North Carolina ignores science in sea level planning
An interesting political battle is underway in North Carolina on how to plan for 21st century sea level rise, newsobserver.com reports. Sea level rise scientists commonly cite one meter (3.3 feet) as the expected global sea level rise by 2100, and more than a dozen science panels from coastal states, including a state-appointed science panel in North Carolina, agree. However, a coastal economic development group called NC-20, named for the 20 coastal counties in North Carolina, attacked the report, saying the science was flawed. NC-20 says the state should rely only on historical trends of sea level rise, and not plan for a future where sea level rise might accelerate. North Carolina should plan for only 8 inches of rise by 2100, based on the historical trend in Wilmington, NC, the group says. Republican state legislators introduced a bill that follows this logic, requiring the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission to make development plans assuming sea level rise will not accelerate. On Thursday, a state senate committee signed off on the bill, sending it to the full Senate. NC-20 also successfully made an "intense push" to get the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management, which is using a $5 million federal grant to analyze the impact of rising water, to lower its worst-case sea level rise scenario from 1 meter (39 inches) to 15 inches by 2100.
FIgure 1. Global sea level rise from 1992 - April 2012, as measured by three satellite instruments (TOPEX, Jason-1, and Jason-2.) Sea level rise has been relatively constant at about 3.1 mm per year (1.2 inches per decade) during this time period. The big downward dip during 2010 is due to the fact that year had a record amount of precipitation over land areas. By 2011, that precipitation had run-off into the oceans, bringing sea level back up again. Image credit: University of Colorado Sea Level Research Group.
Commentary
East Carolina University geologist Stan Riggs, a science panel member and coastal science expert, said of the proposed legislation, “We’re throwing this science out completely, and what’s proposed is just crazy for a state that used to be a leader in marine science. You can’t legislate the ocean, and you can’t legislate storms.” Our climate change blogger, Dr. Ricky Rood, had this to say in his latest post: "I would dismiss the proposed law as an attempt to legislate away that which stands in the way of our desires to consume and build for our personal imperatives. I would dismiss it as politics and note the names of the un-serious politicians for the next election." I agree with both of these assessments. The best science we have argues the planet will continue to warm, melting icecaps, causing accelerated sea level rise. Between 1900 - 2007, global sea level rose at 1.7 mm per year (Bindoff et al., 2007). Between 1993 - 2012, sea level rise accelerated to 3.1 mm per year, a 75% increase over the 20th century rate. If this accelerated rate continues to 2100, global sea level rise will be 10.7", which is higher than the 8" rise North Carolina is being told to plan for. The continuing accelerating trend in Greenland ice loss since 2000 I blogged about last month should make anyone leery of betting that sea level rise will not accelerate even more in the coming decades. Betting that sea level rise won't accelerate this century is like betting that a slowly intensifying tropical storm will maintain that slow rate of intensification, ignoring that the majority of the computer models are predicting the storm will rapidly intensify into a Category 3 hurricane at landfall. Sure, sometimes the models are wrong, but there is good science behind their predictions. If we wait until storm begins its rapid intensification to act, it will be a very costly mistake. The most sound action would be to prepare for the very plausible bad outcome our science is saying is most likely, instead of putting all of our chips on the low-probability, good-for-business outcome we hope for.
Sea, No Evil
Comedian Steven Cobert has a humorous piece on the new North Carolina sea level legislation in his June 4, 2012 Cobert Report. He uses the phrase "Sea, No Evil" to describe the affair. Some quotes:
"It would be a tragedy to lose precious coastal wildlife habitats to coastal flooding. Those habitats should be lost to developers' bulldozers."
"If your science gives you a result that you don't like, pass a law that the result is illegal--problem solved!"
Comedy Central reports on the recent decision by Virginia lawmakers to phase out use of the terms "climate change" and "sea level rise."
Resources:
Scientific America blog on the North Carolina sea level rise battle.
Wunderground's Greenland page.
Wunderground's sea level rise page.
The Atlantic is quiet
There are no threat areas to discuss in the Atlantic today. The NOGAPS model is predicting formation of a tropical tropical depression in the Western Caribbean this weekend, and takes the storm northwards into Florida early next week. None of the other models is going along with this idea, but there is some support for a broad area of low pressure developing in the Western Caribbean early next week in some of the other models. The waters offshore of North Carolina may be another region to watch, late this week, along the edge of a cold front moving off the U.S. East Coast.
I'll have a new post Wednesday or Thursday.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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ILOVE YOU
FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT ALL
Depends entirely on whether they were acute or obtuse angles.....
The pressure is high because the storm is in a high-pressure environment. It has two closed isobars, making it a tropical storm.
Who cares, it will keep forecasting the weather a continued challenge in the years to come and at the same time, keep me employed.
i jus see thunderstorms
Oh i see, pressure gradiant is greater and therefore more wind
two lows on the SE coast..nogaps picking up on the idea as the GFS was yesterday
Looks like the nogaps is taking the hurricane towards texas
Remember when we addressed that problem by banning CFC's? It's funny how problems get solved when we take action.
Does this muddy the picture any?
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A much mocked proposal to ignore scientists' warnings of rising sea levels is moving ahead in the North Carolina Senate.
The Senate's environment committee on Thursday approved a measure sought by coastal developers and mocked by comedian Stephen Colbert. The full Senate was expected to vote Monday on whether to ignore a state-appointed science panel's warning that sea levels could rise by more than three feet by 2100. That could threaten 2,000 square miles of coastland.
The bill approved by the senate committee says that only the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission can calculate how fast the sea is rising and those calculations must be based on historic trends, which are much lower than the science panel's projections.
A coastal development group, NC-20, disputes the science panel's findings and they say the state should instead plan for seas to rise by about eight inches. They say stricter regulations would hurt the coastal economy.
"Science should be based on real hard data," said Sen. David Rouzer, R-Johnston County, who presented the bill. "Just because there is a group of folks that project the sea level rise does not mean the sea will rise. There was consensus years and years and years ago that the earth was flat; turned out to be round."
The only dissenting voice during the discussion was Rob Jackson, professor of environmental science at Duke University. He asked the senators to hold the bill for a month to allow for more input from scientists and the public.
"My primary concern is that the bill won't take into account the best science available," Jackson said. "It's already clear to the scientific community that the rates of sea level rise are accelerating. We know why they're rising because of warmer temperatures and ice melting. This bill basically says we can't use the best scientific information to protect people along the coast of North Carolina."
Rouzer, who is running for the state's 7th Congressional District, disagrees. He said the projections can be adjusted as needed.
"Let's assume in year seven, eight, nine the sea level rise does increase at a more accelerated rate," Rouzer said. "At that point you have that historical data to incorporate in your model to project for the future."
The use of historic data to make future projections drew a large amount of scrutiny before the official text of the bill was introduced for the first time on Thursday. Rouzer said he was aware of Colbert's comments Monday, but did not watch the show.
"Everybody's pursing a different angle for various purposes and I have a great appreciation for comedy, but this is serious business and serious business for the folks on the North Carolina coast," Rouzer said
nah man NOLA:P
it was taking a left at the last frame..looks like texas on that run
There's so much wrong in this that I'm not even sure where to begin.
C-14 dating can be extended far beyond 5000 years. There was no global flood. Local/regional floods, sure. What's now the Himalaya has not been underwater since the mid-Cenozoic, prior to the collisiion and docking of India with southern Asia.
There are genetic bottlenecks in human population, but they date back to closer to 75,000 BP, not 3,000 or even 10,000.
If there WAS a global flood 3000 years ago, there are some archeological and historical records of cultures such as the Egyptians and Chinese that mysteriously ignored such a calamity.
If you do some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations, there are significant problems with a) repopulations and restorations of biomes that would have been devastated by inundation. Rates of soil formation, deposition, lithification, erosion, all fly in the face of a global flood.
Not to mention, in order to repopulate the planet, the female humans traveling with Noah would have had to have been improbably fertile. You can do some back of the envelope calculations on what birth rates would be required.
And this isn't even getting into some thermodynamics that would have been extremely problematic for life as we know it, should there have been that much water vapor in the atmosphere.
You can believe whatever you want. But if you want to propose bad biology, geology, physics, and chemistry, don't be surprised when science pays you no mind.
notsure but a lot of storms form from it
He means the beginnings of it...take it easily.
i was kidding ahah
Amen! I'm a conservative Christian.
Despite the onslaught of politicians attempting to project an air of question around man-made climate change, studies continue to emerge proving the connection between human actions and our changing environment. The most recent study, published in Nature Climate Change, finds an "anthropogenic fingerprint" (human influence) on our warming oceans.
The study, "Human-Induced Global Ocean Warming On Multidecadal Timescales," was conducted by researchers in the U.S., Australia, Japan and India. Based on observations of rising upper-ocean temperatures, the researchers used improved estimates of ocean temperatures to examine the causes of our warming ocean.
According to a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory press release, the study shows that over the past 50 years, observed ocean warming is explained only when greenhouse gas increases are included in the models.
Lead author and LLNL climate scientist Peter Gleckler said in the press release, "The bottom line is that this study substantially strengthens the conclusion that most of the observed global ocean warming over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities."
Gleckler added, "Although we performed a series of tests to account for the impact of various uncertainties, we found no evidence that simultaneous warming of the upper layers of all seven seas can be explained by natural climate variability alone. Humans have played a dominant role."
Report co-author Dr. John Church explained to Australia's ABC News AM that "Natural variability could only explain 10 percent, or thereabouts, of the observed change."
Oceanography expert Nathan Bindoff told the news organization, "This paper's important because, for the first time, we can actually say that we're virtually certain that the oceans have warmed, and that warming is caused not by natural processes, but by rising greenhouse gases primarily." He added, "We did it. No matter how you look at it, we did it. That's it."
The recent ocean warming study has been released on the heels of other disturbing climate change reports.
Arctic monitoring stations are now measuring over 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a disturbing milestone that far surpasses the 350 ppm mark that many scientists consider the threshold separating safe from dangerous.
Researchers recently warned in Nature that the world is heading toward a tipping point of disastrous consequences driven by human-led increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and rising global temperatures:
"The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions. It is also necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing biological changes."
Despite the ominous findings, some politicians are still attempting to project an element of doubt on issues surrounding human-induced climate change. A Virginia lawmaker recently fought to omit mentions of "climate change" and "sea level rise" from a coastal flooding study, telling the BBC, "The jury's still out" on whether humans contribute to global warming. Despite his claim, studies such as the recent ocean warming one are turning in a pretty clear verdict.
two lows on the SE coast..
Who cares?
Anyone with children and grandchildren should care. As should anyone who cares about the lives of the generations that follow those.
Anyone who believes in taking personal responsibility should care.
Storm to hit the TX coast around the 23rd. A few models suggest this possibility.
Early 1900s like heck. The DeepSouth had state laws forbidding Catholics from holding government offices and the employment of Catholics for government positions until after the CivilRightsAct was passed in 1964.
Published on Jun 5, 2012 by ucberkeleycampuslife
A group of scientists from around the world who are part of The Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology (BiGCB) is warning that an ever-growing population and widespread destruction of natural ecosystems may be driving Earth toward a planet-wide tipping point, an irreversible change in the biosphere with unpredictable consequences. Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is the lead author of a review paper about this issue in the journal Nature.
For full story: NewsCenter.berkeley.edu
Video by Roxanne Makasdjian, UC Berkeley Media Relations
http://moe.met.fsu.edu/cgi-bin/ngptc2.cgi?time=20 12061200&field=850mb+Vorticity&hour=Animation
Watch 11.5N/78W for some "potential development"
6z run i think...the one that got posted is 12z
And, I don't believe that Dr. Masters mentioned religion in his original post anywhere.
MODIS True Color images for 06/11/2012
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