Does the PNAS have an interest in selling windmills, solar panels and sea walls and collecting carbon taxes?

Guest essay by Giordano Bruno*

*NOTE 6/7/16 12PM PST: This essay was submitted to me under this name, and I had no reason to doubt it when it was submitted. It was actually submitted by Albert Parker. I should have recognized this name Giordano Bruno from early Earth-centric skepticism, but didn’t.

Further, this article has some flaws that render it problematic. For example, Parker wrote:

“…because of the agreed prospect of up to 9.9 meters sea level rise by 2,100.”

This language is wrong, and implies by the year 2100, but what was actually said in the PNAS article is:

Analysis based on previously published relationships linking emissions to warming and warming to rise indicates that unabated carbon emissions up to the year 2100 would commit an eventual global sea-level rise of 4.3–9.9 m.

Source: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/44/13508.abstract

The language in the abstract is imprecise, and I can see how one could make the conclusion that it implies by the year 2100. But the article itself says:

“We find that within a 2,000-y envelope there is a strong relationship between cumulative emissions and committed sea level under either of our tested assumptions about WAIS stability…”

Thus, Parker confused the time span, and thus his claims in the article below about the year 2,100 are completely wrong.

Thanks to readers who emailed me that pointed out the issues. I apologize that this inaccurate story was published.

I’m making some procedural changes to the way stories are submitted so that stories under pseudonyms won’t happen again, along with other changes to ensure the accuracy of stories.

While it might make sense to remove this article, I think it serves better as an example of a mistake that was made, so that it can be learned from. – Anthony Watts

THIS ARTICLE BELOW IS INCORRECT – PLEASE DISREGARD

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) [4,5,6] are now openly supporting claims of sea level rises by 2,100 for the United States exceeding (10) ten times the upper bound of the most alarmist scenario considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR5 [1], and (50) fifty times the values suggested by the acceleration of tide gauges [2, 3], and the explicit political requests of urgent action now in the US to fight climate change with more mitigation and prevention.

Strauss, Kulp & Levermann [4] propose in PNAS their apocalyptic views of United States coastal cities inundated by rising seas. Their computation suggested unabated CO₂ emissions would commit global sea-level rises of 4.3–9.9 meters with more than 20 million people displaced in the United States. They concluded with the unequivocal political request of more prevention (i.e. windmills, solar panels, carbon taxes) now in the United States.

By censoring every other observation, only a comment by Boyd, Pasquantonio, Rabalais & Eustis [5] has been permitted by PNAS. This comment only adds the request of more mitigation (i.e. levees, sea walls, coastal management) now in the United States.

This comment has been followed in PNAS by the reply by Strauss, Kulp & Levermann [6] for a perfect agreement on the urgent climate action now in the United States in the form of further prevention and further mitigation because of the agreed prospect of up to 9.9 meters sea level rise by 2,100.

The already alarmistic latest sea-level predictions by the IPCC [1], purely based on process based models, were returning projections of global mean sea level (GMSL) rise by 2,100 relative to 1986–2005 for the scenarios SRES A1B, RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP8.5 (Table 13.5 of [1]) of 0.60, 0.44, 0.53, 0.55 and 0.74 metres. The ranges indicated for every prediction were [0.42 to 0.80], [0.28 to 0.61], [0.36 to 0.71], [0.38 to 0.73] and [0.52 to 0.98].

The most likely sea level rise scenario for 2,100 based on true measurements at the tide gauges as [2, 3] is the prosecution of the trend shown in the last 60-70 years. The sea level rise is on average slow rising and acceleration free. The experimentally inferred trend is well below the less alarmist prediction of the IPCC AR5. For the specific of the United States, the average relative sea level rise is constant at about +1.7 mm/year mostly due to subsidence totaling on average less than 20 centimeters sea level rise by 2,100.

Figure 1 – a, b) Relative sea-level rise for the United States (images from [2] downloaded May 16, 2016) over the time window of data 1930 to 1999 and 1930 to 2014. The relative rates of rise are quite similar, somewhere larger and somewhere smaller, to demonstrate they haven’t accelerated that much. Over this century, the rates of rise of sea-levels haven’t accelerated that much in the United States. Similarly, in every other area of the world where they are measured.

References

1. https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter13_FINAL.pdf

2. http://www.psmsl.org/products/trends/trends.txt

3. http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/mslUSTrendsTable.htm

4. B. H. Strauss, S. Kulp & A. Levermann (2015), Carbon choices determine United States cities committed to futures below sea-level, PNAS , 112 (44):13508-13513.

5. E. Boyd, V. Pasquantonio, F. Rabalais & S. Eustis (2016), Although critical, carbon choices alone do not determine the fate of coastal cities, PNAS, 113 (10):E1329, 2016.

6. B. H. Strauss, S. Kulp & A. Levermann (2016), Reply to Boyd et al.: Large long-term sea-level projections do not mean giving up on coastal cities, PNAS, 113 (10) E1330.