hotels. Tourists trample the sea oats that hold the few remaining (pitifully few) dunes in place.
Barrier islands, which are temporary and ephemeral, have been covered with modern cities as if they were bedrock and resides at the top of 50 foot bluffs, when in reality, entire cities exist on a sand bars just feet above normal high tides. Stupid? Yes. Caused by sea level rise? No. Will they be affected if the seas rise on the Florida Coast by ten feet? Of course. As the sea rises, will it push more sand up on those beaches, yes, as it has in the past (that’s how the barrier islands got there in the first place.)
You’re dead on of course Kip. And subsidence problems aren’t due to sea level rise either. They are due either to cutting off the flow of new sediment by upstream flood control (New Orleans) or to pumping fluids out from under the coast (Norfolk-Newport News — and in their case the fluid is water).
On the other hand, the PATH transit tunnels between Manhattan and New Jersey have flooded twice since 1990 and will probably flood again and again and again as sea levels creep up. Eventually, the low elevation stations (Hoboken, Jersey City) will probably need to be hardened or abandoned. Unfortunately PATH is only one example of infrastructure built too close to sea level. There seems to be a lot of it. People like living and working by the sea. But they don’t seem to have a lot of sense about where the water’s edge is going to be on REALLY bad days.
Reply to Don K ==> The flooding of NY City’s PATH tunnels has been the result of storm surge, not the few inches of realized sea level rise in New York. see my essay on Hurricane Sandy .
The reduction in access to New York Harbor’s traditional historic flood relief valve — the Meadowlands — is mostly responsible for the height of recent storm surges (1980-present). Before this time, there were adequate paths for rising storm surge to spread out over those thousands of acres of marshland — but now there are few paths for the water which then must pile up at the mouth of the Hudson and overflow the sea walls of NY and NJ.
With modern GPS, the city and state officials can know the exact altitude of possible water intrusion points into all the tunnels and subways….a few truckloads of National Guard and a ready supply of sand bags at the appropriate spots, just a few courses high, would have avoided almost all the tunnel flooding. Poor judgement, for the most part.
“nearly every member of the Republican controlled US Senate voted last week against acknowledging global warming is caused by humans.”
I’ve seen this repeated in several other places, that the Senate voted last week on climate change, but every link for this claim goes to an article from January 2015. If progressives are so bad at math that they can’t even figure out what year it is, why should I trust anything they have to say about something as complex as the global climate?
Another reminder: The most dramatic effort to protect the city was its raising. Dredged sand was used to raise the city of Galveston by as much as 17 feet (5.2 m) above its previous elevation. Over 2,100 buildings were raised in the process,[16] including the 3,000-ton St. Patrick’s Church. The seawall and raising of the island were jointly named a National Historical Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2001.
And yes. It’s a wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane
No one takes this stuff any more seriously than they do the periodic ‘rapture’. The man in the street has been living with shrill proclamations of doom from the climate chumps for as long as he can remember while nothing much of anything changes and all it does is cause a small chuckle as yet another “tipping point” or whatever zips on by. I don’t think even the loopy left believe it anymore but swing along with it because it’s part of the dogma portfolio and works well with the general mission of western democratic destruction.
Maybe HuffPo thinks there will be 200 feet of sea level rise?
The city of Atlanta downtown was raised 1 story merely for convenience to get over all the railroad tracks (they didn’t raise the buildings, just added a street level).
25% (or so) of the Netherlands is below sea level.
This kind of claim simply shows that the writer is a big chicken with no concept of engineering or human determination.
HuffPo Thinks. Stop right there. No one who writes or contributes to HuffPo is capable of rational thought; therefore the words, “HuffPo Thinks,” should not be strung together in the same sentence.
I had a couple of replies to one of my posts, but there was no “reply” link for them so I have to post my reply at the end of this post. Don’t know if those I’m replying to will see it, since it has been a few days since I posted, but here goes:
Tom in Florida
January 29, 2016 at 1:10 pm replied:
“TA January 29, 2016 at 12:31 pm
So it’s damn the Constitution, full speed ahead? Aren’t you sick of that approach yet?”
Well, Tom, I *am* sick of presidents abusing the U.S. Constitution. I did say in my post that I did not think Trump would do such things. If he does, I would be one of the first to criticize him for it, I assure you.
“Remember, a benevolent dictator is still a dictator, and Trump is certainly not benevolent.”
I actually think Trump is benevolent. If you’ll notice, he only gets nasty when someone attacks him personally. Then he gets real nasty. I would prefer he be more moderate in his words, but one can’t have everything.
“Gary Pearse
January 31, 2016 at 8:22 am replied:
“You don’t have to be an expert, you have to seek to find the experts you need.”
I think that is exactly what Trump will do: Get the best people for the job. That’s what he is good at, and that’s what the United States needs. The U.S. needs a lot of genuine experts, in all fields, working on our behalf. Who better to organize such a thing than Trump?
Don’t get me wrong, I could vote for any of the Republican candidates over any of the Democrat candidates, but I do have my favorites.
TA
“TA
January 31, 2016 at 11:27 am
I would prefer he be more moderate in his words, but one can’t have everything.”
I always say to people in discussions that “I may not be tactful but what I do say is the truth. I also may not always be factual but willing to be corrected.”
Wasn’t this mainly due to sewage flooding from the lake because the outlet was not placed well enough?