The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, has a new website; www.climate.gov. As one writer put it, it lampoons itself. It looks like realclimate.org with flash animation.There’s no balance whatsoever; it’s all alarmism all the time, with a thin veneer of science and policy wonkery.
Now, NOAA is supposed to be there to provide useful information to the public and business and government industries alike. They’re the federal agency behind weather forecasting. They were established to give their best guess as to the weather over the week to 10-day horizon to benefit farmers, sailors, other commercial operations, and the public at large.
Somewhere along the line, somebody thought that they should get into the climate forecasting business. On its face, that seems like a rational thing to do, and there is a rational way to go about doing it. For whatever reason, the decision makers chose not to do that. Instead, they created a political advocacy site that pushes all of the alarmist talking points, whether established by science or not.
Questionable as that all is, one of the tabs links to ClimateWatch magazine. ClimateWatch? As if this is some sort of anti-corruption watchdog organization? This is an official US government “magazine”. And it’s full of alarmist dishonesty.
Let me single out one article to illustrate the point. It’s called “Rhode Island’s Rising Tide“. This caught my eye, because Rhode Island is a tiny bit of beach nestled between Connecticut and Massachusetts, about half way between the metropolitan areas of New York City and Boston. Why single out Rhode Island? Is the sea level there changing at a different rate than those cities?
Recurring flooding at a waterfront park in the City of Providence was a tip off to Rhode Island coastal resource managers that something was going on. The city having to close its hurricane gates numerous times a year to keep its riverfront walkways dry in the face of high tides pointed to a problem that the city couldn’t afford to ignore.
Sounds ominous, doesn’t it? As if the Loch Ness Monster were lurking off the RI shore. Notice they didn’t give a time frame? They imply that this is all recent, but they don’t say anything. So they go on:
Coastal managers didn’t have to look any further than tidal records to identify the source of the trouble: long-term data from tide gauges showed an increase in average sea level of almost a foot since 1929.
Ok, so there’s been some sort of trend going back to the days when only wealthy people had automobiles. That could explain an increase in sea level, but they also don’t tell you what the trend is prior to 1929. But there’s another bit of dishonesty here. Buried down in the the article we have:
In Rhode Island, long-term records from the Newport tide gauge show that relative local sea level has risen 10.1 inches (plus or minus 1.2 inches) over the last century. A recent coastal council science report estimates that Rhode Island’s land surface is subsiding by about six inches per century. The difference between the two observations represents the change attributable to global sea level rise.
So the sea level only rose 6″, and the ground sunk 6″. Now so far, they haven’t attributed any of this to the enhanced greenhouse effect. The closest they came is this:
Sea level rise refers to the observed increase in global mean sea level over time. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that global sea levels would rise from 7 to 23 inches in the coming century. Since 1990, however, sea level has been rising faster than the rate predicted by models used to generate IPCC estimates.
Now watch this next rhetorical trick. In the article, they state:
Other evidence implicating sea level rise as the root of the problem included local erosion rates that had doubled from 1990 to 2006 and some freshwater wetlands near the coast that were transitioning to salt marsh.
Implying that something happened recently in terms of the sea level. But their own graph makes it very clear that the long term rise has been pretty steady throughout the entire period:
So with no reason, other than the thoroughly discredited IPCC AR4, which predicted rises between 7 and 23 inches in the next century, they then go on and show photoshopped images of a waterfront park with three foot sea level rises!
Let me remind you one more time, this is an official US government publication. Anyway, much verbiage about regulatory wonkery, and now we get to the bottom line:
While regulations for requiring new development to plan for 3 to 5 feet of sea level rise have not yet been implemented, Fugate says progress is being made.
So they’ve gone from an historical net 1 foot/century to 7-23 inches per the Keystone cops at the IPCC, to 3-5 feet! And what is this going to mean in practical terms? They’re going make the regulation 5′ above the current high tide mark, and forbid construction within the zone between where the high tide is now and where the theoretical high tide would be at high tide + 5 feet. That’s a lot of coastal land off limits. Of course, government entities will be allowed to build, but they’ll have to put fill in and raise the whole thing up 5 feet.
And just to make the point that this isn’t just one isolated instance, here are the other recent articles on the page:
Short-term Cooling on a Warming Planet: Basically the “it’s still warming” talking point.
An Upwelling Crisis: Ocean Acidification: CO2 is causing other, well crisis is their word, not mine.
Living with an Uncertain Monsoon: The weather used to be totally predictable, and now it’s getting weird.
Can We Blame El Niño?: There is no Warming but Greenhouse, and AlGore is its messenger.
These guys are just rays of sunshine, aren’t they?
On a related note, a personal anecdote. There’s a road rehab project near where I live where the road runs along the shore (George Edwards/Dockton), and the seawall needs to be replaced. The county is evaluating “alternatives”, and seems to be leaning heavily toward rerouting traffic inland and removing the road entirely. This, of course, would strand the only public fishing dock on the island, since they don’t want to even replace the road with a bike or pedestrian trail. Among the factors driving this decision: “sea level change”.
These nuts are like termites, ladies and gentlemen. They’ve penetrated every agency of government, and they’re proceeding as if it’s a done deal that we’re all going to wake up one morning and find the sea level 10 or 20 feet higher. And they’re letting this article of faith influence many decisions, large and small. If you get a flyer about some project in your area, read it. And don’t be shocked if they’re doing something stupid because they’re cocksure that the sea’s going to rise and the hurricanes are going to increase, and you know the spiel. Be angry, but don’t be surprised. We’re being ruled by fanatics.
Just for Giggles: Bill Nye “The Science Guy” — MSNBC Rachel Maddow Show
Nye’s analysis conflates global warming with El Nino in a confusing way and invokes energy, turbulence thinking.“[T]here’s more energy in the atmosphere and this is stirring things up,” Nye said. “If you want to get serious about it, these guys claiming that the snow in Washington disproves climate change are almost unpatriotic. It’s really, they’re denying science. So they’re very happy to have the weather forecast be accurate within a few hours, but they’re displeased or un-enchanted by predictions of the world getting warmer. It’s really, it shakes me up.”“Well, the world, overall — the world’s getting warmer,” Nye said. “If you like – these phenomenon, by the way, this week, are just generally a result of El Niño, where the Pacific Ocean surface gets a little warmer and this affects the weather in North America like crazy and this is very well-documented, and you can go to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Web sites and you can look at this data. The sea surface is warmer, putting more energy in the atmosphere, and making things more turbulent.”🙄
Tags: NOAA
