During the primary debates last night, Democratic candidates said some pretty crazy stuff. Andrew Yang won the award for the best crazy talking point, in my opinion.
He was talking about how we are too late to do anything about climate change:
Yang, referring to the U.S. share of global carbon dioxide emissions, said:
“The important number in this is 15 percent of global emissions…”
“We like to act as if we’re 100 percent. Even if we were to curb our emissions dramatically, the Earth is going to get warmer. The last four years have been the four warmest years in history. We are too late. We are 10 years too late.”
So, we are too late. Chill. But then came this laughable bombshell:
“We need to do everything we can to start moving the climate in the right direction…”
“….but we also need to start moving our people to higher ground—and the best way to do that is to put economic resources into your hands so you can protect yourself and your families.”
Riiight. Yang, who’s a tech guru, apparently has no idea how fast sea level is rising, like maybe we can’t outrun it or something. For example, Honolulu is just 1.49 mm per year.
New York city, almost twice twice that, but a mere 2.84mm per year
Globally, 3.28 mm per year, still nothing to worry about:
But Yang’s advice probably comes from reading too much climate porn, like this:
My post from 2010, still valid today:
Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history
Yet, even though it’s too late and we need to abandon the coasts, he STILL says he wants to regulate – sorry ‘mitigate’ – the climate.
He wants to regulate your lifestyle and mitigate your disposable income.
Her should go and talk to the Dutch.
MJE VK5ELL
The Dutch have a surprisingly short area of sea coast and have already had up to 300 years of shoring it up… unlike the USA with a huge stretch of still unprotected coast line.
And of course they accept and expect there will be sea level rise and unlike the US are working to do something about it
https://dutchreview.com/culture/society/rising-sea-levels-in-the-netherlands/
So, in your world, ‘stupid’ is a selling point.
So, you’re saying this problem was solvable with 1700s-era technology? By people with roughly 1/1,000th of today’s resources?
They have to “do something about it,” they’re underwater already, and would be even if sea levels were falling elsewhere.
The FACT is that there’s no problem with “sea level rise”. It isn’t happening. If it were, then those millionaires wouldn’t be building beachfront houses; they’d be building on the cliffs ABOVE the beaches.
Your missal, dear boy, is loaded with logical fallcies. You assume that millionaires tend to make sensible decisions, and that their conclusions inevitably gibe with the way you would run YOUR life–if only you were a person of wealth with accompanying high class taste. Oh well.
Darn but those Dutch are prescient. Building protections against global-warming induced sea level rise millennia before mass CO2 emissions.
If you had two brain cells to rub together, you might investigate why the Dutch built flood controls rather than spouting your nonsense.
The Dutch reclaimed land from the sea and continue to do so.
No Yen for Yang …. 😉
Let’s spend our last 15 years in abject poverty.
Well, it’s a freak show. Turns out Tulsi Gabbard is a member of some weird cult with a man called Chris Butler as leader. Gabbard s father ran the cult school in Samoa. The Gabbard family are amongst the group’s most devoted followers. Anti-homosexuality seems to be a guiding principle.
Not surprising. Marianne Williamson’s A Course In Miracles is closely associated with CIA MKUltra. Clownworld.
And the satellite measurement is probably an artifact. Tide gauges show ~1.8 mm or so.
Yes and tide gauges have shown this same 1.7/1.8 rate for a hundred years or more.
Beats me why anyone quotes the satellite measurement without mentioning the other, I wish they’d stop, it’s meaningless and creates the illusion of acceleration.
John
1.7 – 1.8 mm/year?
Seems a bit low: I understood the nominal rate was 2.2 to 2.3 mm per year. 1 inch per decade. 10 inches (or so) in 100 years.
Well, not exactly that.
But the good question is, should we measure the theoretical “the Earth getting bigger” or should we measure how much our feet will wet due to this. And the tide gauge measures that better than a satellite.
Only in my wildest dreams could I hope that these people absolutely destroy coastal property values. I’m there, but then again I would have to have liars like this as neighbors, presumably.
Andrew Yang actually did very well. And he would be right except for one tiny little detail.
He got centimeters and meters confused and mixed up. It is a simple mistake, anybody could make it. We should not be too harsh. After all, what is a few orders of magnitude between friends?
After all it is just the difference between 28 cm per century, and 28 meters in the next 100 years.
That is all.
Yes, I was thinking that he thought 0.15 m = 1.5 meters or worse…
Considering this man is listed as a ‘tech guru’ I am not sure which worse – not being able to understand units of measure, or publically outing yourself as a Warm.
Hey, he’s a Vision Guy. Those other pesky details are for the staff underlings.
TonyL; right, don’t blame Yang, it’s that darned dot that keeps moving back and forth which causes all the confusion.
In the debate, he claimed to be ” the Asian guy who likes math”
So, I cut no slack for him.
That’s far more sensible than the rest of the field. His point is that economic growth is the best mitigation to any problems. He’s right about that.
Andno, that’s not an endorsement. His UBI is a disaster.
Even if we accept the argument that the temperature will increase to catastrophic levels, adaptation is still way cheaper than prevention. Maybe some of the Democrats are starting to come around.
What? How can you seriously make such a claim?
Our efforts to reduce global warming are ridiculously expensive, to the point of ruining our economies, and accomplish almost nothing. On the other hand, history shows that human ingenuity has thus far triumphed over everything Mother Nature has thrown at us. Malthus was wrong. Malthus continues to be wrong. We also have the evidence of history that a warmer climate, like the MWP and RWP, has resulted in much greater prosperity and not in disaster. link
When most Democrats talk about getting “economic” resources into the hands of people, they mean by having government tax it away from those who earned it in order to use it to buy votes.
MarkW, you are correct. If the French “have a different word for everything,” Leftists have a different meaning for every word.
We have the same climate loons here in New Zealand.
We have the Green Party yelling about a climate emergency and the leader of the Opposition Simon Bridges stated that there is no climate emergency .
The next day our news paper published by Stuff ran a cartoon showing Simon Bridges on the top of the Beehive our Parliament building nine stories up with the sea lapping at his waist with a placard stating No Climate Emergency .
Our sea level rise in New Zealand is 1.5 mm per year so it would take at least 45 thousand years to reach that level assuming that the roof of the Beehive is 67 meters above sea level .
Stuff? Are they not the publishers who used to hate on those right wing nut jobs over at Fairfax?
Personally I find New Zealand…. interesting… at the moment.
There was a now possibly memory-holed web page describing the discovery of a 1912 (?) map of a very shallow set of lagoons in NZ compared with modern aerial photography showing zero change of the shoreline. If anyone has it or knows where it can be found I’d be grateful.
Ah, excellent – thanks to Anthony it’s preserved for all: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/26/sea-level-surprise-in-new-zealand/.
That’s really funny, too funny but scary too at the shameful and blatant misinformation. Wellington, the capital of NZ, sits on active faults (The whole country does anyway) and is constantly moving. Lambton Quay has the 1840 shoreline marked in plaques in the pavement as it was before a massive quake struck shifting the land upwards extending the shoreline. Much of Miramar (Where some of the Lord of The Rings movies was filmed), Kilbirnie and land the airport sits on now didn’t exist before then. If you go down to Island Bay (Where I used to live) and look east towards Pencarrow Head you will see successive “escarpments”. This shows how the land around the Wellington region has risen over time much much faster than any sea level rise attributed to atmospheric warming due to CO2. So, Stuff have stuffed up and I am sure people believe it.
I still can’t believe New Zealand of all places buys into this drivel. I thought New Zealand was devoid of these nutters.
Unfortunately we have our share of warmists and the warmist guru is James Renwick and his mate Jim Salinger .
We also have some very good scientists who are luke warmers .
Willem de Lange is a sea level expert and he says that the true sea level rise in New Zealand is 1.5 mm per year and there is no sign of any acceleration.
Tonight on the TV news showing James Renwick at some climate affair in Wellington and it was a real scare show telling us that 2019 would be the warmist year eva globally then out of the blue it stated that the sea would rise 1.5 meters in Wellington by 2100.
I checked and that is what was stated . one and a half meter rise by 2100
1.5mm X 80 years = 12 centimeters .
1.5 meters = 150 centimeters which is close to 2 centimeters a year over 80 years .
For this to happen there would have to be a very rapid acceleration of 1300 % and that is just not going to happen .
A 100 % acceleration starting now would equal 24 centimeters a quarter of a meter.
This junk science makes people realize that they are being fed a load of Bull.
The greatest threat is that our children are being taught this in the schools and universities and they accept it as the truth .
Graham
You can relax Graham. Across the ditch at Ft Denison in Sydney Harbour, mean sea levels are falling. The latest monthly MSL, June 2019 is 53 mm [2 inches] LOWER than the first one, May 1914, recorded 105 years ago:
http://www.bom.gov.au/ntc/IDO70000/IDO70000_60370_SLD.shtml
GPS chips are showing Ft Denison is also sinking somewhat so in effect MSL is lower still.
That agrees with other observations of king tides on sea walls built to high water datum over 70 years ago where they used to regularly just cover those walls but now never do except with storm surge.
Then again, I remember seeing Greenpeace morons protesting at Huntly Power Station; which I believe is New Zealand’s only operational conventional power station (Of its kind anyways). Then there was the Greenpeace protest at the Marsden Oil Refinery; although it wasn’t the refinery that was the front of their protest, it was the never activated Marsden B Power Station not far from the refinery. Marsden A Power Station which once stood nearby the B site ran on oil and was dismantled some years ago after closure. Marsden B was also going to run on oil but the plant was never activated. The chimney was demolished but the power station itself sat unused for years while the council struggled to decide on what to do with it. There was a proposal to activate the plant by converting it to run on coal, but this sparked protests by Greenpeace. The plant was eventually sold to an Indian firm who had the entire building taken apart, the sections numbered, and then shipped to India for reassembly.
So yes, unfortunately New Zealand has been infected by these idiots, which is sad because I see New Zealand as one of the grandest countries in the world.
These politicians don’t seem to look at the actual data, if they do they don’t understand the data/observations…
Thanks for posting that Anthony, I was wondering if any WUWTers were watching, as I was.
They look at data…polling data.
Some of these science-illiterate fanatics are worrisome, especially those with money. If the ends are to save the world, any means are justifiable. Sabotage, terrorism, assassinating an archduke, sinking the Maine and pointing at Spain. Gore’s greed may one day be assuaged. A O-C’s quest for power may one day wane. But those who believe they are the ones to save the world, being revered for all time, may die trying, or kill many in the effort.
There are few things in the world as dangerous as someone with a messiah complex.
This is my standard “sig” line for my email:
Sea Level Rise Since 1865: 0.0 cm.
Look at the photos!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Denison
Too late you say?
Ah well, might as well enjoy it while we can then.
And North America is net carbon dioxide negative, as evidenced by the Japanese monitoring satellite.
I am refusing to make any predictions for the November 2020 Presidential election.
However if the Democrats select some of the crazy Left like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or this bloke one Conservative Australian commentator has opined that Trump will go through the Democrats like the German Panzers through Northern France.
Trump would most likely blitzkrieg any Leftist candidates.
Sounds like he got a few things right, such as the futility of any US action and that economic prosperity is the best course of action.
Obviously, Yang has bought in to the climate alarmist party line that the projected global warming—about 2 degrees C (about 4 deg-F) over the next 100 years, assuming a projected trend line—will be the end of human civilization as we know it.
Well, based on scientifically-measured mean average annual temperature differences between the Earth’s poles and its equator, a 2 degrees Celsius average warming of Earth’s atmosphere and land surfaces would be equivalent to moving about 260 miles south in the northern hemisphere (and about 175 miles north in the southern hemisphere), or about 1000 feet lower in elevation in either hemisphere, based on the standard atmospheric adiabatic lapse rate).
So, does the climate, types of shelter, farming of crops and animals, difficulty of obtaining water and power, and overall quality of life change so much over such short distances (~200 miles north/south), or 1000 feet in elevation? I think not . . . and this is among the best possible examples of how a 2 deg C global temperature swing might actually affect life on Earth.
The only thing that is “too late” is candidate’s Yang’s capability to withdraw his displays of stupidity, both on climate and attempting to buy votes for $1000 a month using taxpayer funds.
Speaking as an outside I may be missing some of the subtle points, but this process is somewhat bemusing to watch.
As I understand it a whole bunch of Democrats throw their hat in the ring. So far so normal.
Then they hold a series of rallies before their peers where they publically compete to ‘Out Woke’ each other in order to appeal to the progressive nature of their own party.
Then, after what is basically a Hunger Games but with better catering, Katniss wipes the blood away, accepts the metaphoric fasces of Democratic blessing and then goes out and holds a new series of rallies where he or she or ze or phe or whatever is politically correct right now publically states that they are not remotely as woke as you might think in order to gain the approval of the all important ‘Swing Voter’ while multi tasking with a fist full of Deplorable-Phobia because deep down you still hate those guys.
Yeap.
That makes sense.
Have fun with that.
Nicely done, Craig. You’ve got it right.
The only new wrinkle in this election cycle (2020 election) is that the candidates are so woke, with each trying to one-up the others with how much ‘free’ stuff they are going to give to everybody, that there is no coming back to the center for the election this time after getting the nomination.
Few of the swing voters will be buying that the final chosen candidate is “Omigosh! A moderate after all.” And all too many of the rabid base will be very unhappy if they back off of the socialist agenda.
This election is going to be so politically entertaining that, like the writings of the Ancient Greeks, it will continue to be studied and discussed 2,000 years from now.
Well, of course it’s too late. He must read WUWT. Lots of people here have been pointing that out for years, as one “we have only x years to act” deadline after another passed.
The latest deadline from Price Charles was 18 months (made, I believe, in July 2019). If I calculate correctly that deadline will happen about the time of the presidential inauguration in Jan. 2021. So why is climate change even a campaign issue? It’s too late. Okay. sarc/off
He had a good point to make, but he flubbed it up with that stupid statement. Or maybe he knows he has to say alarming things like that to a democrat audience, and it was intentionally stupid.
His good point is that the US is only 15% of emissions. The US can become completely carbon neutral and the sea will still rise.
So he’s right, the US can’t stop sea level rise because the US president is not president of the world.
The sea is going to rise no matter what the US does. It’s not realistic to assume that huge growing countries like India and China are going to be carbon neutral anytime soon.
Where he is wrong about though is that we don’t have to move to higher ground. It’s possible to adapt, and cities do that already. The Maldives built a new airport on landfill. It turns out sea level rise is relatively easy to adapt to, especially when it is a slow and steady 3 mm/year rate like it is now. But you can’t say something reasonable like that to democrats.
With a Democrat audience you have to say alarming things, so he makes the stupid higher ground comment.
From the article: “We like to act as if we’re 100 percent. Even if we were to curb our emissions dramatically, the Earth is going to get warmer. The last four years have been the four warmest years in history. We are too late. We are 10 years too late.”
Someone should show Andrew Yang the UAH satellite chart. Andrew has been fooled by the NASA/NOAA “hottest year evah!” meme, but the UAH chart shows something completely different. It shows that the last four years are *not* the hottest years in history. The global temperatures are actually cooling, Andrew. You can relax, and while doing so, please take the time to get your facts staight.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_July_2019_v6.jpg
Funny how Miami Beach property keeps going up. You know what people really believe when they vote with their pocketbook.
Andrew Yang and his proclamations are just more evidence that Liberalism is a mental illness. Irrational emotions have seized control of his cognitive processes, aka a blithering idiot.
In Australia, the trend in sea level has been calculated from long term averaged tide gauge records as 1.2 mm/year. (No worries then).
The two longest tide gauge records at Fort Denison in Sydney harbour and at Fremantle in Western Australia indicate a slightly higher trend of 1.4 mm/yr at Fort Denison and a lower trend of 0.9 mm/yr at Fremantle. Both of these Australian determinations may include changes in the reference datum relative to the International Frame (IRF) DUE TO THE VERTICAL MOVEMENT OF LAND. (My emphasis).
https://www.ausmarinescience.com/marine-science-basics/sea-level-rise-1/
Maybe it’s the choice and sequence of quotations, but when I see what Mr. Yang says about the climate, it all seems like disconnnected buzz words, collected by some assistant probably, in order to trigger the right responses in the audience. They just don’t add up to any meaningful, consistent message about climate policy. There is no rationality left, only emotions and simplistic statements. I don’t think Mr. Yang is stupid. I think he knows this perfectly well.
Is he the one who wants the government pay everyone $1000.00 per month? Well, you know, I could get remarried ($2000 per month). Have 15 children ($15000 per month). Think Population Control. Never have to work (I’m semi retired). $17,000 per month, not bad except a cup of coffee at McMicky D’s would cost $30.00
No, the coffee would be $2 — the sales tax would be $28.
Perhaps all the panic over a temperature rise of 2C actually results from an incompetent conversion to F.
2 x 9/5 +32 = 35.6F … You see! This might result from ignorati following a recipe to convert C to F.
The ‘global sealevel rise’ from altimetry of 3.2mm/yr is wrong. There is an as yet unidentified fault in either the instrument or the data processing, or in both.
As a Dutchman knowing about changes in sealevel is or used to be almost second nature. The Dutch keep a very keen eye on their tidal gauges. Chosing between what data comes out of a black box or stuff you can see with your own eyes is not difficult. The rise in the North Sea has been 1.9 mm/yr and constantly so since at least 1880. There may be a little subsidence in the number but we reckon with a sealevel rise between 1.6 and 1.9 mm/yr.
Remember that bloke from Syracuse 2000 years ago, Archimedes? He had figured out that if the change in the North Sea is 1.9mm/yr then the change in the North Atlantic is the same. With perhaps a very tiny correction because the geodetic surface is not an exact sphere. Why? Because they are ‘communicating vessels’ in open connection with each other. And similarly for the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, and so on.
I think Yang is suggesting government subsidized canoes for the coming disaster. The canoes since they are government subsidized will cost $187,000 a piece and you must provide your own paddle.
Yang: “The last four years have been the four warmest years in history. ”
Not even wrong. Maybe warmest on record, which is far from “history”. And again, we’re referring to the completely meaningless “global average temperature”. So he gets, at least, a double dumba** for that one.
The warmest in recent history, as is recorded at the remaining sensing stations. These remaining ones, as we recall courtesy of Watts et.al., are in urban or airport areas. The rural ones, especially those in pristine locations, have been carefully retired.
Have we passed the final “tipping-point” ? (Sorry – I’m not sure how many that’s been). Whatever, I really hope so because, as presumably we can no longer do anything about it, we can all just carry on as normal.
So if “global” sea level is rising at a rate of 3.24 mm/year, this is equivalent to 12.9 inches per century. If Yang wants people to move to higher ground, it doesn’t take much effort to climb 13 inches in 100 years, if a person is lucky enough to live that long.
If low-lying cities are concerned about rising seas, they can also build seawalls. Building a 13-inch-high seawall along the seaward side of a city over the course of a century is much less expensive than trying to build enough windmills and solar panels to replace fossil fuels–the fossil fuels could even help power the earth-moving equipment needed to build the seawall.
How hard is it to build a 13-inch-high seawall in a century? Not very, since people built a 25-foot-high seawall around Galveston within 5 years of the devastating hurricane of 1900, and today’s earth-moving equipment has much more horsepower than that of 1900-05, which was literally powered by horses.
If it’s too late, then there’s no point in trying to control the climate. Since we are actually in a cooling phase, AKA Little Ice Age level cooling, maybe we can start concentrating on adapting to the new climate change instead of impoverishing society with pie-in-the-sky climate control “solutions”.
The adaptations to deal with this sort of thing are 1800s technology. Honestly, even if sea level rises 10M in 100 years, we won’t be evacuating any cities.
Run! Run for your lives, the sea level is rising! What a country and a society we have created, where someone who is smart and who works hard in one area such that he can make millions, can be so clueless in other areas. And then we have others who believe in and live in cluelessness…like Congresscritter Hank Johnson who is worried that Guam might capsize, if too many people are on one side of the island…
And Yang is considered by some to be one of the “serious” DemocRAT candidates…
If the scaremongers are really convinced that man is causing the current ( though cyclical) warming, then when will we hear about massive demonstrations being organized worldwide against the real “perpetrators”, China and India? When will these two “developing” countries be removed from the exceptions to the climate accords? Maybe then will we be able to take these folks seriously. C’mon mates, put your money where your mouth is!
It’s too late? So they are finally admitting that? Good. Maybe now we can focus on increasing prosperity and technological innovation so we can be ready for whatever the future brings, instead of wasting billions of taxpayer money to change the weather.