Hell or High Water

New study shows sea level rise has been slow and a constant, pre-dating industrialization. By Thomas Lifson AMERICAN THINKER

By Timothy Birdnow, AMERICAN THINKER

Tide and time wait for no man, or so they say. But that isn’t really true if you are a rich progressive, or one of those who finagle a fine living off the stupidity of naive guilt-riddled Westerners.

Take the rising tide. For years the climate alarmists have been claiming that low-lying atolls like those in the Maldives would disappear, swallowed by the sea in a manner reminiscent of Atlantis. Global warming is causing sea level rise, they claim,  and places like the Seychelles or Kiribati or the Maldives were doomed, doomed, doomed!

Reasonable people pointed out that the sea levels have been rising for ten thousand years and there has been no major increase in the rate of sea level rise (which is 0.118 ± 0.016  inches per year), but this entreaty fell on deaf ears.

In fact, the Copenhagen Climate Summit made it quite plain:

“The Copenhagen Climate Change conference opened this week with an urgent call to action on the rapidly warming temperatures and the associated human costs that come from it. And, no country in the world will be more affected than the small nation of Maldives. The country is a series of tiny atolls that rise no more than a few feet above sea level. The fear is that as sea levels rise, the entire country of Maldives will simply be swamped and disappear. All 309,000 residents of the country will have to move — everyone from the President to the poorest resident. The newly elected President of the Maldives and his cabinet held a cabinet meeting underwater in full scuba gear to highlight their country’s fate.

So, the prime minister needed lots of money to save a remnant of his people and provide breathing apparatus.

Or was it for other reasons?

The Maldives just built an airport. Actually, they just built four new airports. That is strange behavior for a country that needs to evacuate.

Airplanes put out a lot of greenhouse gases. If the Maldives were really concerned about rising seas wouldn’t that be a bad idea?  Wouldn’t they want to lead by example and not poison the air with plant food? And one has to ask why the country is building airports. The answer is tourism is way up, meaning those holier than thou European internationalists who fret over climate change and demand high gasoline prices and “decarbonization” are living off the fat of the land, flying to a tropical paradise while the hoi poloi struggle to pay their heating bills.

In fact, “experts” are predicting half the world’s beaches will disappear, swallowed by the hungry, hungry hippo, er, ocean.  Meanwhile the rich and beautiful are enjoying the well-deserved luxuries that the Maldives and others provide.

This study points to erosion in populated beachfront areas as proof of rising sea levels. Of course, where a lot of people gather and build you are going to have erosion, but that doesn’t seem to occur to these wizards of smart. Apparently, the Maldives decided to just say no to climate change. And so did the low-lying island nation of  Tuvalu.

We have been told ad nauseam that along with rising seas, global warming would give us more severe and inclement weather and increased precipitation. But the reality is we are not witnessing any evidence of this. For example, deaths by drowning have decreased considerably worldwide.  One would logically expect a rise in drowning deaths to coincide with this alleged increase. People would get caught swimming in unsafe areas, or having flash flooding sweep them away, or whatnot. ‘taint happening.

Also, we have just come out of a hurricane drought which lasted throughout the entire period of global warming. It should further be pointed out tornado activity has been quiet until last year. And tornado deaths were way down.

So what gives?  Either global warming is causing extreme weather events or it isn’t. Is it perhaps just that people are building where they wouldn’t have in the past, and that with the 24-hour news cycle everyone is informed of such things immediately? Certainly the recent tornadoes in Nashville were terrible, but was it all that unusual? As of this writing 22 people have lost their lives. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the survivors.

But unusual? The worst tornado in history was the Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925 which  killed 695 people overall. That dwarfs the Nashville tornado (though it offers small comfort to those who suffered from it.)  The Natchez tornado of 1840 killed 317 people. The St. Louis tornado of 1896 killed 255.

Here is a list of tornado deaths by year.  Notice there is no real pattern to death tolls; if climate change were causing this, we should see a pattern, more (or fewer) deaths. We don’t. In fact the trendline is downward during the 20th and first decade of the 21st centuries.

In short, climate change is not behaving as predicted. When a scientific model fails to predict reality, it means the data are flawed or the model is wrong — or both.

Frankly these models just don’t square with reality. For example, there has been little warming in the tropical troposphere.  Planetary temperatures have risen little. There has been no major changes in the Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) something that should change if either clouds were forming in greater numbers or large swaths of ice were melting. Contrary to hysterical claims, the oceans are not warming much.  Sea surface temps have not risen appreciably. As for ice, East Antarctic ice has been growing.

I suppose that’s why both NOAA and NASA has been forced to fudge data. It’s happening in Australia too.  (BTW, recent work by Dr. Roy Spencer suggests carbon dioxide is removed four times faster than thought.)

And now we have the Maldives building airports. Follow the money, the old saying admonishes. The money is betting on increasing beachfront value, it seems.  And this boom is happening all over.

I wouldn’t sell off that vacation house just yet, folks.