Is sea level rise worse than terrorism?


Flood risk

Amid repeated claims of climate change alarmism from climate sceptics, a new study published in Nature Geoscience claims that sea level rise this century could be double that previously predicted by the IPCC.

This news comes amid a British Government report warning that the UK needs to treat risk of flooding with the same level of priority currently assigned to terrorism following £3 billion of flood damage in the UK this Summer.

Sceptics who once claimed that global warming didn’t exist now admit that the planet is warming, although they repeatedly tell us that current changes in climate are within ‘natural variations’. Extreme weather events have increased dramatically in the past ten years, and as global warming gets closer to home and the natural variation theory gets stretched further we hope that some old prejudices may be re-examined.

We fully appreciate that the science still has some way to go, but the evidence mounting around us every day its time we made some decisions before it’s too late.

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I’ve read the paper in Nature geoscience and it doesn’t claim that sea level rise this century could be double that previously predicted by the IPCC. The paper studies estimated sea levels and rates of sea level rise during the last interglacial 125,000 years ago. Not-with-standing that the estimates come with necessarily high error bars the authors merely state that their results give an ‘observational context’ that underscores the plausibility of rates of sea level rise of 1+/-0.5m per 100 years. Wether or not sea levels in this interglacial will rise at that rate is a moot point and depends on the nature and path of climate change.

The last interglacial was different in several contexts to the present, not least of which is the more extreme warming of Greenland which is estimated to be 3 to 5 degrees C warmer than present.

Paul, you raise a very good and important clarification. You also highlight the fact that precise circumstances surrounding previous warm and cold periods do not necessarily reflect today’s situation, which again is something that people on both sides need to remember.

“Extreme weather events have increased dramatically in the past ten years”

Please cite a source for this claim.

Echo ClimateHeretic’s call for a source.

I won’t mention the Danish Hitler by name, but he raises a good point that rather than extreme weather events having increased in severity or frequency in recent years, the problem is more that increases in wealth and focus on tourism-led development have led to greater <> costs.

Hence keen interest from the ABI in the UK, particularly after this summer but they have actually been actively engaging with climate change for much longer.

Please clarify whether by “increased dramatically” you mean frequency and severity, or economic cost.

typo:- greater ECONOMIC costs

I have a source for the extreme weather events claim, although I need to dig it out from my not very organised filing system. Please bear with me.

In response to the question posed.

Since both terrorism and sea-level rise as a result of AGW are based on the same fear-driven psychology, there are several parallels that can be extracted.

Terrorism works because it instills a sense of vulnerability to the targets as a result of the uncertainity and potential for harm it represents, the underlying message is that you can be affected unless you take steps to protect yourself (in this case relinquish personal freedoms and rights) and vigilently inform on activity that is suspicious.

The fear of sea-level rise is based upon the exact same principal. Is the next step in the process the reduction of your economic liberties and the reporting of suspicious emission activities?

IMO the UN thinks so.

Sea levels are falling in the Pacific Ocean,
sea levels are falling in the Indian Ocean,
sea levels are falling in the Atlantic Ocean, and sea levels are falling in the Arctic Ocean.

How does IPCC arrive at all oceans with rising levels?

It does it by cooking the books.

The following is from Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner the head of the
Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at
Stockholm University in Sweden.

Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in [IPCC’s]
publications, in their website, was a straight line–
suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line
of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide
gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as
though they had recorded something; but they hadn’t
recorded anything. It was the original one which they
had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a
“correction factor,” which they took from the tide
gauge. So it was not a measured thing, but a figure
introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the
Academy of Sciences in Moscow –I said you have
introduced factors from outside; it’s not a
measurement. It looks like it is measured from the
satellite, but you don’t say what really happened. And
they answered, that we had to do it, because
otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!