Posted on 06/09/2014 1:32:15 PM PDT by servo1969
Put water in a bowl it'll find it's own level... No parts will be higher of lower over time. (Yes, if you shake the glass - water will be higher on one side than another for a time - same as a hurricane pushing water ahead of it - and pulling it down from the back... ) But when you put the glass down the water again finds it's own level. My instinct is that 'sea levels rising' is one more 'the world is ending' liberal elite scam - like 'peak oil', global cooling, population bomb, Club of Rome, Alar, nuclear winter, etc. etc. etc. But I could be wrong.
Problem is that past performance does not predict future performance.
That all the “sky is falling” scenarios you mention turned out to be at minimum exaggerated does not in and of itself prove that the next predicted catastrophe is of the same ilk.
If you predict catastrophe long enough, eventually you’re likely to be right.
Hit post too soon.
I think conservatives are to some extent hoist by our own catastrophe-predicting petards of the past.
When you claim Elvis and the Beatles are a portent of the end of civilization, and apparently nothing much happens, it’s a little harder to get people to believe gangsta rap and widely available fetish porn might be bad for society.
Similarly, decades of talk about deficits and debt being “bad” makes it much harder to convince people that, while past predictions of disaster may not have come true, that doesn’t mean present levels of deficit and debt are sustainable.
Problem is that understanding the difference between the deficit of 1979 and that of 2013 requires some understanding of math and economics, two subjects that make most people’s eyes glaze over.
IMO those who viewed Elvis and the Beatles as a slippery slope that would lead to the present degradation of popular entertainment were entirely right. But talking about them as if they were themselves the bottom of the slope just turned the prophets into boys crying wolf.
Same with predictions of disaster about our financial policies.
What most people never remember about the fable is that the wolf eventually turned up and destroyed the villagers’ livelihood.
One would have to have a very good tidal gauge to measure 3 mm. Nothing else could discern that small a change. What I have read is the real SLR is maybe 2mm at most and likely stopped about 10 years ago. The rise was primarily due to thermal expansion as the oceans warmed after a cold Little Ice Age.
It does now occur to me that you could use GPS to determine the height of a point above the center of the earth and, having done so, could use that to establish the location of a pressure sensor. And track the variation of pressure at that known location over decades. So, yeah - I believe that the technology is in being, and probably is in service. That still leaves the issue of selecting the high tide and low tide reading, but . . .
‘It boggles my mind that we can measure 3 mm per year ....”
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It does seemd difficult but I would think that it could be measured over the course of years and averaged out it it were indeed true. What I find far more laughable is the claim to measure the average temperature of the entire Earth over the span of a year or many years to an accuracy of 1/100th of one degree.
Have a look at Dr Soon discussing why it is not possible to resolve sea level to anything close to the accuracy claimed via satellite. He address is satellites at 17:30
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