Science News Daily today felt the need to alert their readers to the continuing decrease in frozen water near the North Pole. Santa may have reason to be concerned at the reduction in area of his landing pad, but should anyone else be worried?
In 2001 and 2002 there were a great many stories about the likelihood of Tuvalu being drowned by rising sea levels. It turns out Chicken Little’s appearance may have been premature.
(A significant contributor to rising sea levels is often alleged to be large glacial melts caused by — again allegedly — global warming, thrice alleged to be too much the result of excessive human production of CO2.)
Cato’s Patrick J. Michaels wrote, in Nov 2001:
“Tuvalu is near the epicenter of a region where the sea level has been declining for nearly 50 years. In fact, the decline is so steep that even using the U.N.’s lurid (and wrong) median estimates of global warming for the next century will not get the Tuvalus back to their 1950 sea level until 2050.”
Dr Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon reported , in Pacific Magazine (Feb 2002):
“The satellite record show[s] that the sea level has actually fallen four inches around Tuvalu since 1993 when the TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite project record began. Second comes from the modern instruments recording tide gauge data since 1978. There the record for Tuvalu shows ups and downs of many inches over periods of years.
For example, the strong El Nino of 1997-98 caused the sea level surrounding Tuvalu to drop just over one foot.
New estimate by scientists at the Centre Nationale d’Etudes Spatiales who also find that between 1955 and 1996 the sea level surrounding Tuvalu dropped four inches.”
Facts like these don’t stop global warming alarmists from being, well, alarmists. Recently, in a discussion of media bias, fellow eTalkinghead contributor, Kira Zalan, stated:
“Too often people align with their ideological camp rather than pay attention to details and facts.”
She’s bringing me around to that point of view quicker than she knows. (Ok, I confess. I agreed with her on that before she said it.)
To get some, facts that is, Clearlight has an extensive summary of data on the subject.
Examination of that data suggests that Santa may have to relocate, but most of the rest of us can relax a bit.
From the lukewarm front, this is Jeffrey Perren.