Breitbart makes fun of the idea that loans and insurance could ever be had if these Islands are soon to underwater… unless these banks and insurance companies know that “Climate Change” is more political than science
Great news from the scuba-diving tropical paradise Maldives. They’ve just opened another airport.
This means that the Indian Ocean island nation now has four international airports and seven domestic ones. Quite a lot for a country with a population of less than 400,000. Presumably they have high hopes for their tourist industry as they develop luxury resorts on ever more remote atolls.
[….]
Here’s the World Bank: “Climate change presents a challenge for every island in the Maldives, which all lie on the sea level. Any changes in the climate will greatly affect the Maldivian way of life.”
Here’s the UN Foundation: “Climate change is a serious threat to low lying islands like Maldives whose landmass is close to sea level. The projected rise in sea level over the next century due to climate change is commonly agreed to be about one meter. The highest point on this island nation is one meter. Learn more about the existential threat of climate change on this island and learn more about how the country is pressing for global action on climate change.”
And let us never forget the tragically moving, yet cheery-in-the-face-of-disaster underwater cabinet meeting staged by the Maldives government in 2009 to draw international attention to the terrible and imminent threat these poor islands face.
Luckily I have thought up a brilliant solution to this problem. Maybe the lucky Maldives (the thriving tourist paradise) could help the unlucky Maldives (the one about to be drowned by global warming) with money and material aid. Perhaps it could use its vast tourist revenues to mitigate against any problems caused by this terrible “climate change” thing. Perhaps it could use its 11 airports to help evacuate the other Maldives’ climate refugees.
(GATEWAY PUNDIT): Seven years ago ABC News warned viewers that New York City will be under water by 2015 due to global warming. (See also NEWSBUSTERS)
New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015. The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, “It’s June 8th, 2015.”
“One carton of milk is $12.99.” (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction for the current year: “Gas reached over $9 a gallon.”
The only way food would be soo high is if Obama’s war on affordable energy works it’s course!
How come Manhattan property is through the roof!
(Breitbart) In 2006, on NBC’s Today Show, former-Vice President Al Gore predicted that Manhattan would be flooded in “15 to 20 years.” He added, “In fact the World Trade Center Memorial site would be underwater.” Just 3 years ago, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority predicted that within the next ten years, “Irene-like storms of the future would put a third of New York City streets under water and flood many of the tunnels leading into Manhattan in under an hour because of climate change[.]”
By hook or crook, through super storms or glacier melt, Global CoolingGlobal Warming Climate Change has doomed the Big Apple.
What we have here are two of the most respected environmental voices among the political Left — Gore and the government — warning of dire flooding hitting Manhattan within the next 10 years. And at least according to their activism, the predominantly left-wing, Global Warming believers of Manhattan are listening. Furious about the lack of wealth-distribution that will save the planet and their small island, just 6 months ago, more than 300,000 took to the streets of Manhattan to protest.
And yet, a funny thing is happening in the real world of the free market. Manhattan might be the elite media/entertainment/intellectual hub of the cult of Global Warming, but where the rubber meets the bottom line, the cult obviously doesn’t really believe in its own propaganda. If they did, Manhattan real estate prices would be collapsing, not hitting record highs as they currently are.
If people truly believe an area is going to be flooded as soon as in the next decade, those same people would be selling off their real estate. Not just to escape but to sell before conditions worsened and real estate prices bottomed out further. As the deadline loomed closer, prices would decrease further.
The average Manhattan home price is now over $1.7 million. With some apartment prices now breaking nine figures, it’s time to take a look at the booming New York real estate market and explore where middle class families fit into the picture.
At 157 West 57th Street, the most expensive New York home sale was just completed with the penthouse of this new building going for over $100 million.
Howard Lorber, the chairman of Douglas Elliman, the city’s largest residential brokerage, told me that there is no sign of this trend slowing down. He called New York a safe place for people around the world to invest in real estate.
Maybe what’s happening is that Manhattan’s left-wing Global Warming believers are suckering right-wing Climate Deniers into buying doomed real estate at record prices?
How come those that warn us about sea rise keep buying property by the sea?
BILL GATES:
(BREITBART)Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been exposed as the ultimate climate-denier with the purchase of a $43 million oceanfront home.
Riddle me this…
If you truly believe in Global Cooling, Global Warming, Climate Change, or whatever-these-proven-frauds-are-calling-it-now is a real and imminent crisis, that means you believe the oceans are destined to rise and flood the coasts and that this will happen in your lifetime… So why would anyone who professes to believe such a thing — as Gates regularly does — invest $43 million in oceanfront real estate?
They wouldn’t — unless they are a madman or a liar, and when it comes to Gates and the rest of the climate phonies, my money is always on the latter.
The facts are this…
If you judge Gates by his meaningless words, he is not a climate denier. But where it matters… In his actions, his behavior, his multi-million dollar investments, Gates is one of the biggest climate deniers in the history of climate denying.
No one — not even if you’re worth billions — pisses away $43 million. Which proves that just like CNN and Barack Obama, Bill Gates is a Climate Change activist who knows it’s all a hoax (and trust me, it is) because no one who truly believes the oceans will flood the coasts would invest 43 million goddamned dollars on a doomed house that sits right on the ocean…..
JOHN KERRY:
(DAILY WIRE) In 2017, Kerry bought historic waterfront property at Seven Gates Farm in Chilmark. Using a private realty trust, Kerry paid $11.75 million for 18.5 acres and a house overlooking Vineyard Sound.
“The seven-bedroom house dates to 1924 and sits on one of 39 original sites that were created over time by the Seven Gates Farm Corporation on land originally collected by Nathaniel Shaler in the 19th century,” The Vineyard Gazette reported. “The Seven Gates Farm property is tucked into a rolling hillside with distant views of the Elizabeth islands, where Mr. Kerry, a member of the Forbes family on his mother’s side, has long ties.”
The ironic juxtaposition caught the attention of Charlie Kirk, a conservative commentator and founder of Turning Point USA. “If Joe Biden’s special ‘Climate Envoy,’ John Kerry, actually believed in Global Warming & rising sea levels, why would he live in a $12,000,000 waterfront mansion on the island of Martha’s Vineyard?”
Kerry’s house is not far from the mansion bought by former President Barack Obama, who famously declared that his 2008 election marked “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
The Obamas bought a 29-acre beachfront plot with a nearly 7,000-square-foot main house. It’s got seven bedrooms and 8½ bathrooms, TMZ reported last year. But Obama spent eight years in the White House saying melting ice caps would cause sea levels to rise, at some point washing over islands and pushing into oceanside communities. Take a look here.
That, too, drew reaction on social media. “If you truly believe that climate change is going to be as devastating as the pundits are saying (ex: the island of Manhattan will soon be underwater), why would you gamble $15M to buy an island estate directly on the water?”….
OBAMA:
(YAHOO NEWS) …Marty Nesbitt, a close friend of the Obamas and chairman of the Obama Foundation, purchased a tract of land in Hawaii for $8.7 million in 2015, miles from where the two families would visit every Christmas during the president’s time in office, and is building a trio of houses on the beachfront estate.
The Obamas are believed to be planning to occupy at least one of the houses when construction is complete.
The project has been controversial locally, in large part because the developers requested and received an exemption from Hawaii’s environmental laws to leave in place an old sea wall on the beach.
Environmental experts say sea walls contribute significantly to beach erosion and should be removed, but plans were submitted to the state to expand the sea wall on the property.
The Obamas own an $11.75 million mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, near the water as well…..
GORE:
Even Al Gore, whose warnings about the danger of climate change have been among the most dramatic from a politician, has invested in property overlooking the ocean he says will wipe out coastal towns. (WASHINGTON EXAMINER)
FAILED PREDICTIONS
For more than 50 years Climate Alarmists in the scientific community and environmental movement have not gotten even one prediction correct, but they do have a perfect record of getting 41 predictions wrong. In other words, on at least 41 occasions, these so-called experts have predicted some terrible environmental catastrophe was imminent … and it never happened. And not once — not even once! — have these alarmists had one of their predictions come true. aei
Below are the 41 failed doomsday, eco-pocalyptic predictions (with links):
1. 1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975 2. 1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969) 3. 1970: Ice Age By 2000 4. 1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980 5. 1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030 6. 1972: New Ice Age By 2070 7. 1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast 8. 1974: Another Ice Age? 9. 1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life (data and graph) 10. 1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent 11. 1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes (additional link) 12. 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend (additional link) 13. 1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s 14. 1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs 15. 1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they’re not) 16. 1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000 17. 1989: New York City’s West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it’s not) 18. 2000: Children Won’t Know what Snow Is 19. 2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don’t Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy 20. 2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024 21. 2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018 22. 2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013 23. 2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World 24. 2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to ‘Save The Planet From Catastrophe’ 25. 2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014 26. 2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015 (additional link) 27. 2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos’ 28. 1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide 29. 1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources 30. 1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years 31. 1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years 32. 1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 1990s 33. 1980: Peak Oil In 2000 34. 1996: Peak Oil in 2020 35. 2002: Peak Oil in 2010 36. 2006: Super Hurricanes! 37. 2005 : Manhattan Underwater by 2015 38. 1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985 39. 1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable 40. 1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish 41. 1970s: Killer Bees!
Update: I’ve added 9 additional failed predictions (via Real Climate Science) below to make it an even 50 for the number of failed eco-pocalyptic doomsday predictions over the last 50 years.
42. 1975: The Cooling World and a Drastic Decline in Food Production 43. 1969: Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century 44. 1972: Pending Depletion and Shortages of Gold, Tin, Oil, Natural Gas, Copper, Aluminum 45. 1970: Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980 46. 1988: World’s Leading Climate Expert Predicts Lower Manhattan Underwater by 2018 47. 2005: Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020 48. 2000: Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past 49.1989: UN Warns That Entire Nations Wiped Off the Face of the Earth by 2000 From Global Warming 50. 2011: Washington Post Predicted Cherry Blossoms Blooming in Winter
But somehow this time will be different, and the ‘experts’ and 16-year olds of today will suddenly be correct in their new predictions of eco-doom and eco-disaster? Not.
[….]
This is my most concise expose of climate fraud. Please pass it around to everyone you know and your elected officials. The video is short, but cuts right to the heart of the matter.
Global Warming Fear Mongering (1988 Flashback: Maldives Edition)
Here is an example of failed predictions that new orgs love to report for their “immediacy” of danger… which makes news “exciting” ~ click to isolate this 1988 prediction:
This seems odd in light of Maldives spending many millions of dollars to build two new airports.
Shouldn’t they be investing in life rafts? Or are Western busy-bodies the only ones really worried about “man-caused” global warming? Here is a Canadian Free Press story:
The Maldives in the Indian Ocean have long been used by global warming alarmists to drive home the dangers of rising sea levels should polar ice sheets keep melting because of man-made global warming. In 2012 former President of the Maldive Islands, Mohammed Nasheed, said, “If carbon emissions continue at the rate they are climbing today, my country will be under water in seven years.”
With such a prediction and recalling how the latest UN IPCC report boosted its estimate of sea level rise, taking into account that CO2 emissions show no signs of abating, you would think the Maldives would be the last place developers would build anything. The Maldives are barely more than a meter above sea level on average. Yet as Pierre Gosselin reports, “The tourist industry does not believe in the downfall of the Maldives. Thirty additional new luxury class hotel complexes are planned for the next 6 to 10 years, not counting the countless smaller homes. Tourism is currently increasing 20% annually. Whatever is really behind all the rising seal level scar stories, huge commercial investors are obviously dismissing them. If anything, these scare stories are providing lots of publicity for the island’s tourism industry. Already more than 1 million tourists are flocking to the islands every year and Nasheed says the island can handle many more.
The developers are on safe ground in spite of Nasheed’s dire warnings. There is a lot of science supporting the tourism industry’s belief that sea level rise is not a problem.
What — in our past — is still worse than today’s “scares” and droughts?
Manhattan and Maldives Property Value Keeps Going Up
BREITBARTmakes fun of the idea that loans and insurance could ever be had if these Islands are soon to underwater… unless these banks and insurance companies know that “Climate Change” is more political than science
Great news from the scuba-diving tropical paradise Maldives. They’ve just opened another airport.
This means that the Indian Ocean island nation now has four international airports and seven domestic ones. Quite a lot for a country with a population of less than 400,000. Presumably they have high hopes for their tourist industry as they develop luxury resorts on ever more remote atolls.
[….]
Here’s the World Bank: “Climate change presents a challenge for every island in the Maldives, which all lie on the sea level. Any changes in the climate will greatly affect the Maldivian way of life.”
Here’s the UN Foundation: “Climate change is a serious threat to low lying islands like Maldives whose landmass is close to sea level. The projected rise in sea level over the next century due to climate change is commonly agreed to be about one meter. The highest point on this island nation is one meter. Learn more about the existential threat of climate change on this island and learn more about how the country is pressing for global action on climate change.”
And let us never forget the tragically moving, yet cheery-in-the-face-of-disaster underwater cabinet meeting staged by the Maldives government in 2009 to draw international attention to the terrible and imminent threat these poor islands face.
Luckily I have thought up a brilliant solution to this problem. Maybe the lucky Maldives (the thriving tourist paradise) could help the unlucky Maldives (the one about to be drowned by global warming) with money and material aid. Perhaps it could use its vast tourist revenues to mitigate against any problems caused by this terrible “climate change” thing. Perhaps it could use its 11 airports to help evacuate the other Maldives’ climate refugees.
“Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise.
“88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.
“It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size.
These results show that atoll and island areal stability is a global trend, whatever the rate of sea-level rise.”- Duvat, 2019
[….]
In other words, the Earth’s coasts gained more land area then were lost to rising sea levels.
“Earth’s surface gained 115,000 km2 of water and 173,000 km2 of land over the past 30 years, including 20,135 km2 of water and 33,700 km2 of land in coastal areas.” (Donchyts et al., 2016)
As a visual example, Ahmed et al. (2018) find that Bangladesh’s coastal land area grew by 7.9 km2 per year during 1985-2015.
“This paper draws upon the application of GIS and remote sensing techniques to investigate the dynamic nature and management aspects of land in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. … This research reveals that the rate of accretion [coastal land growth] in the study area is slightly higher than the rate of erosion. Overall land dynamics indicate a net gain of 237 km2 (7.9 km2annual average) of land in the area for the whole period from 1985 to 2015.” (Ahmed et al., 2018)
I wanted to draw the people who believe this (rising oceans) attention to a very old photograph compared to a new one to compare La Jolla (California) sea levels from 1871 to Now (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
Also, Photographs show no change in Sydney sea level over the last 130 years (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
Much like the “Polar Bear Scare” – Polar Bears reaching a record population since being measured, I tell my “warmist” friends that we should burn more CO2 because if we were worried about CO2 when the population was thought to be decreasing… why aren’t we lauding it as it increases?!
LIKEWISE – here is a report about the “disappearing islands due to “SEA RISE“:
“…the pair of New Zealand researchers set out to examine historical changes in 87 islands found within the Jaluit Atoll…over the period 1945-2010. During this time, the islands were subjected to ongoing sea level rise and the passage of a notable typhoon…which caused severe damage with its >100 knot winds and abnormal wave heights…caused a decrease in total island land area of approximately five percent, yet Ford and Kench write that “despite [this] significant typhoon-driven erosion and a relaxation period coincident with local sea-level rise, [the] islands have persisted and grown.” Between 1976 and 2006, for example, 73 out of the 87 islands increased in size, and by 2010, the total landmass of the islands had exceeded the pre-typhoon area by nearly 4 percent.”
Should we encourage China to build MORE coal plants? Hmmm?
An older challenge was about ANWR… and running a pipeline from Alaska to a port. Eco-fascists use to tell me that it was bad for the caribou species in the area. Then someone did a study and found the caribou population thrived as they used the pipeline to break the harsh elements. After that study came out, the challenge faded into history. But, it caused headlines that swayed public opinion… truth being hindmost in the Left’s arsenal. One last example of this statement for context:
“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders…. Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)
David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), [FN] 161.
JO NOVAcatches us up with the latest studies involving islans shrinking:
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 a resort on, that’s about that is about ten Rugby fields. Conveniently for us, no island bigger than 10 hectares shrank despite the world adding two thousand coal fired plants and a billion cars.
[….]
See the graph. All the larger islands are staying the same size or growing.
WATTS UP WITH THAT has the abstract and the conclusion of the study. Here is the abstract:
Abstract: 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. Atoll islands affected by rapid sea-level rise did not show a distinct behavior compared to islands on other atolls. Island behavior correlated with island size, and no island smaller than 10 ha decreased in size. This threshold could be used to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy and to assess atoll countries and territories’ vulnerability to climate change. Beyond emphasizing the major role of climate drivers in causing substantial changes in the configuration of islands, this reanalysis of available data indicates that these drivers explain subregional variations in atoll behavior and within-atoll variations in island and shoreline (lagoon vs. ocean) behavior, following atoll-specific patterns. Increasing human disturbances, especially land reclamation and human structure construction, operated on atoll-to-shoreline spatial scales, explaining marked within-atoll variations in island and shoreline behavior. Collectively, these findings highlight the heterogeneity of atoll situations. Further research needs include addressing geographical gaps (Indian Ocean, Caribbean, north-western Pacific atolls), using standardized protocols to allow comparative analyses of island and shoreline behavior across ocean regions, investigating the role of ecological drivers, and promoting interdisciplinary approaches. Such efforts would assist in anticipating potential future changes in the contributions and interactions of key drivers.
ADDITION
(h/t to CLIMATE DEPOT)NEW SCIENTISThas an inconvenient article about some islands we have been warned of that sea rise will create “climate refugees” is not so:
Rising seas are eating away at small islands and will eventually turn their inhabitants into climate refugees, right? Not so for some of the world’s most threatened islands, which have grown despite experiencing dramatic sea level rise.
Funafuti atoll, which includes the capital of Tuvalu, is an islet archipelago in the tropical Pacific Ocean made from coral debriswashed up from an underlying reef by waves, winds and currents. Over the past 60 years the sea has risen by around 30 centimetres locally,sparking warnings that the atoll is set to disappear.
But Paul Kench of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and colleagues found no evidence of heightened erosion. After poring over more than a century’s worth of data, including old maps and aerial and satellite imagery, they conclude that 18 out of 29 islands have actually grown.
As a whole, the group grew by more than 18 hectares, while many islands changed shape or shifted sideways.
“There is still considerable speculation that islands will disappear as sea level rises,” says Kench. “Our data indicates that the future of islands is significantly different.”
Storms and other disturbances that churn up the sea seem to be more important than sea level in influencing stability, says Kench. Storms break up coral, which then gets deposited on the atolls. He says other coral reef islands are likely to evolve in the same way, and that the Maldives seem to be showing a similar effect.
“There is presently no evidence that these islands are going to sink,” says Virginie Duvat of the University of La Rochelle in France. She says that she and other researchers are trying to fight the widespread misconception that sea level rise will mean the end for atolls….
Prince EA’s mentioning that a future generation of people will not know what trees are is JUST LIKE people telling us kids will not know what snow is like:
Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.
Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.
[….]
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
Funny thing is, some record breaking snow-fall followed in the years after… so much so that kids wished they forgot what it was.
But in all seriousness we are seeing similar dire predictions fail about the deforestation of trees. Keep in mind this is not a polemic proving all stories of deforestation false. I merely wish to bring some balance to the issue. For instance, in the Amazon, well over 95% of deforestation comes from cattle ranching, commercial agriculture, and infrastructure improvements. Less than 5% is from legal and illegal logging. Take note as well that The New York Times makes the point that,
“…for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.”
I love balance.
William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame, mentioned in a National Geographic video that, “rainforests [are] being cleared at the rate of 20 football fields per minute.” If this were truly the case, the forests would have been completely wiped out years ago. In Prince EA’s video he said 40 football fields! In an interview with Dr. Evaristo Eduardo de Miranda (one of the world’s leading experts on deforestation in the Amazon, is a professor of ecology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest institution of higher learning, and president of ECOFORCE, a private, nonprofit, environmental research/educational institution), he was asked where these numbers come from:
Q. There have been many reports by environmental groups in the U.S. claiming that the Amazon rain forest is being destroyed at a frightening pace. Many conflicting statistics are given concerning the alleged rate of destruction — 4 million hectares per year, 8 million hectares per year, 50,000 acres per day, etc. What are the facts and where are these statistics coming from?
A. A good example of this is the report released at the Earth Summit by the FAO [United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization]. FAO claims that the world tropical deforestation rate is 16.9 million hectares per year. FAO has up to the present been still using their discredited 8 million hectares per year rate for deforestation in Brazil. But when pressed at the summit they conceded to the 2.1 million hectares annually that the INPE, the Brazilian national space agency, has asserted is the real rate. This is an admission that they were inflating the deforestation rate by nearly 300 percent.
But they also said that deforestation for all of South America is 6.9 million hectares annually, which raises an obvious problem. Since Brazil has 70 percent of South America’s tropical forests, it would be incredible to suggest that other countries are deforesting at the levels necessary for the FAO figures to be valid. If you subtract the 2.1 million [Brazilian hectares] from the [FAO’s] 6.9 million, you have 4.8 million hectares being cut down annually in the 30 percent of South American tropical forests outside of Brazil. That is far greater than any data shows.
There is a similar problem with their annual 16.9 million hectares statistic for world deforestation. If you subtract Brazil’s 2.1 million, then you must ask who deforests the other 14.8 million hectares. When they were asked these questions, the FAO could not answer. They could not break the numbers down country by country or show any other means by which they arrived at this figure.
Q. No maps, no satellite photos, no national data ? Where did they conjure up these figures?
A. They were put in a very bad light because they could produce nothing to substantiate these fantastic figures. This is an important example, because if the FAO cannot sustain these numbers, then you can imagine that these eco-groups — the NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] — could not either. They always use these big numbers to make sensational news stories, but they never can break the aggregate numbers down to show where they come from, and they never produce maps with alleged areas of deforestation specified so that they can be independently verified.
One comment from the inter-webs noted: “The Amazon is just fine, as the people are moving out of the jungle to the cities and the jungle is raging back quite nicely. It’s in Indonesia and the area that the forests are being cut down for palm oil/biofuel productions.” Yep
In fact, the co-founder and long-time director of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, said: “All these save-the-forests arguments are based on bad science…. They are quite simply wrong… [Phillip Stott and I] found that the Amazon rainforests is more than 90% intact. We flew over it and met all the environmental authorities. We studied satellite pictures of the entire area.” Phillip Stott, who has 30 years of studying tropical forests under his belt as well as being professor of biogeography at London University mentioned that, “there are now still – despite what humans have done – more rainforests today than there were 12,000 years ago.”
Conventional wisdom is often challenged as well by climatologists and specialists in their field. The NEW YORK TIMES passes along the complexity of an issue most people take for granted:
…Deforestation accounts for about 20 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide. The assumption is that planting trees and avoiding further deforestation provides a convenient carbon capture and storage facility on the land.
That is the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is wrong.
[….]
Planting trees and avoiding deforestation do offer unambiguous benefits to biodiversity and many forms of life. But relying on forestry to slow or reverse global warming is another matter entirely.
The science says that spending precious dollars for climate change mitigation on forestry is high-risk: We don’t know that it would cool the planet, and we have good reason to fear it might have precisely the opposite effect. More funding for forestry might seem like a tempting easy win for the world leaders at the United Nations, but it’s a bad bet.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN gets a bit more detailed regarding the above. But this is a very complicated issue… especially since chopping down massive forests is being posited as a boon to fight “global warming” – to wit:
…A 2007 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that global-scale deforestation would result in a net cooling, as the changes in albedo and evaporation would overwhelm the impact of all that carbon being released into the atmosphere. But that doesn’t mean we should go about chopping down every tree we can—on the whole, preserving tropical forests and even adding more trees in the equatorial latitudes will be beneficial for the climate, not to mention the biodiversity that depends on rainforests. But large-scale reforestation or afforestation projects in the north may not be the best idea, as Lee says:
People are debating whether afforestation is a good idea in high latitudes. If you plant trees you sequester carbon, which is a benefit to the climate system. At the same time, if you plant trees you warm the landscape because trees are darker compared to other vegetation types. So they absorb solar radiation.
The study is another reminder of just how devilishly complicated the climate system really is….
Like I said – challenging conventional wisdom. In reality, what throws many of these studies of deforestation off is the urban heat island effect and rural cold island effect. For more on this see Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy’s (bio) book/chapter: “Climate Change: Myths & Realities”, 2008 — Chapter 7: Ecological changes.
NATIVE-AMERICANS
The second point I wish to comment on, and it is Prince EA’s mentioning of the Native-Americans. I do not doubt that Prince was taught these things in school. However, like many other issues cornered in the monopoly of the government, balance is needed.
For instance, I wrote a response to an in-class supplement to my sons elementary class lesson [he is now married and lives in Florida] about HOW the Settlers treated the New World versus how the Indians treated it. I made sure each parent got a copy and this engendered a visit to see the principle. Here is a quote from that post:
From James Fenimore Cooper to Dances with Wolves and Disney’s Pocahontas, American Indians have been mythologized as noble beings with a “spiritual, sacred attitude towards land and animals, not a practical utilitarian one.”[16] Small children are taught that the Plains Indians never wasted any part of the buffalo. They grow up certain that the Indians lived as one with nature, and that white European settlers were the rapists who destroyed it.
In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, strips away the myth to show that American Indians behaved pretty much like everyone else. When times were bad they used the whole buffalo. When times were good, “whole herds” of buffalo might be killed only for their tongues or their fetuses.[17] Although American Indians adapted to their environment and were intimately familiar with it, they had no qualms about shaping it to their needs.
Indians set fires to promote the growth of grasses and make land more productive for the game and plants that they preferred. Sometimes fire was used carefully. Sometimes it was not. Along with the evidence that Indians used fire to improve habitat are abundant descriptions of carelessly started fires that destroyed all plant life and entire buffalo herds.[18]
Nor were American Indians particularly interested in conserving resources for the future. In the East, they practiced slash and burn agriculture. When soils became infertile, wood for fuel was exhausted, and game depleted, whole villages moved.[19] The Cherokee, along with the other Indians who participated in the Southern deerskin trade, helped decimate white-tailed deer populations.[20] Cherokee mythology believed that deer that were killed in a hunt were reanimated.
In all, contemporary accounts suggest that many Indians treated game as an inexhaustible resource. Despite vague hints in the historical records that some Crees may have tried to conserve beaver populations by allocating hunting territories and sparing young animals, Krech concludes that it was “market forces in combination with the Hudchild’s Bay Company policies [which actively promoted conservation]” that “led to the eventual recovery of beaver populations.”[21]
Those who blame European settlers for genocide because they introduced microbes that ravaged native populations might as well call the Mongols genocidal for creating the plague reservoirs that led to the Black Death in Europe.[22] Microbes travel with their hosts. Trade, desired by Indians as well as whites, created the pathways for disease.
[16]Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, W.W. Norton & Company; New York: NY (1999), p. 22.
[17] Ibid., p. 135.
[18] Ibid., p. 119.
[19] Ibid., p. 76.
[20] Ibid., p. 171.
[21] Ibid., p. 188.
[22] For a discussion of the effect of the Mongol invasions and their effect on European epidemiology see, William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Doubleday; New York, NY (1977).
These little historical facts changes the narrative just a tad, doesn’t it? Like when the Iroquois directed their most furious attacks against the Hurons during the Beaver Wars. One Jesuit missionary wrote, “it is the design of the Iroquois to capture all the Hurons, if it is possible; to put the chiefs and great part of the nation to death, and with the rest to form one nation and one country.” American Indians, alongside the Settlers, accelerated their hunting of the American Bison (Buffalo) that contributed to the near extinction of this plains beast. All in the name of the Mighty Buck! (READ MORE)
POLAR BEAR BREAK
(An UPDATED POSTon an old one can be found showing the bottom line is that the current population is at record highs.) While not dealt with well in Prince EA’s video, his presentation shows a computerized Polar Bear[s] walking in the background while intimating extinction or low numbers. Again, he probably learned about this in school, so you cannot really blame him fully. He is the product of indoctrination. However, this just isn’t the case. In fact, there are a record number of Polar Bears. Here Is The Bottom Line:
1)It confirms the global population size I published in May 2015 (20,129-32,558; average 26,344). See the graph below, now amended to reflect this point. If global numbers do decline over the next 35 years, it will be from a high point not previously acknowledged by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG).
2) The current population trend is listed as: ? Unknown. [NOT declining – if anyone claims it is, send them here: IUCN Red List U. maritimus]
(MS) WINNIPEG, Canada (Globe and Mail 4/2012) The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.
[….]
But many Inuit communities said the researchers were wrong. They said the bear population was increasing and they cited reports from hunters who kept seeing more bears. Mr. Gissing said that encouraged the government to conduct the recent study, which involved 8,000 kilometres of aerial surveying last August along the coast and offshore islands.
Mr. Gissing said he hopes the results lead to more research and a better understanding of polar bears. He said the media in southern Canada has led people to believe polar bears are endangered. “They are not.” He added that there are about 25,000 polar bears across Canada’s Arctic. “That’s likely the highest [population level]there has ever been.”
[Editors note: perhaps to 27,000-32,000?]
Again, this throws a monkey wrench into the narrative, and makes the next proposition trues if the counter proposition can be true:
Look, it is simple:
Either polar bears are dying because of CO2 emissions via man ~ hence, we should stopproducing high levels of CO2;
or [following the train of thinking FROM Al Gore],
Polar bears are at their highest recorded population levels because of CO2 emissions via man, hence, we should produce high levels of CO2.
Want to move on quick over this section? Here is my response to a Starbucks patron (of which I count myself) when they bring up sea rise:
“I believe in sea rise? Hell, 10,000 years ago it was 350ft lower. That is how the American Indian populated the continent.”
Mic Drop!
This was interesting because he calls out a news network. Good for him! He is wrong, but I like his style. This section I will deal with sea level rise in general, and then deal with the Bangladesh portion of Prince EA’s claims. The general sea rise refutation of the school-house session can be seen here, but let us look at a graph:
I wanted to draw the people who believe this (rising oceans) attention to a very old photograph compared to a new one to compare La Jolla (California) sea levels from 1871 to Now (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
Also, Photographs show no change in Sydney sea level over the last 130 years (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
But what interested me was his mentioning Bangladesh specifically… wrapped up in a challenge to Fox News.
Woa Whoa! Throwin’ down the gauntlet. I am going to answer this from various sources, but as you will see, this is another fail on the eco-fascists side. Here is a conservative source first:
It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than a month since the latest example of intellectual collapse at the IPCC. Now added to the fraudulent claims about Amazon rain forests, African crop harvests, and Himalayan glaciers comes the exposure of a very large error in the UN body’s warnings about flooding in Bangladesh. Turns out that the scientists screeching about the cataclysmic effects of sea-level rises forgot to consider sedimentary deposits (via Yid with Lid):
Scientists in Bangladesh posed a fresh challenge to the UN’s top climate change panel Thursday, saying its doomsday forecasts for the country in the body’s landmark 2007 report were overblown.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), already under fire for errors in the 2007 report, had said a one-metre (three-foot) rise in sea levels would flood 17 percent of Bangladesh and create 20 million refugees by 2050.
The claim helped create a widespread consensus that the low-lying country was on the “front line” of climate change, but a new study argues the IPCC ignored the role sediment plays in countering sea level rises. …
But IPCC’s prediction did not take into account the one billion tonnes of sediment carried by Himalayan rivers into Bangladesh every year, which are crucial in countering rises in sea levels, the study funded by the Asian Development Bank said.
“Sediments have been shaping Bangladesh’s coast for thousands of years,” said Maminul Haque Sarker, director of the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), who led research for the study.
Even if the sea level rises that far — a claim which is itself greeted with increasing skepticism — most of the coastline for Bangladesh won’t be affected.
Deltas are formed at the boundary of rivers and oceans. The rivers that build deltas flow to low and slowly sinking parts of the crust, where large volumes of sediment are being deposited. They will always be in balance with sea level but almost by definition increase in size, if rivers are allowed to follow their course. Deltas, by their very nature are building out and up. They also tend to flood frequently and seasonally, often with disastrous effects on the inhabitants. People living in deltas should learn to swim, have a boat and generally be aware of what can happen. Sea level rise is not an issue in large deltas; they have been proven to be able to keep up with any sea level rise. Flooding disasters are seasonally the result of excessive run-off, and occasionally due to unfortunate storm surges that result in breaks through natural barriers, but this has nothing to do with sea level rise. Bangladesh will be there, even if all the ice in the world has melted, with its people still fighting floods while farming the fertile floodplains.
Scientific American also takes a wholly different course and shows that current flooding is caused in big part to the Bangladeshi’s themselves:
Man-made flood protections, not climate change, are the main culprit in sea-level rise in southwest Bangladesh, according to new research conducted for the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research.
The report from a team of scientists at Vanderbilt University is the first part in a wide-ranging, $7.5 million analysis of environmental stress and human migration scenarios in the low-lying South Asian nation.
Published this week in Nature Climate Change, the initial study finds that embankments constructed since the 1960s are primarily to blame for lower land elevations along the Ganges-Brahmaputra River Delta, with some areas experiencing more than twice the rate of the most worrisome sea-level rise projections from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
OF COURSE the magazine then goes on to assert Climate Disruption is still a threat to Bangladesh (towing the line is tough!). But this problem is moot because they gain land from the delta and the flooding is mainly “man-made,” so are the solutions [technology].
CHINA vs SARAH PALIN
WOW, another challenge. Good for you Prince EA! But again, your understanding is wrong.
The Atlantic Monthly has a VERY interesting article I read a few years back. They note that in reality the pollution in China is at our 1980-levels.
Does China, in short, truly deserve its reputation as an environmental pariah?
Ramon Guardans, a biologist who studies air pollution and co-chairs a global monitoring plan on toxic chemicals for the United Nations Environment Program, is skeptical.
“The air concentrations of several pollutants in sites in China are certainly comparable to the levels observed in heavily industrialized areas in Europe and North America before the 1970’s,” he wrote by email. But pound for pound, person for person these pollutant emissions were, and generally still are, much greater than China’s.
“So in relation to the population density we see in China,” Guardans continues, “the U.S. and Europe did a much dirtier job industrializing.”
Beijing just happens to be, similar to Los Angeles, in a geographical bind. Bloomberg makes this point as well around the same time the Atlantic Monthly does:
Why is Beijing susceptible to these episodes? First, and uncontrollable by the authorities, are the peculiarities of Beijing’s geography. In particular, the capital is surrounded by mountain ranges that lead to the unfortunate phenomenon of an inversion layer—cold air settles on top of a warmer air mass, trapping the pollutants inside. This is the same problem that bedevils Los Angeles.
Beyond the misfortune of geography, though, lie a number of factors that have everything to do with China’s policies….
China is blessed and cursed with the world’s largest coal reserves, which means that the country sources some 80 percent of its electricity from burning coal—and much of that coal is of lower quality and highly polluting.
But as I have clearly shown… wind and solar energy is no cleaner. And the dream in peoples heads is truly just that, a dream… I mean when Google caves, you know the end-is-nigh.
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
And bio-fuels cause, literally, food riots and starvation in poor countries and raise the price of food which hurt the poorer people in the more well off nations: Ethanol is killing children around the world… Democrats! It takes 450lbs of Corn to fill one SUV tank… that is a years worth of food for multiple children, not to mention the rise of corn-based food for the poor worldwide.(SEE MORE)
ICE MELTING
Here is another fail on the part of the doomsayers who speak with a tongue very similar to the eschatology handed us at the most fiery southern Baptist church.
Prince EA is just relying on others work that have been either proven wrong or fraudulant in nature. Here for instance we see some predictions simlar to Prince’s:
“Peter Wadhams, who heads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge… believes that the Arctic is likely to become ice-free before 2020 and possibly as early as 2015,” (YALE ENVIRONMENT 360 REPORTED IN 2012). Yet government data shows that arctic sea ice has increased since then….
Here I will post information from a PREVIOUS POST about Polar Bear population levels, in which I point the following out:
Recent Population Increase Partly Due To Lots of Sea-Ice
Canada (CBC News via the Canadian Coast Guard, 3/2014) [ARCTIC Sea Ice] The Canadian Coast Guard is pleading with merchant ships to plan their voyages well in advance this year as the organization’s icebreaker fleet confronts some of the worst ice conditions on the Atlantic Ocean in decades.
“Plan your voyage and we’ll all get through this,” said Mike Voight, the Atlantic region’s director of programs. “We’ve got a pretty bad or challenging ice year.”
The Canadian Ice Service, an arm of Environment Canada, said there is 10 per cent more ice this year compared to the 30-year average.
“We probably haven’t seen a winter this bad as far as ice for the past 25 years,” said Voight, referring to both the amount and thickness of the ice….
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Abstract (12/2014) [ARCTIC sea ice] Despite a well-documented ~40% decline in summer Arctic sea ice extent since the late 1970’s, it has been difficult to estimate trends in sea ice volume because thickness observations have been spatially incomplete and temporally sporadic. While numerical models suggest that the decline in extent has been accompanied by a reduction in volume, there is considerable disagreement over the rate at which this has occurred. We present the first complete assessment of trends in northern hemisphere sea ice thickness and volume using 4 years of measurements from CryoSat-2. Between autumn 2010 and spring 2013, there was a 14% and 5% reduction in autumn and spring Arctic sea ice volume, respectively, in keeping with the long-term decline in extent. However, since then there has been a marked 41% and 9% recovery in autumn and spring sea ice volume, respectively, more than offsetting losses of the previous three years. The recovery was driven by the retention of thick ice around north Greenland and Canada during summer 2013 which, in turn, was associated with a 6% drop in the number of days on which melting occurred – climatic conditions more typical of the early 1990’s. Such a sharp increase in volume after just one cool summer indicates that the Arctic sea ice pack may be more resilient than has been previously considered.
Talking About Weather (7/2014) [ANTARCTIC sea ice] Antarctic sea ice has hit its second all-time record maximum this week. The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the weekend just past, the previous record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal, a mark hit on December 20, 2007, as I reported here, and also covered in my book.
Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, responded to e-mail questions and also spoke by telephone about the new record sea ice growth in the Southern Hemisphere, indicating that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the sea ice growth was specifically due to global warming.
Let us compare this to Al Gore saying the northern ice-caps will be gone
NewsBusters makes the point another way, in that the “media” is derelict in their duty:
The same year that former Vice President Al Gore predicted that the Arctic sea ice could be completely gone, Arctic ice reached its highest level in two years, according to a report by theDanish Meteorological Institute.
According to that report, which was cited by the Daily Mail (UK) on Aug. 30, “[t]he Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in a row.” The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)confirmed this trend, but didn’t go into as much detail as the Danish Meteorological Institute.
But an examination of ABC, CBS and NBC news programs since the Daily Mail story was published found that all three networks ignored news that Arctic sea ice was at a two-year high….
“The West Antarctic ice sheet sits on bedrock which is below sea level. It formed during the ice age but the sea level rose 12,000 years ago and has been chipping away at it ever since. What happens to ice which sits on rock which is below sea level? Hint: it has nothing to do with CO2.” This is a comment from Real Science’s FLASHBACK to 1932 and how the ICe-Sheets were melting then (to the right).
AND FINALLY….
ROCKETS
I hate to break it to Prince EA, but that rocket to find other worlds would have to be powered by (in part) fossil fuels to break earths gravitational force. Not to mention the massive amount of energy (fossil fuels again) And often times the left kills innovation in areas (like nuclear) for ideological reasons. Keeping us dependent on fossil fuels.
You see, all of the above “sounds good,” and grand. But as Thomas Sowell says, liberals — unlike conservatives — do not ask three simple questions:
compared to what?
at what cost?
what hard-evidence do you have?
FOR INSTANCE, as an example, Google came to the logical conclusion that such endeavors with alternative fuels is unattainable:
We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
[….]
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
EDITOR’S RANT: I just think it is sad that people do not realize — in general — that we have been warming for 10,000 years [assuming the broadly accepted ages of geology and the ice-age]. I mean, sea levels stood 350 to 400 feet lower than today — 10,000 years ago. If you run the numbers (see: ICE-AGE NOW), you’ll find that sea levels have been rising an average of .42 to .48 inches (just under half-an-inch) per year for the past 10,000 years. Rising sea levels have been the norm, in other words, for 10,000 years. (Here is a short video of 4-climate guys discussion the issues: YOUTUBE).
“In a House Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing on climate change, under questioning by Mo Brooks, Alabama District Five, four members of a bipartisan panel of climate science experts all admitted that humans are not responsible for the Earth’s global warming that has occurred over the past 20,000 years,” Limbaugh stated. “Why the past twenty thousand years? Because that is when the Earth’s last glacial maximum occurred. The point is… well the points are these: average global temperatures were roughly eleven degrees Fahrenheit colder than they are today, 20,000 years ago. Stated differently, global temperatures have risen on average, one half a degree Fahrenheit every one hundred years for the past twenty thousand years. Sea levels, sea levels were roughly four hundred and ten feet lower 20,000 years ago than they are today. This is according to the United States Geological Survey, which the global warming crowd loves and cites often. Stating this a different way, sea levels have risen on average roughly two feet per century over the past 20,000 years— roughly double the global warming advocates’ claimed average sea level rise of one foot per century since 1993.” (RUSH)
Also this article has some good “average” information: “Climate Alarmists Foiled: No U.S. Warming Since 2005” (REAL CLEAR ENERGY)
When American climate alarmists claim to have witnessed the effects of global warming, they must be referring to a time beyond 14 years ago. That is because there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, according to updated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)…
[….]
…There is also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s. Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago. All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data. Skeptics point out that as the American population has grown, so has the artificial warming signal generated by growing cities, more asphalt, more automobiles, and more machinery…
“Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise.
“88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.
“It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size.
These results show that atoll and island areal stability is a global trend, whatever the rate of sea-level rise.”- Duvat, 2019
[….]
In other words, the Earth’s coasts gained more land area then were lost to rising sea levels.
“Earth’s surface gained 115,000 km2 of water and 173,000 km2 of land over the past 30 years, including 20,135 km2 of water and 33,700 km2 of land in coastal areas.” (Donchyts et al., 2016)
As a visual example, Ahmed et al. (2018) find that Bangladesh’s coastal land area grew by 7.9 km2 per year during 1985-2015.
“This paper draws upon the application of GIS and remote sensing techniques to investigate the dynamic nature and management aspects of land in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. … This research reveals that the rate of accretion [coastal land growth] in the study area is slightly higher than the rate of erosion. Overall land dynamics indicate a net gain of 237 km2 (7.9 km2annual average) of land in the area for the whole period from 1985 to 2015.” (Ahmed et al., 2018)
I wanted to draw the people who believe this (rising oceans) attention to a very old photograph compared to a new one to compare La Jolla (California) sea levels from 1871 to Now (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
Also, Photographs show no change in Sydney sea level over the last 130 years (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
Much like the “Polar Bear Scare” – Polar Bears reaching a record population since being measured, I tell my “warmist” friends that we should burn more CO2 because if we were worried about CO2 when the population was thought to be decreasing… why aren’t we lauding it as it increases?!
LIKEWISE – here is a report about the “disappearing islands due to “SEA RISE“:
“…the pair of New Zealand researchers set out to examine historical changes in 87 islands found within the Jaluit Atoll…over the period 1945-2010. During this time, the islands were subjected to ongoing sea level rise and the passage of a notable typhoon…which caused severe damage with its >100 knot winds and abnormal wave heights…caused a decrease in total island land area of approximately five percent, yet Ford and Kench write that “despite [this] significant typhoon-driven erosion and a relaxation period coincident with local sea-level rise, [the] islands have persisted and grown.” Between 1976 and 2006, for example, 73 out of the 87 islands increased in size, and by 2010, the total landmass of the islands had exceeded the pre-typhoon area by nearly 4 percent.”
Should we encourage China to build MORE coal plants? Hmmm?
An older challenge was about ANWR… and running a pipeline from Alaska to a port. Eco-fascists use to tell me that it was bad for the caribou species in the area. Then someone did a study and found the caribou population thrived as they used the pipeline to break the harsh elements. After that study came out, the challenge faded into history. But, it caused headlines that swayed public opinion… truth being hindmost in the Left’s arsenal. One last example of this statement for context:
“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders…. Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)
David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), [FN] 161.
JO NOVAcatches us up with the latest studies involving islans shrinking:
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 a resort on, that’s about that is about ten Rugby fields. Conveniently for us, no island bigger than 10 hectares shrank despite the world adding two thousand coal fired plants and a billion cars.
[….]
See the graph. All the larger islands are staying the same size or growing.
WATTS UP WITH THAT has the abstract and the conclusion of the study. Here is the abstract:
Abstract: 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. Atoll islands affected by rapid sea-level rise did not show a distinct behavior compared to islands on other atolls. Island behavior correlated with island size, and no island smaller than 10 ha decreased in size. This threshold could be used to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy and to assess atoll countries and territories’ vulnerability to climate change. Beyond emphasizing the major role of climate drivers in causing substantial changes in the configuration of islands, this reanalysis of available data indicates that these drivers explain subregional variations in atoll behavior and within-atoll variations in island and shoreline (lagoon vs. ocean) behavior, following atoll-specific patterns. Increasing human disturbances, especially land reclamation and human structure construction, operated on atoll-to-shoreline spatial scales, explaining marked within-atoll variations in island and shoreline behavior. Collectively, these findings highlight the heterogeneity of atoll situations. Further research needs include addressing geographical gaps (Indian Ocean, Caribbean, north-western Pacific atolls), using standardized protocols to allow comparative analyses of island and shoreline behavior across ocean regions, investigating the role of ecological drivers, and promoting interdisciplinary approaches. Such efforts would assist in anticipating potential future changes in the contributions and interactions of key drivers.
ADDITION
(h/t to CLIMATE DEPOT)NEW SCIENTISThas an inconvenient article about some islands we have been warned of that sea rise will create “climate refugees” is not so:
Rising seas are eating away at small islands and will eventually turn their inhabitants into climate refugees, right? Not so for some of the world’s most threatened islands, which have grown despite experiencing dramatic sea level rise.
Funafuti atoll, which includes the capital of Tuvalu, is an islet archipelago in the tropical Pacific Ocean made from coral debriswashed up from an underlying reef by waves, winds and currents. Over the past 60 years the sea has risen by around 30 centimetres locally,sparking warnings that the atoll is set to disappear.
But Paul Kench of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and colleagues found no evidence of heightened erosion. After poring over more than a century’s worth of data, including old maps and aerial and satellite imagery, they conclude that 18 out of 29 islands have actually grown.
As a whole, the group grew by more than 18 hectares, while many islands changed shape or shifted sideways.
“There is still considerable speculation that islands will disappear as sea level rises,” says Kench. “Our data indicates that the future of islands is significantly different.”
Storms and other disturbances that churn up the sea seem to be more important than sea level in influencing stability, says Kench. Storms break up coral, which then gets deposited on the atolls. He says other coral reef islands are likely to evolve in the same way, and that the Maldives seem to be showing a similar effect.
“There is presently no evidence that these islands are going to sink,” says Virginie Duvat of the University of La Rochelle in France. She says that she and other researchers are trying to fight the widespread misconception that sea level rise will mean the end for atolls….
This is meant mainly as a supplement to a Christmas Eve-Eve gathering/discussion I was at. I will make this post a little different than other posts, as, it will be “minimalist.” This is the third installment of the topics covered, which are polar bears, rising sea levels, CO2, Inconvenient Truth (the movie), nuclear power, warmest year, electric vehicles (EVs)/hybrid cars, and bullet trains.
One of the main “evidences” the students raised was “rising oceans” for global warming being true. These students are basically saying… “Because my professor said” … see for yourself (via BREITBART):
I wanted to draw the people who believe this (rising oceans) attention to a very old photograph compared to a new one to compare La Jolla (California) sea levels from 1871 to Now (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
Also, Photographs show no change in Sydney sea level over the last 130 years (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
Borenstein: In the more than two decades since world leaders first got together to try to solve global warming, life on Earth has changed, not just the climate. It’s gotten hotter, more polluted with heat-trapping gases, more crowded and just downright wilder. Global temperature: up six-tenths of a degree. Population: up 1.7 billion people. Sea level: up 3 inches. U.S. extreme weather: up 30 percent. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica: down 4.9 trillion tons of ice. “Simply put, we are rapidly remaking the planet and beginning to suffer the consequences,” says Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University. Diplomats from more than 190 nations opened talks Monday at a United Nations global warming conference in Lima, Peru, to pave the way for an international treaty they hope to forge next year.
Climate Depot’s Morano comment: ‘AP’s Borenstein can be trusted to shill for UN’s climate summit in Lima Peru, which I will be attending and speaking at. Borenstein relies on Michael Oppenheimer (who is the UN scientists on the payroll of Hollywood stars) and Climategate’s Michael Mann. Borenstein ignores tide gauges on sea level showing deceleration of sea level rise and ignores satellite temperatures which show the Earth in an 18 year ‘pause’ or ‘standstill’ of global warming. Borenstein tortues data in order to claim more weather extremes. We are currently at or near historic lows in tornadoes and hurricanes. Even droughts are on long term declines and floods show no trend. We know not to expect more from Borenstein.’ See: ‘Long sad history of AP reporter Seth Borenstein’s woeful global warming reporting’
Breitbartmakes fun of the idea that loans and insurance could ever be had if these Islands are soon to underwater… unless these banks and insurance companies know that “Climate Change” is more political than science
Great news from the scuba-diving tropical paradise Maldives. They’ve just opened another airport.
This means that the Indian Ocean island nation now has four international airports and seven domestic ones. Quite a lot for a country with a population of less than 400,000. Presumably they have high hopes for their tourist industry as they develop luxury resorts on ever more remote atolls.
[….]
Here’s the World Bank: “Climate change presents a challenge for every island in the Maldives, which all lie on the sea level. Any changes in the climate will greatly affect the Maldivian way of life.”
Here’s the UN Foundation: “Climate change is a serious threat to low lying islands like Maldives whose landmass is close to sea level. The projected rise in sea level over the next century due to climate change is commonly agreed to be about one meter. The highest point on this island nation is one meter. Learn more about the existential threat of climate change on this island and learn more about how the country is pressing for global action on climate change.”
And let us never forget the tragically moving, yet cheery-in-the-face-of-disaster underwater cabinet meeting staged by the Maldives government in 2009 to draw international attention to the terrible and imminent threat these poor islands face.
Luckily I have thought up a brilliant solution to this problem. Maybe the lucky Maldives (the thriving tourist paradise) could help the unlucky Maldives (the one about to be drowned by global warming) with money and material aid. Perhaps it could use its vast tourist revenues to mitigate against any problems caused by this terrible “climate change” thing. Perhaps it could use its 11 airports to help evacuate the other Maldives’ climate refugees.
(Gateway Pundit): Seven years ago ABC News warned viewers that New York City will be under water by 2015 due to global warming.
New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015. The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, “It’s June 8th, 2015.”
“One carton of milk is $12.99.” (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction for the current year: “Gas reached over $9 a gallon.”
The only way food would be soo high is if Obama’s war on affordable energy works it’s course! How come Manhattan property is through the roof!
(Breitbart) In 2006, on NBC’s Today Show, former-Vice President Al Gore predicted that Manhattan would be flooded in “15 to 20 years.” He added, “In fact the World Trade Center Memorial site would be underwater.” Just 3 years ago, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority predicted that within the next ten years, “Irene-like storms of the future would put a third of New York City streets under water and flood many of the tunnels leading into Manhattan in under an hour because of climate change[.]”
By hook or crook, through super storms or glacier melt, Global CoolingGlobal Warming Climate Change has doomed the Big Apple.
What we have here are two of the most respected environmental voices among the political Left — Gore and the government — warning of dire flooding hitting Manhattan within the next 10 years. And at least according to their activism, the predominantly left-wing, Global Warming believers of Manhattan are listening. Furious about the lack of wealth-distribution that will save the planet and their small island, just 6 months ago, more than 300,000 took to the streets of Manhattan to protest.
And yet, a funny thing is happening in the real world of the free market. Manhattan might be the elite media/entertainment/intellectual hub of the cult of Global Warming, but where the rubber meets the bottom line, the cult obviously doesn’t really believe in its own propaganda. If they did, Manhattan real estate prices would be collapsing, not hitting record highs as they currently are.
If people truly believe an area is going to be flooded as soon as in the next decade, those same people would be selling off their real estate. Not just to escape but to sell before conditions worsened and real estate prices bottomed out further. As the deadline loomed closer, prices would decrease further.
The average Manhattan home price is now over $1.7 million. With some apartment prices now breaking nine figures, it’s time to take a look at the booming New York real estate market and explore where middle class families fit into the picture.
At 157 West 57th Street, the most expensive New York home sale was just completed with the penthouse of this new building going for over $100 million.
Howard Lorber, the chairman of Douglas Elliman, the city’s largest residential brokerage, told me that there is no sign of this trend slowing down. He called New York a safe place for people around the world to invest in real estate.
Maybe what’s happening is that Manhattan’s left-wing Global Warming believers are suckering right-wing Climate Deniers into buying doomed real estate at record prices?
JO NOVAcatches us up with the latest studies involving islans shrinking:
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 a resort on, that’s about that is about ten Rugby fields. Conveniently for us, no island bigger than 10 hectares shrank despite the world adding two thousand coal fired plants and a billion cars.
[….]
See the graph. All the larger islands are staying the same size or growing.
WATTS UP WITH THAT has the abstract and the conclusion of the study. Here is the abstract:
Abstract: 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. Atoll islands affected by rapid sea-level rise did not show a distinct behavior compared to islands on other atolls. Island behavior correlated with island size, and no island smaller than 10 ha decreased in size. This threshold could be used to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy and to assess atoll countries and territories’ vulnerability to climate change. Beyond emphasizing the major role of climate drivers in causing substantial changes in the configuration of islands, this reanalysis of available data indicates that these drivers explain subregional variations in atoll behavior and within-atoll variations in island and shoreline (lagoon vs. ocean) behavior, following atoll-specific patterns. Increasing human disturbances, especially land reclamation and human structure construction, operated on atoll-to-shoreline spatial scales, explaining marked within-atoll variations in island and shoreline behavior. Collectively, these findings highlight the heterogeneity of atoll situations. Further research needs include addressing geographical gaps (Indian Ocean, Caribbean, north-western Pacific atolls), using standardized protocols to allow comparative analyses of island and shoreline behavior across ocean regions, investigating the role of ecological drivers, and promoting interdisciplinary approaches. Such efforts would assist in anticipating potential future changes in the contributions and interactions of key drivers.
[I will] say this much for the climate commies who are squawking so loudly about the end of the world. At least they aren’t dumb enough to believe their own lies. If they were, they would live very differently. Matt Walsh will start believing that they believe what they insist we believe when they start living like the Amish:
I can only imagine how I would react if I actually believed that the extinction of all mankind was imminent, and my lifestyle was directly contributing to it. At a minimum, I would not drive a car anymore. Ever. At all. I would ditch electricity. I wouldn’t eat any kind of meat. I wouldn’t buy mass made consumer products. I wouldn’t give my money to any company that sells items made in factories with giant smokestacks. Those smokestacks are literally killing people. How could you continue shopping like everything is normal?
A great couple of paragraphs are posted by MOONBATTERY after the above… and then this:
…And if those who advocate it don’t believe it, why should the rest of us take so much as a second out of our lives to consider its merits?
And this is a great transition because we can tell that those who have the funds to put their money where their mouth is (the wealthy) and preach about this the most (Manhattanites and the Entertainment industry) do not believe their own rhetoric. Why? See below…
“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the National Sierra Club. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Trump melted the ice caps. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.” (Luke 17.26-27, with a wee bit of the fear-mongering changed)
(Gateway Pundit): Seven years ago ABC News warned viewers that New York City will be under water by 2015 due to global warming.
New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015. The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, “It’s June 8th, 2015.”
“One carton of milk is $12.99.” (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction for the current year: “Gas reached over $9 a gallon.”
The only way food would be soo high is if Obama’s war on affordable energy works it’s course! How come Manhattan property is through the roof!
(Breitbart) In 2006, on NBC’s Today Show, former-Vice President Al Gore predicted that Manhattan would be flooded in “15 to 20 years.” He added, “In fact the World Trade Center Memorial site would be underwater.” Just 3 years ago, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority predicted that within the next ten years, “Irene-like storms of the future would put a third of New York City streets under water and flood many of the tunnels leading into Manhattan in under an hour because of climate change[.]”
By hook or crook, through super storms or glacier melt, Global CoolingGlobal Warming Climate Change has doomed the Big Apple.
What we have here are two of the most respected environmental voices among the political Left — Gore and the government — warning of dire flooding hitting Manhattan within the next 10 years. And at least according to their activism, the predominantly left-wing, Global Warming believers of Manhattan are listening. Furious about the lack of wealth-distribution that will save the planet and their small island, just 6 months ago, more than 300,000 took to the streets of Manhattan to protest.
And yet, a funny thing is happening in the real world of the free market. Manhattan might be the elite media/entertainment/intellectual hub of the cult of Global Warming, but where the rubber meets the bottom line, the cult obviously doesn’t really believe in its own propaganda. If they did, Manhattan real estate prices would be collapsing, not hitting record highs as they currently are.
If people truly believe an area is going to be flooded as soon as in the next decade, those same people would be selling off their real estate. Not just to escape but to sell before conditions worsened and real estate prices bottomed out further. As the deadline loomed closer, prices would decrease further.
The average Manhattan home price is now over $1.7 million. With some apartment prices now breaking nine figures, it’s time to take a look at the booming New York real estate market and explore where middle class families fit into the picture.
At 157 West 57th Street, the most expensive New York home sale was just completed with the penthouse of this new building going for over $100 million.
Howard Lorber, the chairman of Douglas Elliman, the city’s largest residential brokerage, told me that there is no sign of this trend slowing down. He called New York a safe place for people around the world to invest in real estate.
Maybe what’s happening is that Manhattan’s left-wing Global Warming believers are suckering right-wing Climate Deniers into buying doomed real estate at record prices?
The average sales price of an apartment in Manhattan is expected to top $2 million this year for the first time, but prices are seen leveling off in 2017 after nearly doubling over the past decade.
Prices were pushed higher by a jump in sales of condominiums valued at $10 million or more, which skewed results, CityRealty, a real estate listings and data website for New York City, said on Wednesday.
The opening of 432 Park Avenue, a 96-story tower marketed by developers as the tallest residential building in the Americas, had an outsized effect on prices, said CityRealty research director Gabby Warshawer.
Fifty-two of the 75 units sold at the tower overlooking Central Park fetched more than $10 million, she said. Some units are priced at more than $40 million.
An increase in new developments and a rise in the price of existing units also lifted the market, Warshawer said.
[….]
The median price for apartments, or the middle of all sales considered, also set a record at $1.2 million, up from $1.1 million last year, in the area examined.
A decade ago, the price of new condo units was almost the same as existing ones, but prices at new developments since 2008 have outpaced those of existing ones.
The average price for an apartment in the area of Manhattan examined was 91 percent higher than in 2006, CityRealty said.
Prices have climbed every year since 2011 but are expected to flatline next year. A lack of expensive, large new buildings will act to keep prices in check in 2017, CityRealty said.
The animated gif above compares 1871 sea level in La Jolla, California vs. a recent high tide picture.
(h/t to Climate Depot) New Scientist has an inconvenient article about some islands we have been warned of that sea rise will create “climate refugees” is not so:
Rising seas are eating away at small islands and will eventually turn their inhabitants into climate refugees, right? Not so for some of the world’s most threatened islands, which have grown despite experiencing dramatic sea level rise.
Funafuti atoll, which includes the capital of Tuvalu, is an islet archipelago in the tropical Pacific Ocean made from coral debriswashed up from an underlying reef by waves, winds and currents. Over the past 60 years the sea has risen by around 30 centimetres locally,sparking warnings that the atoll is set to disappear.
But Paul Kench of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and colleagues found no evidence of heightened erosion. After poring over more than a century’s worth of data, including old maps and aerial and satellite imagery, they conclude that 18 out of 29 islands have actually grown.
As a whole, the group grew by more than 18 hectares, while many islands changed shape or shifted sideways.
“There is still considerable speculation that islands will disappear as sea level rises,” says Kench. “Our data indicates that the future of islands is significantly different.”
Storms and other disturbances that churn up the sea seem to be more important than sea level in influencing stability, says Kench. Storms break up coral, which then gets deposited on the atolls. He says other coral reef islands are likely to evolve in the same way, and that the Maldives seem to be showing a similar effect.
“There is presently no evidence that these islands are going to sink,” says Virginie Duvat of the University of La Rochelle in France. She says that she and other researchers are trying to fight the widespread misconception that sea level rise will mean the end for atolls….
