Be Very Afraid: Ghost Areas of Chesapeake Bay

'Ghost' wild areas haunt Chesapeake Bay region

This spot, in the tidal York River in Gloucester County, was both scenic and sad. Numerous trees were dead, their trunks a spectral white, and others were dying.

Scientists say rising sea levels linked in part to global warming are drowning the trees and turning these fascinating lands into "ghost hummocks."

If the sea continues to rise as expected, the hummocks will turn entirely to marsh and eventually to open water.

You know what's coming next don't you?

"We can show tide-gauge data till we're blue in the face, and sometimes that doesn't work" to convince skeptics, said Hardaway, with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

"Up north in the Arctic, we have visible signs of climate change with the loss of Arctic ice," Watts said. "Here in the Mid-Atlantic, we don't have any glaciers, but we do have hummocks. ... Many of these hummocks are being lost on a scale of years, not decades or centuries."

Yes, sea level is rising, and these "hummocks" are being created.  This is a process that has been going forward since the sea stopped retreating at the end of the last ice age, and started rising again:

The sea level in the bay region rose about 1½ feet over the past century — the highest rate on the East Coast.

True enough, but largely due to regional subsidence, as the article grudgingly acknowledges next.

About half of that increase was caused by a natural sinking of land in southeastern Virginia, said Larry P. Atkinson, an Old Dominion University oceanographer. About a quarter was from natural warming, under way for thousands of years, and about a quarter from man-made global warming, he said.

For having been caused by man-made global warming, it sure has shown a peculiar pattern, showing absolutely no increase in the rate of sea level rise as man has drastically increased his populations and CO2 output since the end of the little ice ages in the late 1800s.  Indeed, it has been coincident with the warming of the globe since then, but the rate has been remarkably constant.  I'd like to see how Atkinson rationalizes the "a quarter from man-made global warming" figure. Probably a "model" of some kind...

The idea here is to scare you into believing that man-made global warming is causing all those dead tree's you see in salt marshes.  They're hoping you'll be compliant and allow them to regulate your life in the interests of "Global Climate Change."  At this point the evidence for such a proposition is quite sketchy, and possibly even contradictory.