North Carolina Taliban try to muzzle climate scientists

[Timo]

I think most of us here can recognize that simple climate change deniers, science deniers, or any other denier who can't grasp that humans can, indeed , change the world we live in, those people have a very simple mind, and for the most part, are ignored. However, if these same people claim to speak for someone else, that they have seen the light and are speaking for God, suddenly, we all pay very close attention and heed their prophecies. Their denials instantly become much more legitimate.

[EnergyUnlimited]

What about introducing ban on sea level rise in form of new amendment to American Constitution?

[dorlomin]

There is some good background information on how this story played out written by the author of the scientific review that caused the government to make this decision. He however claims to have made a fortune as a property developer.

(Coastal Resource Commission: CRC) selected a 20± member “science panel”

Dr. Margery Overton, Chair Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, N.C. State University
Mr. Steven Benton N.C. Division of Coastal Management (retired), Raleigh
Mr. William Birkemeier Field Research Facility, ERDC/CHL, US Army Corps of Engineers
Dr. William Cleary Center for Marine Science, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Mr. Tom Jarrett, P.E. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Retired), Wilmington
Dr. David John Mallinson Department of Geological Sciences, East Carolina University
Dr. Charles "Pete" Peterson Institute of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr. Stanley R. Riggs Department of Geological Sciences, East Carolina University
Dr. Antonio B. Rodriguez Institute of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Mr. Spencer Rogers North Carolina Sea Grant, Wilmington
Dr. Elizabeth Judge Sciaudone, P.E. N.C. State University, Raleigh
Dr. Gregory Williams, P.E. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Wilmington
Dr. Robert S. Young Department of Geosciences, Western Carolina University

Exactly what youd expect to see on a team on coastal sea level rise.
http://www.macvspc.info/A_Different_Perspective-2.pdf
But here is the counter report, the money shot.

“There is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in
the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly
chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And
the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been
using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is
that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
“Despite fluctuations down as well as up, ‘the sea is not rising,’ he says. "’t
hasn't risen in 50 years.’ If there is any rise this century it will ‘not be more
than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm’. And
quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of
physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured
up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

Every known scienetific method?


http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/image ... n_2011.pdf
Yes tilting graphs is a well known scientific method.

Same old tired names, same old tired games.

[rockdoc123]

Same old tired names, same old tired games.

didn't bother to read any of it other than the names did you? Speaking of tired old games.
Nils Morner has some eccentric ideas (dousing) but many scientists more famous have been even more eccentric. What he has done is publish several hundred papers on historical sea level rise, eustacy and isostacy in peer reviewed journals which makes him knowledgeable in the subject, much more so than anyone on that committee. The reference to Morner in this critique is in reference to the fact that the historical sea level rise measured by tidal gauges and corrected for subsidence and uplift does not match with the corrected satellite data and indeed shows historical rise of about 1 mm/yr which is much less than any of the forward predicting models would suggest. If you want to argue with his methodology then I suggest you critique one of his published papers rather than refer to a Monckton paper.

The point being made in the critique is the "esteemed" group you point to only used one reference which has been demonstrated by various reviews to be incorrect (if you wish I can post what those references are). Not only that but that particular reference is based heavily on modeling, not on observations. Please point to the expert in this committee familiar with climate models and/or statistical analysis.

Are you arguing that it is OK for the committee to base their analysis on one paper, a paper that has been demonstrated to be incorrect?

[dorlomin]

Same old tired names, same old tired games.

didn't bother to read any of it other than the names did you?

I did not just read the article you posted but had a quick look through the linked article.

As for Nils Morner, his work is subject to a huge amount of criticism. His criticism of the satellites makes no real sense. It amounts to tilting a graph to make it fit his world view. Studies like GRACE have shown the ice loss from Greenland while there has been a lot of work looking at the mining of aquifers that have also been adding to sea level rise.

As for looking at tide gauges alone.....

Multi-century sea-level records and climate models
indicate an acceleration of sea-level rise, but no 20th
century acceleration has previously been detected. A
reconstruction of global sea level using tide-gauge data
from 1950 to 2000 indicates a larger rate of rise after 1993
and other periods of rapid sea-level rise but no significant
acceleration over this period. Here, we extend the
reconstruction of global mean sea level back to 1870 and
find a sea-level rise from January 1870 to December 2004
of 195 mm, a 20th century rate of sea-level rise of 1.7 ±
0.3 mm yr 1 and a significant acceleration of sea-level rise
of 0.013 ± 0.006 mm yr 2. This acceleration is an important
confirmation of climate change simulations which show an
acceleration not previously observed. If this acceleration
remained constant then the 1990 to 2100 rise would range
from 280 to 340 mm, consistent with projections in the
IPCC TAR. Citation: Church, J. A., and N. J. White (2006), A
20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise, Geophys. Res.
Lett., 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.

http://naturescapebroward.com/NaturalRe ... 024826.pdf

500 odd sites. Perhaps it is wrong, but it is very well supported in the literature and with multiple independent lines of evidence that sea level rise is greater than 1mm per year, that the general mainstream view is acceptable and that by increasing the longwave radiation that is returned to the surface by the atmosphere, this will increase the surface warming and there will be more ice melting.

You want to defend that lot, fine by me. I am not averse to calling out the cranks on the global warming side.

For Morner to be right either a global conspiracy of scientists from various different agencies are colluding to fabricate data, while on the ground other scientists are fabricating tide gauges and the like.
Or a long line of unlikely mistakes on various satellite systems just happens to be the same mistakes as various readings form the surface. For example JASON-1 has two different means of calculating its altitude, GPS and surface laser altimeter.

People will jump on GPS and claim it only offers accuracy of a few meters. This is true for a single reading over minutes. But over years it can accumulate a huge number of readings and use the same algorithms make incredibly accurate readings. To be fair as the satellite moves its altitude will vary as the surface of the earth changes shape and the gravity is not consistent but they have a long time and hundreds of millions of readings to take.

So the claim is that different methodologies on different satellites over a decade and a half have coincidently brought the same error that a whole other set of methods and methodological errors have created.

Either that or Morner is a crank. I leave the reader to their opinions on the matter.

[Satori]

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2012/06 ... -that.html

no worries
soon the NC politicians will be outlawing hurricanes

[rockdoc123]

500 odd sites. Perhaps it is wrong, but it is very well supported in the literature and with multiple independent lines of evidence that sea level rise is greater than 1mm per year, that the general mainstream view is acceptable and that by increasing the longwave radiation that is returned to the surface by the atmosphere, this will increase the surface warming and there will be more ice melting.

You want to defend that lot, fine by me. I am not averse to calling out the cranks on the global warming side.

For Morner to be right either a global conspiracy of scientists from various different agencies are colluding to fabricate data, while on the ground other scientists are fabricating tide gauges and the like.
Or a long line of unlikely mistakes on various satellite systems just happens to be the same mistakes as various readings form the surface. For example JASON-1 has two different means of calculating its altitude, GPS and surface laser altimeter.

People will jump on GPS and claim it only offers accuracy of a few meters. This is true for a single reading over minutes. But over years it can accumulate a huge number of readings and use the same algorithms make incredibly accurate readings. To be fair as the satellite moves its altitude will vary as the surface of the earth changes shape and the gravity is not consistent but they have a long time and hundreds of millions of readings to take.

So the claim is that different methodologies on different satellites over a decade and a half have coincidently brought the same error that a whole other set of methods and methodological errors have created.

Either that or Morner is a crank. I leave the reader to their opinions on the matter.

I believe you have missed what the argument is. First of all although Morner makes the offhand comment in various places of 1 mm/yr what he says as a comment on the study being discussed here is the following with regards to what sea level rise you should expect for the Carolina coastline by 2100:

Our best estimate (for 2100) is +5 cm ±1.5 cm, and that is nothing to worry about

that equates to a rate of ~1.7 mm/yr which is in line with a hoast of tidal gauge measurements from scores of published papers. You can call Morner a crank if you want but he is an authority on isostacy and eustacy which are one of the important calculations that have to be taken into account in using the satellite data in order to look at relative sea level rise. It is the science fundamental to the discussion of relative sea level rise.

The study used only one paper as their reference which was Rahmsdorf, 2007 in which he predicted 1 metre of relative sea level rise by 2100. This analysis has been demonstrated to be flawed on numerous levels and indeed would require ~13 or so mm/yr of year sea level rise from now until 2100 or nearly ten times what has been the historical 20th century measure. A recent paper points out that there has not been a recent acceleration in sea level rise which you would have expected to see if the Rahmsdorf, 2007 projection were at all correct.

J.R. Houston and R.G. Dean, 2011, Journal of Coastal Research, Vol. 27, No. 3

quoted from their conclusions:

Our analyses do not indicate acceleration in sea level in U.S. tide gauge records during the 20th century. Instead, for each time period we consider, the records show small decelerations that are consistent with a number of earlier studies of worldwide-gauge records. The decelerations that we obtain are opposite in sign and one to two orders of magnitude less than the +0.07 to +0.28 mm/y2 accelerations that are required to reach sea levels predicted for 2100 by Vermeer and Rahmsdorf (2009), Jevrejeva, Moore, and Grinsted (2010), and Grinsted, Moore, and Jevrejeva (2010). Bindoff et al. (2007) note an increase in worldwide temperature from 1906 to 2005 of 0.74uC. It is essential that investigations continue to address why this worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years, and indeed why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years

It is also important to note that sea level rise is not continuous and there are changing rates. As a consequence if you choose certain start and end points in the tide gauge record you can end up with different values. That being said there is absolutely no way that the high rates of sea level rise which have been adopted in the study for North Carolina pointed to in this thread are supportable by any empirical data. Given the fact that climate models have proven to have incredibly poor predictive capabilities the N. Carolina gov't is right to use historical empirical data for their planning rather than models.

[Sixstrings]

Creepy.

The South is basically passing the Bible into state law. And yet the same people are paranoid about sharia law, with laws against that on the books too. I wonder, do they see the irony?

[Chief]

Here's a link to an article about this issue in today's Virginia Pilot:
http://hamptonroads.com/2012/06/north-c ... -rewritten

What the bill does is prohibit state authorities from using a projection of a 3 foot rise in sea level by 2100. It is just a projection after all and they will probably save a bunch of money not protecting their shores from something that may just not happen.

After all, any projection about how much sea levels will rise is in turn dependant on projections (assumptions) about how much the Earth will warm, which is in turn dependant on assumptions about how much warming effect X amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will have. Lots of ifs there.

What some here call "science" I call some guy sitting in a room punching numbers into a computer and then using some algorithm to come up with all kinds of horrifying numbers.

When they can predict the weather at my house next week I'll believe them when they say the sea level will rise 3 feet by 2100.

[dorlomin]

When they can predict the weather at my house next week I'll believe them when they say the sea level will rise 3 feet by 2100.

Its the same as claiming that if someone cannot predict the exact roll of a single die, then it is impossible to predict the long term average of hundreds of rolls. You will fit in well.

Well done on being so proud of your stupidity.

[Graeme]

The evidence for sea-level rises in North Carolina

In one US state, it is now illegal for sea level rise to speed up. Although climate models predict that sea level rise will accelerate over the coming decades, North Carolina's state senate has passed a bill saying that its Division of Coastal Management cannot "include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea level rise".

The lobby group supporting the bill, NC-20, has released a number of statements arguing that "the point of the bill is to conform rulemaking to actual scientific evidence". It says there is no indication that sea level rise has accelerated over the last few decades.

New Scientist looks at the evidence.

Are sea levels rising?
This is an easy one: yes. Levels have been rising since at least the middle of the 19th century, and over the 20th century they rose on average 1.7 millimetres per year. The rise was first reported in 1941 by oceanographer Beno Gutenberg.

Two sources of data confirm this: tide gauges and satellites. The data from tide gauges goes back more than 100 years, though it becomes increasingly patchy the further back you look. Satellites with altimeters only came online around 20 years ago, but unlike tide gauges, which are limited to coastlines, they cover much of the ocean.

Much of the rise is caused by water expanding as it warms up. Melting glaciers and crumbling ice sheets are also contributing, as is humanity's overuse of groundwater.

Is sea level rise accelerating?

newscientist

[rockdoc123]

Its the same as claiming that if someone cannot predict the exact roll of a single die, then it is impossible to predict the long term average of hundreds of rolls. You will fit in well.

actually it isn't. The prediction of weather also incorporates Bayesian statistics to give a probability distribution of what weather patterns one might expect. The standard deviation around the mean of that prediction of course decrease the shorter the period of prediction but it is a probabilistic project nonetheless. What will happen with regards to sea level in 90 years time is basically no different...you aren't taking "more rolls" as your prediction is for one time not a number of them.

[Vogelzang]

http://sciliterature.50webs.com/Yobummer.htm