More whimpers.

Yawn.

Entropic man
Sub headline may see
First sentence are likely
fourth paragraph regardless of sea level rise likely to occur and but also accounting for local factors such as the settlement of land, known as subsidence.

Fifth paragraph Louisiana where subsidence, which is not a result of by climate change,

At this point I gave up reading as
a. They have no confidence in their predictions
b subsidence unrelated to Climate Change© seems to be the main concern.

Can somebody explain why we should care very much about the fate of holiday homes in California?

Or why poor peasants in India can't have proper power in case a millionaire's beach hut might get a bit damp now and then?

This hodge-podge of 'if's, 'might's, 'could's and 'maybe's doesn't get anywhere near passing my 'So What' test?

Effect on Bangladesh

Radical Rodent
Thanks, saved me the effort of looking for coulds, mights, possiblys, and added a new one to the Find List "potentially". Never do find will and definitely!

SandyS

Will? Definitely?

These are the currency of priests, politicians and salesmen.

Martin A

"A man who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing."

How do you measure the cost of 34 million refugees?

Radical rodent

Pro rata. The effect is cumulative, not a sudden inundation in 150 years time.

So the icecaps are melting and the seas are rising so what are desirable Beech Front property prices doing.Can i bag myself a nice dirt cheap deserted Luxury Timeshare Condo on some beautiful holiday Caribbean Pacific Indian Ocean exotic destination or even in Torquay.

Entropic the Tourist Chiefs and the investment sharks they,re not buying into Climate Change either.

re: Bangladesh, California et al.

All those who advocate for alarmism seem to fall into the easy trap of projecting today's activities into the far distant future and saying 'if this happened suddenly tomorrow, we'd be in schtuck'.

Well that may or may not be so, because it's entirely imaginary. To quote from my earlier remarks '

'SLR will be such a gradual process that it will be 'no surprises'. A rise of three feet per century is the same depth as a single housebrick (4 inches) every 8 or so years. We have plenty of time to prepare and take action if the more alarmist predictions are seen to be coming true'

Or to put it more directly, the Bangla/Calif argument is another way of saying

'If my grandmother had balls she'd have been my grandfather'

But she didn't and fantasies about 'if it happened tomorrow' are just as irrelevant.

Surely those advocating for alarm or that SLR is 'a threat to civilisation' can do better than this?

'...and here I was, about to say that your 1:12 post suggested that our descendants would be thick as a brick'

Nah Jethro - its just a trick of the tail....

A few years ago I saw Bjørn Lomborg sum up the situation nicely in a TV talk.

He asked the viewer to imagine they were someone, or had met people, who had a living memory that extended across the whole of the 20th Century.

He posed the question: 'What would such a person say about the significant events of the 20th Century? What was important?'

The possible answers could range through anything: The triumphs of human achievement such as motorisation, modern IT, plentiful hot showers for the masses, going to the moon. The failures such as going to Disneyland, the world wars and various holocausts, the politicians, the governments, the movies and their stars, the sports events, the torture, George Best scoring six goals in Northampton....

So much, so many events, so many people, so many opinions.

But how many of those people would say a defining fact or important event of the 20th Century was that sea-level rose 12 inches? And, if it rises another 12 inches in the 21st century, as it is on course to do, who would give a toss? Apart from Entropic Man, of course.

Entropic man

SandyS

Will? Definitely?

These are the currency of priests, politicians and salesmen.

The very group pushing us to bankrupt ourselves to return to the stone-age. Why do you think that cli-scientists don't use more positive language? Perhaps because they know there is a high probability that they are woefully wrong?

SandyS

The key word in your last comment is "scientist". Modern scientific method runs using a philosophy of generating hypotheses and then attempting to falsify them.

In practice this leads to a publication cycle in which a paper describes a set of observations and presents evidence for and against a possible explanation. For the scientists concerned they may have started from a hypothesis or from observation, but the final paper tends to follow a similar pattern either way.

This is then dissected by their peers before publication as a quality control check and again after publication as their rivals try to score points. If the paper passes both tests, being valid science and a good description of reality, it becomes part of the body of knowledge.

By the time they get to this stage scientists are immersed in the idea that any hypothesis might be disproved by inconvenient facts and is therefore conditional. They know it is possible to be wrong.This is why they say " may", "likely" or "probably" instead of "will" or "certainly".

I have noticed that many engineers tend to use " will" and "certainly", even when it is unjustified. I never took an engineering degree, but I wonder. Did your lecturers present their science without the conditional uncertainties?

I have designed and built enough working models and devices to know how uncertain engineering can be. Any engineer who claims that his prototype " will certainly" work, deserves to be laughed at.

You mention teachers. Teachers tell "lies to children". Think of your own science education.

In primary school your science lessons gave simple, clear and definate explanations of the way the world worked. In early secondary school you got more detail and, some indication of how science is done. By A level you should be getting some history of how the ideas developed, and of uncertainty.

At university your courses should be discussing alternative hypotheses and paradigms, along with statistical techniques. Finally as a post grad you spend your time deciding between hypotheses and evidence put forward by different groups within your subject.

A teacher would not expect primary school pupils to understand the subtleties of climate sensitivity, or any other complex debate. Instead, at each stage, the students are given a diluted version of science, within their cognitive capacity. These are " lies to children".