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.
Beach erosion by waves doesn’t always work only in one direction, toward disappearing beaches. Sometimes beaches can be built up by natural forces.
From 1985 through 2010, I made frequent summer trips to a beach along the west coast of France called Tharon Plage, located about 15 miles south of where the Loire River empties into the Atlantic Ocean. From the mouth of the river, the coast extends about 30 miles westward along a bay, with most beaches facing south, with the most famous being La Baule, an affluent city complete with casinos along the boardwalk. To the south of the Loire River, the coast extends due south for about 15 miles, with most of the beaches facing west, including Tharon Plage.
Tharon Plage is a sandy, west-facing beach about a mile long (north to south) between a concrete breakwater used to form a harbor to the north, and a rocky peninsula extending westward to the south. The sandy area is about 100 meters wide, with a concrete wall to the east, with small change rooms built above the wall. When I first arrived there in 1985, the top of the concrete wall was about three feet above the level of the sand at the bottom of the wall. By 2010, the top of the concrete wall was about the same level as the sand, with parts of the wall covered by sand.
Meanwhile, the residents of ritzy La Baule were complaining that their beautiful white sand was disappearing, and the beach was turning to gravel. But they couldn’t blame it on global warming, because “their” sand was being washed across the bay and accumulating on Tharon Plage. So, every winter lots of dump trucks descend on Tharon Plage to bring extra sand back to La Baule to undo the effects of Mother Nature.
Alarmists about beach erosion need to relax–everywhere sand is eroded from a beach, another beach is built up somewhere else.
If you are a fan of sand and synd beaches, make a trip to Arcacon, more south of your region Tharon Plage.
You’ll find there Europes greatest sand dune Dune du Pilat ( a href=”https://austria-forum.org/af/Geography/Europe/France/Pictures/South_West_France/Arcachon_-_Dune_du_Pilat_1″>View, and the beaches are very nice and sandy too. We startet our trip there to the south to Biarrit and remained to weeks in Hendaye.
Correction of the earlier comment that can be deleted – now typing not on phone but computer.
—
If you are a fan of sand and sandy beaches, make a trip to Arcachon, more south of your region Tharon Plage.
You’ll find there Europes greatest sand dune, Dune du Pilat ( View ), and the beaches are very nice and sandy too. We startet our trip there to the south to Biarrit and remained to weeks in Hendaye.
Btw., Arcachon is known for best oysters ! 😀
French oysters…
the best in the world?
Nah..Krishna you just have to try Australian oysters, they are the best in the world!
Tell that a Frenchman 😀
He won’t stop to laugh 😀
It seems unlikely that the vertical scale of your Figure 1 is in mm.
Please fix.
Note the word “Thousands” above the axis label.
I’ll just go skiing ,then…oh, wait, no more snow.
An interesting place to study beach and sand changes would be the great sand islands that form Moreton Bay and Tin Can Bay off the coast of South East Queensland, Australia.
The northern-most sand island is Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world (World Heritage listed).
These islands feed sand to each other as the currents remove sand from their Southern ends and deposit it at their Northern ends. In between are mazes of sand shoals that are *fun* to navigate.
Of course, these areas would not have been islands 10k years ago, as the whole area would have been coastal plains.
Now THAT’S freakin’ climate change!
Mathematics is one of those subjects where there are right answers. (There is no post-modernist Mathematics.) The climate change catastrophe guys don’t care about accuracy; they care about drama. Their only use for Math is to imply an authority based on fake numeracy. Like for instance the claim that we can only tolerate a 1.5 degree rise in global temperature from “pre-industrial levels.” That claim means nothing. A discrete increment above an undefined base is still undefined. My guess is that they cut the magic increment figure from 2 degrees to 1.5 for the sake of having another significant digit, and therefore a more convincing impression of (fake) precision.
“Mathematics is one of those subjects where there are right answers. (There is no post-modernist Mathematics.)”
Don’t think they haven’t tried, though.
As I’ve said, the same ghouls who have tried to kill the English language are now trying to kill math.
Except when più get to statistics…
I’m pretty sure they cut it to 1.5 because it looks like we won’t make it to 2 anytime soon. Just as it was cut to 2 from 3. And to 3 from 4, and 20 years ago they said it was 5 degrees we had to keep below. As it became obvious they didn’t know what they were talking about, so the “tipping point” was moved.
Another point I think we all need to understand that Stefano Valentino of the Guardian ignores is recent past erosion and how and when it occurred.
The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is an excellent example. Cape Hatteras of course itself is just a group of sandy barrier islands sticking far out into the Atlantic Ocean, it is affectionaltely called the Outer Banks and you see “OBX” stickers proudly displayed by residents on their cars. The OBX and gets pummeled every few years by hurricanes and storm surge, which brings much flooding to their streets that are only a few feet above sea level.
The Cape Hatteras light house:
“In 1870 when it was built, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was 1,500 feet from the ocean. By 1919, the ocean had advanced to within 325-350 feet of the tower and by 1935, it was just 100 feet away.”
source: https://islandfreepress.org/hatteras-island-features/the-story-of-erosion-at-the-cape-hatteras-lighthouse/
So 1,400 feet of beach erosion from 1870 to 1935, or 65 years when according to best CO2 estimates pCO2 went from 290 to 305 ppm.
And for temperatures, the Hadley’s Annual Global Average Land and Ocean Temperature Anomaly – 1850 to 2012 from the Hadley Center shows no trend. In fact over the time period 1870 to 1910 the Hadley Land Ocean Temp anomaly actually decreased (oceans got colder), even as the beach in front of the Light House lost over 1,000 feet from 1870-1919. Meanwhile global SLR has been stuck at ~2 mm/yr for 150 years.
Clearly these beach erosion models that show future impact of CO2 forced warming are just junk when evaluated against past SLR, known beach erosions, changing CO2 forcing and and ocean temperature changes.
clarification:
the Hadley Center Annual Global Average Land and Ocean Temperature Anomaly shows no trend over 1870-1935 period. With a downward anomaly trend 1870-1910.
The Hadley Annual Global Average Land and Ocean Temperature Anomaly covers the period 1850 to the present. Not sure how that got mixed up after I came back and read what I posted, but to be sure there certainly is an upward temp anomaly tend to 2012. Just my mistake not re-reading and editing close enough.
I live in New Jersey, 35 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. My property is located on a “sea” of sand known as the Pine Barrens. When I had an out building constructed in my backyard, the contractor excavated down to undisturbed sand. Besides being able to see the disc marks from plowing (more than 100 years ago), the neat thing is that mixed in with the sand were numerous oyster and clam shells, from whenever the sand was at the shoreline of an ancient sea (Last Ice Age?).
So shorelines have changed due to climate many, many times in the past.
I should add that the closest business to my property is a sand extraction company, about 1/3 mile away.
“Climate breakdown” – that is a new one, they have such imaginations, they must fixate on climate and Trump all day.
Just commenting on the Figure 1. graph in the beginning of the article re the “Holocene Transgression”. I always thought that there was a “Climatic Maximum” 6 – 8000 years ago when global sea levels were about 2 meters higher than today.
Was I wrong?
That’s the Holocene Highstand when dea level reached its maximum Holocene elevation Figure 1 doesn’t capture it. See figure 15.
Oops – thanks David – I did not notice Figure 15 which talks about the Holocene high stand. But figure 1 goes back another 2000 year. Here we see levels averaged out over the whole of the Holocene. That is confusing.
Further thinking about this anomaly : the data in Figure 1 derive from records in Tahitian corals. Immediately following the Holocene Highstand when sea levels dropped – the corals would be eroding, wouldn’t they? So levels simply could not appear in the continuity.
Am I right?
David Middleton,
Thank you for a very nice article rebuking the claims of the “disappearing beaches” article in The Guardian/The Grauniad.
Here’s my $0.02, split into two parts (yeah, yeah, a penny for my thoughts):
Part 1. Shouldn’t the tides already have “disappeared” the beaches?
The best scientific measurements of global sea-level rise (that from satellites with instruments built specifically to measure this, such as the TOPEX and Jason 1-3 satellites) show that the rate over the last 20 years has been essentially CONSTANT at +3 mm/year (ref: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/sod/lsa/SeaLevelRise/LSA_SLR_timeseries.php ).
So, in the next 80 years, extrapolation would predict a total rise of 240 mm, or a little under 9 inches, from today’s levels. This rate and SLR projection is consistent with values given in your article.
So . . . how, exactly, is 9 inches (+/-) of increased sea-level going to “wipe out” existing beaches? Most beaches in the world experience low tide-to-high tide variations many times this amount.
Part 2. Don’t overlook (pun intended) land subsidence.
The large variation in tide gage measurements around the world, as inferred to measure global sea-level rise, is in part—maybe large part—due to geographic variations in both land uplift and land subsidence. To wit:
“In this study we evaluate the contribution of land subsidence to the increasing flooding hazard in Miami Beach using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) observations.
“Preliminary InSAR results detected localized subsidence, up to -3 mm/yr, mainly in reclaimed land located along the western side of Miami Beach.
“Although the detected subsidence velocities are quite low, their effect on the flooding hazard is significant, because houses originally built on higher ground have subsided since the city was built, about 80 years ago, by 16-24 cm down to flooding hazard zones.”
— Simone Fiaschi, Department of Geosciences, University of Padua, Padua, Italy, and Shimon Wdowinski, RSMAS, University of Miami, Miami, USA
“Geological changes along the East Coast are causing land to sink along the seaboard.
“New research using GPS and prehistoric data has shown that nearly the entire coast is affected, from Massachusetts to Florida and parts of Maine.
“The study, published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, outlines a hot spot from Delaware and Maryland into northern North Carolina where the effects of groundwater pumping are compounding the sinking effects of natural processes”
—John Upton, “Sinking Atlantic Coastline Meets Rapidly Rising Seas”, Scientific American, 14 April 2016
Things are not always as they seem to be on the surface (again, pardon the pun). Hence, the aforementioned satellite measurements of global SLR are probably more accurate than any collection of tide gage measurements (excluding those that zero out accurately-known land uplift/subsidence at the specific location of the tide gage).
Land subsidence has NOT YET been asserted to be an effect of climate change . . . but give it time.
Gordon, already happened –
“Sometimes global climate change causes droughts, and as a result of droughts people start using water, and the more you extract water—the more it causes subsidence. So there is an indirect relationship because global climate change and land subsidence,” Shirzaei says.
https://richmondconfidential.org/2018/04/03/climate-change-and-land-subsidence-pose-threat-for-coastal-bay-area/
Darn it! HOW COULD THEY?
So in 2100, “stop rowing you’re on the beach” will be a sentence of the past.
“Beaches that formed at the Holocene Highstand are no stranded well above sea level. ”
“No” should probably be “now”.
I have some quibbles, but I won’t bother you with them
One minor, but possibly significant addendum. In some parts of the world (e.g. Southern California) beaches that are the end product of sediment flow from rivers are being depleted because flood control measures are reducing the supply of new sediment, but the ocean currents that transport and distribute the sediments downcoast beyond the river mouth(s) haven’t changed.
“No” should be “now”. Flood control measures are also affecting sediment flow to the Mississippi Delta.
Were there beaches when sealevel was 400 feet lower 11,000 years ago? Between then and now when did the beaches first appear? If beaches are to disappear why is now so special?
There have always been beaches at the land/ocean interface, and there always will be. A question that the study doesn’t seem to address is whether the water line is just moving landward, or whether the beaches are getting narrower. If the beaches are truly getting narrower, and actually disappearing, it may be a reflection of reduced flow of sediments reaching the ocean as a result of dams for water control and electricity generation. You know, the renewable electricity source that is almost as well liked as bird-choppers and silicon PV arrays — which sometimes use beach sand to make silicon and glass.
what about poor old New Zealand…at the bottom of the world……..all our beaches will be GONE?? regards, Trevor Collins.
Florida is actually on the bottom end of the North American Plate that is tilting back up from rebound now that the ice that melted away. The north is moving up and the south is moving down so you can remove a half to a mm of SLR from the gauge value in Florida that are from tectonic effects that is not sea level rise.
Someone’s been watching “waterworld” in a loop while smoking heavy fuel. Just about time for Boeing and AB to start certifying wide-body amphibious air-frames, right ?
Funny enough, that’s not exactly what they display to keep the electric flight crazed crowds dreaming.
Darwin noted evidence of beaches way up mountain sides in a number of places. The earth moves as many a couple have been aware of from time to time.
“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.”
I don’t understand 2081. Did you mean 2008 or 2018?
It would have to accelerate to that rate by 2081 in order for sea level to rise 80-85 cm by the end of the century.
David
Another good piece.
I always enjoy the sea level chart showing the steep rise to some 9,000 years ago.
And using Left-think, conclude that the start of agriculture ended the hitherto fast rise of sea levels.
An outstanding record of stranded beaches exists through most of the Great Plains.
Now there is a beach at the south end of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba.
And there are old such beaches extending all the way to North Dakota.
Glacial Lake Agassiz covered most of the region and as it retreated it left any number of beaches.
And then there is my favourite type of stranded beach.
In the Pre-Cambrian to Cambrian period in South Africa alluvial gold was laid down in river beds and a lot along great lengths of ocean beach front.
The over the almost billion years since the beach formed to sandstone rock or reefs containing fabulous amounts of gold.
Called a Witswatersrand System,
Some researchers calculate that half of all of the gold mined in history has come from the “Wits”.
At least this time its been put out far enough over the horizon that they can bang on about it for a lifetime and not be around for the “what were they thinking” phase.
Pro tip: You can stop reading once you see those words.
It’s quite ironic, really. Peer-review in scientific literature is primarily so that those in the field know that a paper has passed some kind of a minimum standard such that it might, just might, be worth your time reading, if the title seems relevant to your interests. But no guarantee of anything beyond that.
But Cli Sci in particula drags you into the bizzarro world of knowing that it is almost a guaranteed waste of time to read something in certain publications.
David Middleton
“Beaches that formed at the Holocene Highstand are noW stranded well above sea level.” ?
Great post…again !
It’s true;
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/thousands-of-kilometres-of-australia-s-beaches-at-risk-from-rising-seas-20200302-p5463p.html
If only people like Peter Hannam would go outside and check. Sea levels over the greater Pacific have fallen in the last century as coral atolls have increased in size and beaches have never looked healthier.
Mean Sea Level in Sydney Harbour has fallen nearly 5 inches in the last 105 years:
http://www.bom.gov.au/ntc/IDO70000/IDO70000_60370_SLD.shtml
This is a stilling pond adjacent to the biggest piece of ocean in the world.
I have been banned from commenting on his articles because he is so blatantly and proveabley wrong every single time. Still, he admits to believing his BMW i3 is charged by renewable energy only.
Yes Patrick, it’s amazing how these people can continue to supply irrefutable evidence that they are such idiots and still have a following.
This is the problem with most of Climate(tm) research and reporting.
First our brave Climate Scientists(tm) make the assumption that the IPCC reports are hard facts.
Then they cherry pick the most exciting hard fact and make projections on how this scenario will affect their discussion topic.
Then they will send a press release to the MSM who will throw “according to new research” into their blender and serve up some word salad of doom to the Gretas of the world and, just like that, the Science is (again) Settled, It May Be Worse Then We Thought, and Act Now. Also Orange Man Bad.
GIPO – Garbage In, Panic Out
Meanwhile in Ireland 2005
From https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/irish-beach-reappears-storm-vanish-12-years-ago-ireland-republic-ashleam-bay-achill-a8066771.html
and recently in the UK …
From https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5238421/Storm-Eleanor-changes-stony-beach-sandy.html
UNFAIR!
Things always only get WORSE with climate change, they NEVER get better.
You simply can’t say, hey, some beaches come back. Or, hey, more people die in of cold than of heat, so warmer is better. Or even, hey, plants LOVE CO2.
No, you HAVE to leave out the good stuff. Its in the rules.
Oh sorry, I now understand that these reports may be construed as offensive to some.
So please to everyone who feels offended by seeing these reports, understand that I’m profoundly sorry and that I hope and pray (to Jesus Christ redeemer of humanity) that one day your empty, idle lives will have some real meaning.
Have a good day! 🙂
tom0mason, I do hope you realise that Caligula wasn’t serious. People’s words are being misconstrued alot in recent comments, or their irony/sarcasm is being lost.
Yes, very sorry, my /sarcasm tag was missing.
Basically: places like WUWT bring science.
The MSM brings gloss, re-written press releases and is a waste of time and can’t die soon enough, although I’d probably wouldn’t realize when it goes.
Ooops, I failed again.
I was not implying Caligula Jones was one of those who were offended (I took his remark as sarcasm). No, I realized (from his comment) that some others may have been offended, thus my somewhat tongue-in-cheek-response.
However I do pray that some day those who may be offended by seeing that nature can take care of itself, will see the light.
Thanks for responding tom0mason. I too wish we could go back to that time of enjoying not just nature but also day to day mutual respect, kinder times. It’s likely just me being a little on the more sensitive side, writing letters to local, state and federal politicians without response over a long period of time now. It dents the soul.
There is humor here on this site from time to time, which makes me smile.
I’ve said that we’ve gone from:
That’s interesting, where did you read that?
to:
I find that hard to believe
to:
That’s BS, I don’t believe it.
If we could just move back to the middle part we’d all be better off.
But as they say, these days, we don’t listen to learn. We listen to react.
Oh, this is too funny for words. Talk about missing context. The Guardian is clueless (again). If only they knew where our current beaches came from, since we’ve enjoyed over 400 feet of sea level rise since the depths of the last Ice Age glacial period.
So 7-9 inches of sea level rise every 100 years cause beaches to disappear…???
JPP
The only time I’ve seen a beach ruined in the long term was by FALLING water levels.
The water level in Gull Lake in Central Alberta declined – don’t recall why -but the beach sand is now stranded in small dunes above the beach and the swimming area is now all mud – except at the provincial beach, where the Province trucked in acres of sand and deposited it in the shallow water.
As others have suggested , rising water levels will typically cause the beach sand to be moved up-slope by wave and storm action.
Who cares? The world’s gonna end in 12 years.
Except if we extinct rebellion.
Or, if you’re a Democrat or a Never Trumper (same thing these days)…in about 6 months.
Again.
A 2013 article on WUWT dealt with reclaiming beaches. If you are worried about loosing your beach, just follow the well established methods to retain and capture sand.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/09/breaking-news-seventh-first-climate-refugees-discovered/
David, thank you for another of your superb broadsides aimed directly at and hitting the incompetent and seriously misinformed reporting of this rubbish.
There is an interesting story to be told about the origins of the IPCC and the involvement of Maurice Strong in setting its Terms of Reference. There was to be no mention of anything other than human caused Climate Change. Forget the influence of the Sun. Forget anything not caused by humans. It’s all our fault and we must all pay, now and often. Anything goes when the future of the planet is at stake. That’s what you get when emotions take over and real science is ignored.
The IPCC Guide for Policy Makers had to issued prior to the publication of the scientific sections so they could be ‘adjusted’ to fit the narrative. Who are policy makers? Governments. That is why it is the Intergovernmental Panel on CC The IPCC is not really concerned with real science, its about forcing us all to accept the dictates of those who dont have our best interests at heart by appealing to our emotions. That is why when you take the time and trouble to do just a little real research the ridiculously one-sided narrative is exposed for what it really is: Political Propaganda.
Maurice Strong was an Alberta oil fields billionaire who overreached himself and died in China in 2015 so he would not have to stand trial in the USA for manipulating the oil-for-food scandal. Such an sad example, and his legacy continues to harm us all…
But, but, what if the warmings and coolings have nothing to do with CO2?
Henrik Svensmark, a Danish physicist, and his associates, proposed a couple of decades ago that it was sun activity which caused both warmings and coolings. CERN validated that cosmic rays could indeed influence cloud cover. More than average cloud cover leads to less sun being able to reach the earth surface which leads to cooling. Less than average cloud cover leads to more sun reaching the earth surface, so leads to warming. CO2 had no measurable role.
Dr. Don Easterbrook (geologist) recently published a book which covered an 800,000 year duration and claims that sun activity causes both small and large warmings and coolings, including even recent Ice Ages. The level of solar magneticism (sun spots) dictate the level of cosmic rays which enter the lower atmosphere. CO2 has no measurable role.
CO2 may continue to increase but has no appreciable role insofar as impacting global temperature. Therefore, climate is unrelated to human activity.
Not only that, surf report indicates current conditions (at buoy 41114) 3.9’ @ 5 sec, and forecasts as much as 3-5 ft (is that crest to flat ocean? or peak to trough?) seas Saturday afternoon. So a high tide + a wave = 3 m (to the nearest significant digit), and 2 mm/yr, even for 80 years, is supposed to be a problem?
2 mm/year… gosh, do you think we can outrun it?
Sea level is heavily influenced by the velocity of wind circling the south pole with the velocity changing about 25% on 100 year plus cycles. If the wind stopped the adjacent level would rise over 4 feet. See Joseph O. Fletcher lecture in 2000 at CSUMB.
I’ve driven down both sides of Florida, and noticed that the east (Atlantic) side has a steeper slope to the ocean then the western side. surely this is simply because the Atlantic is more active, has bigger waves, than the Caribbean. The reason for this is that the trade winds blow from the south-east, and Florida, even if it is not exactly mountainous, shelters the Caribbean from the wind, whereas the Atlantic coast is exposed to the full strength of the wind.