A pisser of a prediction

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.”
– Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment

NZ’s Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (henceforth, The Pisser) says we’re all going to drown by 2040 due to 1) thermal expansion of the oceans, and 2) melting polar ice.

Yet while the oceans have been rising steadily but slowly since the last little ice age, in recent years the rate of rise has slowed, not accelerated, as as this chart illustrates. (The top line shows sea level; the second shows the rate at which sea level has risen or fallen.)

Jevrejeva analysis of global sea level (“gsl”, upper panel), and rate of change of
global sea level (“gsl rise, lower panel). Source

And:

 
ORIGINAL CAPTION: GMSL [global mean sea level] rate over five-year-long moving windows. a, Temporal evolution
of the GMSL rate computed over five-year-long moving windows shifted by one year (start date: 1994). Source (paywalled)

EU researchers analysed multi-mission satellite records in a new study and determined the following:

1. A huge bulge in the Western Pacific is responsible for much of the past "global" sea rise.
2. Since 2002, sea level rise has greatly decelerated.
3. Globally, on average, sea levels are currently increasing at a 2.31 mm/year rate (that's a 3.2 inches by year 2050 rate).

So that’s sea-level rise slowing, not accelerating.

And meanwhile, sea ice is not melting at an ever-increasing rate. Instead…

the area of sea ice on Earth is higher now than it was on this date 35 years ago. This is the exact opposite of what 97% of climate experts predicted. It is also the exact opposite of what 97% of climate experts report is happening.

2014 by the way is tracking to be another year in which the Arctic icecap continues to get further away from disappearing completely, and Antarctic ice just continues to increase.

So The Pisser follows in a long line of catastrophic warmist apocalypticism. A long line of failed catastrophic warmist apocalypticism…

In 1982 for example, UN official Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned we face “an ecological disaster” within decades unless “unless governments act now” to prevent global warming .

They didn’t. We didn’t. And we haven’t. And this hyperbolic catastrophism has to be put in context with the warnings the decade before that governments have to “act now” to prevent cooling. Even musicians Robert Fripp and Peter Gabriel chose to “act” to warn the world, since we would only have “forty years at the most” to prevent the world being drowned.

Still, the time periods for disaster keeps falling, even as the predicted disasters fail to arrive.

To take a few purely at random …

In 1989, the then-director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Noel Brown, warned of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming, saying “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”

Entire nations have got richer and more populous since Mr Brown leapt into print.

In 2007, UN IPCC chief Pachauri declared 2012 as the climate deadline to act or it would be “too late.”

The WWF said in 2009 we only have 'Five years to save world.'

The same year Hansen declared Obama only ‘has four years to save Earth’

Prince Charles claimed a 96-month tipping point in July 2009.

By October of that year Gordon Brown gave us Only '50 days to save the world.'

And, still in 2009, the Canadian Green Party were were giving us only "hours."

Indeed, we’re now only two days away from having our last chance to save the earth, if Australia’s chief scientist Penny Sackett is correct in her 2009 prediction.

The five years – and all the other miscast milestones – have all come and gone, and neither catastrophe nor catastrophic global warming has ever arrived. Indeed, we’re enjoying an 18-year pause in temperatures even as CO2 levels keep rising, while predictions of melting icecaps, no more snow, drowning cities and hundreds-of-millions of “climate refugees” fail to materialise. Global warming has never arrived, but the effects of it have: governments are taking action now to prevent any private action at all.

The only prophet to prove actually prophetic was the late Augie Auer, who said in 2007 “We're all going to survive this. It's all going to be a joke in five years.”

One of the more criminal effects of The Pisser’s portents of doom however is government and local government doubling down on their project to put coastal property out of reach of New Zealanders who haven’t already built their bach – moving to put even more stringent bans on building within what they now call “a natural hazard” and you and I used to call “a beach.”

The banning is as unnecessary as it is iniquitous. If The Pisser’s predictions have any weight at all, then coastal property would slowly become less and valuable as demand for it dried up as folk become convinced of the dangers. (Sorry.)

Instead, the opposite is happening, and Al Gore is still enjoying his sea-level property in the States.

The Pisser should be told to piss off. And we should listen instead to Rational Optimist Matt Ridley, who says:

“The twenty-first century will be a magnificent time to be alive. Dare be an optimist.”

Here’s David Bowie. For those unsure, it’s a song not a prediction:

[Hat tips Climate Depot, Powerline, Climatism,