Councils’ “experts” among the last still drinking Al Gore’s Kool Aid

Al Bore’s absurdist 2006 film also showed alarmist maps and videos of sea levels rising 20 feet by the by the year 2100 – a rise that would bury a big two-storey house under the sea.

None of the UN’s IPCC reports ever supported this surreal fantasy (or his entirely made-up claim that “New Zealand may be refuge as rising sea levels displace hundred of millions of people”). Indeed the latest UN IPCC report continues to dial back its alarmism, with figures showing sea level rise exhibiting no rate of acceleration at all: rising over the last 100 years at the roughly constant rate of 1.7mm. For those without a calculator, that’s  a rise of just 170mm, a level that would only be able to just barely put a strip of 6 inch thick flooring under water.

Indeed, the UN does offer scare stories suggesting accelerated rises from 410mm to 640mm for their most likely “projections.” Yet GPS and satellite measurements, only used in the last decade, indicate that “Relative Sea Level,the distance between the level of the sea and the level of neighbouring land, … frequently [shows] little sign of change during the recent decade,” even in those places like Stockholm, Pago Pago and San Francisco highlighted by the UN’s report as being especially scary¹.

San Francisco, by the way, is where Al Gore owns seafront property.

So why, you might ask, are Christchurch’s “experts”² now planning to limit what people can do on their property on the basis of guesswork suggesting seas will rise at double the rate of even the scariest of scenarios dreamed up by the UN?

“Experts” [my inverted commas] have delivered a dire warning that rising sea levels will put some suburban areas of coastal Christchurch under water within 100 years… 
    The warning comes in a $90,000 report carried out by environmental consultants Tonkin & Taylor for the city council.
    They key factor in the report is that it supersedes [my emphasis] previous estimations of sea level rises.
    Instead of sea levels rising to half a metre by 2115 as predicted by international authority Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the Tonkin & Taylor report says it will be double this.
    The report also says the worst case scenario of a sea rise of 2 metres by 2100 cannot be ruled out also.

They not only “supersede” previous reports – a curious choice of word since it’s not “superseding” previous estimates that they’re doing, it’s hyper-inflating them – they say this “will” happen, something even the UN’s “experts” are very careful not to say, calling their own much-lower estimates just “projections.”

This is not just a cocktail party discussion because …

The report's findings will now be taken into account when the city council formulates its district plan this year, deputy-mayor Vicki Buck, said yesterday [emphasis mine] …
    The Tonkin & Taylor report for the city council [recommends] areas of the eastern suburbs … be abandoned in a "managed retreat."
    Managed retreat means a strategic decision is made by authorities to abandon or relocate properties and assets in the area.

I’d imaging that if those are your properties or assets you are forced by these pricks to “abandon or relocate,” you might be a trifle angry about a retreat, “managed” or otherwise. In which case, feel free to give the “experts” at Tonkin and Taylor a call. And maybe another to Vicki Buck and her fellow councillors.

Because even if in the tiny, improbable outside chance these bastards were to be proved right (and who’s going to be alive to be sued ninety years from now for incompetence?) isn’t this a risk you’re entitled to take for yourself? After all, if this were to happen, any change would happen at such a “glacial” pace that an unhampered market would easily allow folk to adjust to it through the obvious price signals that would emerge**. And if Al “The Waters Are Rising” Gore can buy and develop waterfront property, then why the hell can’t you?

As Bryce Wilkinson said last last year after Environment Ministry cretins recommended all councils adopt these scary scenarios in a bid to get home-owners away from the coast,

This comes as New Zealand's chief science adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman, has been calling for a greater weighting on objective evidence in policy formation.
Waiting for objective statistically-significant evidence of a marked acceleration in sea-level rise should not be too much to ask. It's not as if coast-loving property owners are facing an imminent, undetected risk.
Another policy consideration concerns the lack of a case for interfering in private risk-taking.
Some scientists and policy advisers seem to be fond of the vacuous "precautionary principle" mantra that uncertainty about science does not justify inaction. Of course not, but neither does it justify action.

Especially not “action” that is simply government action banning private action.

Risk is a personal thing. The only rational approach to risk is to assess likelihoods, costs and benefits and one's own risk preferences.
Perhaps nervous investors should not buy beach houses - or invest in the share market. But risk was never a good policy reason for discouraging risk-takers from making risky investments using their own money.

New Zealanders are adults, not children. Leave them alone to take their own risks and make their own choices³ – and leave them to take responsibility for those choices.

And stop relying on experts that are anything but.

* * * *

1. If you think there’s something “off” in those Manila figures, scientist Vincent Gray says you’re probably right:

Manila is a rogue record.The following website states that the gauge is subject to subsidence:
    http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.shtml?stnid=660-011
The following records from the Philippines, show no recent rise:

2. Definition of climate “expert”: A parrot that can only say, “things are worse than we thought.”

3. If sea levels really began rising at the catastrophic rate needed to get to the levels suggested by Tonkin + Taylor and Al Gore, then prices of seafront property would plunge (sorry), and uphill properties rise. This would of course open up opportunities both for entrepreneurial skeptics and committed warmists…