Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
I always enjoy the headlines of climate alarmist news stories.
This one caught my eye this week. Of course the headline included the infamous weasel words: COULD BE.
At BusinessInsider.com: 4.2 million Americans could be displaced by rising sea levels this century — see if your county is at risk. The linked webpage includes a fancy-schmancy video to show in which counties those displacements might take place, with a bar graph to show which oceanfront states might be impacted most or least.
What did I see?
Less than 1% of Forecast U.S. Population by 2100 Might Be, Or Might Not Be, Displaced by Projected Sea Level Rise of 3 Feet That Might, Or Might Not, Happen. The Other 99% of U.S. Residents Couldn’t Give a Rat’s… Some Optimistically Looking Forward to Their Inland Properties Becoming Oceanfront.
That figure of 4.2 million, of course, was for the low-end could-be scenario. If we look at the might-maybe-could-happen high end of 1.8 meters (6 feet) from the study, the could-be displacement more than triples. Curiously, the headline Up to 13M Americans at risk from sea level rise – study ran for a story at the Governors’ Wind & Solar Energy Coalition website…as if solar panels and wind turbines are going to stop sea level rise. Maybe the Governors are thinking of dismantling them and using them as landfill for dykes.
The study referenced was Hauer et al. (2016) Millions projected to be at risk from sea-level rise in the continental United States.
PS: Maybe the Governors would be interested in a realistic look at anthropogenic global warming and climate change presented in my free ebook On Global Warming and the Illusion of Control – Part 1 (700+ page, 25MB .pdf). If not, maybe the voters of those up for reelection might.
4.2 million Americans could be displaced by rising sea levels
===================
Then why is that waterfront property is the most expensive? Why do celebrities and zillionaires continue to snap up waterfront property? Could these stories be intended to cause the gullible to panic and sell their waterfront properties at fire-sale prices to the very people that are promoting these stories?
We get these sorts of stories all the time in Canada. Newspapers and especially business journals. Such and such is bound to happen. Get in early and make a killing. And 99 times out of 100, the opposite happens and you get fleeced.
The people that ran the story are the ones that make the killing, by doing the opposite of what they are telling you to do. Odds are the authors of this story are in the business of buying waterfront property, and are trying to drive down prices to increase their profits.
Climate carpetbaggers in league with the press.
Who’s going to tell the boss?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/21/while-warning-us-of-rising-oceans-in-sotu-did-obama-just-buy-a-beachfront-mansion/
The study does not include the reduction of global population caused by women rejecting sweaty sex. It is a total fail.
This is how all headlines are done for topics that affect populations. No headline says “Hurricane Sandy causes 98.5% of the American Population not to have to be evacuated” or “Smoking will not kill 319.5M Americans this year”.
I quit reading the “if, then, might, maybe, could happen” articles about climate change on Yahoo “news” some time ago. Occasionally, however, I’ll click on one to see how many replies it received. I have not had to take down the actual number of replies to see that the number of people responding to these articles has decreased significantly from just a few years ago – down from many thousands to only hundreds now. My informal sampling seems to support the polling data that shows people just aren’t paying attention.
Expect the alarmists to become more shrill and insistent before finally giving up.
So, how much does it cost to relocate 4.2 million people and the infrastructure that supports them, as well as the seaside industries and ports, or, instead, to reconstruct the coastlines in response to the sea level rise to obviate the need for relocation? These are real questions that must be considered. Failing to plan for these contingencies, or blithely pretending that they won’t happen, is foolish.
The sea would actually have to rise before anyone has to worry about any of it. The rate of sea level rise has not changed recently over the last 150 years
This is ridiculous. This sea level rise has been going on for at lest two centuries. No advance planning has been done. people build near the sea with the full knowledge that it will make them vulnerable to storms and tides. Just like people build in wooded areas with the knowledge that fires can and do happen. The biggest problem is government covering peoples butts by providing insurance subsidies and disaster relief over and over again when people rebuild in areas that already had flooding (or fire) issues.
Very good comment but make sure you acknowledge there are areas around the world where the land masses are rising as well. Some claim the entire Atlantic seaboard is dropping. It does appear there is a lot of inflated hot air out there which could of course be causing severe problems. Just getting the statists to close their mouths could help.
The Scandinavian land mass, rising since the last ice age as a result of the glacier cover melting away and is still ongoing, is contributing to sea rise all over the globe. This is a place not to purchase shoreline property unless you want to expand your vegetable garden.
Slipstick April 11, 2016 at 9:00 am
“Failing to plan for these contingencies, or blithely pretending that they won’t happen, is foolish.”
Okay so what you are going to do? Start a crowdfund to build protective sea walls? Good luck, not that it wouldn’t be a good idea, even if its just for coastal protection, but think of every wacko environmental group bring lawsuits out to save the creeping dung bug or the wonderful everywhere bird.
Probably best to continue as you are doing, waving your hands about and doing..nothing.
Oh my mistake, you are trying to do something dismantle all out our means of producing plentiful and reliable energy for our civilization. Which of course is counterproductive and very unhelpful.
michael
Business news as a category was once well known for objective and hard hitting, critical takes on news. Even on NPR, the US version of the BBC, the business news was reliable.
That is changing rapidly, as this article shows.
I am one mile as the crow flies from the Gulf of Mexico and at 15 ft elevation. I am one of the 99% that couldn’t give a rat’s ……
How many residences have been built below sea level (New Orleans/Katrina) or on marsh/swamp lands (New Jersey/Sandy) across the country?
Don’t build in floodplains, quite simple really.
So also don’t build in hurricane areas or tornado areas or ice storm areas or heavy snow areas. That should solve all the housing problems.
Is it just me or is the best food, bars and music located below sea level??
4.2 million Americans are displaced by rising immigration levels this century — see if your county is at risk. Perhaps they are referring to CAGW or catastrophic anthropogenic government whoring and anti-native policies that are first-order causes of mass exodus from second and third-world nations.
Has anyone looked at the sea ice growth this last three days? If you draw a straight line through that trend we will all be covered in ice in a month or two and wont have to worry about sea level rise.
,,See next WUWT post !
Marcus
thanks
it came out after I posted this comment, it was sarc anyway.
Bob, being a bit paranoid about what is happening to data – scepticism will do that sort of thing- for the first time, the ENSO graph has not been updated from last week. Any idea on what gives? The current graph is unchanged from last week. I hope we aren’t in for an adjustment to interevene in the free fall that the graph is showing.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/monitoring/nino3_4.png
Gary, BOM may simply be late. NOAA updated this morning:
From the sea surface temperature update I posted today:
https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/march-2016-sea-surface-temperature-sst-anomaly-update/
This line shows that it is not a problem. I guess that if the sea rises the new houses will not be build at the shore. Maybe some older houses have to be abandoned, but would they anyway exist at that time.
Forgot “Less than 1% of Forecast U.S. Population by 2100 Might Be, Or Might Not Be,”
What is wrong with the idea in doing nothing at all the coming 10 years. Maybe in 2025 sufficient knowledge is present about our climate. There is still plenty enough time to act if necessary.
Don’t be silly. By then, CAGW will be dead and buried, and the chance to make scads of dough from the climate sc* am would be lost.
The social elitists of today are an impatient lobby. They have solutions for which there are no problems but because they are apoplectic about not being able to exercise their brilliance because of lack of need they want to begin social engineering immediately. Hence the unflagging alarmism. If too much time passes they will have lost their chance to bask in the glow of their own virtue, will never populate future history books, and will be doomed to be legends in their own minds. The climate has made them giddy with incitement.
Sea level rise has been chugging along at about 3mm per year for thousands of year. Check Ostia, the port city of ancient Rome – completely under water for centuries. And as far as warming goes, Tacitus wrote of the Germans telling him that the Rhine used to freeze over – I’m sure it was all those Roman conveniences that caused the warming. That didn’t have an Albertius Goreus.
three feet of sea level rise by 2100 if profoundly unlikely…
https://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/sea-level-projections-vs-tide-gauge-data/
If they can say 4,000,000 could be displaced by SLR then surely they can say with 100% certainty that, say, 100,000 WILL be displaced. But they won’t say this because then everyone will ask which 100,000 and that opens a can of worms not the least of which are that their predictive capabilities amount to nothing and that if you actually force the evacuation or isolation by sea wall of the 100,000 living closest to sea level and then nothing happens someone has a lot of egg on their face.
300 million Americans could also be at risk of:
A meteor striking the Earth
A nuclear attack
Alien invasion
Another global financial crisis
Donald Trump
Donald Duck
Now, produce a map of which counties could be most at risk for each
Meanwhile, you don’t hear anything about the “50 million climate refugees”, first predicted to occur by 2010, then “updated” to 2020. Have they even found one yet? Maybe if they paid them….
Do the snowbirds who flee the Northern USA to Florida and Arizona count as climate refugees ? Or the Europeans who retire in Portugal and Spain ?
Seems to me they outnumber the folks going the other way by a fair margin. I don’t see any mass movement of OAP’s retiring in the Outer Hebrides or Lapland.
Maybe humans could re evolve and develop gills? This would solve a lot of problems.