Okay, it’s official: rising seas will swamp 1,400 low-lying U.S. cities. It’s got to be true!

• USA Today says so: “Study: Sea-level rise threatens 1,400 U.S. cities”
• The UK Guardian says so: “Climate study predicts a watery future for New York, Boston and Miami”
• The Detroit Free Press says so: “Sea-level rise threatens 1,400 U.S. cities, study says”
• Huffington Post says so: “Sea Level Rise ‘Lock In’ Growing Much Faster than Current Measurements”
• The Palm Beach Daily News says so: “Oceanographer: Rising sea levels unstoppable”
• The Weather Channel says so: “Boston, Miami, New York Face a Watery Future”

Public Radio International’s environmental reporter Steve Curwood is positively breathless: “The Earth is getting hotter. Fast. Piles of scientific studies and documentary footage about climate change have proven that to be true. In some parts of the world, people need only to look around them to see how their environment is being affected. Areas are notching record high temperatures every year, and already-dangerous natural disasters are hitting harder as a result.”Forget that, despite continued increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, there’s been no statistically significant global warming for somewhere between 17 and 23 years.

Forget that the rate of warming from roughly 1977–1998 was no more rapid than two similar periods—each followed by periods of cooling or stasis—since the end of the Little Ice Age—and many similar periods in the centuries before.

Forget that record high temperatures are statistically unavoidable in any given year granted the short period covered by instrumental measurements around most of the world.

Forget that, as climatologist Dr. John Christy told Congress last year, actual observations—not computer models built on alarmists’ assumptions—show no increase in either the frequency or the intensity of severe weather events in the period of allegedly unprecedented warming, driven by industrial civilization’s carbon dioxide emissions.

And—to return to the panicky headlines about sea-level rise—forget that over the long haul sea level has been rising ever since the end of the Ice Age and that the rate of rise has actually decreased over the last 80 years, meaning its rate before significant human contribution to warming was faster than its rate since human contribution began. Forget that claims of accelerated sea-level rise appear to neglect a sixty-year oscillation in sea-level rise, focusing on the upswing but ignoring the downswing. Forget that the rate of rise differs regionally around the globe and is driven by natural cycles. And forget that the lack of acceleration in sea-level rise has been concomitant with an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide content of about one-third, meaning there’s no correlation, and hence no causal relationship, between the two.

(Now why, do you think, didn’t any of those mainstream media trumpet any of these studies of sea-level rise?)

Curwood showed the depth of his scientific confusion when he wrote, “Thanks to a new study from the Potsdam Institute in Germany, it’s possible to measure how global warming will raise sea levels.” By definition, if it’s future, you can’t measure it. You might model it—successfully or not. But you can’t measure it.

And as Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow and NASA climate scientist Dr. Roy W. Spencer has shown, for about the last thirteen years—from the year 2000 onward—every computer climate model on which the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change depends has forecast global temperature above what’s been observed. Indeed, the vast majority of model forecasts, like the average of all of them combined, have been well above observations ever since the early 1980s—and the gap between prediction and reality is increasing! Out of 73 computer climate models, not one made predictions that, over the period from 1979 through 2012, generally (let alone every year) matched observation. Not one.

So if Curwood wants to stake his reputation on models—which are all we have for the future—he might want to think again.

Curwood wasn’t the only reporter showing his confusion. Suzanne Goldenberg, U.S. environment correspondent for the UK Guardian, misunderstood the study on which all the panicky stories were based. She originally reported that 1,700 U.S. cities would be under sea level by 2100. The newspaper later corrected that to “these locations, or at least part of them [,] would be ‘locked in’ to a future below high-tide levels, which would come at an unspecified later date.” “High-tide levels” aren’t sea level, and an “unspecified later date” isn’t the year 2100. Indeed, you might have thought the study’s title—“The multimillennial sea-level commitment of global warming”—would have tipped her off. But, hey, when you’re eagerly reporting the end of the world, accuracy can suffer.

Admittedly, some (but not all) of the mainstream media reports bulleted above (quietly) acknowledge that the swamping of our cities could take hundreds to thousands of years. As USA Today put it, “If global warming continues at its current rate through the year 2100, at least an additional 1,100 cities and towns will be mostly under water at high tide in the distant future” (emphasis added).

But since the vast majority of city structure is considerably younger than that and has a useful life expectancy considerably shorter, that means we’ll have to replace cities no faster than we’ve built them.

Nonetheless, the headlines and lead paragraphs invariably stress crisis, alarm, panic.

And as Rahm Emanuel put it when he was President Obama’s transition team leader after the 2008 election, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

That’s the strategy of alarmists. Foment panic, and people will let you do things they’d never have imagined otherwise—destroy their liberty, undermine their standard of living, and fundamentally transform America.

But forewarned is forearmed. That’s why we at the Cornwall Alliance work hard to bring you the truth you need to cut through the hype. Let your Congressmen and Senators know: global warming is real, it is primarily natural, and sacrificing our liberty while spending trillions of dollars in a useless effort to reduce it, when that money could instead spur economic growth to lift the one-fifth of humanity remaining in abject poverty out of it, is not just foolish but wicked. Please take a moment right now to do two things:

1. Add your name to those of scores of evangelical leaders and countless laymen who have signed the Cornwall Alliance’s Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming.
2. Help us continue our work by making even a small donation at our secure online website.