Sea level rise reaches Boulcott St
I am a little bit gob smacked to see the weekend edition of The Dom Post leading with a climate change story:
Ocean levels are now rising at 2mm a year – twice as fast as they were 150 years ago, according to a study at Rutgers University in New Jersey. And a separate project in the Antarctic has found there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any point during the last 650,000 years.
A Dom Post ’staff reporter’ tweaked the Reuters version of two stories that have been reasonably prominant on the international wires, both having appeared as separate articles in the latest issue of Science.
Just why The Dom Post should suddenly give climate change such a run is a bit of mystery. New studies come out all the time, and yet climate change denial, or at least denial that its caused and could therefore be mitigated by humanity, is still often heard from New Zealand politicians and media, and The Dom Post’s editorial line can be described, at best, as skeptical on green issues, so tends to bury such stories in their international section.
Maybe these two studies are so definitive and credible that they really are the ‘tipping point’ in the debate. Let’s hope.
November 27th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
Co-incidence? I think not.
International day of action for Climate Change, 3rd Dec 2005
coming to cuba mall, Wellington, and possibly a place near you in other centres.
Media have already had a release from the Climate Defense Network.
view their site http://www.climatedefense.org.nz
November 27th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Yes, it was interesting. More interesting still is Infritil’s purchase of Stagecoach from the Scots heading the Business pages. Stagecoach Orkland and Welly, and Mana bus services are now back in NZ-based hands. What is the Greens’ take on this? Can a private company succeed in providing public services better than the state?
November 27th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
I think there may be a case to make that the Dom Post’s flip flop is because these studies genuinely break new ground. In particular the new super long ice core study proves that the current levels of CO2 and methane, and the rates of change in those gases are both unprecedented in nature. Global warming deniers cannot now argue that increased levels of CO2 are not anthropogenic.
Only a few more climate change denial arguments are left…
temperature rises are not realthere is not an overwhelming scientific consensus behind the IPCC positionincrease in tropical storms is not realCO2 rise is a natural cycleLets shoot down those arguments too.
November 27th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
MrZippy:
“Can a private company succeed in providing public services better than the state?”
Who’s paying ? I’m sure that both Stagecoach and Infratil had/have their hand out for the subsidy.
In Chch we have 1 publicly owned and 2 privately owned companies providing public passenger transport services.
So I’m not sure of the relevance of your question !
November 28th, 2005 at 12:13 am
Its good news frog. It is becoming very hard for smart people to ignore the basic facts. But we should be asking why the world’s governments can’t act on climate change with the same vigour that they are going about defending us against bird flu. China is going to vaccinate 14 billion chickens…. That is more than double the global human population. If they put that much effort into climate change who knows how far we would get how quickly…
November 29th, 2005 at 1:26 am
alexei says:
“It is becoming very hard for smart people to ignore the basic facts.”
Can we believe that humans (and their governments) really think rationally?
In my lifetime humans have been able to “ignore” all sorts of “basic facts” consistently.
Why should now be any different? … The possibilities are even more scary now than they have been before, and therefore will most likely be “ignored” with increased zeal.
However, alexiei is right, it is becoming very hard for some of the “smart” people to ignore the basic facts …
What should /can we do to help?
eredwen
November 29th, 2005 at 11:00 am
At the risk of looking like a ‘troll’, I’d just like to put forward another viewpoint to the “C02/Global Warming” debate.
As eredwen states, some of us “ignore all sorts of basic facts”. The IPCC is chosing to do just that.
Consider this fact. When you blow up a balloon with your own breath, you are filling it with CO2 (most high school students can tell you that). But what happens to that balloon when you tie it off and let go? Does it rise up to the ceiling? No. So why do we accept the ‘fact’ that the CO2 rises to the top of our atmosphere to form a ‘greenhouse’ layer trapping in heat below it? In fact, with an atomic mass of 22 it is one of the heaviest molecules in our atmosphere. Why would we use it in a fire extinguisher if it rose up away from the fire? Most CO2 hangs around at ground level (which is just as well, as plants need it) or slowly floats down to the sea where it is disolved and ultimately consumed by algae.
Even this report about sea levels rising 2mm a year. How do they know? Thanks to our moon, sea levels rise and fall over 2m twice every day. How can they be accurate to 2mm? Even if this figure is correct, I’d say “so what?”. In a hundred years (if the levels keep rising) sea levels will have risen 200mm, 8inches. Wow! That’s really spectacular! (heavy sarcasm). Even low-lying athols are over a foot above sea level.
In 1931, the land around Napier rose several metres in a few minutes. The crust is continually moving. NASA has used very accurate satellite telemetry to measure the fact that the crust rises and falls as much as 6inches when the moon passes overhead.
I guess the point I’m trying to make here, and it’s the same one that David Bellamy (one of my favourite environmentalists) is making, is that we are being blinded by this Global Warming hype-machine, and it is distracting us from much more pressing environmental issues.
While we sit around debating whether the sea will rise a few millimetres, we are losing vast numbers of endangers species, water and air polution have reached all-time high levels, genetically modified weeds spread across our continents, and massive deforestation are causing untold environmental damage.
These are the things that we can make a difference with RIGHT NOW!
November 29th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
Duncan K: Bellamy has no credibility on climate change - George Monbiot explains why on these posts
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/08/19/correspondence-with-david-b ellamy/
and more recently
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/05/10/junk-science/
November 29th, 2005 at 12:19 pm
Also, Duncan, sometimes we just need to trust those with more knowledge than ourselves!
Scientists who study these things have tools for answering all your questions. They will also know the limitations of those tools. Other scientists critique them and make sure they’re in line. Policy-makers with scientific knowledge can summarise the scientists knowledge, and pass it on to other policy-makers, who may know the right instruments for correcting problems, etc. Eventually the summarised knowledge and recommendations get to politicians who make policies.
But if the world waited until each and every inhabitant understood each and every scientific fact, well we’d all be dead…
One of the most insightful comments I ever heard was from a guy at the foreshore and seabed rally. A journalist asked him if he’d actually read the legislation to know what he was protesting about. The guy replied “no, but lawyers I trust have”. Egg on the journos face, at least from my perspective
I guess the key is to know as much as possible, but not let that substitute for knowing who to trust and when to take action based on that.
November 29th, 2005 at 12:31 pm
DuncanK, I think you’re getting the Ozone layer and Greenhouse effect confused. And possibly taking diagrams a little too literally, the basic fact you accuse the IPCC of ignoring is not a basic fact.
Besides, Brownian Motion as well as more atmospheric turbulence has a massive effect on molecules within the atmosphere and none or little on a balloon, your counter-example is a complete fallacy.
The real point about sea level increases is that they are accelerating. Because of what we did some time ago. How far and fast will they accelerate is a good question. But basing your projected outcome of an accelerating trend on a linear scale is silly, to put it mildly.
As an example, I suggest you run at a wall from, say 20 metres away. Just after you begin to accelerate you’ll be going pretty slowly, so it won’t hurt a bit, promise.
I’m sure scientists have corrected for tidal motion in both the sea and land in their measurements. They ain’t morons. But why don’t you write to Science and point out their mistake? It could make your name.
Bellamy is a good environmentalist, he is a crap climatologist.
Who is arguing whether sea level will rise a few millimetres? Really, I (and many others) would prefer not to, but it seems some people, like yourself, continue to argue with good evidence on specious grounds.
Doing something about climate change and immediate environmental issues are not mutually exclusive. They both need action RIGHT NOW!.
November 29th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
I don’t think anyone here (maybe except for bjchip) is worried about the amount that average sea-level will rise. What we, and the inhabitants of low-lying atolls are worried about are increased numbers of storm events combined with higher sea-levels that will lead to more devestating floods and vastly increased erosion. Consider that millions of hectares of valuable farmland may be lost to salination due to sea-water inundation.
November 29th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
I’m sorry, but I have read these articles before and while I agree that David Bellamy is not very good at quoting statistics, the sentiment behind what he says is still valid. For instance, in the second article, if he did mistakenly type 555 instead of 55%, the latter is still more than half the glaciers. This fact about glaciers advancing can certainly be corroborated here by NIWA who have measured increases in all our glaciers since 2001.
A classic example is the outcry when glacial recession uncovered a man’s dead body that was thousands of years old. The global warming fraternity cited this as an example of how much the planet is warming. But hang on a minute. The fact that this man was ABOVE the surface of the glacier at the time he died means that the glacier was lower at that time. Indicating that the world has been warmer before.
As with any argument I tend to try and focus on the ultimate sources quoted by each side and try to look at what those sources will gain if the arguments are accepted. What has David Bellamy to gain by sticking out his head and laying it across the very public chopping block? Whereas, the IPCC is now a huge international beaurocartic juggernaut hurtling along at full-speed that employs thousands. Do you really think that it is about to say “Oops, sorry folks. We might be wrong on this CO2 thing. We’ll just find some other job to do”. And what about the huge quantities of IPCC research funding given to various organisations to ‘research’ global warming. DO you honestly think that the IPCC would continue funding those organisations if they found out that global warming is a myth or at least some natural climate cycle?
I liken this to the Peak Oil debate. The overwhelming consensus of opinion is that we are “swimming in oil” and we won’t peak until 2030 at the earliest. But a small minority of people who have very little to gain from their position are telling us that this consensus opinion is wrong. Why do the greens believe these people but not the vocal minority who say CO2 is not a problem.
Besides, David Bellamy is not saying that we should carry on burning fossil fuels and consuming the way we’ve always consumed. What he is saying (and I agree with him) is that our highest priority (and this fits with Peak Oil, too) should be to look at what we consume and drastically curtail our energy-intensive activities. We need to be more energy efficient and aim for a much more sustainable lifestyle/society. Carbon taxes do not do this. They just push money around, with the money-pushers directly benefiting financially.
Again, I re-iterate. I believe we are being distracted from much more important environmental issues by the IPCC hype-machine. We need to refocus on the issues where we can actually make a difference.
November 29th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Tom, you say that “sometimes we just need to trust those with more knowledge than ourselves”.
But isn’t that exactly what has got us into the mess that is Peak Oil today?
Just as with the IEA with Peak Oil, why should we believe a huge beaurocratic organisation paid for by the governments of the world that the primary focus of the environmental movement should be the reduction of CO2?
Maybe, just maybe, reports that companies like Exxon (see http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/company/cnn22280.htm) will actually BENEFIT from carbon taxes, hold some truth.
November 29th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Duncan
The people I trust are the scientists I worked with. They’re scared. You should be.
The people I trust are the ones who understand that the US government lies to you regularly. It does. I know it, and have personally experienced it. The false information out there is so pervasive that one has to wonder if ANYTHING they say is true, but that’s another rant. The issue in this case is the peak-oil date. There’s exactly one group of optimists out there in the US government and a whole raft of pessimists everywhere else… including Aramco. Every single oil producer except Saudi Arabia has already demonstrated that they’ve peaked. *Every Single One* Saudi Arabia doesn’t let you see their books. So when a US Department of Egregious Prevarication tells you that its 30 years away, just WHAT are they really trying to do? Mind you, the US inflation figures don’t include energy prices. The US GDP is adjusted by that same inflation that isn’t measured. They just declared they’re going to hide the M3 measure of money supply and the housing industry is starting to correct. They’re politicians. They do not want people to realize that there is trouble until after the next election.
XOM will profit from peak oil as will BP and all the others. They’re raking it in. What else? Carbon taxes shouldn’t bother them much… but they are needed to put a price on the commons that the market can adjust to. If there’s no price for the use of the commons, the commons gets destroyed. It is as inevitable as death and taxes.
I worry about sea level rise over a longer term than most here do, because when I build something like a road I expect it to last longer (as a route) than most people here consider. It is not the lifetime of the road but of the route and the development along that route, that I consider. The roads built by Rome are still routes in much of Europe.
respectfully
BJ
November 29th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
“This fact about glaciers advancing can certainly be corroborated here by NIWA who have measured increases in all our glaciers since 2001.”
Nice try, but NIWA will not corroborate your twisting of their findings.
“New Zealand’s glaciers are somewhat unusual because they have their source in areas of extremely high precipitation. West of the main divide in the Southern Alps, more than 10 metres (10 000 mm) of precipitation falls a year as clouds are pushed up over the sharply rising mountain ranges. This means the mass of New Zealand’s glaciers are sensitive to changing atmospheric circulation and both precipitation patterns and temperature. So, for instance, the glaciers advanced during most of the 1980s and 1990s when the area experienced about a 15% increase in precipitation, associated with more El Niño events. In most of the rest of the world (with the exception of parts of Norway), glaciers tend to be in areas of lower precipitation, so rising temperatures are affecting the glaciers there more directly and sooner.”
And this is why we have to continue to argue this issue. Because critics wll cherry pick any tiny oppositional point, however out of context, they can find and attack the entire ediface.
On the IPCC, do you really think that if their science is so flawed that they haven’t taken into account the ‘fact’ that CO2 doesn’t rise to create a Greenhouse Layer into account, that wouldn’t've been pointed out? Isn’t that an incredibly strong and simple argument that their entire approach is wrong? Why do you let the argument go so easily?
On Bellamy, I don’t know why he stuck his head out, but the 55% claim, while more reasonable than the doubly messed up 555 claim, was sourced from Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine 21st Century History and Science. yeah, THAT Lyndon LaRouche. The edition that Bellamy cites included the passage “We in LaRouche’s Youth Movement find ourselves in combat with an old enemy that destroys human beings … it is empiricism.â€?
Um, IPCC scientists or whacked out conspiracy theorist? Your choice.
OK, to be fair, the 55% claim surfaces elsewhere too, Singer puts it forward, half citing a Science article from 1989. Well, 1989 isn’t exactly cutting edge glaciology, but we’ll let that pass. But I challenge you to go to a library, look through every Science edition from 1989 and find that data. In fact find an article that discusses glaciers advancing at all.
And when you’ve done that, you can let the IPCC know about it, as well as their flawed understanding of CO2, because no one else can find that article…
Or you can start to believe that thousands of peer reviewed scientists maybe, just maybe, have more validity than a paranoid delusional conspiracy theorist, a climate change denier who probably invents sources, and an environmentalist who can’t type.
“As with any argument I tend to try and focus on the ultimate sources quoted by each side”
Yeah, well, try harder.
For ultimate sources on the zombie 55% (it just won’t die…) I am indebted to (shock, horror) Monbiot - http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1480373,00.html - it’s a fine read, funny as hell, and purely devastating.
November 30th, 2005 at 12:22 am
Pip said:
“Isn’t that an incredibly strong and simple argument that their entire approach is wrong?”
Perhaps the Emperor is not wearing any clothes after all!
November 30th, 2005 at 1:33 am
“But a small minority of people who have very little to gain from their position are telling us that this consensus opinion is wrong. Why do the greens believe these people but not the vocal minority who say CO2 is not a problem.”
Oops Dunk, you’ve let the cat out of the bag here… the vocal minority who say CO2 is not a problem, are NOT people who have very little to gain from it… follow the money… if you provide links to back up your School C science claims, I’ll bet most of them will be financed by the US energy industry. This has been my experience in such debates previously. There is good money to be made in spinning statistics for that crowd, it’s a wonder so few scientists give in to the temptation.
November 30th, 2005 at 9:43 am
Do you believe that David Bellamy is financed by the US energy industry?
What about Aucklands very own Ken Ring, long range weather forecaster, and member of the NZ sceptics society. He has quite a bit to say on Global Warming (see http://www.predictweather.com/global_warming/index.asp)
In fact, Ken Ring explains why measuring sea levels can be a tricky thing to do:
“In comparing sealevel-days, when do they make their comparisons? It’s not good just looking at the tide high water mark and saying it looks higher than when I was a boy. Different lunar factors make for a higher or lower tide level - New or full moons, perigees, the 18.613 cycle, declination, the Moon crossing the equator twice a month going in opposite directions, wind forces, wind direction and high pressure zones which lower the sealevel or low pressure zones which tend to raise it. All of these factors are on the move all of the time and there is no one date which brings them all together so that they can be safely compared to another date”
Do we really know that the scientists that do the measuring of the sea-levels take all this into account?
The latest figures use satellite telemetry dating back to the 1950s to tell us that the sea is rising. How can they say this to an acuracy of 1mm? Are we to believe that the telemtry equipment availble in the 1950s was as accurate as the equipment today? What kind of error-bars are there on this data. If they are any more than 1mm then it is well within the results to say that the sea is NOT rising.
What I am trying to say is that we are focusing on something that may not even be real. While we are admiring the emperor’s clothes, more obvious and tangible problems exist with respect to the environment.
Let’s leave the scientists to battle it out over who’s right and who’s wrong. and we can focus our energies on core environmental issues. Reduce waste, reduce consumption, reduce energy-use, support local, non-polluting infrastructure. This is where we can really make the biggest difference.
November 30th, 2005 at 11:26 am
DuncanK
Back 18 years ago, I was one of the Project Engineers on the Laser Airborne Depth Sounter project of the CSIRO. The ocean depth was being measured with lasers using a plane flying over the area. This because any OTHER method would’ve simply taken “too damned long”. Once the calibrations are done with and the geoid accounted for, the measurements using the lasers, doing one flight, in the presence of tides and waves, gave accuracies that matched hand measured calibrations and post tests