Guest “Son of a beach!” by David Middleton
Gregory Wrightstone linked to the Fox News version of this article on his LinkedIn page, the comments from fellow geologists were fracking hilarious…
World’s beaches disappearing due to climate crisis – study
UK on course to lose a quarter of its sandy coast because of human-driven erosionStefano Valentino
Mon 2 Mar 2020
Almost half of the world’s sandy beaches will have retreated significantly by the end of the century as a result of climate-driven coastal flooding and human interference, according to new research.
The sand erosion will endanger wildlife and could inflict a heavy toll on coastal settlements that will no longer have buffer zones to protect them from rising sea levels and storm surges. In addition, measures by governments to mitigate against the damage are predicted to become increasingly expensive and in some cases unsustainable.
[…]
These estimates are far from the most catastrophic; they rely on an optimistic forecast of international action to fight climate breakdown, a scenario known as RCP4.5. In this scenario of reduced ice-cap melting and lower thermal expansion of water, oceans will only have risen by 50cm by 2100.
However, if the world continues to emit carbon at its current rate, sea levels will rise by an estimated 80cm, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If this happens, a total of 131,745km of beaches, or 13% of the planet’s ice-free coastline, will go under water.
Around the globe, the average shoreline retreat will be 86.4 metres in the RCP4.5 scenario or 128.1 metres in the high-carbon scenario, though amounts will vary significantly between locations. Flatter or wilder coastlines will be more affected than those where waterfronts are steeper, or those artificially maintained as part of coastal development.
[…]
“The length of threatened seashores incorporates locations that will be submerged by more than 100 metres, assuming there are no physical limits to potential retreat,” said Michalis Vousdoukas, an oceanographer at the JRC and lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change. “Our 100-metre threshold is conservative since most beaches’ width is below 50 metres, especially near human settlements and in small islands, such as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean.”
[…]
The Grauniad
Where do I start? “Human settlements”?!?!?!?!? Those are generally called cities. The last time sea level wiped out “human settlements” was called the Holocene transgression.
Those former human settlements are now at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and the reason why the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) employs archaeologists.
I have to quote this bit of idiocy a second time…
These estimates are far from the most catastrophic; they rely on an optimistic forecast of international action to fight climate breakdown, a scenario known as RCP4.5. In this scenario of reduced ice-cap melting and lower thermal expansion of water, oceans will only have risen by 50cm by 2100.
However, if the world continues to emit carbon at its current rate, sea levels will rise by an estimated 80cm, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Unmitigated horst schist!
50 cm is half a meter… 1.6 feet. 80 cm is almost 1 meter… 2.6 feet.
For sea level to rise 80 cm by 2100, it would have to be rising twice as fast as the Holocene Transgression from 2081-2100.
And it just kept getting better for those of us who love to ridicule junk science…
Around the globe, the average shoreline retreat will be 86.4 metres in the RCP4.5 scenario or 128.1 metres in the high-carbon scenario…
Let’s look at Miami Beach, the poster child of catastrophic sea level rise. The nearest tide gauge station with a sufficient record length is Virginia Key.
Since 1931, sea level appears to have risen by about 20-25 cm. A review of USGS topographic maps reveals that the coastline has barely moved.
At 3 mm per year, sea level in the Miami Beach area will have risen by another 240 mm by 2100, 24 cm, about 9 inches. Beach slopes can be highly variable. Doran & Overbeck (2015) found that the slopes of North Carolina sandy beaches ranged from 0.05 to 0.10 radians (~3-6°). 9 inches of sea level rise works out to 7 feet of shoreline retreat at 6° and 14 feet at 3°.
Here’s a topographic profile across Miami Beach.
We can see that the sandy beach side (east) is much steeper than the shoreward side. The gray band represents 14 cm of sea level rise. Even if we double that, the shoreline would only retreat by about 100 feet on the shoreward side and hardly budge at all on the sandy beach side, a far cry from 86.4 to 128.1 meters (283 to 420 feet). However, we can see from the topographic maps that the previous 20-25 mm of sea level rise had no affect on the coastline… What’s up with that? Without anthropogenic intervention, beaches move… That’s what they do.
To illustrate the irrelevance of sea level rise, I devised a little topographic exercise using NOAA tides & sea level trends and a USGS topographic map of the Jacksonville FL quadrangle. There are two NOAA sea level stations in this quadrangle: Fernandina Beach and Mayport. I chose Fernandina Beach because the record goes back to 1897, Mayport only goes back to 1930.
2 mm/yr… Can I get a “yawn” for this?
Here is the current tide range for Fernandina Beach…
1.5 m/day… How can 2 mm/yr be a crisis and 1.5 m/day not be a crisis?
Here’s a topographic map of the Fernandina Beach area…
To evaluate the significance insignificance of 2 mm/yr of sea level rise since 1897, I constructed a topographic profile (A-A’) along Atlantic Avenue from Nassau General Hospital (A) to the shoreline (A’).
My next step was to plot the sea level data at the same vertical scale as the topographic profile.
According the the alarmists, sea level rise will make storm surges worse, somehow endangering beaches more than nature already endangers them. What effect has all of this sea level rise had on a 10′ storm surge? Just above the Dean Wormer line (zero-point-zero).
My next exercise was to compare the typical tidal range to sea level rise.
The construction of topographic profiles was literally the first thing I was taught as a freshman geology student back in 1976. How in the hell could ostensibly professional engineers and scientists write crap like this: “World’s beaches disappearing due to climate crisis”… Well, they didn’t. The idiot Grauniad journalist wrote it. The actual paper isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be…
Sandy coastlines under threat of erosion
Michalis I. Vousdoukas, Roshanka Ranasinghe, Lorenzo Mentaschi, Theocharis A. Plomaritis, Panagiotis Athanasiou, Arjen Luijendijk and Luc Feyen
Abstract
Sandy beaches occupy more than one-third of the global coastline1 and have high socioeconomic value related to recreation, tourism and ecosystem services2. Beaches are the interface between land and ocean, providing coastal protection from marine storms and cyclones3. However the presence of sandy beaches cannot be taken for granted, as they are under constant change, driven by meteorological4,5, geological6 and anthropogenic factors1,7. A substantial proportion of the world’s sandy coastline is already eroding1,7, a situation that could be exacerbated by climate change8,9.
[…]
Nature Climate Change
However, the paper has one YUGE problem with it…
Sandy coastlines under threat of erosion
No schist Sherlock! They always have been and always will be.
Beaches are the interface between land and ocean
No schist Sherlock! They always have been and always will be.
However the presence of sandy beaches cannot be taken for granted, as they are under constant change…
No schist Sherlock! They always have been and always will be.
A substantial proportion of the world’s sandy coastline is already eroding…
No schist Sherlock! That’s fracking obvious to anyone who has ever taken at least one semester of stratigraphy and sedimentation. Beaches are not only destroyed by erosion… They are formed by erosion. How the hell could the beach sand have gotten to the beach if it wasn’t eroded from some place else?
And… Here’s the mother of all “no schist Sherlocks”… Every beach that has ever formed has eventually disappeared or ceased to be a beach because of climate change.
Beaches that formed at the Holocene Highstand are now stranded well above sea level.
Many prolific oil and gas reservoir sandstone formations were once beaches.
Every beach currently on Earth will eventually “disappear” or otherwise cease to be a beach due to climate change. However, much of the sand will just be redeposited on new beaches. Because, that’s what beaches do.
This is another climate “crisis” that can be safely filed away as: “Same as it ever was”…
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing undergroundSame as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever wasWater dissolving and water removing
Talking Heads, Once In A Lifetime
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!
Water dissolving and water removing
References
Doran, K.S., Long, J.W., and Overbeck, J.R., 2015. “A method for determining average beach slope and beach slope variability for U.S. sandy coastlines: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2015-1053”. 5 p., http://dx.doi.org/10.3133/ofr20151053.
Jameson, J., C. Strohmenger. “Late Pleistocene to Holocene Sea-Level History of Qatar: Implications for Eustasy and Tectonics”. AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90142 © 2012 AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition, April 22-25, 2012, Long Beach, California.
Vousdoukas, M.I., Ranasinghe, R., Mentaschi, L. et al. Sandy coastlines under threat of erosion. Nat. Clim. Chang.10, 260–263 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0697-0
After the shock of learning that snow is to be a distant memory, ergo, no ski resorts, how are we to cope with no beaches ?
The Beaches of old will be gone but there unclean offspring will endure…
Those Dirty Sons of Beaches
Hey look on the bright side all the right hand swimming sharks won’t get beached.
What most people don’t seem to get, or know, is that “Miami Beach” is an artificial island that was created by man. There was in fact a very narrow strip of barrier islands separating Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean back around 1900 when the City of Miami was but a tiny fishing/trading village. During the Great Florida Land Boom after WW I, all the harbor and port facilities in the area including “Government Cut”, were dredged out of the very shallow Biscayne Bay, with the dredge spoil – mostly sand – dumped onto the skinny little barrier island that became, Voila! .. Miami Beach. Then during WW Two, the Intracoastal Waterway was dredged along much of the entire Atlantic coast, extending all the way down to Biscayne Bay to provide safe passage for coastal vessels (protection from submarine attacks, which were extensive and violent in the opening months of WW Two), and again that spoil was dumped on “Miami Beach” to make it still larger in area.
In any event, virtually all populated areas with ocean beaches must be continually renewed with sand either dredged offshore or from sand pits onshore in order to maintain their unnatural width. Not because of sea level rise, but purely due to ocean and beach currents, wave action, and occasional damage from large storms like Hurricanes and Noreasters and such.
There is nothing permanent about any beach in the world. Beaches are not static things – they are constantly on the move.
Spot on.
If you count the number of “coulds” in the original article it will make your head swim on land!
One of the things that could be considered instantaneous beach erosion is the both the legal and illegal extraction of beach and shallow ocean sand that is dredged for things like China building illegal islands in the South China Sea. Or just sand for making concrete globally. Or land reclamation into the ocean such as Singapore, Hong Kong and 1001 other projects going on. In SE Asia, this would probably be the single largest source of instantaneous beach erosion. Nothing to do with raising oceans or climate change.
The beaches on the east coast of Luzon Philippines are impacted by typhoons.
The profile of a beach can significantly change in 24 hours.
Yes, that is true for sure. But there is still a beach somewhere down wind/wave. Plus some corrupt local Gov’ts in the western Philippines actually allowed Chinese dredgers to come in and load up sand for their artificial islands in the EEZ of the West Philippine Sea while taking money under the table in kickbacks in the middle of the night to the local Gov’t units in PHP. Corruption is rife in most of SE Asia. President Duterte in PHP just told his people they need to decide to be a territory of the USA, or a Province of China while he ripped up the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with USA. And he has already been bought off by China. He will sell off the rest of their sandy beaches one way or another to the Chinese. Feeling sorry for the Philippines. They have more shoreline on their 7000+ islands than most any other country on the good Earth.
And why not use Saudi Arabia sand ? Wouldn’t it be great for them to have another export item beside oil ?
Desert sand isn’t suitable for construction. It has to be beach or river sand.
+100
What are we concerned about beaches in 2100 ?
We have only 12 years to save the world or only 11, who exactly knows, than the game is over, isn’t it ?
Only 12 years left!
Don’t worry you will have plenty of company.
Looking back recently at papers in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society I came across a paper “Population Explosion and Interstellar Expansion” from 1975 by Sebastian von Hoerner.
http://library.nrao.edu/public/memos/spln/SPLN_76_20b.pdf
He refers to a paper from 1960 “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026” by Heinz von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot.
http://www.bioinfo.rpi.edu/bystrc/courses/biol4961/Doomsday.pdf
Both papers use over 20 values of world population over the last 2000 years to fit an exponential curve. Not a simple exponential curve but one in which the exponent increases with time. They then extrapolate, naughty naughty. As a consequence, the world population reaches infinity in a finite time. That time is calculated as Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 although I expect that there were many tongues in cheeks when implying this. In 1960 I was a fresh-faced youth and Michael Mann was just a twinkle in his father’s eye! But time as caught up with us. They even had a +/- 5 years error on this date so start planning now!
It’s worse as I thought. Time to save some m² against overrun…
😀
Remember, doomsday cults always have to offer more doom because the doom they were pushing is now ignored because it failed to come to pass. #CultofClimastrology
Thanks, David. I laughed when I saw the headline for this nonsense on Google News (didn’t bother to read the story) and hoped you would address it. Once again, your post is entertaining and enlightening.
Regards,
Bob
Besides, any geologist knows about transgressive sand bars… So sea level rise making beaches disappear? LOL
The lead author was much less into climate stuff in 2012 when he published geomorphology papers dealing with science back then…
The next St. Greta stomping grounds could be a sandy beach.
“How dare you not going away, beach!”
Why do you even link to a Grauniad article in the 1st place? It’s a thoroughly debunked leftist rag.
Save your ammo.
It’s both fun and easy to ridicule.
Obviously a day that you didn’t want to overtax your thought processes
I cut & pasted a lot of this post from older posts I wrote.
I think that the expression is “golden oldies” – still fun to read (again) though.
But the time taken to inform us (not them as they don’t read past the headline) is gone, never to be available again.
One of the tragedies of this mess is the time and resources lost pointing out the inaccuracies and doom scenarios that will never come to pass.
But you must realize, David, that stifling all that heart-felt distress by piling on with a contradicting ‘micro-aggression’ just isn’t fair to those who are insistently innumerate, and whose true desire for rescue from their virtue signaling angst is demonstrated by their expressed gratitude for such graciously offered reassurance.
Thank you David for yet another informative and entertaining post.
Climate research has reached a new low in a process of gradual decay in which activism trumps pretension to science bit by bit but the bits add up. The climate crisis is not the end of the world. It’s the end of science.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/03/climate-ozone-crisis/
“However, if the world continues to emit carbon”
Oh no, am I going to have to learn gibberish to understand what these f-wits are saying, or will it go away …. pleeeease go away?
Unfortunately or their FW papers, the World doesn’t “Emit Carbon” It has evolved to utilize Carbon Dioxide as the breath of life for Green Plants which in turn respire the O2 and H2O we need as symbiotes
Go get them, David! My first thought was that there are so many beaches preserved in the stratigraphy that the beach life is obviously a matter of constant change. Not only does oil accumulate in preserved beach facies in the stratigraphic column, red-bed copper, cobalt, vanadium, and uranium does also. Hooray for beaches! Please stop listening to the Talking Heads.
If ‘beaches’ in general will be gone – where will they go to? What proof is offered that new beaches will not form (reform?) elsewhere. This will have the beneficial effect of creating valuable new beachfront property for Californians! What more could one want?
“Since 1931, sea level appears to have risen by about 20-25 cm. A review of USGS topographic maps reveals that the coastline has barely moved.”
Yeah, the ol’ “what if we had a catastrophic climatic shift and nobody noticed?” schist.
I won’t re-post my comments on the other thread, its old news to everyone here, but basically: take a (very) little bit of data, push it through a bad model, get a bad result, then hype it to the gills.
That there is a profession that gets away with this is bad enough.
That it is now called “science” is worse.
My “proof” will be when the great-grand children of the Obamas, Gores and Suzukis signal they might want to sell their beach front properties.
Need to include Dame Emma Thompson (she who flys in jets to Extinction Rebellion climate protests) in with those who have sea-side property. She recently moved to Venice, Italy. That certainly demonstrates a distinct degree of worry about sea-level rise.
eeeeeeehhh…
Using Florida beaches as an example isn’t great because we *sand them* from time to time to maintain the map contours.
Now over in Manatee County the wetlands and mangrove areas are monitored and updated often and they *don’t* add millions of tons of sand there.
Please do not lend credence to the “3 mm/year” “Satellite Altimetry” baloney. Satellite Altimetry is un-calibrated nonsense. There is so much tide gauge data that contradicts satellite altimetry, satellite altimetry should wander off and get lost…
The SLR rates I cited in the post were from local tide gauges.
After David gets through with it (fact-checking the propaganda) it turns out to be much ado about nothing.
That’s why we come here.
You see a doomsday CAGW story in the news, then you come to WUWT, and then you walk away laughing.
Thanks, David. We can always count on you to put things in the proper perspective.
“Son of a beach!” should read “Sun of a beach!”
A classic line from the great Jimmy Stewart movie, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation. HE says, “I’ll go get some sun on the beach”… But the housekeeper thought he said “Son of a b_____”… She’s offended and quits… LOL!
Well that brings back a memory. One of the theaters had a showing of that new at the time movie for my graduating high school class. Enjoyed it.
Oh, noes! The Climate Monster will steal our beaches!
Life will end in twelve years, anyway. I guess it doesn’t matter.
…where’s all the sand going again? And if the sand goes and only bedrock remains, is that not also “beach”? Just bring your boots and a rock hammer! Sounds more interesting without the sand! Of course, not many bikini-clad lovelies would agree!
Maybe Leonardo DiCaprio can do a remake of The Beach but this time when he gets there it’s gone.
So – they’re back to century-out predictions again.
How many times has this rotating cycle repeated, just since the turn of the century?
I wonder how long it will take this new batch of snowflake millennials to recognize the same pattern?
Rodriguez, A. B., et al. 2014. Oyster reefs can outpace sea-level rise. Nature Climate Change. 4:493- 497.
So have beaches [where there is sand], marshes [where there is mud], etc., even if not we will still have oysters.
Well if the beaches start to disappear, beach-goers won’t stand for it.
My plan is to buy a large tract of the Sahara and sell the sand for rebuilding the beaches. Beach destinations popular with tourists will have city governments and local Chambers of Commerce buying every grain I can ship. No doubt I can get plenty of investors from those that believe that alarmist nonsense.
My plan includes taking the investors’ money and running, but my prospectus won’t mention that.
;o)
Ah…so you would be in the “Schemer” section of the Green Energy “Dreamers and Schemers” cohort…
But seriously, you could probably get a grant for this.
Saw this on the local news last night. The idiot “journalists” parroted the information with no critique and then calmly moved on to the next fluff item. Their commercials assure us of their “in-depth” reporting.
You presume:
1) that Ken and/or Barbie was hired for anything other than looks, or at best, voice
2) they have anything more advanced than 10th grade math and can’t critique anything other than what a Kardashian is wearing today
As an old editor said once, the only reason he hired writers was to produce copy so that the underwear ads didn’t all run together.
The only reason why Ken and Barbie exist on TV is so that the ads don’t all run together (which I believe is called The Shopping Channel).
Broadcast media
The study authors wrote in the conclusions:
“Several countries could face extensive sandy beach erosion issues by the end of the twenty-first century (affecting >60% of their sandy coastline under both RCPs; Fig. 3) including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gambia, Jersey, Suriname, Comoros, Guinea-Bissau, Pakistan and Mayotte (France).”
Pakistan’s beaches?? Congo???? Suriname?? LOL.
They also didn’t mention that Greenland’s beaches are also going to get hit hard.
So much for the tourist fun and sun there!!
Furthermore with the RCP 4.5 intermediate mitigation scenario showing significant beach erosion along with the already discredited (implausible) RCP8.5 scenario in their beach erosion model, either we shouldn’t worry about something we can’t stop even with mitigation…. or there is something seriously wrong with their model.
Obviously, since we DO have beaches globally after the 130+ meter rise since the LGM 18,000 years ago , even with dramatic beach erosion, sandy beaches still form.
So where do their beach erosion models go wrong?
Let’s look at their model assumptions:
So right there they say they do not simulate post storm recovery, only “episodic erosion from individual storms.”
This is analogous to the EPA’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) scam, a half-truth lie where only costs of warming are considered and not any obvious and likely benefits of warming or of CO2 fertilization on the biosphere. The lack of benefit consideration makes the entire SCC exercise a fraud on reality. Similarly, these beach erosion paper authors do not consider that beaches also form during storms as sand is moved around. Again, a fraud on reality.
“Pakistan’s beaches?? Congo???? Suriname?? LOL.”
Don’t forget Svalbard (Spitsbergen). Beautiful beaches. 24 hours of sunshine in summer!
😉
When I first read this ‘news,’ my first reaction was that the ‘scientists’ understood little of the dynamics of coastal processes such as longshore transport currents and the seasonal removal and replenishment of sand. Most cliffs behind California sand beaches are the remains of beaches from when the water was much higher (and/or the land much lower). Hence, if a transgressing sea were to cover the existing beaches, the waves would attack the sandy cliffs and create a new beach at a higher stand with re-cycled sand — and the longshore transport current would move excess sand south to supply sand for new beaches. The same is true for much of the east coast of the US and other places in the world. I just can’t fathom (if you’ll pardon the pun) how supposedly educated scientists go off into la la land with all kinds of suppositions about what could, may, or might happen without even considering the alternatives such as, “The beaches will simply move inland from their current positions.”
“When I first read this ‘news,’ my first reaction was that the ‘scientists’ understood little of the dynamics of coastal processes such as longshore transport currents and the seasonal removal and replenishment of sand.”
Well, their method doesn’t appear to need any special knowledge at all:
https://phys.org/news/2020-03-world-beaches.html
“To assess how quickly and by how much beaches might disappear, Vousdoukas and colleagues plotted trend lines across three decades of satellite imagery dating back to 1984.
From there, they projected future erosion under two climate change scenarios.”
In other words, they looked at photos and drew stuff, then put that stuff into a model and got other stuff.
Then they took that stuff and torqued it, then published it.
(For “stuff” you can fill in your own words, apparently “schist” is a good one).
In other words, stop trying to bring science into this stuff, its not fair.
Don’t worry.. beaches go, then they come back years later! (but it doesn’t mean they’ll stick around..)
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/achill-island-beach-that-reappeared-in-2017-disappears-again-1.3755344
Sandy beaches ARE erosion, aren’t they? Or rather the result of erosion.
Not all. Billions of Parrot fish over the eons have created a lot of sand. Parrot fish, any of about 80 species of fishes which are of the family Scaridae. They can be real sand machines. For example, one 2010 study in Marine Biology found that large parrotfish in Hawaii can churn out 840 pounds of eroded coral i.e. white sand per year. And a single giant Humphead Parrotfish can produce 11,000 pounds of sand per year. And fragments of shelled creatures and coral and that have been deposited on the coast by the waves, and then ground up into smaller and smaller pieces. So not all erosion in the traditional sense of erosion eroding rock. Well, coral in the scheme of things becomes rock, but the sand produced was of organic origin by Parrot fish on mostly living coral from all these aquatic creatures for hundreds of millions of years.
So Parrot fish are the REAL danger to corals.