View Article & Comments

The Washinton Times article by Kelly Hearn US dealing with security concerns from change in climate stated the following...

Coastal military facilities are threatened by rising sea levels and more frequent major, damaging weather events such as hurricanes and Tornadoes....although Mr. Fingar declined to give details apart from the number of installations in peril, a Pentagon official told The Washington Times that the Pentagon has commissioned a network of scientists to create a model for predicting the impact of storm surges and sea-level rises on military facilities on the Gulf Coast, in the Mid-Atlantic region and in Southern California.

Dr. Richard Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant made the following News Blog concerning this issue...

Coastal military facilities are threatened by rising sea levels, Really?


The above graph is S.J.Holgate’s reconstruction of the rate of sea level rise rate the 20th century obtained from the highest quality tide gauge data in his 2007 GRL paper..

The IPCC’s 4th assessment report (2007) only mentioned Holgate’s 2004 data and ignored his 2007 data (shown in the above graph). In his 2007 paper, Holgate says:

“…the two highest decadal ratesof change were recorded in the decades centered on 1980 (5.31 mm/yr) and 1939 (4.68 mm/yr) with the most negative decadal rates of change over the past 100 years during the decades centered on 1964 (-1.49 mm/yr) and 1987 (-1.33 mm/yr). There were also significant high decadal rates of change during the late 1910s, 1950s and 1990s. Negative decadal rates of change are seen in the early 1920s and early 1970s.”…

So, where is the evidence for an increase to sea level rate of rise that would threaten coastal military installations? It is not found in the observed seal level changes.

And "Coastal military facilities are threatened by ... more frequent major, damaging weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes." Really?

The article titled "30 -year low for N. Hemisphere tropical cyclone activity" seems pertinent and is at all the article deserves reading, but it begins saying:

"The past two years have seen a "remarkable" downturn in hurricane activity, contradicting predictions of more storms, researchers at Florida State University say.

The 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons had the least tropical activity in the Northern Hemisphere in 30 years, according to Ryan Maue, co-author of a report on Global Tropical Cyclone Activity.

"Even though North Atlantic hurricane activity was expectedly above normal, the Western and Eastern Pacific basins have produced considerably fewer than normal typhoons and hurricanes," he said.

Maue's results dovetail with other research suggesting hurricanes are variable and unconnected to global warming predictions, said Stan Goldenberg, a hurricane researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"The simplistic notion that warmer oceans from global warming automatically lead to more frequent and or stronger hurricanes has not been verified," said Goldenberg, whose research points to periods of high and low hurricane activity that last several decades each.

Maue used a measurement called Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE), which combines a storm's duration and its wind speed in six-hour intervals. The years 2007 and 2008 had among the lowest ACE measurements since reliable global satellite data was first available three decades ago.

Northern Hemisphere activity in 2006 was close to average and the previous two years, 2004 and 2005, which included Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, saw among the highest numbers on record.

Active seasons in one ocean tend to be accompanied by quiet ones in the other, Maue said. When the Pacific is cooler, as it is now, the Atlantic has slower winds aloft, which creates more favorable conditions for hurricanes.

"It tells you that from year to year you have large swings of activity," said Maue, who plans to present his work next month at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. "If you want to find a global warming signal in all that data it's generally going to be rather small."... "

So, where is the evidence for an increase to more frequent major, damaging weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes that would threaten coastal military installations? It is not found in the observed Atlantic storms.

But "the Pentagon has commissioned a network of scientists to create a model for predicting the impact of storm surges and sea-level rises on military facilities on the Gulf Coast, in the Mid-Atlantic region and in Southern California."

Oh!? So the Pentagon is recruiting scientists to provide a model that shows what they want. I can do that if they tell me what they want. Can I have the job, please ? (I want it to be remunerated well).

All the best

Richard Courtney

Graph taken from the answers section of the following link An easy climate change / energy quiz by Tom Moriarty