Tag Archives: national climate assessment

Slow Rise of Sea Level Despite NCA Climate Change Claim

Infrastructure is being damaged by sea level rise, heavy downpours, and extreme heat….Sea level rise, storm surge, and heavy downpours, in combination with continued development in coastal areas, are increasing damage to U.S. infrastructure including roads, buildings, and industrial facilities, and are also increasing risks to ports and coastal military installations. Flooding along rivers, lakes, and in cities following heavy downpours, prolonged rains, and rapid melting of snow ice pack is exceeding the limits of flood protection infrastructure designed for historical conditions. Extreme heat is damaging transportation infrastructure such as roads, rail lines, and airport runways.

Not one word of this passage is demonstrated by the 841 pages of the report either. The NCA simply suggests to Americans to “[replace] short vehicle commutes with biking or walking and [reduce] your red meat intake to reduce the amount of methane emitted from the animals we eat.”

Sea level has been rising, in fact, since the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago! But there has been no acceleration in the rate of sea level rise for at least 200 years. Over that past 200 years, the long term, stable sea level rise has averaged a mere 6.6 inches per century, as measured by major tidal gauge studies.

Yet, the Obama Administration’s report tries to tell us that global sea levels could rise by as much as 6.6 feet by 2100, which would be 12 times the current long term average rate over the last 200 years! Furthermore, a 2014 peer-reviewed study just published by Cazenave, et. al. finds the rate of sea level rise has decelerated by 31 percent since 2002. That is consistent with a slight global cooling trend since that time, which some senior scientists predict could last decades.

sea levels

All of this true climate science is authoritatively explained in complete detail in the thousands of pages of Climate Change Reconsidered II, authored by the dozens of top scientists serving on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and published this year in 3 volumes by the Heartland Institute. Those volumes are “double peer reviewed,” as they discusses thousands of peer reviewed articles published in scientific journals and are themselves peer reviewed. Last year, the Cato Institute published a thorough, comprehensive refutation of the publicly released draft of the NCA, titled The Missing Science from the Draft National Assessment on Climate Change, by Patrick J. Michaels, et. al. If you are interested in knowing what you are talking about, and are an intelligent layman, you can be thoroughly educated by those calm, dispassionate, comprehensive, reasoned discussions of the issues surrounding global warming and “climate change.” You can learn more by attending the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, to be held at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, July 7-9, with more than 1,000 scientists from around the world.

 

Fact Check: NCA Report’s Extreme Weather Claim

The NCA states the following:

Climate disruptions to agriculture have been increasing and are projected to become more severe over this century. Some areas are already experiencing climate-related disruptions….From mid-century on, climate change is projected to have more negative impacts on crops and livestock across the country — a trend that could diminish the security of our food supply.

However, the increased carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration has unambiguously and substantially increased agricultural yields, which is better established than any other proposition of climate science today. Again, in a 50 year period, that has amounted to $3.2 trillion in increased agricultural output. Once more, the NCA statement is directly the opposite of reality. You see what I mean by calculated deception?

Some extreme weather and climate events have increased in recent decades, and new and stronger evidence confirms that some of these increases are related to human activities. Changes in extreme weather events are the primary way that most people experience climate change….Over the last 50 years, much of the United States has seen an increase in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, more heavy downpours, and in some regions, more severe droughts.

So the increased CO2 is supposedly responsible for both more heavy downpours, and more severe droughts. But the truth is there has been no increase in extreme weather events at all. Paul Driessen reports for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow that “no Category 3-5 hurricane has made landfall in the United States since 2005, the longest such period since at least 1900.” Moreover, “U.S. tornado frequency remains very low, and property damage and loss of life from tornadoes have decreased over the past six decades.” University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. authoritatively finds that “the number of years with very large tornado losses has actually decreased” during 1993-2013 compared to 1950 to 1970.

number of hurricanes

The latest report from the U.N.’s IPCC, as well as analysis from the Obama Administration’s own National Climatic Data Center, both conclude that no case can be made that extreme weather is increasing. As the Heritage Foundation explains, that means “no significant trends for floods, droughts, hurricanes or tornados.”

Even the NCA itself says, “there has been no universal trend in the overall extent of drought across the continental U.S. since 1900.” Other trends in severe storms “are uncertain.” Lewis accurately reports:

The Assessment ignores substantial data and research finding no long-term increases in the strength and frequency of tropical cyclones and no trend in extreme weather-related damages once losses are “normalized” (adjusted for changes in population, wealth, and consumer price index).

 

More Evidence of Global Cooling from NCA Report

According to the network of nationwide thermometers monitored by the United States Historical Climatology Network, James Taylor noted that 2014 so far has been the coldest year for the United States ever, at least through May 6. Taylor writes,

Assertions that warming temperatures in the United States are causing a host of problems are soundly contradicted by the objective temperature data.

Soon, the more recent period of no global warming will be longer than the older period of actual warming, which lasted approximately 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Preceding that were 30 years of global cooling, generating alarms regarding a new ice age (which is actually overdue, given historical climate cycles). Even Britain’s Met Office, an international cheerleading headquarters for global warming hysteria, conceded in December, 2012 that there would be no further warming at least through 2017, which would make 21 plus years with no global warming.

The foundation for the establishment’s argument for global warming is nothing more than broad theory, which does nothing to specify how much and when warming occurs, even with 73 climate models collected by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The problem is that the warming trends projected by these models are all diverging farther and farther from the real world trend of actual temperature observations.

The NCA states:

The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.

But there is no proof of this basic declarative statement in the entire 841 pages of the report. Instead, the incontestable truths explained above show that the global warming of the past 50 years was 20 years of warming from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, preceded by roughly 30 years of global cooling, followed by almost 20 years of no warming, despite record acceleration during this time of human carbon dioxide emissions.

The NCA asserts that:

As these data records have grown longer and climate models have become more comprehensive, earlier predictions have largely been confirmed.

Such a blatantly false statement in an official U.S. government report that cost taxpayers $7 billion of whitewashing over 3 years is shameful. As incontestably explained above, the climate model projections have only grown farther and farther from reality over the past 34 years actually, particularly during the last 17 plus years of no global warming.

These climate models, with projections that cannot even replicate the past, have again been falsified by real world temperature data. So to say that over time, as “the climate models have become more comprehensive, earlier predictions have largely been confirmed,” would be fraudulent if the statements had not been so transparently penned by PR flacks with no idea of any actual “climate science,” let alone the incontestable climate science truths explained above.

Increased Human Emissions has its Benefits

Politically-funded and agenda-driven scientists who have built their careers on the theory that the exhaust from the burning of fossil fuels leads to a dramatic increase in temperatures and “the greenhouse effect” and who live well on the $2.6 billion dollars a year of Federal grants for global warming and climate change research cling to this theory and bend the data spread to support the glorified claims in their reports and papers. This is a well-informed, well-reasoned understanding of the National Climate Assessment (NCA) report, which is an exercise in political science, not climate science. Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute rightly called it “an alarmist document to scare people and build political support for unpopular policies such as carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and EPA regulatory mandates,” in his May 6 analysis on FoxNews.com.

While the NCA (and Obama talking points), use the term carbon “pollution,” the “greenhouse gas” supposedly causing most of the trouble, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a natural substance essential for the survival of all life on the planet. Plants need CO2 to grow and conduct photosynthesis, the natural process that creates food for animals and fish at the bottom of the food chain.

In fact, the increased atmospheric concentration of CO2 increased agricultural output and production by $3.2 trillion between 1961 and 2011. Thus, the documented effects of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been positive so far.

Even with increasing human CO2 emissions, carbon dioxide is still a trace gas in the environment, constituting just 0.04 percent of the atmosphere Figure I shows that greenhouse gases compose 1-5 percent of the atmosphere, and Figure II demonstrates that CO2 composes only 3.62 percent of greenhouse gases. We still live in a world starving for carbon dioxide, especially given the crucial importance of CO2 to plant and animal life. Data shows that during the Pre-Cambrian period (about 550 million years ago) CO2 concentration levels were 15 times greater than today with no record of any catastrophic results, shown in Figure III. Human and natural emissions of CO2 are only 4-5 percent of total global emissions.

greenhouse gasesWater Vaporatmospheric co2

In addition, uncontested global temperature data shows there has been no global warming for 17 years and 8 months now, even as human global CO2 emissions have continued to accelerate to unprecedented levels. The Economist reported last year that from 2000 to 2010, human carbon dioxide emissions totaled roughly 100 billion tons of CO2, which equaled about one-fourth of all human emissions since the industrial revolution in 1750.

National Climate Assessment Misses the Mark

Although the National Climate Assessment (NCA) attempts to provide a comprehensive report on the state of global warming and climate change, it misses the mark in every possible way. First, the report claims nothing but negative effects of rising anthropogenic CO2 levels. However, CO2 composes a minute percentage of atmospheric gases, and the rise in emissions has actually been economically beneficial by exponentially increasing crop yield. Moreover, data reveals that the environment is currently entering a period void of any global warming. Second, the assessment states that the rising temperatures are causing more frequent and severe natural disasters. Yet, experts testify that no significant trends in floods, droughts, tornados, or hurricanes exist. In fact, according to these experts, the frequency of tornadoes and severity of hurricanes have decreased over time in the United States. Third, the NCA reports that rising sea levels have severely damaged domestic infrastructure. However, data reveals a deceleration in sea level rise, one that will remain negligible in the coming century. In light of this propaganda, the Obama administration is using this assessment to prevent natural gas and oil exploration which could support tens of thousands of jobs during a staggering economy. As will be explained in future blog posts, it seems like the National Climate Assessment has done nothing but perpetuate lies and hurt the economy.