'Colbert Report' takes on NC General Assembly's bill on rising sea levels

Climate Movement activists are pushing scientificly ungrounded policies, which would have catastrophic economic consequences for North Carolina. This bill represents "push-back," to force policymakers to conform policy to what the science really tells us about sea level rise.

Mankind has been driving up CO2 levels substantially for about 3/4 century.  We've raised average outdoor CO2 levels from about 300 ppm to nearly 400 ppm. (Indoor levels are often several times that.) But over that time period, the rate of sea level rise hasn't increased at all.

NC's best tide gauge is the GLOSS-LTT gauge at Wilmington, which has been measuring sea level continuously since 1935. Over it's full history, the rate of sea level rise has averaged a glacially slow 2 mm/year (about 8 inches per century). But over the last 20 years, sea level hasn't gone up at all at Wilmington.

That's right: sea level rise at Wilmington, averaged over the past 20 years, is zero.

There are hundreds of high-quality tide gauge records around the world measuring sea level. Because the crust of the Earth is constantly moving, these tide gauges show widely varying rates of sea level change.  At some locations, sea level is rising, at others it is falling, but the average is a very slight increase of between 1 and 2 mm/year. (The geographically-weighted average of the sea level trends at 159 NOAA-selected GLOSS-LTT gauges is +1.1 mm/year.)

Most of these tide stations show no evidence at all of any acceleration (increase) in the rate of sea level rise over the last 3/4 century. Some (like Wilmington) show slight decreases, others show slight increases, but the best studies indicate that there has been no increase at all in the average rate of sea level rise around the world, and most of the best studies show a slight decrease.

In other words, all that additional CO2 in the atmosphere hasn't increased the rate of sea level rise at all.

We also have 19 years of satellite altimeter measurements of sea level over the open ocean. That's too short to draw definite conclusions, and there are major problems with the quality of the satellite data, but it is nevertheless worth noting that, like the tide gauge measurements, the satellites seem to show that as CO2 levels go up the rate of sea level rise is decreasing, rather than increasing.

For years, Climate Movement alarmists have been predicting that, as a result of what MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen calls "gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference," higher atmospheric CO2 levels should cause the rate of sea level rise to increase dramatically. But the data contradicts that prediction.

We've done the experiment and we know the result. When mankind began driving up atmospheric CO2 levels (with dramatically beneficial effects on agriculture, BTW) the post-LIA acceleration in rate of sea level rise ceased. The last ~3/4 century of increasing CO2 levels and emissions have caused no increase at all in the rate of sea level rise. It is irrational and unscientific to expect that repeating that experiment over the next 3/4 century will have a significantly different result. The best prediction for sea level in the future is simply a linear projection of sea level in the past.  For the southern NC coast, that's a measly 7" of sea level rise by 2100.

I recently wrote an article about sea level for J. Natural Hazards.  The topic was NY sea levels rather than NC sea levels, but, just as a rising tide lifts all boats, non-accelerating sea level rise in NY is non-accelerating sea level rise in NC.  The N&O does not permit links to other sites, but if you google for "npre.2012.7067.1" you'll find my article.

With these fools in the legislature, we are now becoming the laughingstock for the whole country. We used to be able to say at least we are not as backward as SC and Mississippi.

But now we fund our educational system less, we legislate out sea level rise, we ban marriage equality, we restrict the right to vote, we require unecessarily invasive procedures for women before an abortion, we have lobbyists sleeping with Republican leadership staff, we cut all the trees along our highways for billboards, we restrict the rights of cities to grow and annex threatening our triple A credit ratings, we are ready to allow fracking to get 5 years worth of natural gas at the expense of our lifetime water supply, we are ready to allow guns in bars and parks......

What's next with these clowns - elections has consquences and taken together these hurt our reputation badly. We are all paying the price. We went from one of the most progressive southern states to one of the most regressive.