Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
The Los Angeles Times latest anti-science sea level rise propaganda campaign articles claims are devoid of any scientific data addressing the record of actual California coastal measurements of sea level rise outcomes which remain at unchanging and steady rates of only about 3 to 9 inches per century with no acceleration impacts present.
Actual NOAA measured California coastal sea level rise data through year 2018 is shown for the states coastal sites having between 70 to 120 years of recorded data.
The latest Times propaganda article notes the following as the basis for its exaggerated coastal sea level rise claims.
“But lines in the sand are meant to shift. In the last 100 years, the sea rose less than 9 inches in California. By the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 9 feet.”
This ridiculous and data unsupported assertion was addressed in a prior WUWT article with the following graphic (provided through courtesy of Willis Eschenbach) showing the absurdity of Times “computer model” driven coastal sea level rise climate alarmist hype.
This “big lie” climate alarmist propagandist focused Times article relies on nothing but pure speculation and conjecture based on “computer models” which have a proven 30 year long track record of flawed and failed highly exaggerated coastal sea level rise errors as was also addressed in a prior WUWT article.
Climate alarmists and their media shills desperately try to ignore and conceal this totally flawed prior three decades of failure in completely blowing projections of coastal sea level rise outcomes.
These failed alarmists then proceed to simply move the goal posts yet again and make the same flawed “computer model” claims for the next 30 year and longer intervals and expect everyone to forget their prior failures at bungling assessments of non existent coastal sea level rise acceleration and steady unchanging rates of sea level rise measured outcomes.
The Times scientifically unsupported and flawed “computer model” driven coastal sea level rise claims of future “9 foot” increases are ludicrous given the unassailable fact that NOAA tide gauge data for California coastal locations some of which with measurement records of over 100 years show no sea level rise acceleration has occurred with rates of sea level rise remaining steady and unchanging. These results have occurred despite more than 30 years having passed since climate alarmist first made accelerating sea level rise flawed assertions in alarmism hyped Congressional hearings in 1988.
The actual tide gauge data measurements showing increased sea level rise at California coastal locations remaining between 3 to 9 inches per century with no acceleration displayed make a mockery of the ridiculous hyped Times article assertion of “9 feet” of increased sea level rise during the next century which is based on use of flawed and failed “computer model” speculation and conjecture.
The Times has become nothing but a purely politically driven propaganda publication which provides no objectivity whatsoever in its climate articles but instead is lost in a scientifically unsupported make believe climate alarmist world devoid of connection to scientific reality – especially regarding use of actual data versus the Times continual use of flawed and exaggerated “computer model” speculation and conjecture.
This latest Los Angeles Times article is basically an expansion and repeat of an article published in its March 13, 2019 edition by the same reporter that was addressed in a prior WUWT essay. Both the prior L. A. Times article and WUWT essay are noted below.
The latest Times article mentions a $1.8 million dollar change being made to a sea wall on Balboa Island and falsely implies that this change is based on future sea level rise concerns.
In fact the wall in question is being raised 9 inches above its present height (versus the articles idiotic 9 foot future sea level rise claim) based on new FEMA flood assessments that reflect revised analysis of the impacts of distant swells, local storm waves, tidal variations and El Nino events not future sea level rise concerns.
Nothing has changed regarding California coastal sea level rise data or the flawed and failed “computer model” hyped outcomes since the Times prior article. This latest Times sea level rise hype article which is basically just a repeat of its prior alarmist article is nothing but a reflection of how desperate the Times has become to push scientifically unsupported climate alarmism propaganda schemes.
On the bright side, A 9″ seawall height increase will ensure that they are protected from future sea level rise until 2100
Make it 23 cm.
Why?
It sounds bigger.
Every 25-30 years another course of common brick will have to be put down and back-filled… until sea levels stops rising. Which could happen any day, as while we know it has been rising for some time we have no clue why, or when the trend might reverse.
The advocacy ideas for new tax revenue in California are not linear like sea level measures. That explains the nonlinear scare formula.
The Jerry Brown Award for distorting science for policy gain goes to…..
The reason the LA Times is now so un-scientific is because it has become the regional propaganda-PR outlet for the California Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is the Anti-science Party without any question.
The political imperative is: Keeping the mostly scientifically illiterate middle class of California sufficiently alarmed so the Democrats can pry loose more money out of them. More money in direct taxes and “carbon” taxes to pay for the Democrat’s ever-larger bureaucratic welfare state and hungry public unions, more money in hidden electric bill fees and electricity rates increases that feed Tom Steyer’s and the GreenSlime’s investments.
Please don’t use the phrase “Democratic” Party. It’s the Democrat Party.
In fact they haven’t been in favor of democracy in years. They want judges and bureaucrats to rule over all of us.
Leftists have been against democracy for years. Their ideal world would have judges and bureaucrats in charge of everything.
Democrat party?
No, that is not what they call themselves.
Look at their website, any literature, and reference material at all.
They are called the Democratic Party.
Love it or hate it, it is their name, they get to decide.
Joel O’Bryan
I believe you have a few words out of order in the political imperative.
It should read: Keeping the middle class of California mostly scientifically illiterate and sufficiently alarmed so the Democrats can pry more money out of them.
‘that feed Tom Steyer’s and the GreenSlime’s investments.’
That would be ‘presidential candidate’ Tom Steyer.
even more hilarious.
Apparently Stinky became frustrated that Washington Gov Jay Inslee was doing poorly in the polling after having sunk a lot of money into his campaign and a lack luster “debate” performance.
Inslee is the only one of the 22 Democrats whose entire campaign is based on Climate Alarmism/Climate Action. Now Steyer.
What will be hilarious to watch is if Bernie and Billioniare Stinky end up facing each other on a debate stage.
I’m thinking of Thanos again – one of the ‘Easter egg’ bits after the credits of one of the early Marvel movies (before I stopped watching), after one of his lackeys failed to get him one of the Infinity gems – ‘Okay, I’ll do it myself.’
A little off-topic, but the irony of that entire series is that, in the original story, the universe was saved by a blond, orange-skinned outside, who no one really trusted, who wrested ultimate power from an ideological tyrant and a pirate queen.
Yeah, Disney got rid of that part.
Joel, this is truly disturbing “the LA Times is now so un-scientific” in that the paper was rescued from imminent oblivion by Dr. Patrick Soon-shiong, the richest man in LA whose fortunes were made through his extraordinary inventions as a cancer surgeon. This man claimed he would restore the standards of journalism to the LAT because he loved newspapers (having delivered papers as a child in South Africa) and wanted to let us all continue to hold and read ‘the paper’ well into the future. In the year or so that he has owned and published LAT, there is no evidence of a restoration of journalism and certainly no sign that critical scientific thought is being exercised at all in the El Segundo offices.
Out of an abundance of caution all tourists should stay away from coastal California, despite the CA ad spending to the contrary.
The Times scientifically unsupported and flawed “computer model” driven coastal sea level rise claims of future “9 foot” increases
There’s no getting around the fact that computer models which purport to predict the future of a chaotic system for extended lengths of time are, by the scientific method, unverified hypotheses.
Newspapers and politicians which ritually chant ‘science’ in connection with them are no better than witch doctors or cargo cultists.
The climate models are largely the same models of radiative transfer physics of 30 years ago, albeit with ever higher spatial and temporal resolution resolution. The atmosphere-ocean coupling in them and the macro- to micro-physics of water phase changes are still just unconstrained hand-waving parameterization as they were 30 years ago.
And those models have already failed to project the limited warming of the last 20 years. So they are not “unverified hypotheses.” They are manifestations of already-proven “failed hypotheses.”
The fact that they model ever on-wards with the same basic wrong physics implementations clearly demonstrates today’s climate modelling community are a very real-world implementation of Feynman’s Cargo Cult Science analogy.
Please read Dr. Christy’s recent GWPF presentation. I agree that WUWT should run a new posting on it.
Vertical land movement MUST be taken into account.
Absolute sea level rise (mm/year) (RSLR plus VLM), using relative sea level rise (RSLR) values from NOAA (https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/) and VLM values.
Location RSLR VLM ASLR
Seattle, WA +2.05 -1.10 +0.95
San Francisco, CA +1.96 -1.44 +0.52
San Diego, CA +2.17 -3.00 – 0.29
Galveston, TX +6.49 -4.70 +1.79
Grand Isle, LA +9.08 -7.10 +1.98
St Petersburg, FL +2.75 -0.50 +2.25
Providence, RI +2.27 -0.63 +1.64
New York City, NY +2.84 -1.32 +1.52
Baltimore, MD +3.15 -1.39 +1.76
Don’t forget tectonic plate movement of a few inches per year.
Eventually, LA will be west of San Francisco.
That should be fast enough for the residents of LA to keep up with global warming.
Unlikely that that hackneyed scenario, of LA being west of SF, will ever occur.
It is thought that within a few millions of years, the locus of relative plate motion will shift Eastward to the line roughly delineated by Death Valley, Owens Valley, and the Nevada/California border.
This is because the subducted spreading center that is the northern extension of the East Pacific rise will continue to push further under the NA plate and to the east of the coast.
Correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Lane
Just as a point of information:
The plates mentioned by Walt D. are on the surface of a sphere. Linear trends ought not be followed into an uncertain future.
Note the 120° kink in the Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain.
Another possible reason for the shift, or at least a contributing factor, and one that prevents a clean northward movement of the crustal segment that LA is riding on, is the bend in the San Andreas just east and north of LA.
This locks the fault over that segment for a century or two at a time.
It seems a likely spot, or one of them anyway, for the next “big one”.
Not “kind of big, big one”, but “really big and very bad, big one”.
I know a lot of people are gonna be sorry that are in the middle of that mess when it happens.
PSMSL.org gives both sea level gauge data and GPS land elevation data so you can make your own adjustments, as donb has. NOAA provides only the sea level data – the same data as PSMSL – so you can’t. Could there be a reason or is NOAA just lazy?
Larry Hamlin
Great post, but work needed on your editing…
I would help, but my comments take 5 to 6 hours to post…( I am still in the “doggy house” !) lol
Given the standard dimensions of concrete block, is this “just another brick in the wall”?
They don’t got no education
They don’t got no Thought Control
They got sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, they can be so droll
All in all they’re just an-other brick in the (9ft) wall.
Answer: no! It is comprised of material far more nebulous than concrete.
They should worry about the sudden sea level rise that will result from the tsunami generated by the Big One: 10 meters of SLR in 5 minutes, not the imaginary SLR acceleration for Climate Porn fantasies.
The immediate plate subsidence of >M9 quake on the Cascadia Fault would bring a semi-permanent 1-4 meters of SLR for hundreds of miles.
The San Andreas fault through San Francisco is capable of up to M8.0 quake as was seen in the 1906 M7.9 shaker.
Semi-permanent SLR that is for a few several hundreds of years until slowly building locked-plate stress uplifts and re-raises the landward shorelines as they now have, waiting to be released in a 2-3 minute long ~ M8.0 urban renewable program.
Actually the Big One in CA can’t and won’t cause sea level rise (or land level fall) in California south of Ferndale (where the San Andreas goes out to sea). The San Andreas is a strike slip fault not a seduction zone fault. From Ferndale northwards to Vancouver Island, when the Big One hits there will be a “sea level rise” big time.
“not a seduction zone fault”?
Auto-correct, I presume…
When I was in college, the geology majors had T-shirts that said: “Legalize Subduction!”
Seduction faults are very disappointing …. amorously unsatisfying.
Well, you can’t really blame the geology majors. It’s not their fault.
Oh wow!!🤭 But maybe since it’s California it is a seduction. LOL
The sun never sets on alarmist “journalism” ad placements.
You know what, the alarmists are right. Sea levels will rise by 9′, much quicker than we expect as well. In fact, there’s only just enough time left to sell beachfront properties before they are swamped.
I know some really gullible sceptics over on WUWT who will probably give you, say, 5 cents on the dollar of the original purchase price. I mean, at least you escape with your shirt and those guys get stuck with properties that will be under water in a year or two. Tell you what, I’ll even help you out by offering the same just cos I feel sorry for you.
You can thank me later for at least saving you some money. Close call though.
I have been visiting some of the same coastal sites in the Pacific north west (Birch Bay, Wa & White Rock, BC) for going on 60 years now, and have been looking at the same fixed bench marks in some bed rock all these years and I can’t truthfully say that I can even recognize the 4″- 5″ of seal level rise that has been reported to already have happened. It hasn’t affected anything yet that I am aware of. And that includes coastal California where I have driven and bicycled the coast highway #101 from San Diego to Vancouver many times over the years.
I have also been visiting coastal sites in Central America and SE Asia for many years and having talked to many local fisher folk, they report the exact same thing. Except for one spot in Bohol, Philippines where the sea level dropped about 36″, but that happened in less than a few minutes in the 2014 earthquake when much of the local coastal island uplifted and the shallow coral sea floor rose out of the ocean creating thousands of acres of new beach. That would be terrifying to be in water waist deep one minute and the next you are dry ground while the ground is rocking back and forth and rising out of the sea.
SLR, or acceleration isn’t a concern anywhere I have been around the world, although I realize that several coastal area’s are sinking which may be caused by pumping out deep fresh water wells or river delta subsidence, or even local tectonics. Hudson Bay and Iceland for example is having significant sea level decrease but that is happening for other reasons, such as isostatic rebound, or gravitational shifts due to the melting Greenland Ice Cap and the changing local geoid gravitational field on the ocean level itself. Normal sea level rise or decrease surely isn’t any immediate threat to mankind, and when it is, we will be able to defend our populated coastal lands for centuries to come. In other places we can adapt, which is what we have done since the oceans globally rose 400+ feet just in the last 10,000-20,000 years.
http://sciencenordic.com/mind-bending-physics-scandinavian-sea-level-change
“Except for one spot in Bohol, Philippines where the sea level dropped about 36″, but that happened in less than a few minutes in the 2014 earthquake when much of the local coastal island uplifted and the shallow coral sea floor rose out of the ocean creating thousands of acres of new beach. That would be terrifying to be in water waist deep one minute and the next you are dry ground while the ground is rocking back and forth and rising out of the sea.”
I’d pay real money to experience that, as long as there was no immediately following 10 meter tsunami.
A part of new Zealand rose a few metres a couple years back, kaikoura earthquake
I had the same reaction. I’d have given a lot (short of being washed away by tsunami inundation) to experience a sea bed lifting event like that…with high set videos.
I have looked carefully at every historical coastline photo I have been able to find.
At towns, and roads, and specific buildings on beach front properties.
I have yet to see one single instance where the sea is higher, by any amount, no matter how slight or even vaguely discernable.
Not one.
Not a single place, anywhere, ever.
There are lots of photos that are well over 100 years old from all over the US and the world.
Topographic maps.
Navigational charts.
One exception is, there are places where many hundreds to thousands of years ago, a town or building or some other landmark was known to have been on the coast, but is now well inland.
Another class of exceptions are places where tectonic activity has changed sea level.
And still a third related to changes due to erosion or ground water pumping.
But over the past 100-150 years, no.
Nothing.
Nada.
And there are a lot of such old photos.
Boston globe
They are worried about the aquarium flooding
When I notified the author of story that the aquarium site is on filled sea marsh and the site has always flooded
His reply
I am seeing this in my life time now
My reply key words
My lifetime
I suggested he lookup how often this site floods
About once a year for past 100 years
Salem ma mayor wanted to paint a blue line on public buildings to show how high sea level will be
Then granted building permits to allow construction in a flood zone
Hum
LA Times alarmism focused on my town of Pacifica.
But 2017 paper from Scripps researchers concluding that “storm surge and associated tracks have generally not changed appreciably since 1948”.
http://horizon.ucsd.edu/miller/download/Storm_surge/Storm_surge.pd
Furthemore from 1992 to 2009 Sea level along the west coast of North and South America has fallen despite subsidence at most sea level gauge sites.
http://cdn.antarcticglaciers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/figure-6.png
Whole paper read at ftp://128.171.151.230/coastal/Climate%20Articles/Sea%20level%20review%20Science%202010.pdf
For over a century the rate of sea level rise has been just less than 2 millimeters a years at the SF tide gauge. If you plot the data from 1980 to 2010 you will no sea level rise trend at SF for more than 30 years. Just the opposite of what the media claims to be happening.
start reading the tide gauges in Oregon and work south….
sea level rise gradually decreases until you get to Crescent City where sea level is falling
Latitude
“start reading the tide gauges in Oregon and work south….
sea level rise gradually decreases until you get to Crescent City”
Wow! And why don’t you tell anything about starting in Tijuana and moving up to North Spit?
🙂
J.-P. D.
These temperature and sea level rise graphs are a bit like Schrodinger’s cat. As soon as you look at them they suddenly shoot up for no known reason.
Speaking of ‘propaganda campaign’ one of the movers and shakers just entered the presidential race – a guy who I’ve been actually waiting to step in, and that is Tom Steyer – one of the money interests behind Oregon’s recent close squeak with cap and trade.
Only in Climate Pseudo-Science could you get away with a claim like that.
Nine feet to 2100 in California would require that about one third of the Greenland Ice Sheet plus one quarter of the West Antarctic ice-sheet will melt in 80 years.
Wake me up when FEMA changes their flood zone maps that will wipe-out $50T in property values. Hint: (to the LA Times) … Not. Gonna. Happen. … EVER!
The computer models have the same track record as Harold Camping.
But Camping had the decency to stop with the predictions.
(He died a few years ago.)
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Sea level is probably the biggest scare the Climate Lobby has, and most posts on this forum focus on temperature. The sea level scam really needs some ink. A daily search on “sea level” in the news usually turns up exaggerated claims most days. Here’s one from earlier this morning:
Instability in Antarctic ice projected to make sea level rise rapidly
They want us to believe that:
Warm Circumpolar Deep Water flows in under the sea ice, under the icebergs, under the ice shelf and melts the ice sheet at the grounding line. Then as cold surface water it flows out of the sub-ice shelf cavity where it forms sea ice.
Pretty convoluted if you ask me. If you follow the link, see the illustration.
Alarmists and LA Times lying liars just have to lie. Until they feel negative consequences for their lies they will continue to lie. Any chance of a BBC-type lawsuit?
Not funded by the taxpayer and has no foundation that it has to be unbiased …. so no
I guess you can’t tax earthquake threat. It’s not a good revenue source.
The report and model they base these claims on, while flawed, really isn’t the source of the problem. LA Times cherry picked the worst findings they could use. Read the report hot linked in “By the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 9 feet.” You will find on page 31 the projected 9 feet rise at San Francisco corresponds to RCP8.5 in the year 2100 and has a probability of 0.2%. All of the other scenarios for 2100 and 9 feet are 0.1%, the lowest figure they use anywhere, implying practically zero.
So technically, that number is in the report. But it is more than a little dishonest to present it without any qualifiers or caveats. Definitely not journalism.
So the LA Times is predicting 12 times what the actual data forecasts, based on the 9 inch vs 9 Foot SLR by 2100. Am I right ?
The most dishonest part is that the headline states it as a disaster that is occurring, while way down buried in the text it is revealed that nothing has actually changed yet, and what they said was happening is a fantasy.
So it is clearly a lie.
The headline is a lie.
“This latest Times sea level rise hype article which is basically just a repeat of its prior alarmist article is nothing but a reflection of how desperate the Times has become to push scientifically unsupported climate alarmism propaganda schemes.”
I agree! This irresponsible action by the press is a scandal.
This reminds me an article published a few days ago in Le Figaro concerning 3 people who died in a Spanish winery because a tank they cleaned suddenly filled with CO2, so they suffocated.
But the journalist wrote that they were poisoned!
Due to CO2! Jesus.
70 years living on the SoCal coast at the beach and I can’t tell a difference in ocean height. Balboa ‘Island’, Sunset Beach, and more have been flooding at king tides all that time and still do. Beach erosion and buildup (courtesy of groins) still occurring. Rocks I climbed on as a kid still have the same special holes to explore at low tide. As already stated, LA Times is a Progressive propaganda outlet and nothing more and have openly stated they will not print anything not complimentary to the CC alarmist narrative. Judging by the prices of housing on the waterfront in California not many people believe the propaganda.