Saturday 25 February 2012

Vancouver, Canada - are "planners" trying to frighten residents?

The decidedly warmist  Vancouver Sun has the story "South Delta faces rising threat from floods":
South Delta will be vulnerable to disastrous flooding in the coming decades without wholesale adaptation to rising sea levels.
Speakers at a science symposium in Vancouver on Sunday said projections of a one-metre rise in sea level are too conservative – and that continuing international failure to deal with global warming likely means a “multi-metre” rise in ocean height by the end of this century.
For 21,000 residents of Ladner, a low-lying suburban community that fronts onto the south arm of the Fraser River near its confluence with the Strait of Georgia, that means an urgent need to protect the community from flooding.
Waterfront homes, inland suburban developments, roads and farmland are all vulnerable to a sea level rise of 1.2 metres, according to research presented by David Flanders of the University of B.C.
Flanders, along with Simon Fraser University professor of geology John Clague, were featured local speakers at a symposium for the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which continues through today at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
So a "projected" rise, to be expected decades into the future means there's "an urgent need to protect the community from flooding"? Which disaster blockbusters have these "scientists" been watching? And there it is again, a global estimate for sea level rise is applied directly to a single location in Canada. As with "projected" future temperature, no allowance or adjustment is made for local conditions. Just what are the "local conditions" near Vancouver? I know that seal level rise along the Pacific coast of North America decreases with increasing latitude: the further north, the lower the rate of rise. It's due to "isostatic rebound" - land covered by ice sheets during the last ice age is slowly rising, and has been since the ice started to melt and generate much of the sea level rise since then.

What I found surprised even me; as far as I know it's almost unique.

Sea Level at Vancouver, BC 1910-2010   data source: PMSL
The trend over 100 years is just 0.31 mm year. We're repeatedly told that the global rate of rise has accelerated over the later decades of the 20th century; no sign of that here. The last three decades encompasses the "satellite era" towards the end of which satellites have been monitoring an apparently accelerating rise in sea level:

Sea Level at Vancouver, BC 1980-2010   data source: PMSL
That looks pretty flat to me - if I were Peter Gleick I might say that it was a downward trend, but then I doubt he would ever present and discuss a downward trend in anything other than rainfall. Statistically it's a slight fall, but too tiny to draw any conclusions. The 1982/3, 1997/8 and 2010 El Niños are clear on the first chart, less so on this one, but still distinguishable in the broad, tall upward spikes.

It seems that the worthy citizens of South Delta (a southern coastal suburb of Vancouver) are safe in their beds for a while yet. Did David Flanders and John Clague present this information at the AAAS symposium? I can find no record of them having done so, but then this was an American Association for the Advancement of Science event, not the American Association for the Advancement of Truth.

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