National Public Radio’s March 31, 2017 “Morning Edition” program claimed rising seas threaten some U.S. coastal military bases.
Left wing nonsense.
Reporter Jay Price claimed the Sewell’s Point tide gage at the Norfolk, Virginia Naval Station shows that seas are rising there at the highest rates on the East Coast.
The Norfolk, Virginia area happens to have what may be the largest naval facilities in the world.
Sea level rise measured at Sewell’s Point is 4.59 millimeters (0.18 inches) per year.
Right away, NPR was wrong!
Because two nearby Virginia tide gages had higher rises than Sewell's Point.
(1) The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel gage measured an average sea level rise of 5.93 mm / year.
(2) Up the Delmarva Peninsula, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Wachapreague gage measured an average sea level rise of 5.37 mm / year.
But never mind that !
Today's shoreline infrastructure allows people to work around a daily sea-level rise and fall of over 12 feet in busy ports like Seattle.
NPR would have us believe a continuing sea level rise of 0.18 inches a year (18 inches during the next 100 years) is going to be a disaster for Virginia naval bases?
The NPR claim that US naval bases in Virginia (or anywhere else) are threatened by global warming is complete nonsense.
NPR is a socialist radio station unable to report anything honestly -- to them any left-wing environmental activist claim is 'real science'.
Alternative views are not tolerated.
It's a shame they get free money from the US government !
In fact, there is no CO2-fueled global warming signal in the sea level data from the Sewell’s Point, Virginia tide gage mentioned on NPR.
The rate of sea level rise there has not changed since the gage was installed in 1927.
The tide gage data above show no correlation between the rate of sea-level rise and human production of carbon dioxide (CO2 levels are shown on that chart ).
When that tide gage was installed in 1927, the global rate of CO2 emissions was about 1 Gigaton/year.
The latest estimate of CO2 emissions (2014) was about 10 Gigatons/year (see chart below).
The majority of what is thought to be "sea level rise" in the Norfolk-Hampton-Newport News area is actually caused by sinking land (subsidence) caused by an ancient subterranean impact crater, and the compaction of former wetlands filled in for development.
The huge 50 mile diameter Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater is near the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, near Sewell’s Point.
The crater’s structure causes most of the present-day subsidence of the terrain in this area.
The regional terrain has also been modified by dredging and filling of former wetlands for developers.
Marshes were dredged and filled -- the fill continues to compact for decades, resulting in slow terrain subsidence.
Sewell Point is built on landfill, which subsides more rapidly than solid land mass.
For Sewell, the land is sinking a lot, while the sea rises a little.
One just can’t mindlessly blame CO2 for global sea level rise measured by tide gages.
Close to the Norfolk Navy Station, and the Sewell’s Point tide gage, a large meteor or asteroid struck 35 million years ago, evaporated sediments in the area, and created a huge crater in the crystalline rock below them.
The Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater affected geologic development of the lower Chesapeake Bay in the millions of years ever since.
The Chesapeake Crater continues to induce subsidence of the land, because of the fractured nature of the earth below these towns and cities at Chesapeake Bay’s mouth.
Of course the March 31, 2017 NPR story did not bother to mention
land subsidence.
land subsidence.
Sea levels have been rising for a long time – up about 400 feet since the peak of the last glaciation about 20,000 years ago.
The rise today is much slower than it was 20,000 years ago.
There is no human-caused CO2-fueled global warming signature anywhere in the tide gage records, including the Battery in New York City and in San Francisco, where tide gage records go back to the time of the U.S. Civil War.
There has been no measured effect on the rate of sea level rise from the increasing use of fossil fuels.
Tide gages have one major fault:
They don't know if changing water levels over are due to changing sea levels, or whether the land the gage is on is rising or falling.
The long term vertical motion of the ground near a tide gage can be determined using GPS data from many years.
Data from CO2 measuring stations, and from the Sewell’s Point tide gage, (and almost all other tide gages) refute NPR assertions.
But NPR will never change their mind, or present real science -- they have too many environmental activists ready to rush toward open NPR microphones.
NPR is the home of misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts.
Liberals believe most people are stupid, and need to be lied to so they will do the “right” thing.
Most things liberals say are constructed for the effect they desire -- the truth does not matter.
If you want extremely left-wing biased news, keeping your mind closed to alternative views, and actual facts, then make NPR your only radio news station.
We turn NPR on when we leave our cat alone in the house -- the droning left-wing news puts Mr. Sneaky to sleep in minutes.
Notes on sea level:
Measuring sea level is not simple.
The seas puddle in areas of higher gravity.
The sea around Britain, for one example, is 490 feet (150 meters) higher than the sea around the Gulf of Mexico.
Measuring a single sea level for the entire world, and especially its rise in millimeters from year-to-year, is very hard to do -- and the accuracy claimed is unlikely to be true.