Like, totally doomed!
Meanwhile, a National Climate Assessment has named Miami as the city most vulnerable to damage from rising sea levels. While a Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact paper warned that water in the area could rise by as much as two feet by the year 2060.
On Sunday, one of the state’s U.S. senators, Marco Rubio (R), was pressed about the general subject of climate change, and despite the warnings outlined above, he argued that there was nothing lawmakers could or should do to reverse the climate trends (whose origins he also questioned).
“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” Rubio said, according to excerpts released by ABC “This Week,” “and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.”
“The fact is that these events that we’re talking about are impacting us, because we built very expensive structures in Florida and other parts of the country near areas that are prone to hurricanes. We’ve had hurricanes in Florida forever. And the question is, what do we do about the fact that we have built expensive structures, real estate and population centers near those vulnerable areas?” he asked. “I have no problem with taking mitigation activity.”
The sea rise threatening Florida leads to a NY Times article
Sea levels have risen eight inches since 1870, according to the new report, which projects a further rise of one to four feet by the end of the century. Waters around southeast Florida could surge up to two feet by 2060, according to a report by the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact. A study by the Florida Department of Transportation concluded that over the next 35 years, rising sea levels will increasingly flood and damage smaller local roads in the Miami area.
We don’t really need more, because you surely understand it is all about Doom! Let’s talk about Miami. I’d like to know exactly how they can predict, when NOAA has had no measurements since 1981. The 50 year trend till 1981 was a whopping .78 feet in 100 years. Does someone else have actual data?
Let’s look at other Florida data. Here are the three longest term data sets from NOAA
Key West: 0.73 feet in 100 years. Pensacola: 0.69 feet. Cedar Key: 0.59 feet. OK, granted, all three are on the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s look at the Atlantic coast
- Fernandina Beach, which has excellent long term data: 0.66 feet trend in 100 years
- Mayport, which also has excellent long term data: 0.79 feet
- Daytona Beach Shores (which, surpringly, has limited data): 0.76 feet
- Naples: 0.76 feet
- St. Petersburg, a nice long trend: 0.77 feet
This is completely in line with the average sea rise over the last 7,000 years during the Holocene. That time period is used because that’s when the massive sea rise from the end of the glacial period ended. One would actually expect much more sea rise during even a low level warm period, since a cool period would see very low to decreasing sea levels, in order to create an average. We should expect more than three quarters of a foot. None of which would mean anthropogenic causation.
Don’t forget that the liberals said the sea would rise 8 feet by 1970. Still waiting.
It was amusing how they did that, considering they were also stoking the fear of a new ice age, which would mean, of course, a decrease in sea level.
dave and Teach,
You make all these claims about what liberals said or did decades ago but you never seem to be able to offer support.
Exactly who was claiming the seas would rise 8 feet by 1970?
In the 1970s climate scientists were not predicting a new ice age. Most scientific papers related to climate change then were concerned with global warming.
Why do regressives keep repeating the same falsehoods?
Monday morning links
Thanks to Roger De Hauteville, King of Sicily, who kept our morning links going over the past week and a half. Kings are busy people, and I am grateful to him for having given us the time and for sharing his talent for the rare, the odd, and the absurd…
Jeffy,
I was alive then and about 8 to 10 years old. How old were you then? It really doesn’t matter what the ‘scientific papers’ said, it is the fact that what was being pushed to the public was that we were heading for a new ice age. The general public didn’t have easy access to those papers and only went by what was reported in the news.
Throughout the 1970s there were numerous reports in the media about “the coming ice age”. I recall stories in Newsweek, Time, and Science News. Not to mention a TV show with Leonard Nimoy (“Mr Spock”) making dire predictions.
I can’t say what “most scientific papers” back then were concluding. I suppose one could do a meta-study and investigate. But as far as the general public was concerned, “scientists” were warning of a “coming ice age”. The media had many such stories, and that was the popular perception. And it wasn’t limited to fringe publications: it was supposedly respectable publications like Time and Newsweek and Science News.
I’m sure that when the present scare blows over and we’re onto whatever the next warnings of doom are, people pushing the latest warning will protest that back in the 2000’s there were many scientists who did not subscribe to the global warming scare.
Riddle me this; I have heard that we are undergoing a warming period (Medieval Warm Period was warmer than current conditions. This means recent warming is not unusual and hence must be natural, not man-made.) and that we are actually due to experience an Ice Age.
What would be better for mankind, warm or nasty glacial cold?
I vote for warm. Much as I like my snowy winters, I would like to have some nice spring, summer and fall weather too.
[…] A trend of .66 feet. Big whoop. Like I wrote in regards to Florida sea rise […]