FB Doodlings: Fearmongering by the Portsmouth City Planning Staff??? - Granite Grok

FB Doodlings: Fearmongering by the Portsmouth City Planning Staff???

PortsmouthIt wouldn’t be the first time that someone is crying “Wolf” over…..wait for it…..CLIMATE CHANGE!  Now, I have NO problem in city officials in trying to head off problems – it’s what humans do as being the almost the most adaptable species on the planet (er, cockroaches perhaps a tad more?) and certainly the species that can make the environment adapt to us (emphasis mine):

“Because that’s so important to Portsmouth we wanted to follow up on that to see what we could do to better understand it and to start preparing for it,” Britz said. “The idea isn’t to scare people, it’s not to get people worried about it, it’s to get them prepared.”

That would be city planner Peter Britz. Nice to not scare people – and in the same article, decides to do exactly that:

City planning staff has estimated that Portsmouth will see sea water rise 2 feet by 2050 and 6 feet by 2100, Britz said.

Right – that would be 0.75″ per year for the next 32 years.  Scary numbers, eh?  Being that I can’t help myself, I decided to bring up a couple numbers of my own:

Methinks Peter Britz needs to go back to 3rd grade for a remedial class in simple arithmetic.

 NOAA is reporting that the Atlantic Coast off NH is rising at a whole 0-3mm / year. Let’s take the worst case of 3mm / year. Over 32 years (2050, where he says that the rise will be TWO FEET!), that translates to…..drum roll please…….3 inches. 3mm = 0.11811″.

By 2100, that would be almost 10 inches. Yep, I guess that close enough 6 feet (72″), by golly! Start screaming “WE’RE DOOMED!”

See the map below:

NOAA Sea Level Trends

Find NH – match the green arrow to the table below: the trend is 0-3mm / year.  Or another way of putting it, worst case, is ONE foot by 2118. If the Planning folks can’t get simple math straight (or even simple googling under their belt), what ELSE are they getting wrong (oh look, here’s one!  One of Obama’s favorite Sustainable Initiative folks – the 4th level of Goverment most people don’t realize exists: a Planning Commission (in this case, the Rockingham Planning Commission); we’ve written a LOT about these kinds of folks in the past).

So, in the interest of REAL Science, I decided to dash off an RSA 91:a Right To Know Request.  I sent it to Nick Cracknell, Principle Planner (I should have sent it to Juliet Walker, the Planning Director) and not to Peter Brit (Environmental Planner / Sustainability Coordinator who, being an environmentalist and all that, should be conversant with NOAA’s chart above.  After all, I’m not, but I found it in about 2 minutes (I’m also not an Google Ninja either!):

From: “skipdcm” <Skip@GraniteGrok.com>
To: njcracknell@cityofportsmouth.com
Sent: 2/12/2018 3:24:29 PM
Subject: Right To Know Request – RSA 91:A – sea levels in Portsmouth to rise 2 feet by 2050

Consider this to be a formal RSA 91:A Right to Know request. Please ensure that all materials are protected from deletion.

  • In today’s SeacoastOnline.com, (http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/20180211/portsmouth-invites-public-to-talk-risks-of-sea-level-rise), Peter Britz was quoted as saying:
  • “the city is vulnerable in the South End, in the historic part of town,”
  • “Because that’s so important to Portsmouth we wanted to follow up on that to see what we could do to better understand it and to start preparing for it,”
  • “The idea isn’t to scare people, it’s not to get people worried about it, it’s to get them prepared.”
  • “how much more costly it is to recover from the flooding, than it is to put in strategies to protect people from flooding damage before it happens.”
  • “You’ll end up saving money by not having to repair or tear stuff out and replace it,”
  • “The sooner we start doing things the lower the cost.”
  • “How much do they want to look at, whether it’s flood proofing, wet flood proofing or dry flood proofing, elevating structures or moving structures or looking at whole areas for sea walls and floodgates,”

This RTK demand is over the following quote:

City planning staff has estimated that Portsmouth will see sea water rise 2 feet by 2050 and 6 feet by 2100, Britz said.

Given that this is already 2018, on what basis did Peter Britz / the Portsmouth Planning department determine that the Portsmouth sea level will rise from its average norm now to an additional 2 feet in 32 years?

Please supply all materials leading up to this conclusion and any and all communications involved in giving permission for Britz to state what he did about rising sea levels as this utterance has major political and financial ramifications both at the local and State levels.

Kindest regards,

– Skip

So the clock is ticking – they have five (5) business days to report back.  Let’s see if they do!

(H/T: SeacoastOnline)

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