Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
On August 23, 2023, the L A Times published an article again promoting climate alarmist propaganda that sea level rise along the California coast requires that the state resort to mandated relocation of coastal properties to protect future coastline outcomes from damage caused by increasing rising seas.
This most recent L A Times article regarding coastal sea level rise that supports the states confiscation of coastal properties repeats the theme of a prior L A Times article published nearly 4 years ago by the same reporter. Both theses L A Times articles are discussed below starting first with the article from 2019.
In a December 4, 2019, article in the L A Times titled “California must act now to prepare for sea level rise, state lawmakers say” reporter Rosanna Xia noted:
“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.”
A December 9, 2019 article at WUWT addressed (shown below) the following absurdities with this ridiculous Times supported state government mandated scheme as follows:
“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 involve politicians dictating control of homeowner and business property of tens of thousands of properties representing hundreds of 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 WUWT article further noted many other misleading and erroneous problems with the information in the 2019 Times article as summarized in a few items highlighted below.
“The Times article falsely 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”.
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.”
“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 up 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-yearlong 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.” How any rational individual could evaluate the ridiculous 10-foot increase (shown in red below versus recorded and measured sea level rise data shown in blue) in sea level rise claim by year 2100 as being a feasible basis upon which to base coastal sea level rise policy is beyond absurd.
The primary sea level rise study document (Rising Seas in California shown above) relied upon by state that establishes the coastal sea level rise values are supposedly supported by “probability distribution” assessments which attempt to convey some degree of scientific certainty for these sea level rise future guesses.
The reality however is that these “probability distributions” contained in the Rising Seas study are nothing but subjective assessments as determined by the “experts” doing the analysis using their “expert elicitation”, “expert community assessment” and “process modeling” as noted in the reference contained in the state’s report as shown below.
“We provide complete probability distributions, informed by a combination of expert community assessment, expert elicitation, and process modeling.” This clearly establishes that outcomes of this analysis are impacted by multiple areas of uncertainty that challenge the validity of these analyses.
“Expert elicitation” is defined as being “The elicitation of scientific and technical judgments from experts, in the form of subjective probability distributions.” The Rising Seas in California document outcomes can appropriately be characterized as opinion-based guesses of future coastal sea level rise.
On August 22, 2023 the L A Times once again hyped their ridiculous claim that California must proceed with mandatory relocation of coastal properties to save the coastline for future generations because apparently present owners whether they be individuals, community organizations, environmental groups, businesses, cities, counties, other government organizations, etc. are not proceeding in ways that enhance the protection of coastlines for the future as hyped by the Times.
Seemingly only state government politicians can be trusted to do that through confiscation of coastal property and rights from the state’s inhabitants.
This idiotic scheme proposed by the Times is again addressed in the most recent article shown below.
The article proposes that only planned retreat can save the coastline noting:
“Then there’s what scientists and economists and number-crunching consultants call “managed retreat”: move back, relocate, essentially cede the land to nature. These words alone have roiled the few cities and state agencies bold enough to utter them.”
This latest L A Times article is a completely anecdotal “story” that provides no data or data related analysis to support its claims.
The article offers nothing that changes the data and data analysis provided in this essay’s prior assessments discussed above concerning the large uncertainty of future sea level rise “projections” as well as the complete failure of measured tide gauge sea level rise data to support the flawed and failed climate alarmist hype about accelerating sea level rise over the last 4 decades.
The latest Times article has many flaws in its approach and claims with some of those addressed below.
The article meanders through a strange menagerie of disjointed examples of coastal sea level situations that are supposed to support a case that the ability to manage coastal sea level rise is hopeless and that only state mandated coastal retreat remains viable.
Additionally, many of the articles examples seemingly mix considerations of coastal sea level rise and coastal erosion as being the same issue rather than being separate and distinct coastal phenomenon.
One primary example featured in the article looks at a storm damaged area of Capitola Beach, California (Times article photo above and below) and recent January storms that broke its wharf and flooded the sandbag protected condo areas as shown below as well as local coastal roads.
The article characterizes this example by noting the inadequacy of the sandbags and plywood in protecting the condos and the failure of the wharf and how expensive it would be to rebuild the wharf and protect the condos and other shore areas from future storms.
The “vanishing coastline” Times article failed to mention that the wharf was 166 years old and that the city had been proceeding with plans for rebuilding it because of its very old age and weathered condition. A life of 166 years for a coastline wharf simply does not meet the Times reporters engineering requirements.
The Times “vanishing coastline” article also characterized the January 2023 storms as “a series of record breaking storms” with a link to another L A Times article that discussed these “record” January storms.
This “record” storm article notes that an employee at Picnic Basket near the wharf said that in the 5 years she had lived there “she’s had never seen waves that large”. Apparently, that represents the basis for the Times “vanishing coastline” articles claim of “a series of record-breaking storms”.
This Times storm article also addressed Sonoma County storm damage from the January storms noting that:
“Guerneville will flood Friday, as it is now expected to peak in the morning at 26.2 feet, below the flood stage level of 32 feet.”
“The Hopland area of the Russian River had exceeded flood stage as of Thursday morning, said Brett Whitin, a hydrologist at the California Nevada River Forecast Center.
“It’s not as high as it was in the New Year’s Eve flood,” Whitin said. “It’s a lower-level type of flooding going on there.”
It appears these kinds of anecdotal storm stories constitute the basis for L A Times “vanishing coastline” articles claim of “a series of record-breaking storms” proclamation.
The Times “vanishing coastline” article also mentions damage at Seacliff State beach where ” an elaborate barricade built in 1926 was destroyed the very next winter and has since been rebuilt — and then damaged or destroyed — eight more times. The version in 1982 cost more than $1.5 million and lasted six weeks (it was designed to last 20 years). These cycles of wishful engineering and natural destruction have only continued to intensify.”
The article has a few other examples of coastal sea level rise storms all geared to supposedly show that we just can’t continue to deal with these situations in the future and concludes:
“All this engineering, all this sacrifice: How many times will we try to overcome a force as vast as the sea? People spend years fighting to maintain a wishful line in the sand, yet a few extra feet of water here or there is hardly a shrug for the ocean. When you look at the coast with wise enough eyes, you can almost see the high-water lines of floods and disasters past … lines foretelling the history we’re doomed to keep repeating, if we keep closing ourselves off to change.”
The articles phrase “keep closing ourselves off to change” of course means mandating coastal retreat.
This L A Times “vanishing coastline” article is incredibly deficient in its basic approach toward dealing with a subject that encompasses the entire California coastline and that is as technically complex and economically important to the state as addressing its coastline sea level and erosion challenges.
The articles hodgepodge approach of using examples of a few sea level rise, storm and coastal erosion occurrences in an attempt to support the state’s confiscation of thousands of organizations and individuals property and property rights is monumentally incompetent, arrogant and absurd.
The L A Times claims of “record storms” along California’s coast is typical of flawed climate alarmist propaganda hype of “storms” becoming more severe because of “climate change” are unsupported by NOAA storm data regarding the most powerful storms occurring in the Northeast Pacific Ocean which is defined as the region of the Pacific above the equator and east of the 180-degree longitude line. Storms in this ocean region are the most powerful that will potentially impact the coast of California and other areas of the Western U.S.
The three graphs below provide tropical storm data over the last 50 years in the Northeast Pacific Region with this data shown for yearly total Named Storms, Major Hurricanes and Accumulated Cyclone Energy. This data does no support climate alarmist claims of increasing storms severity in the Northeast Pacific Ocean because of “climate change”.
The 50 yearlong Accumulated Cyclone Energy data reflects the total duration, frequency and intensity impact of all storms occurring in the Northeast Pacific Ocean that could impact the coast of California with this data clearly not supporting flawed claims by climate alarmists that “climate change” is increasing storm severity.
The other type of strong cyclonic storms that impact both the western and eastern portions of the North America coastline are the so-called cool season Extratropical Cyclones typically hyped by the climate alarmist press as “bomb cyclones”.
These strong storms are most common on the east coast U.S. which averages one such bomb cyclone per year as noted in the article below.
The 2021 study by Robert Fritzen noted above evaluated the frequency, storm occurrence across the entire North American region and storm track of these storms from 1979 through 2019 and concluded that these storms have declined in rate of occurrence by about 15% during the last 20 years.
Storm data analysis of the most powerful storms that can impact the California coastline including both tropical storms and subtropical storms does not support the L A Times climate alarmist flawed claims (including the ridiculously climate alarmist over hyped recent tropical storm Hilary) that such storms are increasing in occurrence and severity because of “climate change”.
Another monumental failing of this L A Times sea level rise propaganda article is that it never discusses at all the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the role it has occupied for more than 150 years in addressing huge numbers of coastal projects on the California coastline during this timeframe.
This organization is preeminent in its experience, expertise, and success in addressing California coastline projects that have provided huge technical, economic, and environmental benefits to the state while resolving coastal sea level, storm, navigation, erosion challenges, etc.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operations in California have successfully handled hundreds of coastal projects involving the construction, engineering, design, repair, harbor maintenance, marinas, dams, reservoirs, breakwaters, wetlands management and restoration, dredging, flood management, water supply, emergency management, flood risk management, navigation improvements, bridge building, lighthouses, sand replenishment, etc.
Here in Southern California the Los Angeles District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for 14 harbors as shown in the diagram below.
The magnitude and scope of this work is reflected and characterized as follows in the Los Angeles Army Corps summary description as follows:
“Some of our projects include: The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach which together makeup the fifth busiest port complex in the world and account for more than $420 billion in cargo annually, San Diego Harbor which is home to Naval Base Point Loma and the U.S. Third Fleet, Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado and the Port of San Diego which is a key regional commerce hub and in Los Angeles County, Marina del Rey Harbor which was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1965 and is one of the largest recreational harbors in the United States with 5,300 slips.”
The L A Times article is unbelievably naive in its ridiculous meandering hodgepodge approach in trying to address the magnitude of the issues involved in dealing with the California coastline that completely ignores the huge efforts undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers over the last 150 years to address and resolve coastline sea level rise and erosion issues.
Worse yet the Times blithely dismisses without the slightest mention the enormous economic, environmental, and societal benefits that coastal development has provided to the state of California’s people, businesses, educational organizations, government organizations, cities, counties etc. over the last 150 years.
The photo below shows the completely undeveloped area of the Dana Point Headlands and Beach near where I live but as it looked in 1927. At that time heavy waves frequented the area because of the location, shape and depth of its bay as described in the book Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr. in his incredible adventures there in the mid 1830s on his ship the Pilgrim.
In 1966 City and County officials asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to design a harbor for Dana Point that could be used to provide business, environmental and public benefit as well as other useful purposes with the harbor design studies document shown below.
The Dana Point harbor was designed to accommodate waves at its breakwater of up to 16 feet in height with controlled outcomes in the harbor that can provide safety for the wharfs and slips. The design sketch of the resulting harbor is shown below that accommodates over 2,200 small boat slips.
Given the wave height considerations required for its design the harbors breakwater configuration is not dictated or influenced by the small changes in relative sea level rise at Dana Point which uses the NOAA tide gage data at La Jolla, California as the closest measured relative sea level rise data used to evaluate its relative sea level. The rate of relative sea level rise is about 8 inches per century (0.67 feet per century) with that measurement applied over the last 98-year measurement period as shown below.
Work on the harbor was completed in 1968 with the beautiful Dana Point Harbor now being 55 years old. Over that timeframe the relative sea level has increased by an insignificant 4.4 inches with the harbor looking as shown in the photos below.
The top photo shows the buildings of the Ocean Institute (that was founded in 1977) located next to the dock (an old sailing ship replica of Richard Henry Dana’s Pilgrim ship is shown docked) at the base of the Dana Point Headlands – Headlands that are protected from development and where an information center provides exhibits regarding the history of the area and harbor and where hiking trials are available to the public.
The Institute has provided ocean and marine history and science education programs for more than 100,000 K-12 students and 8,000 teachers from Orange County and is open to the public to enjoy. Moored at the Institute is its 70-foot marine science research vessel, the R/V Sea Explorer (not shown in the top photo) used for student programs including whale watching.
The lower photo shows the 2,200 small boat slips, the extensive breakwater, a protected beach area and adjacent picnic grounds used by the public – one of several such picnic and beach areas in the harbor. The harbor includes numerous restaurants, shops, ocean rental equipment, fishing boats, ferry service to Catalina Island, etc.
Dana Point Harbor is home to numerous whale watching vessels that can operate nearly year round to view the large number of whale and dolphin species that traverse the near ocean off its harbor. Whale species seen at Dana Point include Blue whales, Humpback whales, Fin whales, Minke whales, Sperm whales as well as Orcas and numerous species of Dolphin.
In January 2021 Dana Point was designated by the World Cetacean Alliance as the very first Whale Heritage Site in North America (there only 3 other such sites in the world) that designates and acknowledges areas known for having cultural ties and respectful interactions with whales and dolphins.
Dana Point also sponsors a Festival of the Whales event in March every year and a Tall Ships Festival in September of every year where majestic and impressive sailing ships representing the past era of sailing ships enter the harbor and nearby ocean with rides available for the public.
The L A Times does a terrible job at addressing the huge and extraordinary world of the California coastline regions and the monumental value, benefits and success that changes to its coastline have brought to the state and all who live here.
The Times simply ignores the massive scale of extraordinary benefits and accomplishments that have been achieved along the California coastline and proceeds with its purely politically contrived and scientifically unsupported cause of “fighting climate change” while making false and ridiculous claims that a 166-year-old coastal wharf didn’t last longer because of the Times unsupported hype alleging stronger storms.
Innumeracy seems to be a requirement for greens. Somehow six inches becomes nine feet.
Women report that 6 inches is more like 2 inches.
I thought of the joke as to why women can’t be civil engineers, but thought it too rude.
I think women know exactly how big or small something is. It’s the men that are deluded, innit?
The joke was that women pretend to believe mens lies.
One of the reasons I would prefer that women use the metric system . . . cm, that is . . . not m.
Suggestion: find a moral woman and marry her. She will have no or nearly no data upon which to conclude anything along those lines. She will not compare you with another man — because she cannot (and she most certainly will not want to!).
Do you perhaps confuse “moral with “uneducated”? 😉
OK, I’ll try again with better wording:
Janice, perhaps you confuse “moral” with “uninformed”?
I was going to ignore you, TYS, but, as this issue is obviously troubling you, here’s my response:
To be moral, in this situation, IS to be uninformed.
***************************
And, in case this is of interest to you, I have had and have many women friends over my decades of living. NONE of them EVER complained of this as a problem.
This fact makes me strongly suspect the issue is only a problem for immoral/slutty women.
In all likelihood, it is mostly only an issue for men who simply use it as yet another excuse to talk about what is for an AMAZINGLY large number of men a favorite topic of conversation.
I, being a woman, really don’t want to talk about it anymore, so, please forgive me if I,now, ignore you.
Janice
🤔…👏…👍
(Something) if you can’t take a joke. 😉
It’s that way for a number of lesser men who go into Science
A climate scientist gets home after a long grueling day of running models and crunching numbers. It’s well after 10pm and is wife is in bed awaiting his arrival.
She says to him “Welcome home honey, now get over here…give me 9 inches and make it hurt”
So, being the studious number cruncher, he gives her 3 inches 3 times and hits her in the head with an ash tray
Since you referenced extrapolations, let’s do them correctly. Accounting for acceleration, La Jolla would increase by another foot between now and 2100. San Fran by nearly 3 feet. No, I’m not predicting this. Merely using the tools correctly…
Incomplete post. Using post 1979 data – the data that best reflects modern forcing trends…
Ummmm, would your reference to “modern forcing trends” be for:
— The most recent 44 years since the world’s science community was last concerned about global cooling, around 1980?
— The most recent 44 years since mankind’s first orbiting weather satellites, starting in the 1960’s?
— The most recent 44 years since the Little Ice Age, ending around 1850?
— The most recent 44 years since about 1800, the approximate beginning of the Industrial Revolution?
— The most recent 44 years since Earth entered the Holocene, around 12,000 years ago?
Of course, being mindful that UAH date shows there’s been no significant global warming for approximately the last 9 years . . . but perhaps somebody just accidentally turned off the “forcings” switch nine years ago.
The 44 years since the aerosol age effectively ended, and modern forcings predominated. The 44 years since the GAT trend became steeper than ever recorded.
“there’s been no significant global warming for approximately the last 9 years”.
Pauses like this are meaning free. ENSO events can coincide with other temporary, cyclical processes to cause them. What you avert your eyes from is the fact that each one is hotter than the last. It is interesting that the heretofore monthly WUWT about how long the current “pause” has lasted is on pause.
(my bold emphasis added)
Do you not see your own self-contradictions in that posting?
No. I’ll explicate. This last, instatistiate pause is about over. Rather than admit it, the monthly post goes away.
bob, I can see that you’re trying very hard—too hard actually—but you’re going backward trying to be clever.
1) There is no such word as “instatistiate”.
2) What does the phrase “about over” mean to you? If the science data-based global warming pause is revised to be the last 8 years instead of the last 9 years, does that mean all related issues associated with a pause in global warming despite massive increases in human-originated CO2 over that time period are no longer worthy of discussion? Is it more or less “over” when the fat lady begins to sing?
3) How do you know that the WUWT “monthly post” (not better defined) hasn’t just been delayed? Maybe the poster (unspecified) has an emergency that prevents his/her post? What is your basis for concluding the monthly post has “gone away”?
“instatistiate” is a computer programming word
I had to look twice to see that it’s not “instantiate” which is the programming term. And it would make no sense in the context used.
The only thing “meaning free” here is your rancid agw cultist posts., !
Rambling regurgitated mantra. pertaining to nothing.
So now you are saying, IT IS NOT CO2…
.. but aerosols.
OK !
Hilarious…
Way to destroy your cult-based AGW religion, greasy blob !
WRONG.
The GAT is the URBAN upward-adjusted farcical surface temperature.
It is not remotely representative of whole-of globe temperatures.
In reality the only warming in the whole of the satellite era has come at two major El Nino events
From 1980-1997, there was essentially no warming.
From 2001 – 2015, there was no warming
And since the 2016 El Nino, there has been cooling.
(my bold emphasis added)
Do you have any idea—any idea at all?—of when GAT was first recorded, assuming “G” stands for “global” and “recorded” means documented with at least a bit of scientific rigor?
Let’ see . . . since 1979, Earth has had:
36 VEI 4 and five VEI 5 and one VEI 6 volcanic eruptions, each throwing massive amounts of aerosols into Earth’s troposphere and even higher into the stratosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanic_eruptions_1500%E2%80%931999
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanic_eruptions_in_the_21st_century
So, what exactly marked the end of the aerosol age?
Hilarious,
Big greasy blob has now changed the human “forcing” to aerosols.
Guess that means he KNOWs FULL WELL THAT IT ISN’T CO2 causing the slight but beneficial warming.
Funny watching it slithering around like an eel in its own putrid slime.
Even the most all in “skeptics” admit that the changes in volcanism explains nada w.r.t. modern climactic changes.
Yet ocean seismic activity correlates FAR BETTER with real temperatures than atmospheric CO2 does.
And since that plot includes periods of 30 years or longer, the good correlation does include both NOAA’s and NASA’s definition of climate:
“weather for a specified geographical area averaged over a continuous interval of 30 years or longer”.
“And since that plot includes periods of 30 years or longer,”
Only valid if a time period that long or longer was actually evaluated. My reply was to an evaluation of 23 years worth of data. You don’t get credit for a cherry picked evaluation of a data set the could be properly evaluated.
Got any data* to go with that statement?
*including citations of scientific papers documenting such a claim.
If you’re discussing volcanism, check with Willis Eschenbach…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/25/stacking-up-volcanoes/
I guess if you are going to use made up numbers, you can get whatever result you want.
There is no acceleration.
Do the work. Post 1979:
San Fran:
8.49E-05 m*yr^-2
The “instant” 07/23 rise rate:
5.06E-03 m*yr^-1
La Jolla
2.36E-05 m*yr^-2
The “instant” 07/23 rise rate:
2.33E-03 m*yr^-1
Your numbers are a pile of JUNK based on unsupported conjecture about human CO2 emissions which is soundly contradicted by the DATA:
Source for above graph: https://climateilluminated.com/CO2_facts/CO2_science/25_CO2_temp_trend.html
Steady. Your getting a little Dan Kahan System 2 “Flight or Fight” amygdally overamped. I.e., you immediately jumped about 17 moves ahead to primal pearl clutching, Way back to the modest claim I made at first. If you want to evaluate trends, you need to do so correctly. I hope you agree, but you have a loooonngg history that says otherwise….
Ms. Moore, I’ll even give you a bullet.
“Have you checked for autocorrelation?”
Why no Ms. Moore. Since the poster did not when he displayed the straight line trends, I just went with that. Good catch though….
Ha! Check — mate! 😀
Pat Frankian freedom from gravity.
QED, folks…..
An unequivocal apology to you for my knee jerk reaction to this post. If I am correctly reading it, it is a good natured (and inferentially technically correct) response to my last one. We obviously disagree on a lot, but to accuse you of Pat Frankian hysterical blindness based on this last post was trite and petty of me. I promise to work on that.
You should apologise for being a mindless brain-washed twerp.
Trite and petty is all you are capable of.
Understanding pat complete take-down of the climate model scam, is WAY beyond anything you will ever be capable of.
What a pomp-arse load of pretentious prattle !
What a persuasive, data based, post….
The irony just writes itself.
You poor petal.
Don’t like having the facts pointed out to you.
Best you can manage is more self-righteous, pompous prattle.
Why choose post 1979 when you have data back to the 1920s for La Jolle
That is called cherry-picking.
Read for comprehension.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/09/08/l-a-times-again-hypes-mandated-relocation-of-coastal-properties-based-on-flawed-sea-level-rise-propaganda/#comment-3780474
When you can explain how sea levels can be changing at different rates at different points on the planet, then maybe, just maybe, you will be able to figure out for yourself why your claims are just nonsense.
“When you can explain how sea levels can be changing at different rates at different points on the planet..”
Sorry Mark, that’s always been the case. Currents, wind patterns, temperature differentials resulting in differential expansion. Even the deniersphere gets this. Maybe if you tried harder….
Seems that bog oily blob doesn’t understand anything about sea level rise and the action of water.
Sea must be mounting up meters high in some parts of the globe by now 😉
So Funny !
Just make it up as you go along, petal !
You need to try harder on your mindless rhetoric.
Bug oil bob isn’t in it for understanding. He’s here to support the narrative.
So you admit that the data you are using is too noisy to detect the signal you want to find.
Regardless, you ignore the most significant factor, uplift. I’m sorry you’re such an ignorant twit. Unfortunately your ego won’t allow you to admit, even to yourself, how little you know.
Bigoilbob writes “Do the work.”
Projecting sea level rise from maths applied to a few observations is hardly doing the work.
Sea level rise won’t accelerate because the toa radiative imbalance isn’t going to accelerate but it needs to because sea level rise is directly related to the amount of energy absorbed by the oceans to warm and expand, and ice to melt.
I dont blame people for intuitively thinking that “warming” can mean collapse but it’s just wishful alarmist thinking.
Using a parabolic trend line, seems to be DECELERATING slightly
Now do it for a meaningful time period. I still suggest the post aerosol era, 1979 – present. That’s where we get modern, man made climactic forcings.
You mean a time period that YOU want to cherry-pick
You are such a greasy little blobbo, aren’t you.
No evidence of any CO2 “forcing” [lol] in any real data anywhere.
Get over it. !!
Let’s look at it just this century, shall we.
Oh dear, poor oily blob… very much decelerating !!
“Just this century” is a cherry pick. As is anything less than 30 years. Not only is it instatisticate w.r.t. actual time periods that can be evaluated climactically, but you intentionally lose key earlier data by doing so.
I can see why you want to check out time period after time period until you find one that agrees with your prejudgments. That’s what you do. But please don’t confuse that quest for actual scientific curiosity.
YAWN!.. you are such a child-minded zealot.
Sea level rise DECELERATING this century at La Jolla
DECELERATING over the whole data period.
You are “losing key earlier data” by cherry-picking a random start date.
You are the one picking out a cherry-picked start date..
Stop pretending otherwise, makes you look like a DECEITFUL LIAR.
Don’t worry, oily blob,
No-one would ever confuse anything you type as being remotely scientific. !
What’s the 07/23 instant rise rate BOB?
Why don’t YOU use a meaningful time period???
If the result is the correct one, then it is a meaningful time period.
Correct AKA Desired for bolstering the orthodoxy
“Let’s do them correctly.”
So get someone else to do it,
You know you are basically incapable of anything but cherry-picking.
No, you are not using the tools correctly, you are deliberately losing data from earlier periods, in a vain and pathetic attempt to make a meaningless cult-based point.
La Jolla has been decelerating for the last 23 years.
So any extrapolation you have made using a cherry-picked starting point is totally meaningless. !
As are basically all your comments.
They are NOT based on science.. they are based on cult/religion-driven zealotry.
Sea level rise stories appear every time Barry or his friends want to get a better price to buy some waterfront property.
apparently present owners whether they be individuals, community organizations, environmental groups, businesses, cities, counties, other government organizations, etc. are not proceeding in ways that enhance the protection of coastlines for the future as hyped by the Times.
And who, if anybody, has approved any Coastal Property building permits?
The sea level chart for La Jolla looks rather imteresting.
It shows one trend for 1924 – 1993 and another trend from 1993 to 2023…the latter 30 years being almost 1/2 the rate of the former 70 years
It looks like the pace of sea level rise at La Jolla is decreasing
You have more here:
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?plot=50yr&id=9410230
50 Years cycle was higher round 1975 than today.
FWIW, La Jolla is not necessarily in the most tectonically stable location one might imagine. Assuming that the tide gauge is at the Scripps Institute pier, it would be a little over a mile (2km maybe) West of the Rose Canyon fault — a fairly major feature that many suspect is connected to the Newport-Inglewood fault in the LA basin. The pier is also only a mile or two North of a (probable) fault delineating the North end of Mt Soledad. It’s pretty clear that Mt Soledad (a conspicuous hill) is the North End of a tilted chunk of countryside about 2 miles wide and 6 or 8 miles long that is very likely still moving. It wouldn’t be too surprising if it turns out that vertical motion of the land is a significant portion of the Sea Level change observed at La Jolla. Up? Down? Quein sabe?
Several La Jolla Cove historical pictures here:
https://oac.cdlib.org/search?developer=local;query=la%20jolla%20cove;group=Items
Looks the same today.
Thanks to the link to the old photos. My father, in the mid-1940s, had a Speed Graphic camera. I helped a little with the darkroom chores in the early ’50s. It is likely many of the b/w photos were similarly made.
It is difficult to compare old and new because often date and time of day are not provided, and thus high/low tide info is unknown. When such info is known — I’ve seen a few — the results do not induce panic.
Certain places do have (non-climate) issues. Search-up Washaway Beach at North Cove, WA.
Can anyone send a link to the NOAA Absolute (global) sea level rise graph please. This is all I can find. “given that the absolute global sea level rise is believed to be 1.7 +/- 0.3 millimeters/year.during the 20th century” It was a graph similar to the relative rise shown for La Jolla. It used to be accessible but now probably several layers buried.
Just noticed the San Francisco chart indicates the same deceleration at the same time by about the same rate following a similar slightly increased rate for the prior years from 1924-1973
Yep, a parabolic trendline shows that deceleration…
(May have to click on image to see it properly)
“…8 inches of relative sea level rise per centuary.” The entire west coast of South, Central, and North America is a continental plate in collision and subduction. The complexity is where the subduction direction has turned oblique and the effect is combined transform/transcurrent faulting and slower oblique subduction. The difference in subduction direction is displayed by how active the volcanic arc is locally. So, the relative sea level at the western margin of the three plates is rising land elevation and rising sea level. Look at all of the photos in the article, there is high, hilly, terrain in the photos (compare this to any coastal photo from the eastern plate margins…no, or rare, hills).
The LA Times tried to imply that the recent landslide that disrupted Amtrak service along the California coast between LA and San Diego was due to sea level rise. Yet the landslide came from ABOVE the tracks rather than from below the tracks as would be expected from sea level rise eroding the cliffs from below.
Crickets.
There are some areas of coast where the Southern California coast where the rocks are pretty solid. But a lot of the coastal bluffs are unconsolidated sediment — sandpiles or mudpiles. Of course they slide. An entire housing development (several hundred acres) took off in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean in the late 1950s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Bend.
Yet they keep buying ocean-front property.
Remember Lex Luthor in the 1978 Superman movie? He was plotting to sink the west coast. Part of his scheme was buying up desert in Arizona because it would be beachfront property when his plans came to fruition.
Maybe Lex was right, but for the wrong reasons? Keep this up and Arizona will be the west coast.
The movie got the plate boundaries wrong. The San Andreas runs up the Imperial valley, which is well within California. And the eventual coast would be an extension of the Gulf of California
It is beginning to act like the Left Coast.
Why isn’t the LAT calling for the restoration of Pangea? / sarc
The east coast of England has been eroding here building up there for millennia. 14th century villages are under water – it isn’t climate change
Restoration of Pangea…I don’t care who you are, that is funny.
Your affection is noted – ta.
Why is the LA Times stopping at the coast?
obviously, the threat of major earthquakes REQUIRES that the government must clear all areas threatened. So, lets start with LA, SF, Santa Cruz and a few other localities.
Sure would cut down on the nonsense coming from the left coast 😎
Leave them where they are. Spreading them around the country just spreads the infection.
The north south divide
NYT
LAT
Before the breakwater Dana Point had a good point break when the swell was high enough and the tide just right. Big waves, long rides. Nothing now.
Yes the big waves made the area known as “KillerDana”.
I think the local governments in Malibu, San Diego, etc should believe the LAT and start eminent domain on coastal celebrity homes due to sea level rise. For their protection.
Start with the 2 1/2 men home, then where Hunter was living, then Rockford trailer. Maybe the story would change.
You have it half right.
The government will end up paying for the homes, at double the original value, after they become inhabitable.
This is all about a plan to protect those with beach front properties from losing the value of those properties.
i.e. protection of the rich by their paid employees, the “elected” politicians.
They can’t become (un)inhabitable the water will not rise enough in their life time. I think you missed the point.
Thanks to the LA Times for their public notice of “alarming sea level rise”—and following the exemplary lead set in Australia (see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/08/31/did-a-climate-alarmist-law-student-just-kill-the-green-movement/ )—it should now be a legal requirement that ALL bonds and other debt instruments issued by the State of California and by municipalities within the state have prominent notice that said debt obligations carry significant risk of advertised returns being adversely impacted by unknown future costs associated with managing sea level rise along the coasts.
You know, the ethical and legal obligation for full disclosure and all that.
Following this first step, we can then move on to full listings of similar disclosures associated with risks of “climate change” . . . droughts, floods, global warming, increases in wildfires, increases in frequency and intensity of storms, increases in diseases, influx of climate refugees . . . all the other usual suspects.
The lawyers will have a field day!
Same LAT. Same reporter. Same CA coastal junk on 4 year repeat. Some of us have memories that last longer than 4 years.
I have been amazed how many people think some of the places I visit in Florida are”a bad investment” . And this has played right into the hands of savvy investors. My
Dad had a water front lot in Marco Island Fl he picked up for like $6k in 68. First there was this thing going around that the land could not be built on because of a environmentally driven law suit( but in actuality did not pertain to most of the development) Then it was the “ the rising sea level” scare. My Dad got old and sold it before I could intervene, for like 80k .
Checked a few of the remaining ( only a handful left) unbuilt com-parables a while back- all million and up! Just the land no house. And they seem to survive hurricanes too.
Don’t make fun of a visionary article in the Los Angeles Times. California must be prepared for an inexorable and unprecedented rise of sea level. We must start moving all our ports far inland. Cities will soon follow. 🙂
I am confused. What effect will moving people back from the shoreline have on wave erosion? Waves will still wave regardless. Humans may be able to slow the effects of mother nature but they definitely can’t stop it.
It is actually the tree hugger version of morality: don’t interfere with nature. A prime CA example is forest management. Leave the forests alone to grow as they will (however poorly) and burn when they might.
Force people to leave the coast alone to deteriorate (in human terms) as it will without humans trying to prevent nature’s changes just because the changes don’t suit humans. But of course, don’t tell the non huggers what the true objective is.
Key phrase of entire (excellently detailed!) article: “property owners.”
“,,, foisted upon these property owners“
It is ENTIRELY up to them to decide what to do with their OWN land.
@ the “Tsar:”
Get off my land!
The power to tax is the power to destroy?
Insurance companies are not charging unusual rates for California coastal properties that were not built on unstable cliffs that have been eroding for millennia. I think I’ll go with the insurers betting their own money.
Is Barbra Streisand going to surrender her ocean front property?
Meanwhile, the San Andreas fault creeps along at about 25mm/yr, with occasional transient accelerations of up to 8,000 times that annual average — called earthquakes — and nobody get concerned except during the earthquakes. There is a lack of perspective in the concerns about sea level rise.
Now don’t get them going on Climate Quakes
In preparation at the IPCC for upcoming publication: “New data from models proves tectonic plate movements caused by climate change”
Remember, you saw it here first on WUWT.
(And yes: “data”, “models” and “proves” were used intentionally)
Not “Caused” but rather “Made More EXTREME”
Note that the apparent datum shift for San Francisco SL rise immediately precedes the 1906 earthquake that destroyed San Francisco.
I’d drop “coastal residents as relocation victims” and add “coastal residents as eminent domain winners”. Not all coastline is buildable.
Hey, it’s the LA Slimes. So Ignore it. It’s propaganda.