Pirate's Cove

Shifting goal posts from the Cult of Climastrology, especially regarding sea rise, from “Scientific American”, which used to deal with science, not reading tea leaves and crystal balls

Exposed: The Climate Fallacy of 2100
If we do not plan, now, to limit carbon emissions beyond this century, we will foolishly raise the oceans dramatically for thousands of years

It’s shocking for me (Robert) to accept that my home could be wiped out by greatly rising seas. That’s because I live on a hill north of San Diego, 45 feet above sea level and more than a mile inland from the coast. Equally shocking to me (Dan) is that the current coastline of my beloved Mendocino County, California, could largely disappear, a place where I spend weekends with my daughters exploring rivers that run inland, deep into wine country. These inundations won’t happen this century, but that is little solace. At the rate the world is going, land so dear to our hearts could slip under the sea and stay there for thousands of years.

At the 20th Century rate of 8 inches of sea rise, it would take, what, 67 centuries to get to 45 feet? Scary stuff. Notice the shifting goal posts of doom at the end.

That hurts. Most of us believe our homes, our towns, our cities will be here for centuries and millennia to come. And why not? In Europe and across Asia millions of people live in cities that are thousands of years old. Indeed, inspired by European permanence, Robert’s family built garden walls from stone and fondly looked forward to passing on the land to hoped-for-grandchildren, and theirs, and so on.

They will be, because the warming, for one thing, won’t continue. The normal pattern is for a cool period sometime in the next few centuries.

That idea, however, now seems flawed to both of us writing this article. Strong, new research indicates that anyone or anything tens of feet above the sea today may one day face an unbeatable force, whether a country home near San Diego or a skyscraping condo in Miami. Although shorelines are forever evolving, these changes can be predicted directly, and are due to needlessly excessive carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from a relatively brief, recent period of time.

How has the public not been made clearly and painfully aware of this? Why does fierce debate over climate miss so glaring a threat? The misperception, the widespread disbelief and the fallacy are rooted in a grave error in our thinking about time.

Because people who yammer on about world ending doom hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the future that makes no scientific sense are generally ignored as utter quacks.

The many models that have projected scenarios about future climate change generally forecast only to the year 2100,

We could probably stop there. Once the computer models appear, you know you’re in for a major league ration of mule fritters

or at times merely to 2050. As a result, public discussions have been mostly about “X degrees of warming” or “Y feet of sea level rise” to the end of this century. We have accidentally but notably limited our thinking, causing us to miss striking impacts that arise beyond this limited and artificial, specific time horizon.

It is fair to say that citizens and politicians intend for Miami, and indeed the whole State of Florida, to exist well beyond 2100. Same for New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., London, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Mumbai and so on. Yet the same people discount staggering losses these places face beyond 2100. That’s wrong, and immoral too.

Immoral! If that’s the case, all Warmists should immediately stop using fossil fuels, in order to save a house 6,700 years in the future. It’s for the children.

They won’t. They’ll just shift their goal posts. Because the current ones keep failing.