According to a claim making the rounds through the media, global “temperature is expected to rise by 2.8° C at the end of this century due to climate change. This … will cause sea levels to rise, causing half of the world’s beaches to disappear.” My current search turned up at least a dozen more references that reconfirm the rampant pack-journalism mentality in today’s media.

A quick read of the article below suggests several misinterpretations indulged in by the reporter.

1) The only reason for asserting a 2.8 deg C or greater rise in global average temperature by the “experts” derives from the outputs of several global climate computer models. Yet these climate models are the handiwork of arm-chair meteorologists who have spent their whole careers indoors in front of computer screens while attempting to construct algorithms to confirm their preconceived beliefs.

2) The next difficulty is accounting for the superabundance of beach sand that has persisted throughout the multiple cycles of ocean rise and fall over hundreds of millions of years. As the strand line moves inland, also much of the existing sand moves with it in inshore, consistent with the dynamics of wave and current action. It is never all washed out and deposited on the bottom of the deep blue sea.

I went through this same laborious exercise two decades ago when the National Park Service was implementing its plans to move North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras light house inland to avoid being lost to shore erosion. Ironically, the base of the light left behind at its original location, a mere 30 yards from the surf at high tide, still stands. The NPS project, by all appearances, was a multi-million dollar boondoggle.

And as some few of us at the time tried to point out, it would have been possible to secure the light safely at its original location merely by constructing another groin just south of the area of active erosion, as had been recommended by the Corps of Engineers. But somehow Mother Nature has decreed that the base will remain where it had been since its construction in 1870, at least for the time being.

3)  Later in the piece the writer goes on about “failure to control climate change,” as if it were even possible to do so.

4) Not that it is necessarily material to the narrative, the reporter employs some very odd locutions suggesting at least that he does not have much grasp of what he is writing about. Read thoughtfully and you will discover them also.

5) Arm-chair meteorologists and climatologists who have never seen Antarctica and as specialists are blissfully unaware of tectonic and active volcanism currently going on under the West Antarctic Ice Sheet make pronouncements about the disappearance of the massive quantity of ice held in the polar deep freeze. They apparently are unaware that the icecap first began accumulating on the southern continent several million years ago. Some ice deep in the column had never melted and remains there just as it did prior to the beginning of the Pleistocene. Hence hypothetical temperature rise of a few degrees is unlikely to result in the melting of a significant proportion of the store of frozen water. Therefore any projected acceleration in the rate of ocean rise in excess of the current 6 to 7 inches per century remains a pure conjecture and unworthy of attention from the AP, the New York Times, or the Manchester Guardian. But just try to tell them that.

Photo by Claudia Altamimi on Unsplash.