Some level-headed thinking please

SUNDAY JANUARY 24, 2010

From the latest Climate Change Information Sheet 11

“ Higher sea levels could also cause extreme events such as high tides, storm surges, and tsunamis to reap more destruction”.

When there is a polar bear extinction story, there is quiet but growing doubt. With the next polar bear story, a few more people catch on that someone is trying to mislead them. Polar bears range over half a million square miles and cannot possibly be counted. And how would you know you’re not counting the same one twice? How can they be seen in the pitch-black 6-month Arctic winter darkness? Counters in 2005 summered at the Arctic Circle with helicopters, snow-buggies, and clattering canteens, making great amplified noises in that dead silent pristine environment. Self-preserving polar bears quickly made themselves scarce. Because of the ice melt they tend to leave anyway in summertime. They follow the seals and end up in coast Alaskan towns searching for food, where they invariably get shot. Surprise - the official count of bears-on-ice came in low. So why, after the Arctic has periodically warmed and cooled, 350,000 years after their first grizzly-bear ancestors moved north, are polar bears still with us? Does anyone seriously believe that polar bears evolved since the Medieval Warm Period or the last Arctic warm period around the 1930's? Nevertheless the fewer-bears story created a media sales bonanza. Google “polar bears heading for extinction” and read the 39,000 responses. They supposedly begin to die out if there is less Arctic ice.

They must be talking about a certain ex-vice president’s fictional Arctic, because the real Arctic has had 10% more ice this winter than over the previous winter, extra surface ice amount equivalent to the size of Germany. Satellite images are showing that the cold spell is helping the sea ice expand in coverage by about 2 million square kilometres, compared to the average winter coverage in the previous three years. "It's nice to know that the ice is recovering," Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, told CBC News..." Google it under "Arctic ice thickening in 2009". You will read Antarctica too is thickening, in about 7,000 references. But that news tidbit has not yet reached daily newspapers.

For two years I have been warning of longer colder winters down here until about 2011. Yet all media warning is still about warming, by 2degC over the next century, based on..what? Computer models extrapolating for the whole globe using data only gathered in warm cities? NZ Grey Power claims that 1600 people a year have been dying in NZ because they cannot afford heating bills. When 1600 have not equally died because summer was too nice, shouldn’t we be reading warnings about the cold? The sun has been quiet for about two years and the next sunspot cycles, when they do get underway are expected to be weak. We may be facing two decades of temperatures cooler than we have experienced for about 70 years. Some glaciers are advancing (google "advancing glaciers"-1,330,000 responses) some oceans are dropping (google “sea-levels falling” – 921,000 responses), and ice increase in Antarctica (2,620,000 responses) is causing “calving” - pressure at the edges to break pieces off, setting some afloat. Some made it as far as the Oamaru coast in 2006.

If the warmers are going to move their progressive agenda, they have to do it before nature puts an end to the AGW "crisis" once and for all. If the sun continues to be inactive and the cooling Pacific Decadal Oscillation persists, the cooling trend will continue and the IPCC top scientists and NIWA will not be able to hide it. The taxpaying public will have little patience bankrolling a scam and international news media will have to think of other scares to keep up sales.

I collect old prints. Century-old photographs and paintings of wharves and tranquil coastlines depict identical sea levels to today. On all NZ’s real-life beaches no sea appears to be rising. There is always erosion, more often caused by lower sea-levels, because lower water tends to gouge the shoreline further down, destabilising and undermining a beach. Higher sealevels, with their higher watermarks deposit sand further up the beach which delays erosion. Larger storm wave action erodes, but large waves do not correlate with sea-level. Wave size is a function of local storm and surge, governed by the repeating 18.613-yr tidal cycle, whereas sea levels are part of the 50-100,000 year cycles of ice-ages and interglacials. These rhythmic fluctuations are governed by periodic changes over time scales of thousands of years in the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the tilt of Earth’s axis, and the wobble of Earth’s spin axis.

Yet recently, the SF Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News printed warnings about rising sea levels, up to 5 feet by the next century. From 1900 to 2000 the sea level has increased no more than 10cm (4"). Nevertheless, expected sea level rise over the next century has become a contest for the highest number. In 1988 the NZ government figure was 28mm/century, about 1/3mm per year, but 10 years later this was revised by NIWA in 1998 to 1mm per year (4" per century). The next IPCC report claimed 1.7mm per year (170mm per century), then the CSIRO upped the stakes to 3.1mm/yr. Then in 2004 the UK Treasury report decided on 14mm/year. Not to be outdone by a British institution, the German Advisory Council on Climate Change in 2006 decided on 20mm/year. Not a year later this was topped by James Hansen's 50mm/year. By May of 2008, we had Real Climate talking of half a metre per year, 57m per century. Al Gore is still ahead with nearly three quarters of a metre per year - 70m by 2100.

How can they all be correct? Obviously there is no consensus. Around the globe, the sea levels vary due to the tides, twice a day by about 2 metres. So even just a 1mm per year rise, if it is happening, would be 1/365 of a millimetre (0.002mm), in each tide variation of 2 metres (2000mm), which is a tide-level incremental rise of a millionth per day. Some would say it is not even measurable. Others believe that it will one day submerge Tuvalu and erode away our coastline. But a tsunami it aint.