Thursday, March 5, 2020

I Might Have to Rename the Blog

If this article from From Watts Up With That: Climate “crisis” to eradicate world’s beaches by 2100 is true
Gregory Wrightstone linked to the Fox News version of this article on his LinkedIn page, the comments from fellow geologists were fracking hilarious…
World’s beaches disappearing due to climate crisis – study
UK on course to lose a quarter of its sandy coast because of human-driven erosion

Almost half of the world’s sandy beaches will have retreated significantly by the end of the century as a result of climate-driven coastal flooding and human interference, according to new research.
The sand erosion will endanger wildlife and could inflict a heavy toll on coastal settlements that will no longer have buffer zones to protect them from rising sea levels and storm surges. In addition, measures by governments to mitigate against the damage are predicted to become increasingly expensive and in some cases unsustainable.

These estimates are far from the most catastrophic; they rely on an optimistic forecast of international action to fight climate breakdown, a scenario known as RCP4.5. In this scenario of reduced ice-cap melting and lower thermal expansion of water, oceans will only have risen by 50cm by 2100.
However, if the world continues to emit carbon at its current rate, sea levels will rise by an estimated 80cm, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If this happens, a total of 131,745km of beaches, or 13% of the planet’s ice-free coastline, will go under water.
Around the globe, the average shoreline retreat will be 86.4 metres in the RCP4.5 scenario or 128.1 metres in the high-carbon scenario, though amounts will vary significantly between locations. Flatter or wilder coastlines will be more affected than those where waterfronts are steeper, or those artificially maintained as part of coastal development.

“The length of threatened seashores incorporates locations that will be submerged by more than 100 metres, assuming there are no physical limits to potential retreat,” said Michalis Vousdoukas, an oceanographer at the JRC and lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change. “Our 100-metre threshold is conservative since most beaches’ width is below 50 metres, especially near human settlements and in small islands, such as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean.”[…]The Grauniad

Where do I start? “Human settlements”?!?!?!?!? Those are generally called cities. The last time sea level wiped out “human settlements” was called the Holocene transgression.

For sea level to rise 80 cm by 2100, it would have to be rising twice as fast as the Holocene Transgression from 2081-2100.

And it just kept getting better for those of us who love to ridicule junk science…

Around the globe, the average shoreline retreat will be 86.4 metres in the RCP4.5 scenario or 128.1 metres in the high-carbon scenario…

Let’s look at Miami Beach, the poster child of catastrophic sea level rise. The nearest tide gauge station with a sufficient record length is Virginia Key.



At 3 mm per year, sea level in the Miami Beach area will have risen by another 240 mm by 2100, 24 cm, about 9 inches. Beach slopes can be highly variable. Doran & Overbeck (2015) found that the slopes of North Carolina sandy beaches ranged from 0.05 to 0.10 radians (~3-6°). 9 inches of sea level rise works out to 7 feet of shoreline retreat at 6° and 14 feet at 3°.
Anyway, the article goes on an on to debunk why a largely hypothetical dramatic increase in the rate of sea level rise would spell doom for the worlds beaches. Entirely too much to debunk a deeply stupid article.

But that said, the media, and the climate alarm scientists keep up a steady drum beat of this crap, and people without any background in science, (and sadly, more than a few scientists who should know better) swallow it without any critical thinking, and if you challenge them on it will call you science deniers.

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