L A Times supports mandated relocation of coastal properties based on climate alarmist flawed sea level rise claims

Guest essay by Larry Hamlin

The Los Angeles Times ran yet another scientifically unsupported climate alarmist sea level rise propaganda article supporting the position that government entities in the state need to mandate relocation of coastal properties away from the coast based upon speculation and conjecture derived from unvalidated and failed computer model outcomes of future sea level rise.

State government mandated relocation actions potentially involves politicians dictating control of homeowner and business property values of tens of thousands of properties representing billions of dollars in property value located along the 840 mile California coastline resulting in Draconian economic impacts being foisted upon these property owners as determined by the state’s climate alarmist government politicians.

The Times article notes: “Lawmakers have told cities they must start addressing climate adaptation in their planning, but have otherwise shied away from issuing mandatory directions. The California Coastal Commission, through modest grants and some general guidance, has been encouraging local officials to consider “everything in the toolkit” — including the controversial option of relocating oceanfront properties and critical infrastructure away from the water — when updating city policies.”

The Times article bases its climate change hyped sea level rise alarmist propaganda on computer model output derived from a 2017 California report that utilized UN IPCC AR5 report future emission scenarios that are characterized by the UN as being simply “illustrative” and “plausible” with no probabilities associated with the assumptions employed in these scenarios meaning

outcomes using these scenarios amount to nothing but conjecture and speculation.

The Times article utilizes climate alarmist characterizations of California’s future sea level rise concerns as follows:      

“The rising sea might feel like a slow-moving disaster, they said, but this is a social, economic and environmental catastrophe that the state cannot afford to ignore. By the end of this century, the sea could rise more than 9 feet in California — possibly more if the great ice sheets collapse sooner than expected.”

The California sea level report attempts to assign probabilities to the ranges of sea level rise calculated by computer models using the various UN IPCC AR 5 emissions scenarios by combining these speculative scenarios with the UN reports assessments by its alarmist writers of “level of confidence” and “assessed likelihood” qualifiers assigned to the reports outcomes.

These UN report “confidence and likelihood” qualifiers are completely subjective and represent manufactured and fabricated assigned values that form the basis for the California report sea level rise “probabilities”. These “probabilities” are nothing but subjective opinions  – they are not calculated probabilities.

Thus the California sea level rise report outcomes represent opinions based upon speculation and conjecture regarding future claims about California’s coastal sea level rise.      

As noted in a WUWT article at the time of the UN IPCC AR 5 report: “The UN IPCC has completed its three part (WGI, WGII, WGIII) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) process where future climate findings are portrayed using “level of confidence” and “assessed likelihood” qualifiers that attempt to cast these outcomes in a cloak of scientific certainty.”

As always the Times the article fails to note that coastal sea level rise has been occurring along the California coastline for tens of thousands of years based on natural climate behavior since the last ice age with the rate of sea level rise remaining at low levels for at least the last 8,000 years.

Additionally the Times article as always conceals and suppresses the more than 30 year failure of climate alarmist scientists claims of accelerating sea level rise made before Congress in 1988 where their computer models showed that sea level rise would increase by between 1 to 4 feet by mid century with this outcome completely unsupported by global tide gauge data that reflects no coastal sea level rise acceleration occurring during the last three decades.

The climate alarmist embarrassing failure demonstrated by extensive NOAA tide gauge data measurements that do NOT reflect acceleration of coastal sea level rise as hyped by failed climate alarmist computer models over the last more than 30 years is illustrated by the 120 year long tide gauge measurement sea level rise data recorded at San Francisco shown below with this long record of steady sea level rise of course unaddressed by the Times alarmist article.

The Times article mentions the usual idiotic assertion, as clearly displayed below, that California coastal sea level rise could increase by 9 to 10 feet by the end of the century based on pure speculative from computer models. This flawed claim is about the same rate of sea level rise increase hyped by climate alarmist “scientists” testifying in 1988 before Congress with that assertion shown to be flawed and failed over the last three decades.

Computer models created and utilized by climate alarmist propagandists for political purposes are incapable of accurately representing global climate either regionally or globally regardless of the climate metric being evaluated including global temperatures which are grossly overestimated by these models.

California’s purely politically driven climate alarmist government needs to abandon the use of incompetent, inaccurate and failed sea level rise computer models and instead utilize actual measured coastal sea level rise data to establish meaningful, justifiable and cost effective government climate policy actions.