Yet another much-predicted climate-change catastrophe turns out to be baseless: Worldwide sea levels are not rising any faster than a century ago. [emphasis, links added]
This doesn’t mean climate change isn’t happening, nor that particular locales don’t face a rising-seas problem — but it does mean no apocalypse is coming unless the whole world takes drastic action to prevent it.
For decades, complex climate-change models have indicated global sea levels to be rising at twice or more the historic level, but until now, no scientists had bothered checking that against actual observed reality.
Dutch engineer Hessel Voortman and researcher Rob de Vos finally did the work; their peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, “A Global Perspective on Local Sea Level Changes,” shows the models have gotten it completely wrong.
They reviewed actual data (on an average of a century of observations) at 150,000 coastal locations across the planet to determine that sea-level rise this century will likely be about six inches, the same as the last century.
The models, which extrapolated from observations in the Antarctic only, plus a host of assumptions about how the oceans respond to rising global temperatures, suggested sea levels would increase by 1 foot to 3 feet by 2100.
The Dutch researchers’ “first-ever global study of sea level rise” refutes those claims — and raises the huge question of why no one else had bothered to test the predictions.
Indeed, Princeton University’s Michael Oppenheimer predicted in 2019 that sea levels would rise by more than 34 inches by the century’s end.
The Dutch researchers’ “first-ever global study of sea level rise” refutes those claims — and raises the huge question of why no one else had bothered to test the predictions.
As of 2020, they found, the worldwide rise is only around 1.5 millimeters per year — far less than the 3 mm to 4 mm (0.12 to 0.16 inches) a year routinely reported in scientific literature and the general news media.
For his own uses as a hydraulic engineer working with flood-protection and coastal-infrastructure adaptation projects, Voortman two years ago checked actual data for the Netherlands, and found it didn’t match the global predictions.
He was shocked to find that no one else was checking the models’ claims against observed reality, and set out at his own expense to do the global study.
Don’t expect the truth to set in fast: “Climate Week” later this month will surely blare the same old now-debunked warnings.
After all, the propagandists still keep telling everyone that climate change is producing a surge in extreme weather events — and the data don’t bear that out, either.
Heck, they outright lie about the “death” of the Great Barrier Reef, too.
All this is supposed to justify a rush to bring carbon emissions to “net zero,” which requires drastically less use of fossil fuels and (the story goes) heavy reliance on wind and solar power.
Yet such energy policies are insanely expensive — which is why nations like India and (especially) China keep building coal-fired electric plants even as they pay lip service to the “need” for change.
Chasing “net zero” has helped zero out economic growth in Western Europe, and slammed consumers in New York, New Jersey, and other states.
The idea that human progress is making the planet uninhabitable scratched a deep ideological itch on the left, leaving most in the media and academia prone to eat up and amplify all the predictions of apocalypse.
And the “need” to stop the catastrophe requires huge state interventions in the economy — growing the power of government insiders and UN bureaucrats, giving them huge incentives to join the “sky is falling” brigade.
It also allows for huge payoffs to your friends in the name of saving the planet.
High tide on an empty beach shows the “rising seas” panic may be overblown. Photo by Ariel Cattai on Unsplash
Read rest at NY Post
Imagine that. Actually check reality by testing the assumptions in the models shows that the models are wrong–Garbage In->Garbage Model->Garbage Out. So the Obamas and others with homes on the coast aren’t going to lose their homes anytime soon from a rising sea level.