Verily Verily It Is (Not) Written By The Great Prophet Hansen

The sea level studies which came out last week demonstrate that global warming has left the realm of junk science and is now a full blown junk religion.

Hansen wrote that “multi-metre sea level rise this century was nearly dead certain” His basis for this bizarre claim is that he believes that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will “collapse” after the year 2080. Ignoring the fact that the concept is idiotic, let’s assume for a minute that he is correct. Hansen expects that sea level will suddenly accelerate in about 70 years.

Because Pope Hansen normally delivers mass in Latin, the congregation apparently missed the seventy years part, and started evangelizing that sea level in San Francisco may rise one foot over the next twenty years.

There are two tide gauges in the San Francisco Bay – one shows 0.00 mm/year since 1980, and the other shows -0.78 mm/year since 1980.

I pointed this out to the lead author Gary Griggs, who responded by telling me that west coast tide gauges had “leveled out” over the last decade, and that the Alameda tide gauge was likely affected by uplift.

His response was absurd. The San Francisco gauge has been dead flat for three decades – how could it have “leveled out” over the last decade? The Alameda tide gauge is built on fill dirt more than five miles to the west of the strike-slip Hayward Fault. It is more likely that the Alameda tide gauge is subsiding than that it is rising.

Similarly, satellite measurements show no rise in sea level off the coast of California

Griggs and NRC have no basis for their claims. There is no existing data to back up rapid sea level rise in California over the next twenty years, and Hansen’s WAIS collapse theory doesn’t support it either.

This is a classic case of a religious cult run amok, which doesn’t even bother to listen to their own clergy any more.