There’s an interesting article over at NHPR. The hook at WBUR is How New Hampshire’s Seacoast Communities Are Preparing For Climate Change. The actual article is titled N.H.’s Seacoast Prepares for a Rising Sea in Surprising Ways.
With credit to the second title, there are some interesting “ideas” to address the problems of storm swell and rising water, but these solutions are prefaced with a lie.
(NHPR) It’s just one of the ways communities around the Seacoast are preparing for a future with rising seas and bigger storms. Scientists predict the average high tide could rise by as much as 2 feet by the year 2050, and by 2100, it could be over 6 feet higher than it is today.
The average high tide level could also increase by only a few inches if you trust NOAA. And in this instance, they have far more credibility than the source for the “over 6 feet” estimate, which comes from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) which,
“…collects buckets of money from the traditional left-wing foundations and in return advances the global progressive agenda. Disarm America. Remove its influence. Handcuff and kneecap the United States through an economically regressive energy policy driven by global warming alarmism.”
UCS is not an unbiased scientific source. It is a politically driven progressive mouthpiece. Kind of like NHPR. But that doesn’t excuse them from blindly reporting UCS alarmist estimates without doing even a tiny bit of work to compare that “prediction” to 100 years of data and the projections for future years based on it.
First off, UCS claims that sea level in the area has risen a foot in the past 100 years and predicts another six-feet in the next century. But according to NOAA, Seavey’s Island has experienced an average of only 1.76 mm of annual increase over the past hundred years. They estimate an increase of 0.58 feet in that time, less than 7 inches in the most recent century of interglacial melt. Their calculations out to 2020 continue this trend with no long-term increase predicted.
If we ignore every other factor, including several necessaryto generate accurate measurements of Sea Level Rise (SLR) that NOAA pays no attention too, NOAA’s calculations (as is) would add 0.175 feet (just over 2-inches) by 2050 and only 6.9 inches by 2120.
No real scientist would bet his lunch money on the notion that the weather patterns are not going to change over the course of 100 years. Local, regional, and global weather patterns change year to year, decade to decade. The prescient “computer models” are not even close. But knowledge of the past does not prohibit an understanding of the future, especially when it comes to something as vast as the oceans, where we have data going back tens of thousands of years. Nor should we ignore other signals that hint at long-term cooling trends in the northern hemisphere, which if viable, could present a much more severe threat and a different outcome entirely.
It’s unfortunate. I think the article had a lot of value without repeating alarmist lies. The seacoast, every seacoast, has to consider how storm surge or flooding will impact citizens. Innovation is exciting. But that wasn’t enough for the lib-leaning NHPR. They had to insert their slant and make it, at least on some level, about so-called man-made global warming.
