Last June Penn State climatologist Michael Mann prophesied that the oceans would rise six to eight feet by the year 2100. Climatologist James Hansen, who also predicted in 1988 that New York City's West Side Highway would be flooded within twenty to forty years, warns that such an outcome would cause coastal cities to be inundated and precipitate mass migrations of urban dwellers into the hinterlands.
But not all climate scientists are convinced. One skeptic is Judith Curry who argues that the data simply don't warrant the dire claims of her colleagues.
In an article at The Daily Caller Curry is quoted as saying that, “Projections of extreme, alarming impacts are very weakly justified to borderline impossible.”
The article goes on to say that,
Curry, however, sees estimates of sea level rise above two feet by the end of the century as “weakly justified” even at high levels of warming. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts the likely range of sea level rise at 10 to 32 inches.In other words, sea level fluctuations are normal and the predictions of her colleagues are hyperbolic. In any case, there's probably at present not much more that the U.S. can do, practically speaking, than it has already done to reduce greenhouse gasses. Surely, there's little appetite for following the French example.
Alarming sea level rise predictions are based on “a cascade of extremely unlikely-to-impossible events using overly simplistic models of poorly understood processes,” Curry wrote in her report.
Current sea level rise is well-within natural variability of the past few thousand years, according to Curry. Curry said coastal communities should base their future flood plans on likely scenarios, such as one to two feet, rather than high-end scenarios.
“There is not yet any convincing evidence of a human fingerprint on global sea level rise, because of the large changes driven by natural variability,” Curry wrote. “An increase in the rate of global sea level rise since 1995 is being caused by ice loss from Greenland.”
However, the “Greenlandic ice loss was larger during the 1930s, which was also associated with the warm phase of the Atlantic Ocean circulation pattern,” Curry wrote.
French President Macron apparently thought that the French people would be willing to bite the bullet and pay higher fuel costs in order to reduce their petroleum consumption and fund renewable energy sources, but he seems to have badly misjudged the willingness of the French middle class to impoverish themselves in order to keep the Riviera beaches available for the great, great, great grandchildren of the French elites.
Today Paris is in flames, and so are Macron's hopes of lessening the French carbon footprint.
