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Rising sea level means huge Bay Area impacts
New study projects billions in damage and hundreds of thousands displaced by rising sea level and a major storm

by Jay Thorwaldson
Palo Alto Online Staff

Posted by B Lemon, a resident of the Old Palo Alto neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2009 at 6:51 am

This sounds extreme - particularly since Al Gore bought a condo downtown

Posted by Henny Penny, a resident of the Downtown North neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2009 at 9:21 am

"The Sky is falling in" now transformed into "The ocean is swallowing us all up"

The article and those pseudo scientists who promote such nonsense really take the cake for spewing crud. Such nonsense.

Posted by Walter_E_Wallis, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2009 at 9:44 am
Walter_E_Wallis is a member (registered user) of Palo Alto Online

A great argument for the Reeber Plan. Dam the GG, then divide the bay into fresh water polders. The dividing levees make excellent transportation corridors and the experience of the Netherlands proves you can win against the sea. Now THERE is a stimulus package.

Posted by Sense from NonSense, a resident of the Barron Park neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2009 at 12:33 pm

LOL - This must be a joke.

Can I send the authors of this load of nonsense a gift card for Toys-R-Us?

It would allow the hims and her some good play time to get in touch with play fantasies than attempting to find it on the keyboard of his computer.

99 pages of nonsense most of which is cut and paste data from others. However at the bottom of page ii the truth can be found.

"All  conclusions and errors are, of course, our own." I think that about covers it.

Posted by Super, a resident of the Community Center neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2009 at 1:56 pm

This is awesome. I suspect my house will become oceanfront property soon.

Posted by Hulkamania, a resident of the Duveneck/St. Francis neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2009 at 2:50 pm

Will the City allow us to put row boats on our roofs like they do in Foster City?

Posted by Don G., a resident of the Community Center neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2009 at 3:26 pm

Is the ocean rising or the land sinking? Either one and the Eco-terrorists will claim man caused it.

Posted by resident, a resident of the Adobe-Meadows neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2009 at 4:06 pm

To all those in San Mateo and Orange County: stop paying your mortgages now! Your house will get wiped out! Apply for taxpayer funded bailout now!

Will California now raise taxes to protect us from this crisis? LOL!

Posted by Hulkamania, a resident of the Duveneck/St. Francis neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2009 at 5:17 pm

"Is the ocean rising or the land sinking? Either one and the Eco-terrorists will claim man caused it."

And they'd be right.

Posted by specific problems, a resident of another community, on Mar 12, 2009 at 8:22 pm

Are there some specific problems with the report? E.g., can anybody point to a specific graph and say "this is in error" or "this data wasn't properly recorded" or find some other concrete, specific mistakes the authors have made?

For example, you might say "observing data over one century, as done in figure 4 on page 11, is inconclusive because the known effect of ..... etc etc".

I think this kind of concrete criticism would be more effective than saying "the idea of climate change was championed by Al Gore and therefore must be wrong".

Of course the report really might be wrong, and skepticism is good. And scientists can be wrong and biased. And i'm not trying to say that Al Gore has transcended humanity and is now a deity.

But as more scientists come to a consensus that the climate is changing, those who are skeptical do have a responsibility to try to be specific and support their position.

For reference, the report cited in the article (but not linked in, for whatever reason) is:

Web Link

And the wikipedia artile on climate change is:

Web Link

And Jay Thorwaldson, thanks for the article. It looks like nice summary of how the report says the expected climate change will affect this area.

Posted by Walter_E_Wallis, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Mar 13, 2009 at 2:28 am
Walter_E_Wallis is a member (registered user) of Palo Alto Online

Solly, Cholly, you don't get to move the goal lines any time you want. Critics are allowed to determine how they criticize. My criticism of man made climate change and of Hansen's magic grantgrinder are well documented and totally unanswered. Just validate the predictive capability of the box against real world data and quantify the change in end point predicted for any specific change in human behavior. What we have now is throwing virgins into volcanoes because the priests say it will pacify Gaia. If Hansen used his program to file his tax return he would be spending time in club Fed.

Posted by Terry Martin, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Mar 13, 2009 at 1:26 pm

To “specific problems” . We may ultimately disagree about the global warming issue, but I appreciate your comment above and the posting of the source web link, which should have been a part of the original article.

The media seems to be full of speculations relating to global warming, but they always start with an undocumented premise that it exists due to human activity. I read the web link, and as an old physicist, I have to say that I never wrote or read a real scientific paper starting with a legal disclaimer. This paper seems to be a commissioned engineering report on the possible results in the “theoretical” rise of sea level, but not a compelling argument that it will.

Scientists always like to understand natural phenomenon, and to make predictions based on their theory. Unfortunately, climatology is extremely complex, and all contemporary attempts to computer model climate behavior are simply not yet up to the job. Yes, there are computer models that predict climate disaster, however ALL of these models fail miserably when fed past data and asked to predict the present. Ever wonder why some folks are so confident of global climate 50 years ahead, yet the local weather forecast is often wrong a few days in the future.

FYI, it is my opinion that variations in solar energy and sunspot activity have more to do with our global temperature than CO2.

If anyone is seriously interested in a scientific perspective of global warming, I recommend one of the last papers written by Roger Revelle before he died. Remember, Dr. Revelle was highly credited in Al Gore’s movie for his early work, but it is less well known that he changed his mind about the impact of CO2.

From the conclusion of : Cosmos: A Journal of Emerging Issues Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer 1992. by S. Fred Singer, Roger Revelle and Chauncey Starr

“Drastic, precipitous and, especially, unilateral--steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective. Stringent controls enacted now would be economically devastating particularly for developing countries for whom reduced energy consumption would mean slower rates of economic growth without being able to delay greatly the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Yale economist William Nordhaus, one of the few who have been trying to deal quantitatively with the economics of the greenhouse effect, has pointed out that ". . . those who argue for strong measures to slow greenhouse warming have reached their conclusion without any discernible analysis of the costs and benefits. . . ." It would be prudent to complete the ongoing and recently expanded research so that we will know what we are doing before we act. "Look before you leap" may still be good advice.”

Posted by Perspective, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Mar 14, 2009 at 7:37 am

Great post, Terry Martin!

Thanks.

Seems to me that ever more people are willing to brave coming out of the closet and telling the truth, including those who initially jumped on the bandwagon.

Posted by Sharon, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Mar 14, 2009 at 8:07 am

Time to hold these conflict of interest, doom predicting "scientists" personally accountable for malpractice and fraud.

Remember this one :

Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born 29 May 1932 ) is an American entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera (butterflies).

He became a household name after publication of his 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he predicted that

"In the 1970s and 1980s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

"India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980," and "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971."

Ehrlich offered a partial solution to the "population problem":

"(We need) compulsory birth regulation... (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food.

Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size".

Where have we heard that before, Mao in China, Stalin, the 3rd Reich ?

All three in fact

Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies in the department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University.Web Link

Posted by specific problems, a resident of another community, on Mar 16, 2009 at 8:21 am

Thanks Terry for the info about Roger Revelle.

The article about him on the wikipedia is here:

Web Link

It looks like in addition to his scientific work

he did other work to improve society.

If anybody has a link to the Cosmos Journal article

i would like to read it. When i read the part that

Terry quoted, i can see that Revelle and his coauthors

were urging some restraint --- "haste makes waste".

But i don't have the sense that he was backtracking,

at least from that passage. That is, there are all

these graphs showing the mean temperature going up

in a secular trend over the last century, and a

similar trend with carbon dioxide (although i don't

know how far back the numbers go for co2). Now

correlation of course does not prove causation,

and climate science is indeed devoted to an extremely

complex subject.

But i'm not aware of any scientific studies which

tend to discredit the hypothesis that greenhouse gases

are contributing to the observed global warming we are

experiencing.

And finally, i think you (Terry) are right about the

nature of the study that Jay wrote about. It is not

a scientific paper as you would find in a journal, but

a study commissioned by our state government. (So to

the list of people believing that greenhouse gases are

a real problem we can add the Governor and his

administration.)

Posted by Sense from NonSense, a resident of the Barron Park neighborhood, on Mar 16, 2009 at 5:10 pm

(So to the list of people believing that greenhouse gases are a real problem we can add the Governor and his administration.)

He has already been discounted. In fact his ROI to this state is a net loss, given that Maria is calling the shots in Sacramento.

Government commissioned studies with pre-packaged results. Shameful

This is no different than academic freedom that goes against the university mind-set. When someone offers up a different opinion they suffer loss of budget or are out right fired. It usually goes like this: sorry professor so and so we are not renewing your employment contract.

Yea, so much for science.

Posted by MV, a resident of another community, on Apr 1, 2009 at 1:30 pm

Interesting to see how an infinite number of people will argue about whether or not global climate change is connected with CO2 or is even occurring at all, and not take advantage of how this popular scare will positively impact peoples' way of living and their view on how they negatively impact our earth. True or not, why not embrace this prattle and use it to change our way of life, and make extraordinarily green advances in technology?