|
|
By Jo Nova
And where was the ABC, the BBC, the CBC…
This week UN was scaring the kiddies again in order to increase the river of funds that it feeds from. Harder to understand, science journalists were rushing to sell-out their homelands and repeat their incantations. We’re worrying about a 3mm annual rise (at most) but while Grok was inventing the wheel circa 5,000 BC, oceans were 2,000 millimeters higher. That surging water left clues like piles of giant oyster shells that are still 20 kilometers inland at Taiwan.
In the frozen depths of the last ice age, the water piled up at the poles in the ice caps and the oceans shrank 125 unthinkable meters below where they are today. We’re getting precious about losing a sand dune, but Mesolithic people lost entire continental shelves.
Only a poorly educated high schooler, or a UN Secretary-General, might be silly enough to think that the oceans had stayed the same for a million years and just jumped up 20 centimeters…
Science communication is a train-wreck. When will the “journos” discover the Pleistocene.
Axios https://www.axios.com/2024/08/27/un-sea-level-rise-antonio-guterres
The prophesy reads like a new Bible:
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned […]
By Jo Nova
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on yet another paper that shows things were much hotter back in the early Holocene when there were hardly any coal fired power plants, and cars were just molecules spread across hematite deposits, emitting nothing.
Awkwardly, carbon dioxide levels were very low during this five thousand year Monster Heatwave, so climate modelers are forever trying to erase the hot Holocene, it’s just that the dang evidence keeps turning up in the damnedest of places.
In 2002 construction workers in Taipei dug up a giant oyster shell, and a whole oyster reef, rather improbably in the metropolitan area. This was 20 kilometers from the ocean where oysters are not supposed to grow.
One particular oyster shell was especially hard to ignore because it was a 42cm across. When it was carbon-14 dated, it clocked in as 7,500 years old. This particular kind of oyster is not found around Taipei any more (even in the ocean), but is found in colder waters around Japan and Korea. So the researchers wondered if this meant the oceans were somehow improbably higher but cooler at the time. They also wanted to find out if these oysters […]
By Jo Nova
A little tiny delated backdown from extreme climate hype begins
In 2018, a study of aerial photos of 700 Pacific Islands showed that 89% were the same size or growing. This rather destroyed the idea that sea levels were swallowing small nations. The New York Times said nothing. Indeed, the only Pacific things shrinking were deserted sand drifts. No islands bigger than 10 hectares were getting smaller. Measured in square kilometers that’s “0.1”. Despite the media headlines and delegations from Kiribati and Tuvulu begging for money to hold back the tide, no islands with people living on them were shrinking. None, not one island in the Pacific big enough to matter, was disappearing. The largest 630 islands in the Pacific had not being touched by climate change for decades.
In 2023 another study of 1,100 islands came to the same conclusion. To find that many islands they included things as small as one thousandth of a square kilometer — we’re talking about spits of sand 10 meters square. (There are whales larger than that.) The Kench team studied islands in the Indian Ocean too. In one case, they sliced, diced and drilled through one poor island […]
Humans live in a 90 degree range from Marble Bar, Australia to Oymyakon, Siberia. | Photos: Marble Bar, Wilford Peloquin, Oymyakon (and more glorious ones) by Amos Chapple.
By Jo Nova
The “hottest ever” headline is misleading
While the UAH satellite measurements are the hottest by far of the 44 year satellite record, nothing about the “hottest ever” media frenzy makes sense — not for health, history, the long term, or human biology. It’s only the “hottest ever” if we ignore most of the last ten thousand years. It’s just another attempt to scare people out of their money.
The latest UAH satellite measurements may be affected by the water vapor launched into the atmosphere by the Hunga Tonga volcano. There don’t appear to be any clear details about that, but even if we accept this as is, it’s still nothing to spend a trillion dollars on:
From Roy Spencer, UAH
In the big scheme of human history, the world has been a lot hotter and a lot colder. Homo sapiens are 37 degree animals who retire to warm climates, not cold ones. Most people on Earth live in the warm tropics, not the cold poles. […]
By Jo Nova
The “hottest day” is not that hot, and very irrelevant
So the news cycle went hyperbolic over a single dubious hot day in records that only go back 0.01% of human existence. Remember when “30 year trends” were all that mattered?
Let’s ignore for the moment that the error bars on measurements of global temperature in 1899 would make any normal scientist blush. Who believes for one minute even today we can measure the global surface temperature to one hundredth of a degree? The cringeworthy insignificant digits were everywhere. On Monday the Earths surface was supposedly 17.01 degrees Celsius for the first time in “human history”. Then Tuesday it was 17.18C, Hallelujah. Who are we kidding?
Probably the biggest lie was to call this “human history” as if the ancient Egyptians were measuring the temperature on Earth and every day of the week. Are we really sure we know what the temperature was on July 3, 2201 BC? Maybe it was 17.31C that day — prove me wrong? We have no idea how hot the “hottest days” were for 99% of human civilization. The best proxies we have can’t tell us what the temperature was for 24 […]
By Jo Nova
A new paper shows islands are young, dynamic creatures, and mother nature is mean. And nothing we see today on Indian or Pacific Islands is unprecedented. All the panic about islands disappearing is nothing compared to what nature does all the time. Indeed, man-made climate change, if it has done anything at all — has been a boon for islands in the last fifty years.
Thanks to Kenneth Richard, at NoTricksZone for finding the paper: Recent Shoreline Changes To 1100 Pacific Islands ‘Dwarfed’ By Change Magnitudes Of The Past
The new paper by Kench et al looked at 1,100 islands across the Pacific and Indian oceans, and even though CO2 levels rose from 325ppm to an apocalyptic 420ppm, the average island got bigger instead of smaller, and only 3 small uninhabited islands completely disappeared. And when we say small, some of the islands we are tracking are mere 30m wide sand spits. Is it really fair to call that an “uninhabited island”?
The world may have Olympic-sized junkets every year because shorelines have moved 40m in the last fifty years, but it turns out that shorelines moved 200 meters before anyone built a coal plant.
This, below, […]
The oceans were supposed to be swallowing up the islands
Climate change has unleashed rampant growth in mangrove forests. The trees are capturing coral detritus in large sand drifts, and locking it into whole new ecosystems that expand 5 to 6 meters a year. It’s just remarkable — some islands have grown by several kilometers since 1928.
The Howick Group of islands is north of Cairns Australia. Three scientific expeditions mapped out them out in 1928 and in 1974, and again in 2021, and lo, they have grown, especially in the last four decades. That makes them like most of the 709 islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans that were studied a few years ago. Satellites showed that 89% of those islands had grown.
It turns out warmer more carbon rich world makes mangroves happy. Who could have seen that coming, apart from every biologist on Earth?
From the commentary in the video below:
“We’ve seen some really dramatic changes. Some of the things that we’ve seen are advancing fronts of forests. Forests that were mapped to small patches on the windward part of the reef flat are now occupying a much larger section of […]
Please, sell us your low lying land
Let’s play sea level bingo with the latest advertising from the Merchants of Sea-level Scares.
Hitting the media outlets tonight — the latest “Prepare to Die” news stories claim we must plan now for evacuees, refugees, inundation and homeless koalas. All the usual features of marketing are there — firstly all the images they use are from mocked up futuristic sea level rise. Secondly, it’s not a continuation of current trends, it a sudden acceleration — in this case from 1mm to year to 9mm a year, effectively starting tomorrow.
1 tiny millimeter
From 1969 – 2013 the seas have not changed the beaches around these Tuamotu atolls — or almost any other atoll you can name.
By every method known to man, seas are rising around 1mm a year:
1,000 tide gauges, hundreds of studies of beaches, satellites measuring sea levels, and satellites measuring beaches.
All anyone needs to know about sea levels is that for the last 50 years sea levels have been rising at 1mm a year as shown by a thousand tide gauges all over the world. There was no acceleration. (Beenstock et al). Some of those gauges […]
This should end all the Pacific Island climate claims right here. A new study of over 700 islands for decades shows that even though seas are rising faster than any time in the last million years, somehow no islands with people on are shrinking. This means there are no climate change refugees from any vanishing island. Plus it’s more proof that highly adjusted satellite data is recording sea levels on some other planet.
Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.
Look how closely these researchers are tracking the shores. Below on Tuamoto, French Polynesia, scientists can tell you that islets 12 and 14 (see pic) have disappeared since 1962. So we can track roving blobs of sand about 20 to 30 meters across.
….
No habitable island, none, got smaller:
The researchers reckon that 10 hectares is about the smallest island you’d want to plonk […]
The Green Blob is going to have to get rid of satellites. Real data is so inconvenient.
For years many people called scientists have assumed, like any smart 5 year old would, that islands are fixed blobs of rock and sand that just sit there and sink as oceans rise. Now satellite images show that three quarters of the islands in Tuvalu are growing rather than shrinking.
Total land area is up 2.9%. Total government funded scientists who predicted reality, down 97%.
…
Since our emissions helped create nearly a square kilometer of free real estate in Tuvalu, it seems only fair that they return any climate funds, and pay a royalty. 😉
The whole of Tuvalu is 26km2 and about 10,600 people live there. Total GDP is $32 million. It’s a cheap marketing tool. In May last year, despite Tuvalu being used as an advertising posterchild for climate change for years, it had not received funding from the Green Climate Fund. In August 2017 UNDP finally promised $38 million. That’s theoretically an extra income equivalent to 20% of their GDP for the next seven years. No wonder these islanders are keen to talk “climate change”.
Scientists who have […]
PMSML stands for Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level, though there is nothing permanent about sea-level data — like all obedient climate change data, it’s subject to change fifty years later — and the adjustments are as large as the trends.
We’ve seen this pattern in so many places. Now Cliff Ollier and Albert Parker have shown it in the Indian Ocean looking at Aden in Yemen, and Mumbai in India (and other places, and other data). Kenneth Richard at No Tricks Zone goes through it at length. James Delingpole calls it TideGate. The New York Times says nothing (just like last time).
Parker and Ollier conclude that at Mumbai, apparently the sea levels were “perfectly stable over the 20th century”. At Aden, sea levels trends are rising at a pitifully small quarter of a millimeter a year during the twentieth century. (And that’s their upper estimate). The lower estimate is minus five hundreths of a millimeter a year. Looking at other sites as well they estimate a rise of …”about zero mm/year” in the last five decades. zero.
This, they say, agrees with other things like… coastal morphology, stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, archaeological remains, and historical documentation. (But not […]
Kiribati, with a natural resource base of almost nothing, makes 15% of its nominal GDP, via donations from the Australian government. Periodically Mr Anote Tong, president of Kiribati,visits Australia to remind us how much they need help money.
Creatively, this year, Mr Tong is comparing Kiribati’s future to the sinking of the Titanic.
Give the man points for theatrix:
“We are the people who will be swimming,” he said. “The question will be — will those people on the lifeboats bother to pull us in or push us away because we would be too problematic?”
Kiribati’s highest point is 13m above water, and is sinking at a rate of 1mm a year (see the updated graph below by Eyes On Browne). To rephrase Euan Mearns, at this rate, complete inundation of it will take 13,000 years.
The Titanic’s elevation (waterline to the deck) was 18m, so it was 50% higher, yet it sank in 2 hours 40 minutes. That’s one ninth of a day, or one 3,285th of a year. Conservatively, the comparative speed works out to be 42.7 million times faster. Allowing for the higher elevation (but discounting funnels and/or palms) that would be 59.1 million times […]
File this under Nasty Nature. This is the sort of thing planet Earth throws at life.
The is real “sea level rise” — where most of a continent (called Zealandia) sinks under the waves — and — as far as we know, though I could be wrong — fossil fuel use was minimal circa 50 -80 million years ago. Can Exxon be blamed?
New Zealanders may be feeling a bit cheesed that they carelessly lost something like 80% of their land. (Call that “Old Zealand” which was once as big as India.) Given that it is one kilometer underwater, it looks like it isn’t coming back soon. But think of all the national parks, reefs, etc that were destroyed?
Zealandia. | Credit: IODP
The story is that the Pacific Rim of Fire “buckled” 40-50 million years ago, and Zealandia sunk a lot deeper. There is a suggestion that it was originally submerged about 80 million years ago (or so), when this renegade land split from Australia and Antarctica.
Since 1,000 tide gauges estimate current sea level rise at around 1 mm a year, real climate change puts the current panic about sea levels into perspective. Even the next ice […]
Scaremonger photos of inundation abound in our national news this week. Famous foreshore parks are gone, islands disappear, houses, picnic areas, racecourses, golf courses — all submerged. The water rolls in over Sydney’s Circular Quay, Melbourne’s Docklands, Brisbane Airport, Hindmarsh Island — swamped. Rooned. Today its the satellite photo, tomorrow it’ll be computer generated streetscapes; coming soon, the underwater documentary: Swimming in the Opera House.
This is a mocked up satellite pic of Perth, WA projecting how much ground we will lose.
If you live in these future washed out zones, email me. I’ll buy your house.
Compare the forecast two metre rise, to actual Tide Gauge Data for Fremantle since 1900 (Fremantle has the second longest record of sea level change in the Southern Hemisphere):
Sea Level rise Fremantle, Perth, Australia shows about a 20cm rise in 110 years.
So there has been a 20cm rise or so in 100 years. But 200cm is coming. Yeah. (For details of the way Sea Levels around Perth Coastline change see Chris Gillhams work.)
This slow rate of sea level rise is not just a west coast thing: Sydney’s sea levels are rising at just 6.5cm per century.
The model […]
If you thought seas were constant 6,000 years ago…
Microatolls are apparently very accurate proxy for sea levels, giving a higher resolution estimate of sea levels. But the extra data suggests more natural oscillations in seas than the experts used to think. Six thousand years ago, near Indonesia, seas apparently rose and fell twice by as much as 60 centimeters in a 250 year period. A similar pattern happened 2,600km away in SE China. Seas were changing so fast researchers estimate the shift occurred at 13mm per year and comment that these regional changes are “unprecedented in modern times.” (Or unrepeated, perhaps?) At the first peak 6,750 years ago, seas were 1m higher than today. The current rate of sea level change is 1mm a year in hundreds of tide gauges and 3mm in “adjusted” satellite data).
From the paper I gather that sea levels in this region change a lot even now. ENSO and the Indian Ocean dipole slop the oceans back and forward. Meltzner et al don’t know why the seas around asia changed so much in the holocene, nor do they know if this is a global phenomenon. They talk about other studies on the Great […]
…
A group called NGIS Australia are helping climate skeptics find cheaper beach-houses. They’ve put up a website called Coastalrisk.com.au and an App to scarify homeowners. There’s a spike coming, it’s accelerating, and we’re talking billions of dollars.
Do I hear tipping point? It’s a tipping point:
At the moment, there are only a few homes impacted by coastal flooding, high tides and storms but Mr Mallon said we needed to brace for a big spike.
“Tens of thousands of homes in Australia — meaning hundreds of millions of dollars in property — are under increasing threat,” he said.
You could say they’ve gone full mental with the fear factor — especially when global sea levels are rising at about 1mm a year (according to a thousand tide gauges). In Sydney, sea levels are streaking up even slower, at 0.6mm a year.
Changes in sea levels in Australia don’t fit the carbon meme too well. Sell up anyway.
Australian-NZ seas were changing as fast or even faster before World War II.
How many Australians? Seriously…
About 80 per cent of Australians who live near the coast could be the target […]
This is a big deal. Here’s a state government telling people to be more scientific, and not blindly follow the IPCC. This is a win we need to translate to other areas.
The former Labor government in NSW had told councils they had to plan for sea-level rise “according to the IPCC”, but that made sea-side properties unsalable, and was pretty painfully stupid compared to what the tide gauges were actually saying (like in Sydney where the rise is a tiny 6cm a century). The new strategy says councils need to be scientific and look at the conditions on each beach separately.
In this issue, the costs of following the IPCC plan were borne by those living on the coast (and property developers), and that pain motivated them to press the State government to get the IPCC out of the way. This is a reminder that it is worth protesting and sane things do happen.
If we can get citizens of the free west to appreciate the true cost of the IPCC, it would surely be gone by 2020. Now there’s a target..
Rob Stokes announces shake-up of council coastal management
In an interview with The Australian, […]
Minister Peter Dutton made a joke about Pacific Islander time. The Offendotrons howled and called for him to be sacked. But the real problem here is not the small 1mm rise in sea-levels, it’s the the national media end up discussing global “offense” levels rather than sea levels. The scientific data shows there is no issue. Australian taxpayers pay the ABC, the CSIRO and the BOM to inform the Australian public, yet none of them explained that the real sea level rise recorded in Kiribati is less than 1 mm a year. Why not? The ABC does not clear the fog for Australians, it generates it. Dutton apologized, but he shouldn’t have. It feeds the offendotrons. They didn’t accept it, won’t stop referring to his comment, nor start talking about real problems. Apologizing only extends the time our national conversation is wasted on mindless things.
Yet again, the unfunded bloggers report the scientific data and not the institutes we pay to do that?
Noting that today’s meeting to discuss the resettlement of refugees was running late, Mr Dutton quipped that it was running to “Cape York time”, to which the Prime Minister replied: “We had a bit of […]
Headlines across Australia yesterday told us the dire news that a new study finds that “Sea level rising faster in past 20 years than in entire 20th century“. A new paper by Watson et al is driving the headlines, but underneath this Nature paper is a swamp of adjustments, an error larger than the signal, and the result disagrees with many other studies and almost all the raw measurements. Paper after paper kept showing that sea levels rates had slowed (e.g Chen showed deceleration from 2004, Cazenave said in the last decade sea-levels had slowed 30% (but argued post hoc adjustments could solve that). Beenstock used 1000 tide gauges and found no acceleration of sea levels over the last 50 years. A different researcher — Phil Watson, found that Australian sea levels rose faster before World War II then slowed down.)
Firstly, hundreds of tide gauges show sea level rising at about a third of the rate than satellites do. Worse, the original satellite raw data showed the same slow rise, until it was suddenly adjusted. The real scandal is that the rapidly rising trend was largely created by adjustments in the first place. These latest corrections just adjust down […]
Sea levels are part of the scare campaign, but how many journalists ask, and how many scientists admit, that sea levels in the South Pacific are noisy data that changes as the ground moves and the ocean slops back and forward? The Pacific averages 4 km deep. Is it any wonder that slight changes in winds and currents will shift the top 10cm, just 0.0025% , around? Long term sea level changes are difficult to assess. But this is not what we hear much in the media:
“Rising sea levels making island nations such as Vanuatu more vulnerable to storms and amplifies the impact of tropical cyclones” –The Guardian
“Coastal flooding is a sleeping giant,” it says. — The Climate Council (News.com)
The good recent data shows big rises and falls that don’t correlate with CO2
A very neat high-quality network of SeaFrame equipment was installed around South Pacific Islands in 1992 to measure both land and sea movements. This is called the Pacific Sea Level Monitoring Project. It is maintained by the Australian BoM. The geodetic observations are done by Geoscience Australia.
These tide gauges show that sea levels are rising and falling around Vanuatu […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments