Study now says
global warming slows sea-level rise, Extra 3.2 trillion gallons now 'soaked up' by lakes, aquifers,
by Bob Unruh, 2/13/16, WND
A prominent
global-warming skeptic is marveling at a new NASA report that concludes the
purported human-caused changes in the climate now, after years of being blamed
for raising the sea level, is slowing
down the rise.
“Is there anything
global warming can’t do?” Marc Morano asked
on his Climate Depot site in
response to the NASA assessment. “Now it seems that there is so much global
warming that it is slowing the rise of sea levels.” He noted that 30 years ago,
scientists blamed global warming for sea level decreases.
The new theory behind
the slowdown is that as the Earth becomes more parched as a result of humans
pumping more water out of the ground, water that otherwise would cause oceans
to rise is “being absorbed” by lakes, rivers and underground aquifers, much as
a sponge absorbs water. The estimate is that 3.2 trillion gallons of water “has
thus been soaked up and stored and is not pouring into the streets of coastal
cities.”
The
London Daily Mail said it means islands
and cities such as Venice and Miami might be spared from flooding in the near
future
NASA looked at satellite
measurements collected over recent years to estimate the rate of sea level rise
has slowed by 22 percent. The author of the study is JT Reager of NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. “We always assumed that people’s
increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting
in a net transfer of water from the land to the ocean,” he said. “What we
didn’t realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global
water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping,
causing the land to act like a sponge – at least temporarily.”
NASA launched a couple
of satellites in 2002, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment that provided
the data. The government agency said that from 2002 to 2014, it looked at
changes in gravity as well as estimates of glacier melt. The Daily Mail
reported the analysis suggests climate variability resulted in an increase of
about 3.2 trillion tons of water being stored in land.
The report said the gain
partially offset water losses from ice sheets, glaciers and groundwater
pumping. The rate of sea level rise, consequently slowed by between 0.7
and 0.2 millimeters annually. The results were published in the journal
Science. The authors cautioned that much more data is needed to “fully
understand.”
At
the Climate Depot, Morano pointed out the
widely divergent predictions about the effect of global warming on sea level in
the scientific community. He noted that in 1987, Florida State University
geology professor William Tanner said climate change would cause the sea level
to fall. Tanner plotted 4,000 years of sea-level data on 5,000 years of
climatological data, Morano said, and every time the climate cooled a couple of
degrees, the sea level went up.
Even further back, the
National Science Foundation estimated that a large part of the Antarctic
ice mass appeared to be collapsing, which could cause oceans to rise by “almost
20 feet.” “It has nothing to do with a warmer climate, just the dynamics of
unstable ice,” said a scientist at the time.
Morano pointed out the
sea level rise over the past 200 years or so “shows no evidence of
acceleration, which is necessary to assume a man-made influence.” “Sea level
rise instead decelerated over the 20th century, decelerated 31 percent since
2002 and decelerated 44 percent since 2004 to less than 7 inches per
century. There is no evidence of an acceleration of sea level rise, and
therefore no evidence of any man-made effect on sea levels. Sea level rise is
primarily a local phenomenon related to land subsidence, not CO2 levels.
Therefore, areas with groundwater depletion and land subsidence have much
higher rates of relative sea level rise, but this has absolutely nothing to do
with man-made CO2.”
WND
has reported extensively on global warming, including a few months back when, despite no rise in average
global temperature for nearly two decades, some two-dozen scientists with major
U.S. universities urged President Obama to use RICO laws to prosecute opponents
who deny mankind is causing catastrophic changes in the climate. That’s the
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which can put people in
jail.
In a letter addressed to Obama, Attorney General Loretta
Lynch and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren, the
scientists said they “appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative
use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant
Congress.” “One additional tool – recently proposed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
– is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation
of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the
American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall
America’s response to climate change,” they wrote, according
to Politico.
The scientists said
their critics’ methods “are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco
industry,” which was the target of a RICO investigation that “played an
important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the
American people about the dangers of smoking.”
“If corporations in the fossil fuel industry
and their supporters are guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in
books and journal articles, it is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as
soon as possible so that America and the world can get on with the critically
important business of finding effective ways to restabilize the Earth’s
climate, before even more lasting damage is done,” they said.
But
WND reported new evidence indicates
the polar ice cap is growing, not shrinking. Blogger Steven
Goddard at Real Science cited information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado,
showing the Arctic ice mass, as of Sept. 7, 2015, was substantially bigger than
it was in September 2012.
“Nobel Prize winning
climate experts and journalists tell us that the Arctic is ice-free, because
they are propagandists pushing an agenda, not actual scientists or
journalists,” he said. In the past three years, he pointed out, the Arctic ice
mass “has gained hundreds of miles … much of which is thick, multi-year ice.” WND long has reported the predictions of an ice-free Arctic by scientists who believe
mankind is causing global warming.
But in just last few
winters, Cairo saw its first
snow in 100 years. And Oregon, like
several other states, reached its coldest
temperature in 40 years.
Chicago saw the
coldest days ever recorded, and – as if to add finality to the trend – Antarctica reached the
coldest
temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth.
London’s Independent
newspaper declared at the turn of the millennium, “Snowfalls
are now just a thing of the past.” The report quoted David Viner, senior research scientist at the
Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, long considered an
authoritative resource for global warming research, saying snow would soon be
“a very rare and exciting event” in Britain. “Children just aren’t going to
know what snow is,” he claimed at the time.
Former vice president
and current carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore told an audience in a 2009
speech that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months
could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” And his 2006
documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” famously predicted increasing
temperatures would cause earth’s oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many
scientists say is utterly without rational basis.
See
Gore video:
A
2013 column by Mark Hertsgaard was headlined: "The End of the Arctic? Ocean Could be Ice Free by
2015."
He wrote: "Say
goodbye to polar bears and a whole lot of ice. New research suggests the Arctic
Ocean could be ice-free by 2015, with devastating consequences for the world.
Can it be stopped?"
Goddard also cited
Gore's prediction that the "polar ice cap may disappear by 2014." Taking
one more step back in time, the BBC said the Arctic summers would be ice-free
by 2013. Sierra Club Canada also said in 2013 that the Arctic sea ice would
vanish that year.
Tim Ball, a former
University of Winnipeg climatology professor, said global temperatures have
been dropping since the turn of the century, prompting the change in
terminology from "global warming" to "climate change."
Activists are also
spending less time discussing temperatures and more time pointing to more
extreme events such as tornadoes, droughts, cold snaps and heat waves. Ball
said there's a shred of truth there, but it's being badly distorted.
"Yes, there's been
slightly more extremes," he said in an interview with WND and Radio
America. "That's because the jet stream patterns are changing, because the
earth is cooling down. All the arguments about sea-level rise, about Arctic ice
disappearing, if you recall it's not that long ago that our friend Al Gore was
saying that there would be no summer ice in the Arctic. I think the year he set
for it was 2014. That proved to be completely wrong."
Listen
to the WND/Radio America interview with Tim Ball:
Scientist Art Robinson
has spearheaded The
Petition Project, which has gathered the
signatures of at least 31,487 scientists who agree that there is "no
convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane,
or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause
catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's
climate."
They say,
"Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric
carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plan and animal
environments of the Earth."
Robinson, who has a
doctorate in chemistry from Cal Tech, where he served on the faculty,
co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling,
where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon
Institute of Science and Medicine.
http://www.wnd.com/2016/02/study-now-says-global-warming-slows-sea-level-rise/
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