82 Days Under Water: Tide Is High, but They’re Holding On

Fall Flooding Imperils Florida Communities

This is all just NYT nonsense. What is described has little or nothing to do with the sea level or tides. The Southeastern U.S. coast has been subsiding for years and gives no sign of stopping.

The same is true of the East central English cost -- where records showing sinking and erosion go back hundreds of years.  There is no cure for it in either the USA or England and it is most unlikely to stop

All coastal land along the affected coast should be made public parks.  There is no other safe use for it. I believe that has already been done in some cases


The “King Tides” are unusually high this year, creating a maddening logistical task for people along the Blackwater Sound, a low-lying stretch of the Upper Keys. The tides have been six to 18 inches higher than expected.The “King Tides” are unusually high this year, creating a maddening logistical task for people along the Blackwater Sound, a low-lying stretch of the Upper Keys. The tides have been six to 18 inches higher than expected.

The are 215 homes in the neighborhood, whose mangrove-lined streets now look more like stagnant canals.

Life during the unusually high “king tides” in South Florida this fall has become a maddening logistical task for people along the Blackwater Sound, a scenic but low-lying stretch of the Upper Keys. For nearly three months, the residents of Stillwright Point’s 215 homes have been forced to carefully plan their outings and find temporary workarounds to deal with the smelly, stagnant water — a result not of rain, but a rising sea — that makes their mangrove-lined streets look more like canals.

Another Key Largo neighborhood, Twin Lakes, is similarly inundated. Scientists say a combination of factors, including disruptive hurricanes, have contributed to this year’s exceptionally high tides.

“King tides” take place predictably each fall, when the alignment of the moon, sun and Earth creates a stronger gravitational pull on the warm oceans. Rising sea levels caused by climate change make the flooding worse.

This year, Hurricane Dorian and other tropical storms in late August and September likely interrupted the Gulf Stream, which moves water away from southern Florida. Instead, the water backed up, said Chris Rothwell, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in Key West. Tides from the Carolinas to Florida, and from the Florida Keys to Tampa, have been six to 18 inches higher than expected.

“This is a high anomaly,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

“But as time goes on, what we think of as high anomalies will gradually become more normal. There’ll be a time at some point where what used to be our high tide becomes the mean sea level.”

The last time Miami set a record for an average monthly low tide, measured by a tidal gauge in Virginia Key, was in 2009, Mr. McNoldy said, adding that he would not be surprised if that record is never broken. In contrast, Virginia Key set average monthly records for high tide this year in March, July, August, September and October, “and in November, I have full confidence that we’ll break that monthly record too,” he said.

Longtime Florida Keys residents and officials say they have never seen tidal flooding this bad outside of a hurricane — and certainly not when they bought their properties 20 or 30 years ago. The most flooding that Stillwright Point regulars remember was for 22 days in 2015. When this year’s flooding reached biblical proportions — 40 days and 40 nights — the dramatic news made the front page of The Miami Herald.

That was more than a month ago. The water, which neighbors say reached 18 inches in some places, briefly started to recede; then, overnight during the last full moon, it swelled again, surprising residents who had thought the worst was behind them.

“You feel like a trapped rat,” said Jan Darden, 61, who is Mr. Darden’s wife, as she stood outside the couple’s house with water up to the driveway. She had postponed a trip to the mainland to pick up prescription eyeglasses.

Stillwright Point was once an enclave of fishing cottages that later drew commercial pilots craving the island life, just an hour from Miami International Airport. Now, the neighborhood has some million-dollar homes. A single road, North Blackwater Lane, leads in and out of the community.

Residents want Monroe County to elevate their roads and install pumps, similar to what Miami Beach did to mitigate its sunny-day flooding. Rhonda Haag, the county’s sustainability director, said she would ask commissioners next month to expedite road-modeling work, but any actual construction would still be far-off. Pilot elevation projects for Twin Lakes and a low-lying community in Big Pine Key that have been in the works for years are planned first.

Elevating a third of the county’s 300 miles of roads could cost $1 billion, Ms. Haag said. “We are the most vulnerable county in the state, if not the nation.”

“For sale” signs sit outside several houses. Two streets have handwritten “No wake” signs, reminding drivers to go slow to avoid splashing onto other cars, driveways and what used to be gardens.

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Educational deficiencies lead to doomsday projections

Using microscopic sound bites from vast data on social media from celebrities like Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Barbara Streisand, and Meryl Streep that the Earth will end in ten years is an insult to the intellect of our students and educational system.

So, if we’re not educated by reviewing wider ranges of available data, to see when and where climate changes have and are occurring, then we better start educating the world of upcoming social changes trying to live on electricity alone.

Today, it’s the Green New Deal and the Paris Accord that promotes electricity as the worlds’ savior to replace fossil fuels that are taking the brunt of the blame for the recent changes in climate. The doomsday prognostications have quickly chosen the need to eliminate our use of fossil fuels and replace it with electricity.

Before we shut down the airlines, and rid the world of militaries, and throw away our iPhone, let’s imagine how life was without those fossils before 1900 when we didn’t have TV’s, No computers, NO I Pads, NO cell phones, NO Disneyland, NO militaries, NO vehicles, NO airlines, NO cruise ships, NO space program, NO medications and medical equipment, NO vaccines, NO fertilizers, NO tires for vehicles, and NO asphalt for roads.

But when we look at what intermittent electricity from wind turbines or solar panels CAN NOT do, we see they are blatant failures to qualify as replacements for the fossil fuels that produce those 6,000 products. They are the basis of our lifestyles and of our numerous infrastructures. Which manufacture the aviation, diesel and gasoline fuels every day to meet the demands of the worlds’ transportation and commerce.

It’s obvious that the worlds 4.5 billion years of existence has gone through numerous and continuous climate changes so let’s look at just a few of the topics now perversely on social media.

CO2: To support the microscopic scientific evidence for warming of the climate system, the NASA graph only looks at CO2 levels back 800,000 years to show recent increases to 400 ppm which is tiny in comparison to Earth’s historical levels. NASA dismisses the facts that earths’ CO2 levels reached 3,000 ppm about 150 million years ago, and levels of 8,000 ppm almost 550 million years ago. Today, the real risk is CO2 starvation as mass extinction occurs at levels below 150 ppm. Maybe we should reconsider the current doomsday predictions as the earth survived CO2 levels in the past that were as much as twenty times higher than today.

Sea Levels: We’re constantly being bombarded by NASA with projections that the recent ocean levels rise by millimeters from 1870-2013 are projected to flood major cities and populations. What we’re not being told is why the oceans have been rising by more than 450 feet over the last 20,000 years with the last 8,000 years being flat. In fact, it looks like there has been no rise since civilization began, and that the recent rise of about 20cm is another microscopic interpretation of data to inject fear about climate change. Given factual data to our millennials, about what the sea levels have been doing over a longer period of time, what is their conclusion.?

Heat Waves: The local weather reports constantly over-emphasize those recent heat waves as a reflection of climate change. When one looks at 130 years of data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) we see that the 1930’s was the hottest recent period, while temperatures today are the same as the early 1900’s, more than a century ago. Injecting fear of incurring heat waves into the future from small sound bites, deprives intelligent residents of all the EPA supported evidence to the contrary. What conclusions do millennials have when they see where we’ve been on heat waves?

Temperatures: When its hot outside, we quickly surmise that the end of the world is eminent. But the data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show we had much hotter periods from the 1800’s to 1955. Concluding that the slight upward trend from 1955 is a rise that is unstoppable, is another doomsday prediction from microscopic data points. What conclusion do millennials have when the see that the hotter temperatures were before 1955?

Wildfires: California has been getting more than their share of recent wildfires and yes, it was former California Governor Jerry Brown was the first to blame manmade global warming on the horrific fires. Jerry appears to be one of many that have yet to review the USDA Forest Service data that documents the greatest number of wildfires occurred from 1926 to 1959 and that today, they’re one-fifth of the record. Jerry is one of many that is only looking back to 1983 when a slight upward trend in fires occurred. Again, Jerry is using a microscopic data snippet as a talking point. But what conclusions do intelligent residents see in the USDA Forest Service data on wildfires?

We’ve had more than 100 years to find an alternative or generic to fossil fuels and the products we get from them. Yet, have only come up with electricity that can be generated intermittently from sunshine and wind. We still haven’t found a replacement for the source of those thousands of products that are now the standard for our lifestyles. As discussed above, the NASA, EPA, NOAA, and Forest Service shows us that not much has changed over the last century.

Thus, just changing to intermittent electricity from industrial renewables will most likely not impact any climate changes. Moving to electricity ALONE would severely impact our lifestyle as wind and solar are unable to produce those 6,000 products that are the basis of our lifestyles and of our numerous infrastructures. It’s obvious we would be unable to support the military, airlines, cruise ship, and merchant ships. As a reminder, without transportation and the leisure and entertainment industries, we have no commerce.

In the event we deprive underdeveloped countries from experiencing an industrial revolution that we’ve enjoyed, how can the world help to reduce the 11 million children deaths per year due to “preventable” causes that developed countries have mastered the cures?

We’ve got a lot of creative minds in our youth and in our educational system. I encourage them to be agnostic before investigating a wider and larger data base, rather than pick upon sound bites, short tweets, and microscopic data points before projecting the demise of the world in the next few years.

Our educational system could do the world a favor and begin to educate our youth about our planet’s natural cycles that have been happening for 4.5 billion years. A species that’s only been around, relatively speaking, a little less than the last two minutes, when we portray the worlds’ total existence into a 24-hour clock, may not be the cause of this weeks’ climate changes.

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The Climate change money machine

For far too long the public has been deluded into believing that groups whose titles indicate their efforts to protect our environment are the Davids in a battle with the Goliath industrial complex of our nation. They tell a story of protecting our air, our water, our forests and our wild life. In the past 20 years with few exceptions, a central theme on which their fundraising letters and advertisements depend, is the need for money to stop the existential threat that a rising temperature from the carbon dioxide emissions from the use of fossil fuels is causing.

Ron Arnold and Paul Driessen, authors of the 2018 book Cracking Big Green, learned to read IRS form 990 in the annual reports of non-profit organizations. They focused on the readily available year 2012. You can be sure the dollars they found to have been received that year have increased in the more recent years of Climate Change hysteria. Here is what they found to have been the incomes of some of the major well known groups in 2012 alone.

The Sierra Club took in $97,757,678

The Sierra Club Foundation took in $47,163,599

The Environmental Defense Fund took in $111,915,138

Natural Resources Defense Council $98,701,707

National Audubon Society $96,206,883

National Wildlife Federation $84,726,518

Greenpeace USA $32,791,149

National Parks Conservation Association $25,782,975

The Wilderness Society $24,862,909

Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection $19,150,215

But those are the medium sized incomes, here are the biggies:

The Nature Conservancy $949,132,306

Greenpeace International $406,000,000

Wildlife Conservation Society $230,042,654

World Wildlife Fund $208,495,555

The picture the green groups make of the big bad energy companies like Exxon-Mobile and BP is that of gigantic sums of lobbying money to keep the government on its side. This is not true. They do not spend even a small fraction of the sums listed above in an effort not to be driven out of business. These companies and their competitors, rather than battling the Green Ideology, spend money to join them by embracing wind and solar energy, even energy from bacteria as well as efforts to pump CO2 emissions underground.

But the money the above environmental groups take in is not the whole story of their gigantic power. They work their magic through a program of law suits against the government which the government settles rather than going to court and thereby giving the groups success in their goals without reducing the funds in their coffers.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s report “Sue and Settle:Regulating Behind Closed Doors, shines a long overdue light on the back-room manipulations that are now common between Big Green and the Environmental Protection Agency. It works like this.

A private environmental group sues the EPA to issue new regulations by a date certain. The agency and the environmental group meet behind closed doors. In the typical case, the government agrees to do whatever the activist group wants because for decades the EPA has been peopled by men and women who have long had a relationship with the ideology of the activist groups. There are no messy congressional hearings, no public comment period, no opportunity for parties that will be adversely affected by the deal, to have their day in court. Still better for them, in most cases you the taxpayer paying the litigators legal fees.

In addition, the international banking community is a major part of the green money machine. It has financed the worlds rush to solar and wind projects regardless of there dim future in providing economic energy across the globe. Germany’s Deutsche Bank, Switzerlands Credit Suisse, America’s Morgan Stanley and Goldman Saks and nearly all their competitors are knee deep in the billions of dollars spent by the global warming industry.

F. William Engdahl, in a perceptive essay titled ‘Climate and the Money Trail’ in the Journal NEO, published on September 25, 2019 said: “the links between the largest financial groups, central banks and global corporations, to the current push for a radical climate strategy to abandon the fossil fuel economy in favor of a vague unexplained Green Economy, it seems, is less about genuine concern to make our planet a clean and healthy environment to live. Rather it is an agenda, intimately tied to the UN Agenda 2030 for “sustainable” economy, and to developing literally trillions of dollars in new wealth for global banks and financial giants who constitute the real powers that be.”

We must recognize that today’s radical environmentalists are not attempting to solve problems but instead are calling for changes in our political system, in the reach of our laws, our methods of agriculture and industry, in the structure of capitalism, the profit system, international relations and definitely in education. They are now working toward these goals with the best financed lobby in our history. Global warming and climate change just turned out to be the very best mechanism to achieve these goals.

Portions of this article were excerpted with permission of the authors and publisher of Cracking Big Green by Ron Arnold and Paul Driessen. It is a stunning expose of the modern environmental movement and its hidden financial masters.

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Clive James, Legendary Author, Poet, Humorist & Climate Sceptic Has Died

Below is his 2017 essay on global warming.  I liked Clive. He was a conservative but hid it behind humour

Mass Death Dies Hard

When you tell people once too often that the missing extra heat is hiding in the ocean, they will switch over to watch Game of Thrones, where the dialogue is less ridiculous and all the threats come true.

The proponents of man-made climate catastrophe asked us for so many leaps of faith that they were bound to run out of credibility in the end. Now that they finally seem to be doing so, it could be a good time for those of us who have never been convinced by all those urgent warnings to start warning each other that we might be making a comparably senseless tactical error if we expect the elastic cause of the catastrophists, and all of its exponents, to go away in a hurry.

I speak as one who knows nothing about the mathematics involved in modelling non-linear systems. But I do know quite a lot about the mass media, and far too much about the abuse of language. So I feel qualified to advise against any triumphalist urge to compare the apparently imminent disintegration of the alarmist cause to the collapse of a house of cards. Devotees of that fond idea haven’t thought hard enough about their metaphor. A house of cards collapses only with a sigh, and when it has finished collapsing all the cards are still there.

Although the alarmists might finally have to face that they will not get much more of what they want on a policy level, they will surely, on the level of their own employment, go on wanting their salaries and prestige. To take a conspicuous if ludicrous case, the Australian climate star Tim Flannery will probably not, of his own free will, shrink back to the position conferred by his original metier, as an expert on the extinction of the giant wombat. He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be, one of the mass media’s mobile oracles about climate. While that possibility continues, it will go on being dangerous to stand between him and a TV camera. If the giant wombat could have moved at that speed, it would still be with us.

The mere fact that few of Flannery’s predictions have ever come even remotely true need not be enough to discredit him. The same fact, in the case of America’s Professor Ehrlich, has left him untouched ever since he predicted that the world would soon run out of copper. In those days, when our current phase of the long discussion about man’s attack on nature was just beginning, he predicted mass death by extreme cold. Lately he predicts mass death by extreme heat. But he has always predicted mass death by extreme something, and he is always Professor Ehrlich.

Actually, a more illustrative starting point for the theme of the permanently imminent climatic apocalypse might be taken as 3 August 1971, when the Sydney Morning Herald announced that the Great Barrier Reef would be dead in six months. After six months the reef had not died, but it has been going to die almost as soon as that ever 1 since; making it a strangely durable emblem for all those who have wedded themselves to the notion of climate catastrophe.

The most exalted of all the world’s predictors of reef death, President Obama, has still not seen the reef even now but he promises to go there one day when it is well again. Assurances that it has never really been sick won’t be coming from his senior science adviser John Holdren. In the middle of 2016 some of the long-term experts on reef death began admitting that they had all been overdoing the propaganda. After almost half a century of reef death prediction, this was the first instance of one group of reef death predictors telling another group to dial down the alarmism, or they would queer the pitch for everybody. But an old hand like Holdren knows better than to listen to sudden outbursts of moderation. Back in the day, when extreme cooling was the fashion, he was an extreme coolist. Lately he is an extreme warmist. He will surely continue to be an extremist of some kind, even if he has to be an extreme moderate. And after all, his boss was right about the ocean. In his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, Obama said – and I truly wish that this were an inaccurate paraphrase – that people should vote for him if they wanted to stop the ocean rising. He got elected, and it didn’t rise.

The notion of a count-down or a tipping point is very dear to both wings of this deaf shouting match, and really is of small use to either. On the catastrophist wing, whose ‘narrative’, as they might put it, would so often seem to be a synthesised film script left overfrom the era of surround-sound disaster movies, there is always a countdown to the tipping point. When the scientists are the main contributors to the script, the tipping point will be something like the forever forthcoming moment when the Gulf Stream turns upside down or the Antarctic ice sheet comes off its hinges, or any other extreme event which, although it persists in not happening, could happen sooner than we think (science correspondents who can write a phrase like ‘sooner than we think’ seldom realise that they might have already lost you with the word ‘could’).

When the politicians join in the writing, the dramatic language declines to the infantile. There are only 50 days (Gordon Brown) or 100 months (Prince Charles wearing his political hat) left for mankind to ‘do something’ about ‘the greatest moral challenge . . . of our generation’. (Kevin Rudd, before he arrived at the Copenhagen climate shindig in 2009.)

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Australia: NSW Labor Leader: Shorten Daylight Saving Time To Fight Climate Change

Labor leader Jodi McKay has lobbied the NSW government to consider a request made by one of her constituents that daylight saving be shortened to help combat climate change.

In the letter sent by the Strathfield MP to Energy Minister Matt Kean, Ms McKay writes that her constituent "advises that daylight saving time in NSW had made last summer too hot for walking in Hammond Park, her local park, at 8pm as the temperature at that time remained at the 40°C mark".

"[The constituent] has requested the duration of the daylight saving period in NSW be shortened as it has a significant impact on climate change," Ms McKay wrote on October 11. "I await your consideration and response on this matter."

Daylight saving has been a fraught issue since being introduced in 1971, with multiple referendums in Queensland and Western Australia rejecting the arrangement.

Over the years, critics have attributed the change of time to a fall in robberies, increased petrol sales, a jump in heart attacks, less milk being produced by cows and faster fading curtains.

There are also various studies that show the change in time leads to higher or lower energy use.

A spokesman for Ms McKay said it was not her view that daylight saving should be changed. "Strathfield has a diverse community with a wide variety of views," he said. "It is the job of the local member to represent those views to government without judgment ... she will never apologise for making sure that members of her community have their concerns heard."

Mr Kean, who is in London, declined to comment.

Without daylight saving, which begins on the first Sunday of October and continues until the first Sunday in April, the sun would rise in Sydney between 4.30am in summer and 7am in winter.

Ms McKay's constituent is not alone in calling for the daylight saving period to be shortened. Adam Marshall, now the Agriculture Minister, told the Moree Champion in 2015 that he would propose cutting the first and last months of the daylight saving period.

"While it's not in my top two or three burning issues, it's an old chestnut, but it's a real burr in the saddle and it grates for many of my constituents," he said at the time.

Despite the Strathfield electorate resident's concern, and numerous university studies, there appears to be no strong connection between daylight saving and climate change.

A 2011 study published in The Review of Economics and Statistics found daylight saving time increased the social cost of pollution emissions by up to $US5.5 million that year. Another paper, published in the journal Energy Policy in the same year, found energy had been saved in southern Norway and Sweden.

Earlier research by two University of California, Berkeley, academics — which focused on Sydney during the 2000 Olympics — decided there was no effect on energy consumption whatsoever.

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