New data shows that Bangladesh’s landmass is increasing, contradicting forecasts that the South Asian nation will be under the waves by the end of the century, experts say.
Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh’s landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming.
Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century.
AFP/Yahoo News: Bangladesh gaining land, not losing: scientists
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Damned if that reality thingy just keeps on intruding on a good climate scarenario, don’t it?
But how very normal. A bunch of green shonkademics have only measured the adverse impacts and ignored the beneficial processes. Standard MO for the folks from Bull$hitistan.
Don’t expect to find Hansen under his desk, sucking his thumb in the foetal position. Reality goes right over his head.
“Maminul Haque Sarker, head of the department at the government-owned centre that looks at boundary changes, told AFP sediment which travelled down the big Himalayan rivers — the Ganges and the Brahmaputra — had caused the landmass to increase.”
I didn’t even have to look up the link to guess that. What has that got to do with AGW being wrong?
“Don’t expect to find Hansen under his desk, sucking his thumb in the foetal position. Reality goes right over his head.”
Ender … you can stop counting now.
I understand that if it keeps getting any colder in Canada, they plan to resettle a lot of their frozen people to this new land in Bangladesh.
Is this a positive or a negative feedback?
From Planet Ark :
” GASES RISE, ICE SHRINKS
Johannessen gave Reuters a hitherto unpublished study showing there was a 90 percent match between rising greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from use of fossil fuels, in recent decades and observations of a retreat of the ice.
“Ninety percent … of the decreasing sea-ice extent is empirically ‘accounted for’ by the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” he wrote in the study, to be published next month in a journal by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
If the match continues to hold true, the annual average ice extent would be several million km smaller by 2050 than predicted by the UN Climate Panel, which draws on the work of 2,500 scientists, it said.
Serreze said that he stood by a prediction that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by 2030, decades before predictions by the Panel”
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/49595/story.htm
We think that in the next 50 years we may get another 1,000 square kilometres of land.”
Mahfuzur Rahman, head of Bangladesh Water Development Board’s Coastal Study and Survey Department, has also been analysing the buildup of land on the coast.
He told AFP findings by the IPCC and other climate change scientists were too general and did not explore the benefits of land accretion.
“For almost a decade we have heard experts saying Bangladesh will be under water, but so far our data has shown nothing like this,” he said.
“Natural accretion has been going on here for hundreds of years along the estuaries and all our models show it will go on for decades or centuries into the future.”
Dams built along the country’s southern coast in the 1950s and 1960s had helped reclaim a lot of land and he believed with the use of new technology, Bangladesh could speed up the accretion process, he said.
“The land Bangladesh has lost so far has been caused by river erosion, which has always happened in this country. Natural accretion due to sedimentation and dams have more than compensated this loss,” Rahman said.
Bangladesh, a country of 140 million people, has built a series of dykes to prevent flooding.
“If we build more dams using superior technology, we may be able to reclaim 4,000 to 5,000 square kilometres in the near future,” Rahman said.
So, rather than being under water by 2050, gaining an extra 1000 square metres is more likely.
Hansen and the IPCC need to look at the bigger picture, rather than pontificate about CO2.
Birdie – more predictions doomed to fail!
“Natural accretion has been going on here for hundreds of years along the estuaries.”
Hansen and the IPCC ‘missed’ this long established natural process!
Paul, sea level is rising and has done so almost continuously since the first IPCC report in 1990 (the exceptions being the year after a La Nina). This rise is because of global warming.
200 million people currently live within 1m of sea level.. I’m guessing your not one of them.
What exactly is your point?
Well, so much for beach front property values in Bangladesh. Just as the IPCC predicted they are falling fast. Albeit for the wrong reason. But the IPCC was right about value, nevertheless!
This is just the standard of accountability in technocratic authority we have come to expect from a UN organization.
More importantly, are Rudderless, Wrong and the rest of the Clueless Party paying any attention to yet another part of the edifice crumbling away?
With the news this morning about the collapse of the WTO/Doha negotiations, they must be beginning to feel like they are holding the winning ticket in the AGW/ETS Quadrella:
-1st leg: WTO/Doha negotiations collapse
-2nd leg: McCain wins US Presidential elections
-3rd leg: Copenhagen negotiations collapse
-4th leg: Gordon (“Dead Man Walking”) Brown gets slaughtered at UK General Election
This is a winner-take-all prize and Rudderless is holding the only ticket. The payout for getting all 4 correct is that you serve one term as PM and your party spends another 20 years in the wilderness.
The point, David, is that sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the present interglacial.
So to say “”sea level is rising and has done so almost continuously since the first IPCC report in 1990” indicates that you didn’t major in the earth sciences while at uni or you would have a geological time frame a bit larger than the last 18 years to reckon by.
I wonder what caused GW and sea level rises during the last 18,000 years? Perhaps the cause of sea level rises is human induced during the last 18 years?
Get a life, David.
What’s your point David? The IPCC have been so bad at predicting near-term sea leve rise, in 1990, 1995, and 2001 that they went for a 90-year prediction in AR4 2007 instead.
And sea level rise isn’t accelerating to anything out of the ordinary over the past 12 – 18,000 years.
Ivan,
McCain’s chance of winning the US election in November is about the same as a snowball’s chance in hell.
The other 3 points are quite possible, but they all help Rudd’s regressive program. The chances of Rudd being a one term PM are almost nil. The opposition is simply too timid, stupid and disorganized to rule.
Most importantly, they are too ignorant of the facts to make a stand on AGW. This is the one point they could have turned the election upon, but instead they have endorsed ETS, if with only half a heart. They have thus forfeited creative leadership to the ALP and doomed themselves to a decade or more in the wilderness.
I sympathized with your hopes. But it ain’t gonna happen. Get use to many, many more years of ALP socio-economic deconstruction.
Ultimately, we can hope that the weather refuses to cooperate with their socialist agenda. That is Australia’s best and only hope at the moment. That’s how far we have fallen, we hang like a thread dependent on which way the wind blows.
>And sea level rise isn’t accelerating to anything out of the ordinary over the past 12 – 18,000 years.
Again, what is your point?
Sea level up until about 150 years ago was stable, or in all likelihood falling slowly from the Medieval warm period. It started rising slowly, and in recent decades accelerated dramatically in line with global temperature. The current decadal rate of rise is about double that over the last century as a whole, and we have now seen about 20cm – that’s a lot
The IPCC and Hansen are very clear in articulating the fact that sea level rise will accompany rising temperatures. This happened 15,000 years ago – cause by a combination of rising CO2, ice albedo & water vapour feedbacks and hot northern summers. It is happening again now due to rising CO2 and ice albedo and water vapour feedbacks. Trouble is, the CO2 is now coming from us.
The big picture is global sea level rise, not whether sediment is locally adding land in Bangladesh over the last 30 years.
Gosh, it seems sea level is rising but only in the places where the public cannot confirm or deny it. What we do know is that in places like Fort Denison (sydney harbour), where 4 million people can confirm the observation, the change has been minimal.
More importantly, when changes do take place they have this tendency to rise in a single year and then plateau for the next few decades. This plateauing has no explanation in the theory of carbon muddles. If sea level is rising due to both melt water (minimal) and heat expansion it should be gradual and directly in line with temperature changes. But it just ain’t.
Once again the climate muddles cannot be reconciled with reality.
david,
you talk arrant nonsense!
No point even to argue with you.
Surely you are not flogging that stupid old ice albedo crap again, David. Check the cloud levels at the poles, fella, and then consider the fact that the current ice albedo takes place at the times of year when the angle of surface incidence is lowest, the trajectory through the clouds is longest and the spatial spread of each m2 of solar rays is widest.
People forget that albedo is expressed as a percentage of whatever insolation is about. And in mid-winter at the poles that means ice albedo is a high percentage of jack $hit insolation. The net result is that changes in ice albedo amount to 2/5ths of sweet planetary FA.
David,
I’ve been connected with one seafront property since 1963 when I built a jetty there and I can’t see any difference.
In 45 years it should have risen 6 inches but it hasn’t.
And Nils Axel Morner reckons those seas are falling.
The U of Colorado thinks similarly:
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/
These people have been using these increments for a long time and their numbers keep increasing even more than the delta lands.
Wes” “McCain’s chance of winning the US election in November is about the same as a snowball’s chance in hell…” like the previous post it misses the point; the above report says more about the Indian sub continent rates of erosion than rising sea level in modern times.
It’s a snowball’s chance in hell the globe surface is not heating
Wes,
I don’t know that I’d put the house on any of that. I’ve just been reading a number of articles in the media lamenting the fact that Obama’s European jaunt didn’t produce any ‘bounce’ in the opinion polls (http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/obama_poll_bounce/2008/07/24/116049.html), and that Obama and McCain are neck-and-neck with still 3 months to go. If I were a snowball descending into hell, I wouldn’t mind having a 40% chance of survival.
As far as the Liberals being a complete shambles – there is hardly anything new in that. They were in a worse shambles following Hewson’s loss in 1993 and they won 3 years later on a trot. Currently they have more people in parliament capable of leading the rabble than they had in 1993/4. This little set piece that is being played out at the moment is a distraction. They will abandon the lot in a nanosecond if it becomes politically expedient to do so (and it will go into the mythology as ‘resurrecting the Nelson plan’).
The economy will determine what happens at the next election, not the climate. With a recession looming, and with the US sub-prime still having a long, long way to run, “feel-good” policies like saving the planet will run a distant second when ‘working families’ are asked to put their hands deeper into their pockets for everything that has an energy component built into its price.
Also – I wouldn’t put too much credence in all these push-polls that purport to show 70-80% support for ‘doing something’. The telling statistic in all these polls is that only 7% admit to understanding how an ETS would work. Would you want to bet your house on a 93% ignorance rate? When the punters finally wake up to the fact that what it means is: “you pay, dummy”, then watch the support drop.
If anyone needs any convincing of this, review the discussion prior to the last election where there were several opinion polls in which a significant percentage of people said that they would sooner the government used the surplus to fund infrastructure, health, education, welfare, etc – in preference to tax cuts. What happened? The Liberals offered a $30B tax-cut bribe, and the ALP immediately matched it $ for $ – as they had to. They both knew opinion poll bull$hit when they saw it.
It’s not so much a ‘hope’ as an ‘opinion’. I don’t know that I’d give Rudderless very good odds on winning the next election – at least not with the current policy settings. If Gippsland was to be repeated on a national basis, he would be gone. Against a declining economic background, the state of the climate will be the icing on the cake.
“The big picture is global sea level rise..”
David,
Perhaps you would be good enough to point us at some actual evidence that sea levels are rising. I’ve been doing a bit or research myself, and came up with the following:
Maldives? No sign of any here:
From “New perspectives for the future of the Maldives” Nils-Axel Mörner, Michael Tooley, and Göran Possnert, Global and Planetary Change, Vol. 40, Issues 1-2, Jan 2004, pp 177-182:
“Mörner’s group found that sea levels stood about 60 cm higher around A.D. 1150 than today, and more recently, about 30 cm higher than today.”
“From the shape and freshness,” Mörner says, “one would assume that the sea level fall took place in the last 50 years, or so.”
Hmmm. Maybe Tuvalu, then?
Telegraph, 6 Aug 2000 (http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/global/sea_level.html):
“In the early 1990s, scientists forecast that the coral atoll of nine islands – which is only 12ft above sea level at its highest point – would vanish within decades because the sea was rising by up to 1.5in a year. However, a new study has found that sea levels have since fallen by nearly 2.5in and experts at Tuvalu’s Meteorological Service in Funafuti, the islands’ administrative centre, said this meant they would survive for another 100 years.”
Nope – none here.
Maybe the Arctic Sea, then – after all, with all that melting ice, it would have to be rising, right?
BBC – 15 June 2006 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5076322.stm)
“Arctic sea level has been falling by a little over 2mm a year – a movement that sets the region against the global trend of rising waters.”
Bugger me if it isn’t falling there too!
Help me out here Dave and share your material with the rest of us. If sea levels are falling in the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Arctic Sea – it’s got to be rising somewhere – right?
Or am I missing something? I always thought “global” meant “global”.
Ivan, mate, I’m with you all the way. But my money is on Obama. It’s close enough to November to remember these archives and I will eat humble pie if I am wrong. In fact, I dearly hope I am wrong.
As it stands today, Obama will win by the biggest landslide since Reagan snuffed Mondale.
I don’t put so much credence in polls as I do political gestalt and historical evidence. When Nelson, et al, decided to support the ETS with lack luster, they ceded moral leadership to the ALP and sealed their sojourn in the wilderness with the kiss of Judas.
It will take a very long time to come back from this lack of courage. Rudd’s government has done well setting up the coalition to take the blame for the current economic downturn.
And having a state funded national broadcaster in your pocket as the dominant source of news doesn’t hurt the ALP’s future either. Welcome to a one party state! Australia is becoming more like China than America. Margo Kingston must be so proud.
Gotta love those who toy with people’s names. It always manages to get a point across, although not necessarily the point you were hoping to make Ivan. Telling someone to get a life Wes is of a similar maturity level.
Of course there is no question of the quality of the analysis of CEGIS’s work, when they agree with what you believe already. It is instantly as reliable as Yahoo news, the Telegraph and the BBC online, sources already dismissed by some people here as not acceptable-when they don’t agree with what you believe already, of course.
Let’s use the Bangladeshi Delta system as a sign that the IPCC and Hansen got it wrong. It has such a simple story to tell doesn’t it? Let’s use a third world country of 140 million people bordering on India to make a point about the non-existence of AGW. Yeah right.
Marcus definitely has a feel for what the real agenda is though-arrant nonsense, there is no point in arguing with you lot. It’s like being in sideshow alley surrounded by the clown ping pong machines.
Drake,
There is no point in arguing unless you’re going to contribute something to argue over. What you’re doing isn’t arguing, it’s carping from the sidelines. And anyway, let David defend his own silly statements.
In reviewing David’s comments above, all he has done is regurgitate a bunch of assertions:
“sea level is rising and has done so almost continuously since the first IPCC report in 1990…This rise is because of global warming.” – Assertion, not fact.
“It started rising slowly, and in recent decades accelerated dramatically in line with global temperature.” – Assertion, not fact.
Both of these assertions are demonstrably false, as evidenced by any amount of on-the-ground research. Even the BBC can’t resist tying themselves in knots over this nonsense:
“Arctic sea level has been falling by a little over 2mm a year – a movement that sets the region against the global trend of rising waters.”
Now – can you or any of your ping pong associates tell us how the sea levels can be both rising and falling at the same time? Or – even more absurd – how the Arctic sea can be sinking while all the seas around it are rising? More AGW “science”, perhaps?
IPCC AR projections are plotted against observations and discussed here:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001323verification_of_ipcc.html
A number of factors spring to mind with regard to sea levels, thermal expansion, melting ice, tectonics etc. Sea levels are also spatial, which is not reflected in a global average statistic. Most of the world’s ice is stored in the Antarctic, where the west and east antarctic have had divergent climte histories for 14 million years, a phenomenon that persists today:
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003126.html
We’ve discussed sea level rise many times here. This was one of my more recent posts:
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/002945.html
If anyone thinks that sea levels can be manipulated by attempting to manipulate atmospheric CO2, then either think again or start thinking! CO2 emissions from developing countries will more than replace any reductions made by developed countries.
The key underlying point of this post, and one that everyone seems to be missing is that the effects of any trends in global mean sea level are small compared to other effects. Locally there can be differences due to changes in wind and current patterns, changes in average barometric pressure, patterns in evaporation losses, etc.
Then there are the geological effects that swamp this at all. Near the Arctic, there is still a “rebound” of the land after shaking off the glaciers of the last ice age — in many places this is 10 mm/year. Natural river deltas that are still permitted to flood, like the Ganges, are building up land faster than any rise in GMSL can eat it away. Where we have kept this from happening, like the Mississippi river delta, the land is falling due to subsidence at a rate much faster than overall sea level rise.
Add to this tectonic effects and pumping out of groundwater, oil, etc. The rate of rise of GMSL, whether 1mm/year or 5mm/year, is small beer compared to this.
Well it proves one thing, Mr. Hooper. It proves that you wealthy college boys don’t have the education enough to admit when you’re wrong. – Quint, Captain of the Orca
Ivan (846 days & Counting) you are clearly not looking very hard for sea level rise evidence if all you can find is news items about local changes (mostly weather associated). The IPCC has a whole chapter of material (in peer reviewed journals). The best real time data is from satellites – see http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_ns_global.jpg for example.
Yes David, Seems the sea level rise has a paused and levels have started to fall according to your link. Now run along and learn some geology/meteorology/oceanography and get some perspective.
“Sea level up until about 150 years ago was stable, or in all likelihood falling slowly from the Medieval warm period.”
Pray tell David, what caused the Medieval warm period?
Maybe the sea levels rose then due to the warming?
Or maybe the sea levels have been rising since the last ice age which humans didn’t have anything to do with ending?
Thank you, Curt for placing the issue in proper geologic perspective. Your comment is worth stating twice…
“The key underlying point of this post, and one that everyone seems to be missing is that the effects of any trends in global mean sea level are small compared to other effects. Locally there can be differences due to changes in wind and current patterns, changes in average barometric pressure, patterns in evaporation losses, etc.
Then there are the geological effects that swamp this at all. Near the Arctic, there is still a “rebound” of the land after shaking off the glaciers of the last ice age — in many places this is 10 mm/year. Natural river deltas that are still permitted to flood, like the Ganges, are building up land faster than any rise in GMSL can eat it away. Where we have kept this from happening, like the Mississippi river delta, the land is falling due to subsidence at a rate much faster than overall sea level rise.
Add to this tectonic effects and pumping out of groundwater, oil, etc. The rate of rise of GMSL, whether 1mm/year or 5mm/year, is small beer compared to this.”
wes: So to say “”sea level is rising and has done so almost continuously since the first IPCC report in 1990” indicates that you didn’t major in the earth sciences while at uni . .
Wes, you give David too much credit. I have my doubts given his statements that he has yet to make it out of grade school . . . He obviously needs to be taught!
Lesson 1:
Rise in sea level, driven by thermal expansion of the ocean has been consistent through the whole span of the 20th century regardless of CO2 levels:
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise_png
The average temperature of the ocean is 4.8 deg C. The average surface temperature is about 12.5 deg. C. So you see my boy, it’s still got a lot of warmin’ and expandin’ to go!
Lesson 2:
Measured sea levels are no actually dropping:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SeaLevel_TOPEX.jpg
Lesson 3:
The Arctic and Antarctic are recipients of a whopping 2.8% of the incident solar radiation to the earth. Basic math which you obviously don’t understand my boy! Albedo schmeedo!
Now study up or you’ll be held back a grade (again!)
I’d like to point out a fundamental flaw in the title of this post. I have not seen any claim by IPCC that Bangladesh would lose land area, nor am I aware of any such claim by Mr. Hansen. The IPCC AR4 mentions increased flooding in Bangladesh, but not loss of land area.
Thus, as far as I know, they are not “wrong again” in this case.
“nor am I aware of any such claim by Mr. Hansen”
Who are the denialists now?
Here..
(http://lightblueline.org/nasas-james-hansen-ipcc-forecast-climate-change-news-business)
“According to Hansen, large areas of Florida, East Anglia and the Netherlands, as well as many oceanic islands and most of Bangladesh, could be inundated within the lifetime of children now being born.”
And here:
(http://www.topix.com/forum/world/bangladesh/TBJSRG1BU23254VMC)
“Bangladesh could disappear entirely by end of century: NASA”
And here:
(http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=43563)
“Johann Hari wrote: “[A]nd found that many climatologists think the IPCC is way too optimistic about Bangladesh. I turned to Professor James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose climate calculations have proved to be more accurate than anybody else’s. He believes the melting of the Greenland ice cap being picked up his satellite today, now, suggests we are facing a 25-metre rise in sea levels this century — which would drown Bangladesh entirely.””
..amongst others.
First off, Ivan, to state that one is unaware of a fact is not to deny the fact. I think your insinuation is unfair.
The quotes you provide all contain a common element: they are long-range predictions. Note the time indicators:
“within the lifetime of children now being born now”
“by the end of the century”
“this century”
Note also the use of the word “could” in every case. Finally, note that not one of these statements is a direct quote from Mr. Hansen — they are all statements by other people who are presenting their opinions of Mr. Hansen’s beliefs. While such statements have some suggestive value, they’re certainly not enough to hang your case on. Hearsay is never a solid form of evidence.
But let’s get back to the point about the long range of the predictions. The evidence we have shows that Bangladesh has been gaining land area. That’s because there is some silt deposition rate — which I shall call D — from the rivers flowing through it. There is also another factor at work: the rise in sea level due to the melting of ice, which I shall call R. Presently, D is greater than R, and so Bangladesh is gaining land area. However, if we predict that R is rising, then we conclude that at some point in the future R will exceed D, at which point Bangladesh will begin losing land area. Thus, there is no conflict between Mr. Hansen’s statements and the evidence provided, and hence the headline of this article contains a false statement.
R is predicted to be rising? Based on one factor – melting ice masses?
What about land subsidence – and I know as a fact the existence recent raised beach strandlines inland from Tweed Heads in northern NSW. In fact I was drilling the submerged beach strandlines off Tweed Heads in 1970, some 6 fathoms under the sea. Looking for beach sand deposits.
So we have a recent submergences of old beaches, together with raised beaches of a comparable age inland.
And AGW only considers polar ice cap melting as the sole factor affecting ocean volumes.
The GCM’s are somewhat incomplete.
“The quotes you provide all contain a common element:”
Dead right:
“inundated”
“disappear”
“drown”
Seems plain enough to me.
“Note also the use of the word “could” in every case.”
Of course – it’s the standard weasel word in the AGW lexicon. Since they have no science, they can only run with the guessing game. “Could” and “If” appear in every AGW prediction.
“Presently, D is greater than R, and so Bangladesh is gaining land area.”
Let me see if I have got this right:
Localised D is greater than Global R. And this explains why areas not affected by D are not being submerged by R? A sort of sympathetic non-sinking phenomenon? Do you guys ever think through the nonsense you write?
“Finally, note that not one of these statements is a direct quote from Mr. Hansen”
This is a completely disingenuous statement. If you had bothered to follow the links, you would find that the first one directly references an interview conducted with Hansen (i.e. IS from direct quotes):
http://www.climatechangecorp.com/content.asp?ContentID=4898
The second extensively quotes from Hansen’s ‘testimony’ to Congress (i.e. IS from direct quotes)
And the third directly quotes from two of Hansen’s works (i.e. IS extracted from direct quotes).
Louis, I urge you to read IPCC AR4. You state that “AGW only considers polar ice cap melting as the sole factor affecting ocean volumes.” This is false. Here’s the relevant quote from IPCC AR4, (5.5.1, page 408):
“On decadal and longer time scales, global mean sea level change results from two major processes, mostly related to recent climate change, that alter the volume of water in the global ocean: i) thermal expansion (Section 5.5.3), and ii) the exchange of water between oceans and other reservoirs (glaciers and ice caps, ice sheets, other land water reservoirs – including through anthropogenic change in land hydrology, and the atmosphere; Section 5.5.5). ”
It also discusses subsidence issues.
Ivan writes: “Of course – it’s the standard weasel word in the AGW lexicon. Since they have no science, they can only run with the guessing game. “Could” and “If” appear in every AGW prediction.”
No, these are qualitative statements of uncertainty. An honest scientist acknowledges the uncertainty associated with every measurement and every calculation. In a few cases, the uncertainty is small enough to be negligible. Most of the time, however, the uncertainty is non-negligible and the scientist has an ethical responsibility to report that uncertainty. And you criticize these scientists for their honesty?
“Localised D is greater than Global R. And this explains why areas not affected by D are not being submerged by R? A sort of sympathetic non-sinking phenomenon? Do you guys ever think through the nonsense you write?”
You are apparently assuming that there is no evidence of sea rise anywhere on the globe. Please see Figure 5.3 from IPCC AR4, which shows a rise of sea level of just under 200 mm in the last 130 years. Thus, your premise is false.
You take me to task for pointing out the difference between the hearsay comments and the direct quotes; however, there’s a crucial difference between the hearsay quotes and the direct quotes: Mr. Hansen is careful to state the limitations of his statement, such as the long time range, the inherent uncertainties, and the contingencies. That’s why I criticize the reliance on hearsay — it’s usually inaccurate.
“You take me to task for pointing out the difference between the hearsay comments and the direct quotes”
See my previous post.
Item #1 and #2 are taken from direct quotes. Item #3 is taken from direct testimony. James Mayeau previously provided a link to a paper authored by Hansen where he spcifically mentions “almost all of Bangladesh”:
(www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2007/CanWeAvert_20070625.pdf)
The fact that you continue to refer to these as “hearsay comments” is, quite frankly, simply being disingenuous.
“You are apparently assuming that there is no evidence of sea rise anywhere on the globe…Thus, your premise is false.”
Not only am I assuming it, but in my post at July 31, 2008 09:23 PM, above, I provided references whereby the notion of sea level rises in the Arctic, Pacific and Indian Oceans is challenged by measurement. The premise is not false, as you assert, but is supported by contemporaneous measurement, rather than by “manufactured” data from history.
The fact that you continue to ignore any of the substantive points that are made in the various comments and focus on the irrelevant (e.g. hearsay vs. direct quote) indicates to me that you are more interesting in sidetracking the discussion than debating the issues.
That’s fine with me – but don’t be disappointed if it all just keeps going around in circles.
Ivan writes: “The fact that you continue to refer to these as “hearsay comments” is, quite frankly, simply being disingenuous.”
I suggest that you reread my post. I do not refer to direct quotes as hearsay quotes, and in fact I talk about the DIFFERENCE between the two kinds of quotes, and further I discuss the content of the direct quotes.
With reference to sea level, you rely on cherry picking your data. Yes, there is some data that suggests that sea level has not risen. However, there is a great deal more data, and more reliable data, indicating that sea level is rising. It is not rational to pick the data you like and ignore the data that you don’t like. Please see IPCC AR4 Section 5.5.
Lastly, your hypothesis on my internal thought processes is based on a selective interpretation of a tiny amount of data. You think climatology is complex? Try human cognition! 😉
“I suggest that you reread my post. I do not refer to direct quotes as hearsay quotes”
Really? Let me quote from your post above:
“Finally, note that not one of these statements is a direct quote from Mr. Hansen — they are all statements by other people who are presenting their opinions of Mr. Hansen’s beliefs.”
As I subsequently pointed out, #1 and #2 are direct quotes from Hansen. #3 is quoted from his testimony before Congress. They are not ‘their opinions of Mr. Hansen’s beliefs’, or ‘hearsay’ – but rather the words out his own mouth.
So what would your motive be in publishing something that is obviously and demonstrably false?