On February 2, 1978—41 years ago!—The Wall Street Journal warned in a headline that “Low-Lying Lands Could Be Submerged by Climatic Disaster.”
Fears of apocalyptic sea-level rise are nothing new despite the fact that they seem to have recently taken on a new life of their own, especially in South Florida, where I live.
The only scientific correlation I can make with any certainty is that these fears rise in direct proportion to the number of socialists elected to Congress.
So, let’s first talk about the science of climate change as it pertains to sea-level rise.
Dr. Roy Spencer, who has a Ph.D. in meteorology, writing in An Inconvenient Deception, states that compared to Al Gore’s warnings of a sea-level rise of 20 feet, the actual measurement is one inch per decade for over 150 years with no observed acceleration.
This could not be true if it were anthropogenic (human-caused), since there has been ample time for acceleration since 1940, “which is the earliest that humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions could have had any substantial effect.” Sea-level rise is a process that is mostly natural since it “predates the Industrial Revolution,” Dr. Spencer explains.
This may be small comfort to the people living in Miami Beach, for example, where sea-level rise has been worse than the average. But a 2017 study reported that the land is sinking at a rate of 3 mm per year—equal to the sea-level rise—causing a doubling of the effect and magnifying the rise of water at lunar high tides.
No one should “deny” climate change per se. It is a characteristic of the planet upon which we live.
The argument boils down to how much of it is due to relatively recent anthropogenic increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide compared with the Earth’s natural climate fluctuations caused by other factors including solar activity.
And it’s not just the science that is on the side of those appealing for moderation. Earth’s climate history also has a story to tell.
A graph of the Earth’s mean temperature over the last 2,000 years shows two previous periods when temperatures were warmer than they are now; from 1–200 A.D., an epoch called the Roman Warm Period, and more recently the Medieval Warm Period from 900–1100 A.D.
Historical records during the Medieval Warm Period report many benefits such as extended growing seasons, a reduction in infant mortality, and the explosive growth of Europe’s population. The Vikings colonized portions of Greenland and were able to plant warm-weather crops such as potatoes.
It is worth noting that both of these climate optima occurred centuries before the discovery of fossil fuels and the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Getting back to that 41-year-old Wall Street Journal headline, the article that accompanied it reported that the temperature rise due to the burning of oil and gas would result in a “sudden deglaciation of the West Antarctic, unfreezing enough water to raise world sea levels by five meters (about 16 feet).” It was further stated that such a sea-level rise could “result in the submergence of much of Florida, Holland and other low-lying areas in the next 50 years.”
That scenario, though, depended on the worst-case scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario for warming, and the worst-case scenario for the effect of warming on the ice. None of those was at all likely, and none of them happened.
It was far more likely that continental ice melt would continue at about the rate of the past thousands of years—about a foot per century, meaning it would take 1,600 years to achieve the feared 16-foot rise.
And indeed that’s what’s happened. Sea level has continued to rise at about the same rate of a foot per century or 1.2 inches per decade. To achieve the 16 feet warned of 41 years ago in 50 years, the rate would now have to jump to 208 inches per decade—nearly 200 times as fast. Does anyone want to put a bet on that?
If you’ve ever visited a new housing development, inland or along the coast, it doesn’t matter, you already know the sandy soil is littered with the shells of mollusks. Have you ever wondered why?
A December 3, 1993, article that appeared in The Sun-Sentinel may have the grim news: “Rising and falling ocean levels complicate the geologic picture. The coast has shifted several times, which is why shells can be found far inland ….”
Apocalyptic sea-level rise may simply be just a thing of the past.
Originally published on Townhall.com.
Featured Photo by Lance Asper on Unsplash.
William Zmistowski, Jr., AIA says
Melting ice shrinks 10% when it changes state from a solid to a liquid. Ice is a solid. Water is a liquid. Therefore, when arctic ice in water melts the water level goes down.
Thank you,
louis wachsmuth says
Why the nasty remark about “socialists”? That’s a pure republican talking point to scare the voters. I believe many important public institutions are based on the “socialistic” principle. You want the fire and police departments owned by Wall Street corporations? You think private ownership is going to lower costs? Or, is it that you hate the fact that public tax monies are going into climate research and the results are not looking good for Cornwall Alliance?
Dan M. says
The only thing clear here is the real motive of global warm-mongers. They’re less interested in cleaning up the Earth than in controlling human beings in the name of “the common good” — just as the Bolsheviks once did, first in Russia, and then in China, where the tyranny continues to this day.
Climate research alarmists “want to change us, they want to change our behavior, our way of life, our values and preferences,” according to a man who knows a thing or two about communist regimes, former Czech President Vaclav Klaus. In a speech to Australia’s Institute of Public Affairs in 2011, he stressed: “They want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. Therefore, what is in danger is freedom, not the climate.”
This is not a “republican” talking point. Just fact.
Juan Anibal trespanier says
Al Gore has a beach front house paid by the money he has accumulated with the global warming hoax and the sea level rise.
Charles Clough says
The problem with climate research today, as also occurs in several other science communities, is that the politics of finances can unintentionally create conflicts of interest. President Eisenhower warned about this very dynamic in his 1961 farewell address. Having lived through the massive Manhattan Project that established a network of federal laboratories that have long since outlived the nuclear threat of World War 2, he noted the danger that “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
From its beginning climate science funding came for reasons other than pure interest in increasing our knowledge of long-range atmospheric processes. I well remember wondering as a meteorologist why and from where the massive funding came from when for many decades meteorological science budgets were so modest. Bernie Levin in his historical investigation (Searching for the Catastrophe Signal) provides the reasons. One source was the nuclear power industry that wanted to compete with lower cost fossil fuels and in effect hired the science to further its business opportunities. Thus climate science from its origin was focused upon fossil fuels rather than on the larger question of why climate change had occurred prior to the increase in CO2 emissions. Another powerful financial incentive to limit the scope of climate research solely to human activity’s effects is the mandate from the United Nations for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Finally, as those close to the funding lobby today have publicly admitted, the narrow focus on only the human-cause of climate change is to further the socialist vision of re-distributing the world’s wealth.
This narrowly focused funding stream has created what Dr. Judith Curry and others who originally worked within the IPCC have called a “manufactured consensus.” Restrictions on publishing research on the natural causes involved in climate change automatically eliminates the grants necessary to fund such research. And if you don’t get grants, you lose your job. Thus claims of a consensus of climate scientists that human activity virtually dominates climate change is self-fulfilling.
So the remark about socialism isn’t a mere talking point. Public tax monies are going to keep climate research restricted to studying only anthropogenic effects. That profoundly affects the likely success of any carbon-based “solutions” so popular with certain politicians.
Gene Albrecht says
How timely…just after reading this article by Gregory Rummo, with expert input from Dr. Roy Spencer I came across this NBC article which minimizes the two warming periods discussed as minor and apples to oranges compared to the much more drastic human caused temperature increase in recent time.
**Climate scientists drive stake through heart of skeptics’ argument
by Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky | NBC NEWS
New research shows that the recent rise in global temperatures is unlike anything seen on Earth during the past 2,000 years.**
This kind of ‘expert witness’ divergent presentation is what makes this whole topic so difficult to discuss. How are we to help others overcome the perception that Scientists have a vast consensus supporting anthropogenic based severe consequences with the ability to prevent with so much smoke?
I would absolutely love to put 50 leading, equally field based and credentialed scientists from each side of the key issue…into a Hotel and not let them out until they could agree on ‘something big’ to help the rest of us better judge whether there is something needing to be done.
Tim says
This sarticle gets very, very basic facts wrong. Quite literally the underlying premise of that whole article is disproved with the first link on a google search of “sea level rise data”
Again, using our own government, NASA (in this official NASA study) finds that sea level rise has accelerated 100x in the past 25 years alone.
https://climate.nasa.gov/…/new-study-finds-sea-level…/
So are you going to believe the people who literally put us on the moon, or one PhD in Meteorology? (which is a different field than Climatology, by the way)
And before getting into the whole “it’s a conspiracy!” bullshit, who stands to gain anything from cleaning up the environment? US! Not the coal or gas magnates. There are no “clean energy billionaires” that can engineer a conspiracy like that. If it were a conspiracy, this would be the first conspiracy I’ve ever heard that has been perpetuated at the highest levels of science, academia and government to… help us?
One dude (with a PhD in an unrelated field) selling a book to make some $ from climate skeptics looking to reassure themselves is a LOT more believable that 97% of scientists coming to agreement in tens of thousands of separate and unrelated studies.
Rebecca says
First of all, we are cleaning up the environment and have been for years. Second, there are two clean energy billionaires Tom Steyer and Warren Buffet, plus many more invested in wind and solar. And, you don’t think people like Al Gore haven’t become rich off of climate alarmism? Seriously? And you think all the left-wing politicians world wide preaching climate alarmism is not an indication that the whole thing is political? You’ve got the internet to research this stuff. Look up who is for alarmism and who is against it. Use your own mind.