It has become something of a ritual. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) issued yet another ‘report’ warning about accelerating sea level rise along the New Hampshire coast, and the local media parrots it without question. It happens every few years, and wouldn’t you know, we’ve been around to report on it. “Back in 2016, (UCS said) we were looking at a foot of rise by 2050 and 6 feet by 2100. Now [2018] it will be 1.8 feet by 2045 and 6.6 feet by 2100.” Eight years after the 2016 fearmongering, the UCS is still singing the same tired song.
A recent study from the Union of Concerned Scientists shows as sea levels rise, pieces of critical infrastructure in New Hampshire could be threatened by flooding from the ocean on a regular basis.
In a medium sea level rise scenario, where the ocean rises about 3.2 feet, a fire station in Hampton would flood about twelve times a year by 2050. An affordable housing unit in Exeter could flood 26 times a year.
The rising tides will ruin the infrastructure narrative is not new but has become more of a focus. Telling people their homes will be ruined is more personal than generic rising seas. It touches them on an individual level. The problem is that it hasn’t stopped liberals from buying coastal property or the values of those homes from continuing to rise more than the already high cost of housing. Sea level rise (SLR) is so terrifying that believers are dropping top dollar on investments that, for reasons they won’t explain, never end up underwater financially or literally.
Read This, and You’ll Know More About “Sea Level” than 99% of Climate Cult Alarmists.
However, they could be and might be one day, so experts say you’ll see more flooding more often in places like Portsmouth, but with the exception of storm surge, it hasn’t happened, and there’s a good reason. Sea level rise isn’t accelerating.
Fort Point, New Hampshire, is the only NOAA tide gauge used almost continuously in the Granite State (Seavy Island is in Maine). The data is quite conclusive. Between post-little ice age melt (land, not sea), eustatic change, and isostatic rebound, Fort Point reports a steady 2.04 mm a year, or about 8-9 inches in the past century. The interannual variation adjusted for seasonal changes looks like this.
There is no evidence of acceleration, and we’d have a better view if Fort Point had a 50-year trend graph, but it does not, and neither does Seavy Island (due to a gap in historical data), so we’ve got to look north to Portland, Maine, and south to Boston, Mass.
And Portland
Again, it’s not very scary stuff, and it does not get scary when we look further south to Battery Park, New York, which has a longer record.
Kip Hansen over at WUWT took a dozen of these from Bermuda to Maine and compiled some comparisons, including a graph where he “aligned the “linear sea level trend using the entire period of record” for each gauge (the arrow points to that line).“
Two things are immediately apparent: CO2 isn’t driving this, and if you want to create a narrative about the rise in sea level, you’d best focus on data after 1985, which, according to Kip’s report, is what NASA did.
The extrapolated projections, the disproportional graph, and the cherry-picking of data (some locations have declining SLR) ignore history and reality, which does not at all concern the so-called Union of Scientists, whose funding likely depends on this lie nor the paid reporters and editors of local newsdesks that repeat it. Although I’d expect a lot of clicks on a headline that implied they’d got it wrong or been ignoring the truth (I doubt they’d ever admit to lying).
The seas do rise, and the climate changes, but the original sin they point at for cause is a lie, as is their so-called saviors (the government).
GraniteGrok.com is a reader-supported endeavor, and we can’t continue without your support. Please consider a monthly subscription donation. It goes a long way to helping offset the rising cost of everything. One-time donations are also always welcome. If you would like to donate by check, email me at steve@granitegrok.com.
