Obamas EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy stood in Miami and called for slashing American CO2 emissions (while China and India ramp up) to stop sea level rise. She couldnt be more wrong. She apparently gets her science from Big Green press releases. Should President Obama allow members of his administration to make policy based on long-debunked propaganda? Share the facts at Climate Depot: climatedepot/ Every step in Ms. McCarthy’s chain of reasoning is either wrong or misleading. No global (atmospheric) warming has occurred for the past 18 years. Independent measurements show that neither has there been significant ocean warming since at least 2003. As a consequence, the ocean is not expanding and cannot be causing extra sea-level rise. Neither has the much-trumpeted prediction of an acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise taken place. Instead, a deceleration of the global rate of rise has occurred over the past few decades. Despite the cessation of warming, accurate National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tide-gauge measurements show that sea level at specific U.S. coastal locations continues to rise at about historic rates. How can this be? It is so because the idea that sea-level change is driven primarily by human greenhouse-gas emissions, global warming and ocean expansion is fallacious. Instead, rates of sea-level change at any given place are controlled mostly by the combination of the volume of water in the ocean (itself a function of global land-ice volume at any given time), by dynamic oceanographic features, such as movements in major ocean currents, and by the uplift or subsidence of the solid earth beneath any measuring station. The only way the sort of sea-level rise feared by Ms. McCarthy is possible is if massive quantities of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps melted. This did not happen even during the two-degrees Celsius warmer Holocene Optimum, 5,000 to 9,000 years ago, and the current trend is toward lower temperatures and greatly more expansive sea ice around Antarctica, the source of 90 percent of all ice on Earth. In reality, the rate of sea-level rise today is now so low that adaptation is relatively easy, and certainly far more cost effective than restructuring our energy infrastructure on the off-chance that this will affect global climate and sea level.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 13:01:26 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015