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Post by nickrr on Dec 21, 2012 14:57:24 GMT 1
The quote you gave claimed that he was an independent scientist. This is clearly false. Lucky you! I see that you still don't understand the term ad hominem. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominemIt's not irrelevant that he is funded by large oil companies.
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Post by nickrr on Dec 21, 2012 15:02:21 GMT 1
Normally I do but this wasn't my clearest link! I'll find something more interesting when when I've got a moment.
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 21, 2012 18:32:57 GMT 1
Judith Curry remarks on the huge coastal landfill site that spared adjacent areas from the worst effects of Sandy a few weeks ago Given the low maturity of the global mean sea-level data sets, it doesn’t make sense to use GMSL as a primary variable for documenting the existence of AGW. Rather, the practical issues associated with sea level rise are fundamentally local, and local sea level rise can be substantially different from GMSL rise. Practical solutions like land use policy and landfill seem to be a better choice than hoping to control sea level rise via reducing greenhouse emissions. judithcurry.com/2012/12/20/20th-century-mean-global-sea-level-rise/The whole thread on sea level at Climate Etc is interesting.
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 21, 2012 18:46:53 GMT 1
How a Former Landfill Helped Absorb Hurricane’s Surge Staten Island Landfill Park Proves Savior in Hurricane By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN watch the video, too, here artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/staten-island-landfill-park-proves-savior-in-hurricane/During Hurricane Sandy, the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island absorbed a critical part of the storm surge. Its hills and waterways spared nearby neighborhoods like Travis, Bulls Head, New Springville and Arden Heights much worse flooding. The 2,200-acre site, which closed a decade ago and is being turned into a park, was also temporarily reopened as a transfer station, helping officials and relief agencies clear debris from around the city. If many New Yorkers, Staten Islanders included, still can’t help thinking of the place as a mountain range of stinking trash, that’s understandable. But since its closing, Fresh Kills has become a model for landfill reclamation around the world, having been transformed into a vast green space full of wildlife. Now it is also demonstrating the role of wetland buffers in battling rising waters. Maybe this will help push officials to ready what is known as Freshkills Park for visitors. James Corner, the landscape architect who helped design the High Line and heads the firm Field Operations, won a competition years ago to transform the site and imagined a decades-long, evolving earthwork of different grasses, grown, cut and replanted, creating a rich new soil and landscape. It’s a visionary plan. But regulatory and financial hurdles, along with the usual bureaucratic conflicts, have stalled progress. The state environmental agency wants to make sure the site is safe, which makes sense. At the same time, the price tag — by some estimates, hundreds of millions of dollars — has clearly daunted city leaders and led officials to pursue a piecemeal transformation that could undo Mr. Corner’s concept. Considering the unconscionable $4 billion (or more) that is being squandered on a new PATH station at the World Trade Center site for perhaps 50,000 commuters, the cost of Fresh Kills doesn’t sound quite so crazy. Now there’s word that the Metropolitan Transit Authority may need to spend $600 million to restore the South Ferry subway station, which opened just in 2009 and was flooded by the storm. It’s hard to say which is more scandalous, that the authority’s planners hadn’t anticipated flooding at a station on the water’s edge, or that subway fare increases will partly go to pay for their shortsightedness. By comparison, Fresh Kills has come out smelling like roses. I recently paid a visit and shot a video of the site with my colleague David Frank and Eloise Hirsh, administrator of Freshkills Park for the New York City Parks Department. No wonder Mr. Corner discovered such potential in what has become a timely research post for climate change and ecological restoration. Once it is opened to the public, the park also promises to repay long-suffering Staten Island residents who endured generations of stench and anger, and more than that, to give the entire city an immense, bucolic urban playland — a 21st-century postindustrial landmark rising from mounds of 20th-century waste. Who knows? In its shift from blight to boon, it could become a park as unexpected and transformative for the city as the High Line. artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/staten-island-landfill-park-proves-savior-in-hurricane/
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Post by marchesarosa on May 16, 2013 16:30:23 GMT 1
Not strictly about sea level rise, this post, but about Pacific Island GROWTH which keeps pace with sea level. At last the mainstream media have caught up with the facts about coral islands and coral reefs - they grow ever upwards as sea level rises and presumably reduced in height when the sea level fell and water was locked up in ice during the planet's regular long glaciations. www.abc.net.au/news/2010-06-03/pacific-islands-growing-not-sinking/851738Climate scientists have expressed surprise at findings that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking.
Islands in Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, largely due to coral debris, land reclamation and sediment.
The findings, published in the magazine New Scientist, were gathered by comparing changes to 27 Pacific islands over the last 20 to 60 years using historical aerial photos and satellite images.
Auckland University's Associate Professor Paul Kench, a member of the team of scientists, says the results challenge the view that Pacific islands are sinking due to rising sea levels associated with climate change.
"Eighty per cent of the islands we've looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, gotten larger," he said.
"Some of those islands have gotten dramatically larger, by 20 or 30 per cent.
"We've now got evidence the physical foundations of these islands will still be there in 100 years."
Dr Kench says the growth of the islands can keep pace with rising sea levels. www.abc.net.au/news/2010-06-03/pacific-islands-growing-not-sinking/851738
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Post by marchesarosa on May 16, 2013 16:38:58 GMT 1
Of course anyone who has read Willis Eschenbach's articles on this subject on WUWT over the years knows all about this phenomenon already. I guess it takes the IPCC climate change hacks a while for the facts to sink in. How the alarmists used to abuse Prof Nils Axel Morner who almost single handedly has represented the true facts over many years! Guess they'll have to remove his name from their hate list now. wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/16/australias-abc-comes-round-to-what-we-said-on-wuwt-years-ago/#more-86380
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Post by fascinating on May 16, 2013 17:46:57 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on May 16, 2013 19:20:22 GMT 1
New research projects mitigation of sea level risePosted on May 16, 2013 by Anthony Watts wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/13/what-we-dont-know/#more-86197Recent snowfall anomalies in Dronning Maud Land, East AntarcticaEnhanced snowfall on the East Antarctic ice sheet is projected to significantly mitigate 21st century global sea level rise. In recent years (2009 and 2011), regionally extreme snowfall anomalies in Dronning Maud Land, in the Atlantic sector of East Antarctica, have been observed. It has been unclear, however, whether these anomalies can be ascribed to natural decadal variability, or whether they could signal the beginning of a long-term increase of snowfall. Here we use output of a regional atmospheric climate model, evaluated with available firn core records and gravimetry observations, and show that such episodes had not been seen previously in the satellite climate data era (1979). Comparisons with historical data that originate from firn cores, one with records extending back to the 18th century, confirm that accumulation anomalies of this scale have not occurred in the past ~60 years, although comparable anomalies are found further back in time. We examined several regional climate model projections, describing various warming scenarios into the 21st century. Anomalies with magnitudes similar to the recently observed ones were not present in the model output for the current climate, but were found increasingly probable toward the end of the 21st century. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50559/abstract--------- Sounds like one of those self-regulating negative feedback mechanisms to me!
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Post by marchesarosa on May 16, 2013 19:21:15 GMT 1
Apparently unknown to modern alarmist climatologists and propagandists , however, fascinating! I guess it's just one of those things they, in their general ignorance, overlooked!
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Post by alancalverd on May 16, 2013 23:51:49 GMT 1
The notion of global sea level rise seems bizarre. Most of the planet is covered by sea and just a few dry bits stick out from time to time as the tectonic plates move around and volcanoes pop up. The whole thing is in a constant state of flux, with no fixed datum anywhere. East Anglia is sinking and west Wales is rising, at least until the next ice age.
Mean sea level is a useful concept for aerial navigation, but only over short distances and within the range of undulations of the solid surface - above 16,000 ft (3000 ft in the UK) we use pressure altitude with an arbitrary reference. It also has some value for coastal navigation. But it would be a foolish sailor or airman who plotted a course within a millimeter or even a foot of his limit, because the damn stuff, whether water or air, is going up and down by several feet all the time.
It strikes me as very odd to use such a crude, poorly defined, and locally variable concept as mean sea level in any scientific or engineering discussion. What matters to people is the extent to which high tide encroaches on useful land, the maximum height of waves, and the minimum safe pressure altitude to fly, at particular times and points of interest.
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Post by marchesarosa on May 18, 2013 10:18:54 GMT 1
Indeed, Mr Calverd. And mankind is not without the means to protect coastlines if it is necessary to do so. Mankind is just as able to reclaim land from the sea if necessary and is doing so in many places round the world. Sea level rise is a politically motivated non-problem which scaremongers are trying to use to bash the ignorant into compliance with their world governance aspirations. Future generations can safely be left to deal with the matter of sea level change in precisely the same way as we have. In fact "the grandchildren" that alarmists are so anxious to protect will undoubtedly have greater insight and abilities into future problems than we have if history is anything to go by!
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Post by alancalverd on May 19, 2013 0:43:37 GMT 1
Short-term economics appear to be more damaging to the ecosystem than any longterm predictions of sealevel. I understand that significant areas of low-lying and even expensively reclaimed arable land in the Far East are being intentionally flooded with seawater for prawn farming: an attractive short term export, but very far from a sustainable staple, which is what the local population eally needs.
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Post by fascinating on May 19, 2013 8:22:57 GMT 1
I think I know what you mean about calling the notion of rise in sea level as bizarre, Alan. The water sloshes around the globe, there are 2 tides a day, the water expands and contracts with changes in temperature, and of course there are waves almost constantly. Then there is the fact that the land itself rises and falls and shifts, so that the position of the coast at any point keeps changing. There's nowhere on Earth where you could plant a giant nileometer and say "this indicates the exact level of the world's seas".
On the other hand we do know that if, for example, all the ice in the Arctic melted then the sea level would ermm well of course it would have no effect on sea level, since it is floating ice. OK, suppose all ice on Antarctica melted (a big if). Then that would release a huge amount of water into the oceans. What we are talking about is the total ocean water volume. But to translate that volume into the effects it would have on people, we need to assess how much average sea level would rise and from that we can see to what land contour the waters would reach.
Another way of looking at it is to try to measure the change in average sea level and determine if the supposed melting of ice caps and glaciers is matched in the increase of sea volume, using the average sea level as your metric.
The sea level rise around the world seems to be miniscule.
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Post by marchesarosa on May 19, 2013 9:19:39 GMT 1
We are living through the epoch of ice-ages. Even during the brief interglacials like now all the ice does not melt. People who stir up irrational fears on the basis of "what if all the ice melted" are crass. It ain't going to happen any millennium soon. They should find something else to scaremonger about.
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Post by alancalverd on May 19, 2013 12:54:10 GMT 1
But not until all the arctic ice, and the antarctic ice shelf, had melted. And until the melted floating polar ice had warmed to 4 deg C, it the mean sea level would of course decrease. So unless the physics of water has changed (face it, AGW proponents believe any old rubbish as long as it's scary enough) global warming should lead to a decrease in mean sea level.
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