Sea level rise -- or land subsidence? by Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek

At the request of Paul Driessen, I am posting this article:

Sea level rise -- or land subsidence?

Alarmist claims about rising seas inundating coastal areas blame the wrong culprit 

Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek 

In his 2006 Inconvenient Truth mockumentary, Al Gore infamously predicted melting ice caps would cause oceans to rise “up to 20 feet” (6.1 meters) “in the near future.” Kevin Costner’s 1995 “action thriller” Water World presumed totally melting planetary ice would almost submerge the continents. 

However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated in 2007 that seas might rise up to only 2 feet by 2107. By comparison, oceans have risen nearly 400 feet since the last ice age ended, reflecting how much water was trapped in mile-thick glaciers that buried much of North America, Europe and Asia. In recent decades, though, global sea level rise has averaged just 7 inches per century – which may explain why Mr. Gore bought an $8.5-million mansion on the California coast in 2010. 

And yet “rising seas due to dangerous manmade climate change” remains a contentious issue, with profound land use, wildlife, economic, insurance and policy implications – especially for certain regions, like the Atlantic Coast’s Chesapeake Bay region. Some say “seas could rise” 2.5 to 7 feet (2.1 meters) or more by the end of the century around Norfolk, Virginia, a huge population and agricultural center and home to America’s largest Navy base. Even if that happens, the prediction combines multiple causes. 

Saltwater intrusion clearly has been an increasing problem across much of this region for several decades, and storms have sent tides and waves further inland than in the past, flooding and battering homes, croplands and wildlife habitats. Climate alarmists attribute this danger to human fossil fuel use. 

As a new report by Dr. Bezdek explains, reality is much different. (His report awaits publication in a scientific journal.) At least for the Chesapeake region, Houston-Galveston, Texas area, Santa Clara Valley, California and other places around the globe, the primary cause of seawater intrusions is not rising oceans – but land subsidence due to groundwater withdrawal from subsurface shale and sandstone formations, and to “glacial isostatic adjustments” that have been ongoing since the last glaciers melted. 

The solution therefore is not to continue trying to control Earth’s climate – an impossible, economy-busting task that would further impede fossil fuel use, economic development, job creation, and human health and welfare. The solution requires reducing groundwater removal in these coastal areas. 

Ice age glaciers buried continental land masses under trillions of tons of ice. Land under the ice was pushed downward, while areas somewhat beyond the glaciers were forced up. Once the ice was gone, the compressed areas began to rise, while lands that had bulged upward began to sink. Isostatic subsidence is still occurring, at about 1 millimeter a year (4.4 inches per century) in the Chesapeake region. 

While Chesapeake farms and cities have been utilizing groundwater for centuries, withdrawal rates from Virginia Coastal Plain aquifers skyrocketed between 1950 and 1970, as modern pumps took over. The rates have remained high ever since, causing significant land subsidence.  

The aquifer systems involve layers of porous sandstone with water in the interstices between sand grains. These layers are sandwiched between layers (lenses) of impermeable but wet shale and clay. As water is pumped from the sandy layers, the shale-clay layers are squeezed like a sponge by hundreds of feet of overlying rock and sediment, forcing their water into less compressible sands, and then into pumps. 

The amount of water in a system, its recharge rates (from rain, snowmelt and other sources), and the degree of compaction depend on how much water is being withdrawn, the thickness of sand and clay layers, and how compressible the layers are. Most of the pumped water ultimately comes from the clays, as they are squeezed dry. Analysts have estimated that 95% of water removed from Virginia Coastal Plain aquifers between 1891 and 1980 came from their clay layers, which have steadily compressed as a result. 

Compression means subsidence, at 1.1-4.8 mm/yr – for an average rate of 11 inches per century, on top of the 4.4 in. per century in isostatic subsidence, and compared to the average sea level rise of 7 in. a century. 

The net effect in Virginia’s Coastal Plain can thus be nearly 2 feet of subsidence per century. The impacts on land, habitat and property loss, saltwater intrusions, inland storm surges, farming, homes and other buildings, regional economics, wharves, piers and naval bases, and insurance rates is easy to discern. 

Confusion arises because discussions often involve “relative sea level rise” – which combines glacial isostatic and groundwater subsidence, along with actual sea level rise – just as we just did with our 2 feet per century total. However, the term obscures what is really going on and lends itself to climate alarmism, by leaving the false impression that the entire problem is melting icecaps and rising seas. 

It clearly is not. Focusing attention on alleged “manmade climate cataclysms,” supposedly driven by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, will result in our spending hundreds of billions of dollars to replace oil, gas and coal with expensive, subsidized, land-intensive renewable energy systems – while foregoing hundreds of billions of dollars in jobs and economic growth. Meanwhile, China, India, Indonesia and other developing nations will continue doing what they must to lift billions out of abject poverty and disease: burn more fossil fuels, thereby emitting more CO2. 

Those nations are not about to succumb to the Obama EPA “social cost of carbon” con game. This is the fraudulent scheme under which bureaucrats blame US oil, gas and coal for every climate and weather event, habitat and species loss, and other problem that they can possibly conjure up anywhere in the world – while completely ignoring the phenomenal and undeniable benefits of using those fuels, and the equally important benefits of having more plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. 

President-Elect Trump’s nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA underscores his intent to end climate-obsessed government by junk science and Executive Branch decree. 

What can be done about the real-world problems of “relative sea level rise”? Sea levels will continue to rise (or fall) in response to ice growth and melting, caused by powerful natural forces over which humans have no control. Glacial isostatic subsidence will continue – albeit at a glacial or geologic pace – unless another ice age buries continents under more miles of ice, again lowering sea levels hundreds of feet, and wiping out arable land, growing seasons and agricultural productivity. 

Moreover, once water has been squeezed out of the clay and shale, it cannot easily be replenished. That means the subsidence process cannot be reversed. However, we can nevertheless reduce or even halt subsidence due to groundwater extraction. 

Rates and locations of land subsidence and relative sea level rise change over time. Accurate predictive tools and measurements are thus needed to improve our understanding of subsidence in particular areas. Although subsidence rates are not as high on the Atlantic Coast as they have been in the Houston-Galveston area or Santa Clara Valley, the problem is nonetheless serious because of the southern Chesapeake Bay region’s low-lying topography and consequent susceptibility to ocean water intrusion.

In the Houston-Galveston area and Santa Clara Valley, resource managers have moved groundwater pumping away from the coast, reduced groundwater withdrawal rates, increased aquifer recharge and substitut­ed surface water for groundwater supplies. These actions have successfully stopped subsidence in the Santa Clara Valley and slowed the process in the Houston-Galveston area. 

Similar steps could be taken in Virginia’s Tidewater or Coastal Plain region. In addition, pipelines could bring fresh water from nearby lakes and rivers, replacing at least some of what is now provided by wells. Yet another option might be to construct one or more desalination plants (in California and Texas, as well), utilizing nuclear or natural gas power to operate facilities that utilize new Israeli technologies that employ a chemical-free reverse osmosis process that converts seawater into freshwater for pennies per gallon. 

The new Congress and Executive Branch need to focus our limited money and resources on real problems and viable solutions – not on their false, politically correct, anti-development alter egos. 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.Roger Bezdek is an internationally recognized energy analyst and president of Management Information Services, Inc. (www.MISI-net.com).

Paul Driessen - Olympic-sized climate propaganda

I am posting this article at Paul Driessen's request.  I would add to the comments of the Egyptian commentators he quotes about Obama's belief that man-made global warming is our foremost crisis that Hillary Clinton claims she will have an even more radical program of fossil fuel use suppression than does Obama.  And yes, I do believe that Hillary is so divorced from reality, such a criminal, and so mad for power that it is very reasonable to evaluate her as insane. Here is Paul Driessen's article:

Olympic-sized climate propaganda

It was wrong to interrupt Rio’s delightful opening ceremonies with deceitful agitprop  

XXXI Olympiad competitors are joyfully showcasing their skills and sportsmanship, while delighted fans revel in their amazing efforts. But opening ceremonies featuring colorful history, dance, song and athletes were rudely interrupted by an unprecedented propaganda film.

As audiences around the world were getting pumped up in eager anticipation for the upcoming events, a slick but deceitful video soured the mood by inserting partisan climate change politics.

Fossil fuels are warming our planet, and the manmade heat is melting its ice caps, narrators intoned. Animated maps showed Greenland “disappearing very quickly” and Amsterdam, Dubai, Miami, Shanghai, Lagos and Rio being swallowed up by rising seas.

Well, yes, if average global temperatures really did soar 4 degrees Celsius (7.5 Fahrenheit), and if all of Greenland’s ice melts, oceans certainly could rise 20 feet and other terrible things certainly could happen.

But wild assumptions, computer models and animations are not reality. Few of us are really worried about being eaten by raptors and Tyrannosaurs cloned from DNA in fossilized amber, even though Jurassic Park sure made them look real. Ditto for Hollywood sharks, werewolves, cave monsters – and global warming.

In the Real World outside the animators’ windows, average planetary temperatures barely budged for 18 years. After climbing a headline-grabbing 0.55 degrees C (1 deg F) in 2015, a strong El Niño year, they plummeted a media-ignored 0.5 degrees C the first seven months of 2016, as La Niña approached. That’s a far cry from the 4/7.5 temperature spike that animated the animators’ fear-mongering. The sun has entered a low-sun-spot phase, possibly heralding a new colder period for Planet Earth.

As to temperatures increasing “since the industrial era began,” that primarily reflects Earth’s emergence from the 500-year Little Ice Age. Of course, climate alarmists happily claim this natural warming is due to mankind’s growing fossil fuel use during the same period of time, though scientists still cannot distinguish human and natural factors. With temperatures rising 1850-1940, cooling 1940-1975, warming 1975-1998, and mostly flat-lining since then, it’s hard to blame oil, gas and coal for any warming.

So the likelihood of Greenland’s ice all melting is about zero. In fact, its ice mass has been growing since the time period the Olympics propaganda squad selected to show the ice sheets “disappearing.”

News stories about the Rio video also featured claims that climate change has “already had real effects in Brazil,” where 60% of the Amazon rainforest is located. Some 240,000 acres were clear-cut just in June 2016, “as a result of deforestation” – related to global warming, it was slyly suggested.

If they’re talking about replacing rainforests with biofuel plantations, to replace fossil fuels that could be produced from a fraction of that acreage, then yes, there’s a climate (policy) connection. But there would be little need to chop down all those trees if climate chaos campaigners weren’t obsessively opposed to the fossil fuels that power 80% of the world’s economy and provide other vital human needs.

The indispensable benefits of hydrocarbons and petrochemicals for Olympic Games alone are impressive.

They are the raw materials for uniforms of every description; swim suits, goggles and caps; kayaks and kayaker helmets and paddles; bicycle helmets, shoes and carbon-fiber frames; basketballs, vaulting poles, tennis balls and racquets, soccer balls and shin guards; bows and arrows; volleyball and field hockey nets; basketballs [Paul really likes basketballs]; seats and clothing for fans; prosthetics and wheelchairs for Paralympians; and much more.

No one could watch the games without plastics for computers, cameras, monitors, cell phones, dish antennas, banners and other equipment that promote, record and transmit the events. Neither athletes nor fans could get to the games without airlines, vehicles and fossil fuels.

In short, virtually nothing we make, grow, eat, use or do is possible without fuels and materials that come out of holes in the ground somewhere on our planet. But radical greens want it all put off limits. They would rather see billions of acres of croplands, rainforests and wildlife habitats cleared and plowed – and trillions of gallons of water and fertilizer expended – to grow biofuel crops to replace fossil fuels. “Keep it in the ground,” they demand.

African, Asian and European countries cannot afford to stop using oil, natural gas or coal. Nor can the United States or any other modern or developing country.

Naturally, the video and news reports mentioned none of this. So why did the Rio organizers agree to present this manmade climate cataclysm video?

One possible reason is a desire to distract people from its real problems. Mosquitoes are spreading Zika. Shoddy athletic housing has bare wires and sinks falling off walls. The open-water swimming venue is a bacteria-infested open sewer. Swallowing just a few teaspoons of Rio’s tap water will make visiting athletes and fans horribly sick. Eleven construction workers died while preparing Rio for the games.

Brazil’s economy is on the rocks and #174 out of 189 nations for starting a new business. Its current and previous presidents are under investigation for corruption.

But once the games got underway, they were fantastic, fun, exciting and dramatic; their own distraction.

So the video could be simple “greenwashing” – making the 2016 games the “greenest ever.” Or it might be to reinforce Brazil’s claim to billions of dollars that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have promised for mitigation, adaptation and compensation for the climate chaos we supposedly caused.

Just as strange, even ExxonMobil played the politically correct climate game. Its Olympics TV ad says the company is doing all it can to reduce “carbon pollution.” Surely Exxon knows it’s not carbon (soot); it’s carbon dioxide. And it’s not pollution; the plant-fertilizing CO2 is enriching the atmosphere and making forests, grasslands and food crops grow faster and better. So why use Obama/EPA terminology?

Maybe the company just wants to buy some feel-good PR and “peace in our time.” Maybe it and its corporate and political colleagues are forgetting 1960s radical activist Jerry Rubin’s comment: “The more demands you satisfy, the more we’ve got.” And Winston Churchill’s blunt truth: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

All of it reminds me of the way several Egyptian journalists responded to President Obama’s 2015 commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy. “Climate change is a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security,” he asserted. “It will impact how our military defends our country.” Anyone who fails to recognize this is guilty of “dereliction of duty.”

The journalists reacted in disbelief. “Is he insane? Is he on drugs?” asked one. “What did you expect from a president who never served in the military and never worked a day in his life?” said the second. “I’m sure he’s not deliberately trying to destroy his country,” the first suggested. “Of course he is,” the third said.

Now millions of Americans appear perfectly willing to sacrifice their livelihoods, living standards, liberties and country on the altar of manmade climate Armageddon. Are they insane? Are they on drugs?

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

NASA Finally Agrees that Antarctic Ice has Long been Increasing

A NASA paper published in the Journal of Glaciology found that Antarctic ice has long been increasing in agreement with many other studies, but in disagreement with the UN IPCC report of 2013.  Its main conclusions are:

• The Antarctic ice sheet had net gains in ice of 112 billion tons per year from 1992 to 2001.
• Antarctic ice from 2003 to 2008 had a net gain of 82 billion tons per year.
• Extra snowfall in East Antarctica began about 10,000 years ago as the Earth warmed after the last Ice Age and this snowfall thickened the East Antarctic and the interior regions of the West Antarctic by 1.7 cm/year.  This accumulation over vast expanses more than offsets the melting of ice on the West Antarctic peninsula which gets so much publicity.
• The increased ice in Antarctica is now acting to reduce sea levels by 0.23 mm/year.

One of the more interesting observations on this data is that the global warming due to the end of the last Ice Age caused more snowfall in Antarctica, which serves to counterbalance the rise in sea level due to the thermal expansion of water in a warmer world.  This is one of many ways in which the Earth moderates climate changes.

The findings of this study were the result of more accurate measurements of the small thickening of the ice in most of Antarctica from satellite measurements, with the exception of the ice core investigations by others that indicated the increase in snowfall beginning 10,000 years ago.  It would not be surprising if the application of these satellite analysis methods to Greenland were to find that previous claims of large ice losses there were also wrong.  It is easy to observe large glaciers calving into the ocean while missing the slow increases of ice thickness over much larger areas.

The Ocean Acidification Myth

Professor Cliff Ollier of the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Western Australia has written an interesting and entertaining article on the myth of ocean acidification.  The oceans are always alkaline or basic, not acidic.  The acidity or alkalinity of water is measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 14, with 7 being neutral.  This is the pH scale and basic pH is greater than 7, while acidic pH is less than 7.  The oceans are commonly about pH 8.2 and it is very difficult to reduce the basic water even to neutral water because this is a logarithmic measurement.  Through at least the last 600 million years the oceans have not been acidic.  The most added dissolved CO2 does to the oceans is make them less basic or alkaline.

Among Professor Ollier's interesting comments:

• CO2 is critically needed by coral, shellfish, and marine plants.
• A volcanic vent bubbling huge amounts of CO2 to the surface is a favorite of divers because of the thriving life there, including corals.  The water there is fully saturated with CO2.
• Ocean pH varies by 0.3 by region and seasonally by 0.3 in a given area.
• The day to night variation in a coral pool was found to be 9.4 to 7.5, making claimed variations due to atmospheric CO2 look very inconsequential.
• Marine life evolved at much higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 than we have now or would have if CO2 atmospheric concentrations doubled.  As is the case with land plants, it appears that marine life is better served by higher CO2 concentrations.
• Under good conditions, a coral reef can grow by 2 cm a year and added CO2 helps.  [From 1870 to 200, the average rate of sea level rise is claimed to be 1.5 mm a year.  Faster rates of as high as 3.3 mm a year have been claimed for 1993 to 2009, but coral reef islands can keep up.  Indeed, they have to have had this capability to deal with past climate changes over the last few hundred million years.]  Most atoll islands are doing well in keeping up.
• Human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere compared to what some plants and animals have removed in making limestone are trivial.  There is far more CO2 in limestone than there is in the oceans and the atmosphere combined.  Because the oceans remain alkaline, this stored CO2 in the form of limestone is not released and the result is a CO2 deprived planet.

The Disappearance of the Arctic Ice Coverage

We are hearing many claims that the arctic ice has melted, retreated to historic low coverage, and that this is due to global warming.  Actually the big drivers of arctic ice coverage are usually wind and sometimes precipitation.  The main reason for the present low arctic ice coverage is an August cyclone that broke up the arctic ice coverage.  See the NASA video of the cyclone winds here.


Meanwhile, and little remarked, the ice coverage in Antarctica is near a record high.  At Real Science it is noted that:

Day 256 Antarctic ice is the highest ever for the date, and the eighth highest daily reading ever recorded. All seven higher readings occurred during the third week of September, 2007 – the week of the previous Arctic record minimum.

 See the Day 256 Antarctic ice coverage data below:

There is no evidence here for the often claimed global warming.  Perhaps we can find some evidence by looking at sea level data.  Well, here is the NOAA sea level data, which you must remember is the result of the sea level and the level of the land.  Just as the sea level may actually rise or fall, so does the land at these various coastal areas.  If you adjust the world map to examine North America and Europe, you will see that mostly the sea level is rising in the 0 to 3 mm/yr range indicated by upward green arrows.  In these areas, the land is relatively static and this is indicative of the range in which the real sea level rise is to be found.  But, you will observe that the Mississippi delta is sinking, as is the Texas coast at a more moderate rate.  Similarly to the Texas coast sinking, there is sinking land in South Carolina and in the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay areas.  On the other hand, there is rising land on the Canadian and Alaskan Pacific coasts and in parts of the St. Lawrence River area.  In Europe, most of Norway, Sweden, and Finland have rising land.  There are a few areas in the Aegean Sea that are sinking, but most of Europe has a sea level rise in the 0 to 3 mm/year range.

So, even at the top of this range, 100 years of rising at 3 mm/year is 0.3 meters, which is at the bottom end of the range of the 2007 4th IPCC report prediction for the next 100 years.  The NOAA data actually looks more consistent with a rate of 0.15 meters over the next 100 years, but even that may be too high given the indications of an on-coming global cooling.  Given that through most of the last 10,000 years sea level has been rising, though land levels in many areas have also as the weight of glaciers was removed from the land, there is no looming catastrophe here.

The Rising Seas Will Flood Bangladesh?

According to the UN IPCC AR4 report, the rising seas in the next 40 years will bring great destruction to the low-lying Bangladesh.  Like earlier exaggerated claims that 55% of the Netherlands was below sea level, this claim turns out to be wrong.  The UN report claimed that a three-foot rise in sea level would flood 17% of Bangladesh by 2050 and result in 20 million refugees.  The Center for Environment and Geographic Information in Dhaka, Bangladesh looked into this looming catastrophe.  They found that the UN IPCC forgot to take into account the fact that rivers arising in the Himalayan Mountains carry 1 billion tons of sediment through Bangladesh to the ocean.  The Ganges and the Brahmaputra are among these rivers and they dump this load of sediment where the river meets the ocean.  If the ocean rises, the rivers dump more of the sediment at the threatened land areas and builds them up.  In fact, recent measurements have noted that Bangladesh is actually rising.

Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Morner, the former head of the International Commission on Sea Level Change, says that despite fluctuations, the sea level has not risen in the last 50 years.  He says if there is a rise in the remainder of this century, it will not be more than 10 cm, with an uncertainty of 10 cm.  10 cm is about 4 inches.  He and his team went on six expeditions to the Maldive Islands and found no rise of the sea level there over the last 50 years.  Trips to Tuvalu, where leaders use the phantom of sea level rise to try to get welfare payments from the industrialized world, the sea has actually dropped, if anything, in recent decades.  Of course, Venice, Italy is sinking, literally.

The Dutch are now saying that only 26% of the Netherlands is below sea level, not the 55% claimed by the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.

The IBD article in the second link above concludes:

There's been a sea change in the consideration of the bogus claims of the IPCC, Gore, Britain's CRU and other climate charlatans. No longer accepted on faith, they are being challenged and disproven by scientific fact.

Our sediments exactly.

I added the emphasis to "sea change" and "sediments."  I would not want anyone to miss the fun.

The Melting of Arctic Sea Ice

According to Archimede's principle anything floating in water displaces its own weight in water.  Thus, an ice cube of pure water floating in pure water will not cause the water level to change at all when the ice melts.  But, the arctic ice is not floating in pure water, since ocean water is saline and a bit warmer than the ice.  According to a study by Professor Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds and colleagues called Recent Loss of Floating Ice and the Consequent Sea Level Contribution and published in Geophysical Research Letters, the loss of about 1.5 million ice bergs the size of the Titanic has resulted in a sea level rise of 49 micrometers!

Al Gore recently bought a home overlooking the beach in the elite Montecito area of Satellite Beach on an Atlantic Ocean coastal island.  He invested $8.875 million in it, so he apparently thinks that all of his dire predictions of catastrophic sea level rise is just so much bunkum for the lowly masses of peasants.  Apparently peddling such bunkum to them is very remunerative, however.  In view of this recent research finding, he may want to change keep an emergency life raft at his new home, perhaps tied to the top of his chimney.

For those of us with level heads, the diameter of a human hair lies in the range from 17 to 181 micrometers.  So, the melting of a huge amount of arctic sea ice still has no significant effect upon sea level.

UN IPCC AR4 Errors on Himalayan Glaciers Revealed

An article in the Seattle Times by Seth Borenstein notes that numerous claims made about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 were wrong.  As usual, all of the errors made it appear that global warming was much more dire than it actually is.  Here are the errors in a half page of the report:

• "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world." Cogley and Michael Zemp of the World Glacier Monitoring System said Himalayan glaciers are melting at about the same rate as other glaciers.
• It says that if the Earth continues to warm, the "likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high." Nowhere in peer-reviewed science literature is 2035 mentioned. However, there is a study from Russia that says glaciers could come close to disappearing by 2350. Probably the numbers in the date were transposed, Cogley said. 
• The paragraph says: "Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035." Cogley said there are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.
• The entire paragraph is attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from the WWF, Cogley said. And further, the IPCC likes to brag that it is based on peer-reviewed science, not advocacy group reports. Cogley said the WWF cited the popular science press as its source.
• A table says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840 meters. Then comes a math mistake: It says that's a rate of 135.2 meters a year, when it really is only 23.5 meters a year.

The Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh says that some glaciers are expanding and others are receding more slowly than indicated in the UN IPCC report. But secondly, note that an Indian scientist did speculate, not in a published paper, that the Himalayan glaciers might vanish by 2035.  He says his speculation should not have been used in the UN IPCC report.  Note that losing 400,000 square kilometers of glacier by 2035 is a much greater loss of sources of fresh water than is the loss of some fraction of the 33,000 square kilometers of actual Himalayan glacier and a much greater contributor to images of sea level rise.  The error on calculating the rate of retreat of the Pindari Glacier is especially foolish, since it was particularly easy for any reader to check the calculation.  The article rate of 23.5 meters/year is also actually wrong.  The rate is really 23.7 meters/year.

This set of errors, all favoring alarmism, is simply another indicator of a massive scientific fraud orchestrated by the UN IPCC, the Hadley Center and CRU of Great Britain, and NOAA and the NASA GISS of the U.S.  All of them aided and abetted by Al Gore, Tony Blair, Obama, Pelosi, many other socialist politicians, and much of the socialist press, which is most of the press.  The People have been massively betrayed here again by many scientists, almost all universities, many politicians, and most of the press.  The desire for money from governments and/or more control and power over other people's lives is just too great.  This is a great lesson in the perils of government grown beyond its rationally limited powers as defined in our Constitution, now ignored by our government and the fascist/Marxist/environmentalist intellectual pretenders and posers.

EPA Fraud: Antarctic Ice Growing

The EPA has just ruled, as it was politically certain it would, that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and they will regulate it as such. They will cause coal-fired electricity to become especially expensive and they will require still more stringent automotive fuel standards, raising the cost of our cars and putting us in ever more danger on the highways. This is being done primarily with the claim that the oceans will rise catastrophically if the American fossil fuel users do not make drastic cutbacks in fuel use. The fact that China, India, Brazil and other countries will continue to use ever more fuel will make any American cutbacks look very silly. Of course, it is silly to cut back fuel use and to make energy very expensive when there is no chance that the kind of catastrophic ocean level rise will occur for which the radical environmentalists are drooling.

Why not? First, there is at most a modest net loss of ice in Greenland. Second, 90% of the earth's ice is in Antarctica, along with 80% of its fresh water. While western Antarctica has suffered a loss of ice, eastern Antarctica is four times as large and much of it is getting colder. In fact, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research has issued a report saying the South Pole has had "significant cooling in recent decades." One wonders if this large cooling area was properly weighted into the claims that the earth was warming in the 1980s and until 1998.

The heavy calving of ice from the Wilkens Ice Shelf, is more than counterbalanced by the increase in ice in the Ross Sea area. The melting of sea ice has little effect on ocean levels anyway since the ice is already in the ocean. Land ice flowing into the ocean does have an effect, but the land ice in Antarctica is generally thickening. The worst case the SCAR report could envision was a rise of 1.25 meters by 2100, or only a quarter of the claims by some that up to 6 meters of rise might occur.

Last year, the ice near the Davis station of east Antarctica operated by Australia, had a fast ice thickness which at 1.89 meters was the thickest it had been in 10 years. The average thickness since the 1950s has been 1.67 meters.

The Geophysical Research Letters is about to publish a paper that will confirm that for 30 years the area of ice around the Antarctic continent has expanded.

So, where is the basis to be found for the EPA's declaration that the expected sea level rise will be a catastrophe requiring that the carbon dioxide we all breathe out and that plants must have to grow will have to be drastically reduced? It is not in science, it is not in the facts of reality. The basis is the need that socialists have to exercise more control over our personal lives. The basis is power lust. The basis is the change we can count on which will subjugate us all to the socialist elitists in the Obama administration and in the Democrat Congress.

Rising Oceans Due to Rising CO2

The usual viewpoint is that any observed rise in the ocean level is due to a combination of water expansion as the temperature increases and a usually smaller component due to some melting of polar ice caps and glaciers. Back on 28 March 2008 in a note called "Ocean Cooling with Expansion", I discussed the fact that the Argo buoy system had found the ocean temperature to be near constant, but perhaps dropping very slightly, over a four year period and yet sea level had risen by 0.5 inch. This was a mystery.

In the last paragraph of that note, I wondered how much of that rise might be due to an increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which has been rising steadily for the last 150 years. Some of this rise was because as the oceans warm, as they generally have following the end of the Little Ice Age, dissolved CO2 in the oceans is released. This will cause some contraction of the ocean and a fall in level, which is counteracted by any melting of polar ice and glaciers due to the same general warming occurring since the end of the Little Ice Age. But with no general warming of the oceans over the four year period, the main reason for the ongoing rise in CO2 in the atmosphere was presumably man burning fossil and organic fuels. So, with the ocean not warming and increased CO2 in the atmosphere, the oceans ought to absorb more CO2 and expand because of the absorption of the CO2. But how large an effect might this be, I wondered?

Well, Tom V. Segalstad at www.CO2web.info has done an interesting kitchen experiment. He put enough Ca(OH)2 in water to make the pH=8, which is the pH of the oceans. He then put a glass over a candle floating on the water and as the flame burned the water level remained constant. This shows that the burning process using oxygen from the air inside the glass and over the water and candle, was not producing a low pressure volume or vacuum and sucking more water in under the glass rim at the bottom of the container holding the water. Then, after the candle burned out because it had used the limited supply of oxygen in the air and had given off CO2 in the combustion process, the water level began to rise and rise dramatically. The CO2 was reacting with the Ca++ ions to form CaCO3 and the water expanded as the calcium carbonate content went up. In the real oceans, there are also many Na+ and K+ ions in addition to Ca++ ions, which form NaHCO3 and KHCO3 bicarbonates. So, it is very reasonable that the oceans expand also as the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere goes up with the removal of the CO2 to form bicarbonates and carbonates in the oceans. This process should be rather rapid, making the assertion by the IPCC that CO2 added to the atmosphere by man lasts 50 to 200 years look absurd, according to Tom Segalstad. It seems reasonable to me that he is right.

There are quite a few interesting things on Tom Segalstad's website. He has an information page with all sorts of key facts I have been looking for on such things as the thermal energy in the atmosphere compared to that in the oceans. As I was sure was the case, the ocean thermal energy is huge compared to the puny energy of the atmosphere, being about 2000 times larger. He also notes that the latent heat of melting of all of the ice on earth is an energy about 10 times greater than all of the energy in the earth's entire atmosphere. This ice mass is a huge buffer against warming.

Chicken Little at the Washington Post

On Sunday, 25 January 2009, the Washington Post ran an article called Warming Trends Alter Conservation. It filled most of page A3 with a large picture of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland's Eastern Shore and two maps of the refuge showing the marsh boundaries now and as projected in 2100 using a conservative estimate for sea-level rise, or so the large font text above the maps claims. Of course, little of the marsh land remains under their projection. The alarm bells ring violently for most readers, I am sure.

I had observed this article because my wife was reading it. I asked, "How much sea-level rise are they projecting in their 'conservative estimate'?" Anna: "I don't know. It has not been mentioned yet, but I am still reading the article." Charles: "I'll bet it is not actually conservative." Anna, with some annoyance: "Oh, you don't believe anything in the Post." It is dangerous to disagree with the Post or all sources of the conventional wisdom. People, even those you love and who love you, will resent your being a know-it-all. But, what can I do but judge the media on their track record? I am doomed to being resented!

Sure, enough, in paragraph 18 of this long 21 paragraph article by Juliet Eilperin the Wildlife Federation turns up as the source of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge maps. These were based on the "conservative" sea-level rise of 27 inches by the year 2100. They said that the Chesapeake Bay region would lose 90% of its tidal fresh marsh, tidal swamp, and brackish marsh.

This is interesting. The IPCC's Third Assessment Report of 2001 estimated sea-level rise by 2100 to be at most 27 inches, equalling the 'conservative' estimate of the Wildlife Federation. One would have thought that in 2002, the Wildlife Federation would have used the mid-range or bottom limit projection of sea-level rise as a conservative estimate, not the maximum limit rise of the 2001 IPCC report! Moreover, the long-since available IPCC Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 revised this estimate, along with temperature estimates, drastically downward. This report estimates sea-level rise to be between 8.5 and 18.5 inches. The middle of this range is 13.5 inches. This mid-range sea-level rise is half of that which the Wildlife Federation claimed to be 'conservative.' Apparently, the Wildlife Federation is neither competent in keeping up with the IPCC reports nor able to comprehend the meaning of the word 'conservative.'

After the cut-off date for the IPCC report of 2007, G. B. Woppelmann and colleagues published a paper in Global and Planetary Change using GPS satellite data to measure sea-level rise and continental landmass rise, which may have caused the 2007 IPCC report to project even lower sea-level rise estimates. The land masses covered with ice in the last ice age are still rising due to the loss of weight of crushing ice which melted long ago. The relaxation of the continental masses in response to the loss of weight on them is a very slow process, but one with important consequences for the usual sea-level measurements which reference sea-level to the land. Correcting for the rise of land, the sea-level rise over a one hundred year span is less than 5.5 inches!

So, a conservative estimate of the rise of sea-level by 2100 should be 5.5 inches, not 27 inches, which was the upper end range of the estimate by the 2001 IPCC report, which upper limit was reduced by the 2007 report to 18.5 inches. That 2007 report had a lower range limit of 8.5 inches sea-level rise, which might have been taken as a 'conservative' estimate prior to the important work of Woppelmann and colleagues in 2007. The map of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge would surely look less dismal for a projected conservative sea-level rise of 5.5 inches!

Who is Juliet Eilperin? Obviously, she is not a very competent staff writer. She does not check her facts. This would be true if she were just a general topic reporter given an out-of-the-blue assignment to write up an article on nature conservancy and global warming. According to the Huffington Post she is:

A born-and-bred Washington [sic], Juliet Eilperin graduated in 1992 magna cum laude from Princeton University, where she received a bachelor’s in Politics with a certificate in Latin American Studies. In the fall of 1992 she went to Seoul, South Korea on a Luce Scholarship, which allowed her to cover politics and economics for an English-language magazine. Returning to Washington, Ms. Eilperin wrote for Louisiana and Florida papers at States News Service and then joined Roll Call newspaper after the Republicans seized Congress in 1994. In March 1998 she joined The Washington Post as its House of Representatives reporter, where she covered the impeachment of Bill Clinton, lobbying, legislation, and four national congressional campaigns.

Since April of 2004 she has covered the environment for the national desk, reporting on science, policy and politics in areas including climate change, oceans, and air quality. In pursuit of these stories she has gone scuba diving with sharks in the Bahamas, trekking on the Arctic tundra, and searching on her hands and knees for rare insects in the caves of Tennessee.

During her first year at the Post Ms. Eilperin was the most prolific writer on the news staff, writing more than 200 stories. In the spring of 2005 she served as the McGraw Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, teaching political reporting to a group of undergraduate and graduate students. This spring Rowman & Littlefield has published her first book, “Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives.”

It does make it easier and faster to be "the most prolific writer on the news staff" if you do not bother to learn anything about your subject or to check your facts! Can you imagine all the harm and falsehoods this writer has spread through her many articles in the Washington Post? Apparently, Princeton thought she had all the necessary tools to be an effective socialist propaganda generator and made her a magna cum laude graduate in recognition of those skills. Critical thinkers need not apply! After her track record was well-established, they further encouraged her by making her McGraw Professor of Journalism at Princeton and allowed her to warp the minds of younger Princeton students. Sorry, but I am very unimpressed by both Ms. Eilperin and Princeton University.

Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

I wish to direct my readers to an excellent review of the climate literature on the subjects of global temperature and climate related to the observed increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide which has occurred since 1870. The rate of increase in CO2 has been faster since about 1950 than it was before that date. This review by Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, and Willie Soon was published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (2007) 12, 79-90 and was entitled Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Because the article was written for physicians, it is well aimed for my audience of intelligent people, who may very well not be up on the latest jargon of climatologists or all the details of the many ocean cycles, etc.

The first figure of the article shows the temperature measured at the surface of the Sargasso Sea, which is a large area of the Atlantic, over a 3,000 year period using isotope ratios of marine organisms left in the sediment. The average temperature of this period is drawn as a reference and it is seen that the height of Greek civilization occurred during a warm period with a maximum temperature about 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than the average temperature, that the Roman period corresponded to a temperature period very near average, that the Fall of Rome and the Dark Ages corresponded to a period in which the temperature dropped by about 1 degree Centigrade, followed by the Medival Climate Optimum during which conditions improved in Europe, followed again by a decrease called the Little Ice Age, followed again by a return to a very nearly average temperature, where we are today. The French and Indian War and the American Revolution were during the coldest parts of the Little Ice Age, with conditions few living Americans would prefer to those of the present near average temperature. This figure is shown below:

They then show that the shortening of glaciers occurred well before increases in the atmospheric CO2 began. It began as a result of the warming ending the Little Ice Age. They show that the arctic temperature correlates very well back to 1880 with solar activity and does not correlate with atmospheric CO2. Then they show that the increase in annual mean surface temperature in the contiguous United States from 1880 to 2006 was 0.5 degree Centigrade per century. This is a temperature difference well within the 3 degree Centigrade variance over the last 3,000 years and one which few people would notice personally. A 0.5 C temperature increase is caused by an increase in solar activity of about 0.21% and the measured increase in solar activity from 1900 to 2000 was 0.19%.

During the recovery from the Little Ice Age, U.S. climate has improved with more rainfall, fewer tornadoes, and no increase in hurricane activity. Sea level has trended upward over the last 150 years at a rate of 7 inches per century. This sea level rise also began with the end of the Little Ice Age, rather than with the major increases in atmospheric CO2.

During the past 50 years, human use of hydrocarbons has increased 6-fold, but the increase in atmospheric CO2 has been only 22%. This increase in atmospheric CO2 has stimulated plant growth, which is good for both humans and other animals. Higher CO2 concentrations allow plants to grow faster and larger and to grow better in drier climates than otherwise. The Industrial Revolution has not only improved human life, but it has benefited plant life and the animals who depend upon plants. Increased warmth has also made life a bit easier for most plants and animals. The historical record of bursts in human civilizations also seems strongly to correlate with the warmer periods of the last 3,000 years.

Ocean Cooling with Expansion?

While visiting Robert Bidinotto's Blog, I found a note he had written on an account called The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat by Richard Harris of NPR. This article discusses the Argo buoy system finding that the oceans are not only not warming, but they are if anything cooling slightly. But, Harris goes on to note that in the last 4 years in which these measurements were made, the oceans also rose about 0.5 inches. It is said there that this is a lot. In general, the Global Warming alarmists have been cranking up the fear that there will be very great sea level increases due to man emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere. Certainly 0.5 inch is not a lot, except that those of this alarmist mindset have a tendency to project change at the rate measured over short times far into the future if it is consistent with catastrophe. Ofttimes, they will even assume positive feedbacks that amplify the rate of change in the future.

Wikipedia has an article called Sea Level Rise. There is a plot on the first page showing the rise in sea level since the last Glacial Maximum about 21,000 years ago. There has been a rise of sea level of about 125 meters since then. However, for the last 7,000 years, there has been little change in sea level, but there is a slightly positive slope to the data since then. Since about 1910, there has been a roughly linear increase in sea level of about 20 cm or a bit less than 8 inches, according to the first graph in the article, titled Recent Sea Level Rise. If you examine the fluctuations in that curve, you will see that in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s there is a sudden dip in sea level followed by a rapid increase. These changes were at least 3 cm, or about 1.2 inches. Still, the overall averaged curve before and after that time is approximately linear. With this perspective, a 0.5 inch change in 4 years is not a reason to throw industry and the automobile upon the scrapheap. They would love to tie humans down to propelling grind stones by walking in circles hour after hour and put horses back on our roads.

The NPR article mentions ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland as a possible reason for the sea level increase in the last 4 years, since there has been no thermal expansion of the ocean water due to increased temperature in that time. However, with most of Antarctica experiencing an increase in ice cap thickness, while only the western peninsula is losing ice, it is not clear that the Antarctica effect is very large or even a positive one. Greenland also has areas of receding glaciers and others with ice thickness increases. There has been recent growth of ice in western Greenland and in the interior regions, while there has been loss of ice near the sea on the eastern side. What is the net effect on the sea level?

There are other factors that affect sea level:

• Sediment washed into the seas
• Changes in the salinity of ocean water
• Changes in the amount of dissolved gases such as oxygen and carbon dioxide.
• Earth rotational variations or Chandler wobble
• El Nino/southern oscillation
• Tectonic plate movements
• Volcanic creation of new land masses in the ocean
• Earthquakes dropping land into the sea or opening new chasms undersea
• Atmospheric humidity
• Changes in water in lakes, rivers, soil, and minerals on land
  

These factors are not commonly going to be constant over any 4 year period of time. The Wikipedia article also notes that the TOPEX and JASON satellites making sea level measurements since 1992 have determined a 2.9 +- 0.4 mm sea level rise since 1992. This is an error of about 14% and the error over any four-year period is probably substantially larger. So, there is likely to be significant error in the 0.5 inch measurement.

It would be very interesting if a contributor to the sea level rise proved to be an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans. Since the CO2 in the atmosphere has increased in the last 4 years and the ocean temperature has not, the equilibrium in the exchange of CO2 molecules between the oceans and the atmosphere will be shifted due to the present higher concentration in the atmosphere. This means that the oceans will dissolve more carbon dioxide and that will increase the volume of the ocean waters. I do not know the size of this effect and whether it is a substantial part of a 0.5 inch rise in sea level, however. It would be interesting to learn something about the magnitude of this effect.