A funny thing happened on the New York Times’ way to climate alarmism today — a paragraph of debunking facts.
In an above-the-fold, front-page story, the Times’ Leslie Kaufman tried to tell a sad tale about global warming-induced sea-level rise wreaking havoc in Norfolk, VA.
If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides.
For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea.
As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.
And of course, what tale of global warming would be complete without an “expert”?
Many Norfolk residents hope their problems will serve as a warning.
“We are the front lines of climate change,” said Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.”
Kaufman’s tale of woe then ends with the “bitter reality” of global warming:
“The fact is that there is not enough engineering to go around to mitigate the rising sea,” he said. “For us, it is the bitter reality of trying to live in a world that is getting warmer and wetter.”
Unfortunately for the Times, Kaufman and Schultz, some editor (with an ironic sense of humor) inserted the following text into the middle of the story:
Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.
So climate alarmism and Norfolk have much in common. Both were built in on a faulty foundation. Not unexpectedly, both are now sinking.
What’s remarkable about the Times’ coverage of both is that facts — even when printed in plain English in the middle of the story — just don’t matter.
Next they will ask, I wonder why there was marsh there?
Do liberals have functioning brains or do they just start talking.
This is nothing new for the NY Times. I refer readers to an article I wrote earlier this year called “159 Years of Climate Alarmism at The New York Times” It can be found at:
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/01/24/159
While the Times appears to be the leading propaganda arm of the perpetrators of the AGW hoax, when we look back in history a bit, we find that all newspapers and news magazines have been pushing this nonsense continuously since their inception for one very simple reason: CATASTROPHES SELL NEWSPAPERS.
Of particular note on this subject is an article published in Time magazine on June 24, 1974 entitled: “Science: Another Ice Age?”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
I find it most interesting because of what it says about our vehicle emissions:
“Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The University of Wisconsin’s Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.”
First our emissions were blocking the sun’s heat from reaching us, and now they’re preventing that heat from escaping back into space.
Once the general public learns that this current go-around is actually the 4th case of climate hysteria in the last hundred years, perhaps they’ll learn to stop wasting their time reading this drivel.
Now we simply have to figure out how to teach them the truth, because no matter how great a job websites like Green Hell are doing, the word is still not getting out to any significant percentage of the public at large.
We’ll know when we’ve won when anyone using the term “carbon footprint” becomes a laughing stock.
fs
Walkingawake: I know prefectly well who are all those reputed “scientists and experts”. I am among the 500 personalities included in the “Black List” published through a PNAS “paper” some months ago (if you can call an undergraduate a ‘paper’) listing all dangerous and highly inconvenient “global warming deniers”.
You should know by know that Wikipedia is no peer reviewd source -thanks to Wiki Connolley and his gang. Furthermore, we don’t “deny” the science. We only deny the flawed results of useless PlayStation 3 video games they call “climate models” and the pseudoscience behind AGW hypothesis. The moment you can prove the hypothesis is in the level of a “theory”, then we could start debating it.
But as things are developing right now, with all the newest discoveries about cosmic forces driving climate -with almost exclusion of greenhouse gases- warmists are pitifully grasping at a red hot burning nail.
achuara, if you are actually interested in knowing who these expert scientists are, read the wikipedia article entitled “scientific opinion on climate change” where you will see the extensive list of reputable scientific organizations around the world that support AGW. The fact that we are this far along since people have been talking about global warming and so many people like you clearly haven’t bothered to check out this information is extremely disheartening.
Someone explain it to me I would have thought that if the sea level rises then it should rise globally, if not then would the increase not be due to geological changes, either land masses locally moving up or down! or am I on the wrong track?
Ok, now I have it . I could not get here unless I checked the remember me box . rsstien where you are wrong is the Times still insists that man is the cause of the sea level rise when in fact they have not risen , many scientist have stated that it is not rising or warming due to man . and I remind you of the 32,000 scientists that refute man made warming and yes they do say it is changing but it is getting cooler instead of warmer . so which is it warming or cooling we are guilty of ? I do admit we contribute some to the Co2 but it is not enough to make any changes that would cause the problems mentioned in all of the tripe that has been hoisted on the public . remember this: it is a hoax of the greatest order the worst hoax that has ever been put on the public . one volcano eruption can negate what we spend a trillion dollars on to try and change any thing . the money will be wasted and nothing will change . The Times is grasping at straws drawing on a natural occurrence of land mass sinking to make the point they are rising due human actions when in fact they are not to any degree that would harm any one. We would do well to spend that money on clean water and doing away with chemical dumps by third world countries and the USA .
I was born & raised in Portsmouth, Virginia just across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk. Norfolk also borders the Elizabeth River. At high tides and heavy rains both Norfolk and Portsmouth have areas that have always flooded. In fact, I could sit on my front porch and see tide water coming out of the storm drains, instead of water flowing away into the drains. This was in the late 1930s & ’40s. Waterfront areas did, and still do, flood in heavy rains and high tides.I don’t think AGW /”Climate Change” or “Climate Disruption” has anything to do with it. It’s just another scare tactic on the part of the alarmists.
Who are supposed to be ‘real climatologists’ o ‘experts’? Hansen, Phil Jones and his merry crook buddies at East Anglia University?
THe fact is sea level trends have been growing at an average of 2 mm/year since 300 years ago, with NO increase in speed. But as sea surface temperatures have been falling since 2003 the increase has slowed and will turn on the opposite direction in a few years. But NYT point is to keep hype about AGW high and running.
The point is that the NYT article is falsely blaming the problem in Norfolk (actually in Porthsmouth, a stone throw across the river) to GLOBAL WARMING. Isostatic movement is to be blamed mostly due to fresh water extraction from he subsoil, while real sea level rise accounts for 3.76 mm/year, for a total of 1.23 feet in 100 years.
So, the 2 to 3-foot level in the poodle “routinely” taking place during high tide must have been happening for the last 200 years or so. Check the levels at: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.shtml (or http://tinyurl.com/6c6ulj ), zooming into the Norfolk area.
Also, an interesting graph of sea interannual sea levels in Porthsmouth is in: http://tinyurl.com/25fj2ow showing no anomalous increase in sea level.
Dear Mr.Milloy,
I feel it is you who are distorting facts. The story is correct and does say that the rise in water level is due BOTH to the sinking of the land AND to rising sea level. You try to use this to create the impression that there is not a problem with rising sea levels. This disagrees with the conclusion of most REAL experts. Much of the public fails to realize who these are and tends to believe people like TV weather forecasters rather than climatologists. It would be interesting to see how well these forcasters would do in a course on climatology.