The Bottom of the Ocean Is Sinking

The work noted below got its results by comparing an approximation to an estimate so is doubly guesswork. And since the decline found consisted of only eight hundredths of one inch we must allow for it being no more than an error of measurement

So I don't think I really have to mention it but the article is a crock in other ways too.  Where are the "melting ice sheets and glaciers" that they refer to?  96% of the earth's glacial ice is in Antarctica and that is  GAINING mass overall, not melting.

And if the earth's oceans are "swelling", we should be seeing big sea level rises.  But in lots of places worldwide sea levels are FALLING (e.g. here). It is only very dubious "corrections" for isostatic movements in Northern Europe that turn the falls into apparent rises

And that the isostatic adjustments are a crock is shown by the fact that there are substantial sea level falls even in isostatically stable parts of the world

Below is the raw sea level record from Stockholm, Sweden, showing a steady fall.  No wonder they called on isostatic assumptions to "correct" it!



The ice age ended long ago.  Assuming isostatic rebound from it still in the 21st century is totally implausible.

The whole article simply depends on conventional assumptions which are not supported by the evidence


The bottom of the ocean is more of a "sunken place" than it used to be.

In recent decades, melting ice sheets and glaciers driven by climate change are swelling Earth's oceans. And along with all that water comes an unexpected consequence — the weight of the additional liquid is pressing down on the seafloor, causing it to sink.

Consequently, measurements and predictions of sea-level rise may have been incorrect since 1993, underestimating the growing volume of water in the oceans due to the receding bottom, according to a new study.

Scientists have long known that Earth's crust, or outer layer, is elastic: Earlier research revealed how Earth's surface warps in response to tidal movements that redistribute masses of water; and 2017's Hurricane Harvey dumped so much water on Texas that the ground dropped 0.8 inches (2 centimeters), the Atlantic reported.

In the new investigation, researchers looked at more long-term impacts to the seafloor. They evaluated how much the shape of the ocean bottom may have changed between 1993 and 2014, taking into account the amount of water added to the ocean from liquid formerly locked up on land as ice. Previous research into seafloor stretching had omitted that extra water, the scientists wrote in the study.

To do that, they reviewed approximations of mass loss on land, as ice melted and drained into the oceans, and compared that to estimates of sea volume changes. They found that around the world for two decades, ocean basins deformed an average of 0.004 inches (0.1 millimeter) per year, with a total deformation of 0.08 inches (2 mm).

However, there were distinct regional patterns to the seafloor's bending and stretching, and the amount of sag in certain parts of the ocean bottom could be significantly higher — as much as 0.04 inches (1 mm) per year in the Arctic Ocean, for a total of 0.8 inches (20 mm), the study authors reported.

As a result, satellite assessments of sea-level change — which don't account for a sinking ocean bottom — could be underestimating the amount that seas are rising by 8 percent, according to the study.

The accuracy of future sea-level estimates could be notably improved if the sinking of the ocean floor were incorporated into the calculations, "either based on modeled estimates of ocean mass change, as was done in this study, or using more direct observations," the scientists concluded.

SOURCE




Pope Francis: Global Warming Is ‘Consequence of Human Activity’

He's just a typical "liberation" priest from South America.  When he steps outside religion to involve himself in secular issues he has neither authority nor expertise and creates disrespect for the church.  After pedophile priests, does the church really need a Leftist Pope?

Pope Francis took a strong stand on anthropogenic climate change Monday, telling a gathering of diplomats in the Vatican that global warming is a result of human action.

We must not “downplay the importance of our own responsibility in interaction with nature,” Francis told the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See. “Climate changes, with the global rise in temperatures and their devastating effects, are also a consequence of human activity.”

In his statement, Pope Francis went beyond earlier declarations that seemed to exclude the Church taking a formal stand on questions of climate science.

In his 2015 teaching letter on the environment, Laudato Si, the Pope explicitly declared that “the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics.”

In the same text, Francis said that he was encouraging debate rather than trying to impose his own understanding of environmental concerns.

“On many concrete questions,” he wrote, “the Church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion; she knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts, while respecting divergent views.”

Francis also said it is necessary to create “a social debate” in which of those involved in any way can explain their problems and “have access to adequate and reliable information in order to make decisions for the common good,” something rarely seen in contemporary discussions of climate change that tend to exclude climate change skeptics.

Nonetheless, with the passage of time, Pope Francis has seemed to take an ever more decided stance behind the notion of manmade global warming, while sending signals that there was not much room for debate on the issue.

In November 2016, the Pope called climate change skeptics to an “ecological conversion,” while denouncing what he believed to be a “weak reaction” from governments to the climate crisis. He also criticized “the ease with which well-founded scientific opinion about the state of our planet is disregarded.”

On that occasion, the Pope also said that politicians had been “distracted” in implementing important measures to curb carbon emissions and blamed the sluggish adoption of COP21 protocols on “an economy which seek profit above all else.”

“Never before has there been such a clear need for science to be at the service of a new global ecological equilibrium,” Francis told his audience, while painting a picture of a world on the verge of “ecological collapse” and a “consequent increase of poverty and social exclusion.”

In his address to diplomats Monday, Francis continued along a similar vein, stressing the duty to leave “a more beautiful and livable world” to future generations and “to work, in the light of the commitments agreed upon in Paris in 2015, for the reduction of gas emissions that harm the atmosphere and human health.”

SOURCE





Exxon Prepares To Sue California Cities, Says They Contradict Themselves On Climate Change

ExxonMobil is apparently planning to sue the California cities and counties that have sued it over climate change, alleging they must be lying in their lawsuits or misleading potential investors in bond offerings. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown)

Some government officials in California are hypocrites pushing a political agenda that involves using private lawyers to sue and demonize ExxonMobil, the company is now arguing in a Texas state court.

On Jan. 8, Exxon took the first step towards suing those who orchestrated climate change lawsuits in California by asking the Tarrant County District Court to allow it to question an assortment of government officials and a Hagens Berman lawyer. The company says those local officials are talking out of both sides of their mouths - blaming Exxon for an impending flooding disaster while not disclosing that alleged threat to possible investors in their bond offerings.

In 2017, the counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach filed suit against dozens of energy companies, including Exxon and 17 other Texas-based businesses, over climate change. The company has previously been targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.

“It is reasonable to infer that the municipalities brought these lawsuits not because of a bona fide belief in any tortious conduct by the defendants or actual damage to their jurisdictions, but instead to coerce ExxonMobil and others operating in the Texas energy sector to adopt policies aligned with those favored by local politicians in California,” attorneys for the company wrote.

In doing so, they must have lied to potential investors in their respective bond offerings, the company claims.

Statements made to potential investors contradict allegations made by the municipalities when they sued the energy industry, the filing says. For example:

-San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur";

More HERE




It’s All Over: German Parties Agree To Scrap Legally Binding 2020 Climate Target

Germany’s would-be coalition partners have agreed to drop an ambitious plan to lower carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, two sources told Reuters on Monday — a potential embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Negotiators for her conservative bloc and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) told Reuters the parties had agreed in exploratory talks on forming a government that the targeted cut in emissions could no longer be achieved by 2020.

Instead, they would aim to hit the 40 percent target in the early 2020s, the sources said, adding that both parties are still sticking to their goal of achieving a 55 percent cut in emissions by 2030.

The deal would represent something of a u-turn by Merkel, who has long presented herself as an advocate for climate protection policies on the international stage.

SOURCE





Australia's Green Party: A rabble without a cause

The Greens have been heavily infiltrated by old Trots.  Both Rhiannon and Bandt are former members of Trotskyite organizations. Trots are the heavy haters among Leftists

The similarity between the words “progress” and “progressive” is one of the great curiosities of modern politics. Could perchance the two be related?

The meaning of the noun progress is clear enough, having served as a statement of political intent since the dawn of democracy. Progressive, on the other hand, is an adjective struggling to give coherence to a succession of exotic causes, many of which are likely to send us backwards.

Which leads us to the Greens, a party easily bored by the prosaic challenges of government — balancing budgets, defending borders, efficient service delivery, that sort of thing. How will the party fill its working day, now the battle of the rainbow has been won?

No amount of pink champagne could hide the Greens’ disappointment when the changes to the Marriage Act were agreed. It must have hurt like Hades to see a Liberal prime minister lapping up the applause. Even worse, with such a potent issue now off the agenda, the Greens are beginning to look like a rabble without a cause. In the fickle world of progressive politics, that is the quickest way to irrelevance.

Adam Bandt was less than exuberant when the Marriage Act amendments were passed. It wasn’t victory, he told parliament, merely “a watershed moment”. It was “not the end and not the beginning” since equality “will continue to elude us well after this bill is enshrined in law”.

What on earth could he mean? We were led to believe that the right to be joined in secular matrimony was la cause du siecle, the fulfilment of the promise of liberte, egalite et fraternite, not to mention sorority, and that once the legislation was passed we would ­finally be able to hold up our heads as members of a civilised nation.

But no, says Bandt, it is just “a step on a long, winding path towards justice”.

“We must remember that we are only dismantling one part of a system that bombards LGBTIQ people from every angle with a message that they are different,” he said.

A long, winding path towards justice is an essential element of the progressive narrative. Another is the dark past and bloody struggle, and Bandt made sure there was one of those as well.

“We must remember that every step towards equality for LGBTIQ Australians has been paid for with pain and sometimes blood — the blood of queer Australians and their allies who took to the streets to stand up for their rights, only to be batted down by batons and fists,” said Bandt, reaching for the cliche bowl. Australian lesbians and gays had faced “hundreds of years of persecution”; had been “callously murdered for daring to be who they are”; “innocent blood was spilt”; it was “an unspeakable tragedy”; the horrors of which “many of us can only imagine”.

A postal plebiscite, scrupulously conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and bloodless as far as we can tell, seems a tame ending to such an epic struggle. It is little wonder Bandt felt obliged to denounce this dastardly democratic act. It was a “final humiliation ... a cruel twist”. How so? Because “the fundamental rights of a minority were decided by the very majority that oppressed them for so long”.

It seems unlikely that sex will return to being simply an activity rather than a political cause. The Greens have invested too much in these boutique human rights to give it away, even if their search for aggrieved minorities is yielding ­diminishing returns.

The Greens’ next big cause is not immediately clear. The Labor Party has stolen their pitch on ­climate change, and it seems only a matter of time before the federal ALP turns its back on coal altogether. Labor is well on its way to embracing Palestine. The Greens lost the moral high ground on asylum-seekers eight years ago, when the toll of drownings became too big too ignore.

The struggle to carve out a constituency in a crowded market for minor parties is a challenge for Green parties across the democratic world. In Germany, the Greens finished in sixth place in last September’s federal election as they struggled to hold their own against Die Linke, a left-wing populist party. Green parties are struggling for members in Britain and France too. In Australia, Richard Di Natale’s strategy of leaning towards the mainstream is in trouble. The Greens failed to maintain double-digit support for much of last year.

A convincing by-election victory in the Victorian state seat of Northcote late last year and the strong possibility that the Greens could win the federal Victorian seat of Batman in the event of a by-election show the party’s resilience, but highlight its dilemma.

It can clearly hold its own in demographically exceptional enclaves where university lecturers outnumber plumbers, but if its support nationally is to rise beyond 10 per cent it needs wider appeal.

The party’s internal tensions are strongest in NSW, where the Left Renewal faction is in open revolt against the federal leadership.

“Talk about misreading the portents of our times,” Hall Greenland wrote recently on his blog Watermelon Papers. “Social democracy everywhere shifts to the left and the Australian Greens parliamentary leadership decides to go in the opposite direction.”

Greenland says Labor has stolen the march on ­renewable energy and urges the party to keep the ecological ­“crisis” at the centre of its agenda. His vision for the future for the party is two-speed: an “activist extra-parliamentarianism” — an ugly word for an ugly concept — while using parliament for “carrying popular causes”.

In the absence of any other ­viable radical progressive minor party, the Greens clearly cannot be written off. The apparent drought of moral crusades should not fool us into thinking that progressive politics is likely to become any less fruitier.

After all, there is one thing we know for certain: when the next batty progressive cause arrives, it will catch the centre-right by complete surprise. It will make the mistake of assuming that the cause will collapse under the weight of its own craziness, failing once again to recognise that the unopposed absurdity of today becomes the conventional wisdom of ­tomorrow.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************