Pine Island Glacier ice shelf in West Antacrtica (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When co-anchor Katie Couric asked Al Gore on the May 24, 2006 Today show “What do you see happening in 15 to 20 years if nothing changes?...Even Manhattan would be in deep water”, he replied: “Yes, in fact the World Trade Center Memorial site would be underwater.”
Earlier, in January 11, 2006 on the same show, Obama Science Czar John Holdren’s prediction was even more terrifying than Gore’s: “There is an even greater threat that scientists can only speculate about. As global temperatures rise, they may cause the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet to slip more rapidly. Then we’ll be facing a sea-level rise not of one to three feet in a century, but of 10 or 20 feet in a much shorter time. The Supreme Court would be flooded. You could tie your boat to the Washington Monument. Storm surges would make the Capitol unusable.”
But don’t imagine for a moment that this flood of fright would be limited to New York or Washington, D.C. When Tom Brokaw featured NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James Hansen on a two-hour Discovery Channel special titled “Global Warming: What You Need to Know”, those Water World horrors were predicted to be much more widespread than that. Brokaw opened the interview, opining: “About 10 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by ice, most of it in the polar regions. But if the ice melts, the seas will rise dramatically and the results will be calamitous…If this worst-case scenario should occur, in the coming centuries New York could be abandoned, its famous landmarks lost to the sea.” Whereupon Hansen added: Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami…They would all be under water.”
Much of this alarmism trumpeted to and by the media, arises from reports issued by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based upon two unsupportable claims that are resulting in expenditures of countless billions of dollars for futile programs aimed at combatting climate change. The first attributes global warming-related threats to human greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), principally carbon dioxide. Key among these are coastal flooding and extreme weather conditions.
The second claim alleges that “…recent decreases in ice mass are correlated with rising air temperatures,” and more specifically that “…the late- 20th century glacier wastage likely has been in response to a post-1970 warming.” Here, the IPCC emphasizes that “Because of the corresponding large areas, the largest contributions to sea level rise came from Alaska, the Arctic and the Asian high mountains. Taken together, the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have very likely been contributing to sea level rise over 1993 to 2003 [italics in the original].”
Unfortunately, that IPCC report has provided the sole basis for draconian regulatory restrictions that the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration is placing upon our nation’s energy production and utilization. A most recent and radical example involves proposed rules to limit GHG emissions from new coal-fired power plants which will most certainly result in loss of a large number of coal facilities. The EPA specifically identifies “greater sea level rise and storm surge” as effects the rule alleges to address.
So how warranted is all that trepidation about a Western Antarctic glacier meltdown? That notion can be traced to November 2001 when a large iceberg separated from that region’s Pine Island Glacier, the continent’s currently fastest moving and largest ice discharger. Some scientists speculated that this event might herald the “beginning of the end” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Other studies during this approximate period indicate otherwise.
Satellite radar measurements of the Pine Island Glacier revealed a retreat rate of about 1.2 kilometers per year between 1992 and 1996. A subsequent mapping study in 2000 using radar altimeter and synthetic aperture radar interferometry revealed a system of tributaries that channel ice from the catchment area into the fast-moving glacier. By comparing the velocity data with information on ice thickness and snow accumulation rates, it was possible to calculate the glacier’s mass balance within an uncertainty of approximately 30%. The results showed that the mass balance of the catchment region was not significantly different from zero.
Still another study of the Pine Island Glacier used satellite altimetry and interferometry to determine the rate of change of thickness of the entire drainage basin between 1992 and 1999. Although it had thinned by up to 1.6 meters per year over that period, the researchers concluded that since glacier dynamics are typically driven by phenomena operating on time scales of hundreds to thousands of years, this was unlikely to have been caused by twentieth century warming. They also said they could “detect no change in the rate of ice thinning across the glacier over [the] 7-year period.”
And what if that 1.6 meter per year thinning continues unabated? The researchers said that, at the present rate, the estimated net contribution to sea-level rise would be 6 mm, or about the width of a paper clip each century.
Also, what about those rapidly melting Greenland glaciers? It seems that they aren’t rushing to the sea nearly as rapidly as breathlessly advertised after all. A study reported ina recent issue of Science magazine titled “21st Century Evolution of Greenland Outlet Glacier Velocities” examined 200 of them across that continent over a period between 2000-2010 using synthetic-aperture radar data collected from satellites and determined that their individual flow rates were complex and varied, both in location and time.
Glacier growth-rates that were found to be accelerating during a few years, decelerated in others. Some accelerating glaciers were in proximity to others that were decelerating. Glaciers in the northwestern portion of Greenland typically showed accelerations throughout the study period, while those in southeastern Greenland showed speed-up from about 2000-2005, then showed fairly steady rates from 2006-2010. Overall, the speed-ups across Greenland were much lower than IPCC sea-level rise projections based upon a warming climate made them out to be.
And what about melting sea ice? How much can that increase ocean levels? Actually, not at all. If you don’t believe this, put some ice cubes in a glass of water… and measure the water level before and after they melt.
Is the sea level rising? Yes, worst studies indicate that it has been rising at the rate of about 2 mm/year over the past 40 years, but not from melting glaciers, and not at an accelerating rate.
Dr. Nils-Axel Morner who has conducted an extensive analysis of this subject noted that “…prior to 5000-6000 years before present, all sea level curves are dominated by a general rise in sea level in true glacial eustatic [correlated with water volume and ocean basin size] response to melting of continental ice caps”, but that ”…sea level records are now dominated by irregular distribution of water masses over the globe…primarily driven by variations in ocean current intensity and in the atmospheric circulation system and maybe even in some deformation of the gravitational potential surface.”
Dr. Morner, who heads the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, goes on to observe that, “With respect to the last 150 years, the mean eustatic rise in sea level for the period 1850-1930 was [on] the order of 1.0-1.1 mm/year,” but “…after 1930-40, this rise seems to have stopped.” This statis “…lasted, at least up to the mid-60s.” Then after that, with the advent of the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite mission, he notes that the records show: 1) stability between 1993-1996; 2) a high amplitude rise and fall in 1997-1998 during a large El Nino period; and 3) an irregular record between 1998-2000 with no clear tendency.
Although the highly theoretical IPCC climate models have predicted an increase in the rate of global average sea level rise during the 20th century, that rate has actually been rather stable, with no significant rise over the past 50 years. And while a satellite-altimeter study published in 2005 revealed an increase, this was most likely believed to be a non-permanent feature of the global ocean’s transient thermal behavior that isn’t attributable to melting of land-based glacial ice. The global sea level rise rates in the 1920-1945 period were probably just as large as today’s.
Based upon records taken from 57 U.S. tide gauges with data base lengths between 60-156 years (with a mean span of 82 years), there had not been any acceleration on the rate of rise along U.S. shorelines over a period of time when alarmists had claimed that the planet had warmed at a rate and to a level “unprecedented” over the past one to two millennia. Instead, those records detected a slight deceleration of -0.0014 mm/year/year. Twenty-five tide gauge records that contained data for the period 1930-2010 revealed a ten times larger deceleration of -0.0130 mm/year/year. Similar decelerations were found in analyses of worldwide gauge records, leading researchers to ask why slight worldwide temperature increases haven’t produced an acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years; and why that level has possibly decelerated for at least the past 80 years?
As well known British scientist and former global warming believer James Lovelock replied when asked why, after three decades, he had decided to move to an old lifeguard cottage by the beach in Dorset, “I’m not worried about sea level rises. At worst, I think it will be 2 feet a century.”
Yet nothing here is intended to suggest that rising sea levels, however gradual, shouldn’t constitute a concern for public preparedness. North Carolina’s coastal land slopes are so gentle in many areas that a 1 foot rise can flood areas two miles inland. New Orleans was built below sea level from the beginning. In such cases, not concentrating population centers and vulnerable facilities in hurricane-prone coastal flood plains is a certainly a very prudent idea.
And then there’s the extreme case of California, a state where legislators have been a great deal more concerned about preventing sea level hazards than drowning in rapidly rising debt. This alarm began in December 2009, when then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger released a report based upon a California Energy Commission study predicting that global warming would cause San Francisco Bay waters to cover Fisherman’s Wharf and Treasure Island by 2100. As a result, the state legislature enacted AB 32, a “climate change law”, which mandates a 30 percent cut in carbon emissions from cars, trucks, utilities and other businesses by 2020. This is to be accomplished with a web of new taxes and regulations, including cap-and-trade…despite the fact that California already has the nation’s highest state sales tax, and third highest income tax.
Speaking of California, wouldn’t you imagine that, above all people, Al Gore would be really the most worried about underwater real estate? In his An Inconvenient Truthfilm, didn’t he feature an animation depicting a sudden global-warming-induced break-up of the Arctic Peninsula’s Larson-B ice shelf in 2002, suggesting that the entire Greenland Ice Sheet might suffer the same fate during this century?
But then, if this were the case, what about his recent purchase a big $9 million ocean-view villa in Montecito? Is his intent, perhaps, to keep watch on that rising tide of terror for all of us…heroically serving our nation as a modern-day Paul Revere?
