Scam and Scare: Why rising seas don't spell disaster
Of all the images most likely to instill fear into the hearts of the climate conscious, that of coastal villages, cities, even entire islands sinking under the waves is one of the most striking.
Green warriors have been warning about rising seas for decades, however. Why is it that Atlantis 2.0 has yet to submerge?
Millions at risk, zero details
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), “over 410 million people could be at risk from rising sea levels by 2100.” The WEF doesn’t mention who or where these people are, other than somewhere along a coast. Nor does it cite a single example of a life lost due to rising seas. But they do cite unspecified government agencies who warn that by 2050, coastal sea levels in the U.S. could rise by another 25 to 30 centimeters, along with unspecified scientists who “currently expect an unavoidable sea level rise of 1-2 meters” over coming years, due to melting ice at the Poles.
To bolster these assertions, the WEF reproduces a graph from NASA which portrays a rise of over 10 centimeters in global sea levels between 1993 and 2024.
The data for this graph is derived from NASA satellites which bounce radar signals off the ocean’s surface and average out the various measurements of sea level from all around the globe. Prior to use of satellites, sea levels were measured using physical markers at several thousand stations around the world. Accessing the marker data is relatively easy; accessing the raw data from NASA, and understanding it, is extremely difficult. To make things simpler, the NOAA Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry provides the data in pictorial form:
35,000 years of climate data?
NASA, like the WEF, has no doubt that, “Global sea levels are rising as a result of human-caused global warning.” Using the usual narrative, they describe how carbon dioxide emissions heat the planet, melting the ice caps and warming the seas.
The result, NASA states, is that recent rises in sea levels are “unprecedented over the past 2,500-plus years.” NASA doesn’t provide any evidence to back up this extraordinary statement. Chasing after the “2,500-plus years” reference leads to a single and very complicated study published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA. This study claims that it is possible to track the rise and fall of ocean levels over the past 35,000 years with enough certainty to declare that, “during the approximately 6,000 years up to the start of the recent rise approximately 100-150 years ago, there is no evidence for global oscillations in sea level on time scales exceeding approx. 200 years duration or 15-20 centimeter amplitude.”
The rest of the article uses the word “estimates” 32 times, “uncertainties” 10 times, and “assumption” 7 times. The authors also admit that, “the records become increasingly fragmentary backward in time.”
Reconstructing statistics
The WEF is perhaps on surer footing with its claim that,
The global sea level has risen by about 21cm since records began in 1880.
The link it provides is to another WEF article, which sends the persistent reader to a U.S. government website, the “Global Change Research Program.” Chasing up the links gives three sources for this claim. One source (here) uses data that starts in 1993. Another (here) goes back to 1960. The third (here) apparently provides data going back to 1880 that is evidence enough to show global changes dating back that far.
Only it doesn’t.
It is actually true that in some parts of the world, people have been monitoring sea levels for hundreds of years. Today there are several thousand gauge stations around the world. Unfortunately, not many have data going back to 1880. So, in order to provide a global picture extending that far into the past, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) uses data from just 24 stations to come up with an average.
The Reconstructed Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) dataset records the sea level from 1880 to 2009...
Sea level is important to record because rising sea levels is one of the major effects of climate change...
Correctly estimating historical sea level rises is critical to projecting future climate change and its consequences. There is a great deal of uncertainty as to how the GSML will change up to 2100...
The early sea level values given here are calculated from tide gauge results. These records are sometimes unreliable, as the gauges are attached to land which can rise and fall, making the readings inaccurate. For this reason, a small number of gauges (around 24) have been chosen from around the world, and a “reconstructed” global mean sea level has been calculated based on those readings.
CSIRO doesn’t mention which 24 readings it uses for its GMSL data, but the National Oceanography Centre allows access to data from the global stations and plots graphs showing sea rise over the years. In more than a few stations, the sea level has actually fallen over the years, such as in Stockholm, Sweden’s capital:
Other stations show erratic data going back less in time, such as Tel Aviv:
Off the coast of the Netherlands, the sea level has apparently risen by around 40 centimeters over the past century:
42 villages for evidence
The question is, how significant are these rises (or falls)? After all, much of the Netherlands is already several meters below sea level and managing fine nonetheless. But the United Nations has decided that the Netherlands, along with Bangladesh, China, and India are all at especial risk of rising seas, “with nearly 900 million people living in low-lying coastal areas in acute danger.”
The WEF also claims that hundreds of billions of dollars are needed to address this danger.
Already, millions are being invested in places like Fiji, subject of a long Guardian report on how climate change has led to 42 villages being earmarked for relocation to higher ground. A few of these villages are already partially underwater. Only a few have actually moved inland so far.
The Guardian provides a video to illustrate the plight of locals, in which one villager appears to condemn the world for causing climate change:
You know, you want to go against nature, this is what will happen.
The article (right at the end) provides the missing context for this statement — the damming of a local river in order to make it possible to use land to grow rice.
Other locals describe the benefits of relocation — including being provided with new housing complete with plumbing, in place of squalid huts which housed several families each. While they are now further from the coast and need to travel in order to fish,
... most people agree that the benefits of the move outweigh the disadvantages.
‘You’re still there?’
The WEF’s other main example of rising seas threatening lives and livelihoods is the Maldives. In one of their doomsday scenario videos, the Maldives are described as “the world’s lowest lying country.”
It’s building a floating city within a 200-hectare lagoon to protect itself.
The collection of islands that comprise the Maldives are also the subject of a recent New York Times article, titled:
The Vanishing Islands that Failed to Vanish:
Low-lying tropical island nations were expected to be early victims of rising seas. But research tells a surprising story: Many islands are stable. Some have even grown.
Just a small glitch in calculations
It turns out that the Maldives are the anti-proof of climate scaremongering when it comes to rising seas. If seas have really risen by 20 centimeters over the past 150 years, or even by 10 centimeters over the past 20 years, why are the Maldives still there? As NYT puts it,
The very existence of low-slung tropical islands seems improbable, a glitch. A nearly seamless meeting of land and sea, peeking up like an illusion above the violent oceanic expanse, they are among the most marginal environments humans have ever called home.
The Maldives, however, have defied all the predictions, including one made by its former president, Mohamed Nasheed, who said back in 2012 that,
If carbon emissions continue at the rate they are climbing today, my country will be under water in seven years.
‘The sea rose, and the islands expanded’
Scientists tended to agree with Nasheed; according to NYT, the islands were “identified as some of the first places climate change might ravage in their entirety.”
Since the Maldives have been photographed from the air from the 1960s onward, they decided to take a look and see what’s been going on there over the decades, given the dramatic sea rises they believe in. They had a nasty surprise:
Researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000.
They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.
Climate isn’t as simple as they thought
The initial startling findings were published in 2010 and, according to NYT, “caused an uproar.” While some of the islands had shrunk, others had remained stable, and some had even grown in size. For example, in the Huvadhoo Atoll, made up of 241 islands in the southern Maldives, a study of aerial and satellite imagery shows that 42 percent of land has been lost to erosion, 39 percent has remained stable, and 20 percent has grown over past decades.
Dr. Kench, one of the researchers, pointed to one section of beach that the sea had “eaten away.”
People obsess on that end of the island,” he said. Then he pointed up ahead. “This side has got bigger.”
Apparently it had never occurred to scientists that waves could either wash shore away or actually build it up, by “piling sediment on the islands’ shores.”
Their position on the reef might have shifted. Their shape might be different. Whatever was going on, it clearly wasn’t as simple as oceans rise, islands wash away.
Hubris and debris
While there, these climate scientists decided to take a look into the islands’ past, using advanced equipment: a six-foot steel pipe. They bored a hole in the jungle floor and pushed the pipe down into it, hoping it would come up with clear layers of different types of soil.
They had some idea of how far below ground to look, thanks to seismic measurements that Tim Scott, an ocean scientist at Plymouth, had taken. Still, he warned the group: “It’s not an exact science.”
As they withdrew the pipe, Dr. Kench told the group, “This is the moment of truth.” It was, in a way:
They levered out the pipe and hoisted it above a tarp. Out came a messy line of sediment and gravel and coral bits. Everyone leaned in close. No group of people in human history had ever seemed more interested in some chunks of damp sand.
If it’s ‘inexact,’ is it science at all?
Commendably, the experience apparently did give these scientists a measure of humility as they “pondered whether even inexact science could help atoll governments think through their options.” Just what are those options? There aren’t many, and they are all hugely expensive — projects such as barricading the shore, literally building new islands on the reefs, and connecting them via undersea tunnels.
Some of these projects are already underway. According to Dr. Kench, the islands have still “got a bit of time, but they need to be thinking about it quickly.”
All the same, this group of climatologists, if not those at NASA and the WEF, aren’t talking about islands about to disappear under the waves anymore.
They’re trying to answer a bigger question: If atoll nations aren’t facing certain and imminent erasure, then what are they facing? For having a future is not the same thing as having a secure future.
And they’ve also been forced to admit that all their doomsday predictions, in relation to the Maldives, at any rate, were wrong:
These studies have also added to the intrigue by revealing another pattern: Islands in ocean regions where sea level rise is fastest generally haven’t eroded more than those elsewhere.
