Bishop Hill Yong wrong
Aug 5, 2014 Climate: WG2 Science journo Ed Yong points us approvingly to an article in Grist magazine. It's about an oil refinery in Delaware which apparently is going cap in hand to the government to help it deal with the threat of rising sea levels.
The refinery has tried to get help, submitting an application with the Coastal Zone Management Act seeking shoreline protections due to “tidal encroachment” — which is one way of saying sea level rise.
Yong is not sympathetic.
Quick, fetch me my tiniest possible violin
However, I don't think he has actually given this any thought. The thrust of the article is that oil companies have caused the sea level rise - although this is all implied rather than stated clear - but this is quite incredibly daft. You don't have to look at the question of sea level rise for very long to realise that the biggest factors affecting sea level at any particular locale are likely to be natural. As if to underline this point, a recent paper on the Delaware bay found the underlying level of sea level rise to be 1-2mm/year, but locally affected by things like sediment, development of marshes, changes to tides and so on. Some studies have therefore estimated sea level changes in the north of the bay as 3-4mm/year. When you see that the refinery is actually way up the Delaware river you start to realise that any climate-related effect is just a drop in the ocean (so to speak).
Reader Comments (11)
Yong is the Brit response to Mooney and just as clever. He blocked me on Twitter some time ago because I criticised his chum Bora, who later on acquired the wrong kind of fame.
Successful science writers are the worst kind of bigots really. I am starting to think the Nobel curse isn't just a Scandinavian thing, and accolades do ruin people.
Mann's Nobel certainly seems to have ruined him...
Oh, that's right .. this was faked up...
First sentence in the application:
All the engineering in the proposal talks about absorbing wave energy. Apart from one, apparently boilerplate statement that it will be resilient to 50 years' sea level rise (which I'd guess is either a regulatory requirement or aimed at getting climate change funding), it's not mentioned again. At least, not in the sections I've briefly skimmed.
Still, it's likely that nobody from Ed's or Grist's usual audience will read that far. It's only the headline that matters, isn't it?
"Sea Level Rise" is often (mostly?) caused by "ground elevation dropping", i.e. subsidence, erosion, poorly design shore protection facilties, etc.
That being said, if funding from the government is available, any business would be be hard-pressed to ignore it.
The US is just giving up on English, isn't it? "The shoreline ... is being impacted by erosional forces predominantly associated with wave energy from storm events." For heaven's sake! Storms are eroding the shore.
The tidal gauge at the tip of Manhattan Island began measurements in the 1850's, and the rate of sea level rise has been a constant since then. The rate of apparent sea level rise (about half is actually subsidence) started long before our second half 20th century emissions could have caused it, and has not been altered by our emissions.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8518750
dearieme, Shoreline erosion is more usually caused by boating, at least in river areas. An oil refinery is probably fronting a bay, so you could be correct too.
This in the Grist article (written by a Ben Adler):
And this Ed Yong guy is a science writer?
And of course in all that time these sanctimonious planet-savers have used just as much fossil fuels as the average person and for the high-roller greens, who prefer first class travel, considerably more. The great thing about being a believer in manmade warming is that you don't have to walk the walk to feel morally superior.
I grew up in this neck of the woods, spending much of my summers on the bays in that area. I can confirm that the vast bulk of erosion problems are due to "horizontal" effects such as storm waves, and not any sea level rise. (Returning 50 years later, I cannot notice any change in sea level. Of course it's possible that there is some, but it cannot be noticed by the casual observer.)
Bishop,
Greater than 50% of "tidal encroachment" due to land subsidence caused by a massive offshore crater created long ago. Reedy Point Tidal Gauge is a few miles South of this refinery and shows 3.46mm/yr Relative Sea Level Rise so with a land subsidence factor of 51% the Absolute Sea Level Rise is only 1.70mm/yr. If man made CO2 contributed 40% to the 20th Century warming of .8C degrees this means fossil fuels accounted for .65 x .4 x .8 = .208 of 20th Century warming and all else being equal 26% of 1.70mm/yr of Absolute Sea Level Rise which is .44mm/yr. So fossil fuels maximum contribution to sea level rise in this area is .44mm/3.46mm = 12.7%. The crater and other things unrelated to burning fossil fuels account for roughly 87.3% of the problem. The sad/tragic element in this story is that even if the world went to zero CO2 emissions from fossil fuel tomorrow, the Delaware area would still see 3.02mm/yr of Relative Sea Level Rise but there has been no education of these facts going on and people wrongly think curbing CO2 will save the East coast.
http://web.vims.edu/GreyLit/VIMS/sramsoe425.pdf