"Sea level is rising! OMG! We'll all be killed!" Uh...wait a sec...

If you live near a coast you've undoubtedly read breathless newspaper articles about how fast sea level is rising, and "OMG we're all gonna' lose our homes!!!"

Virtually all these stories are press releases from outfits with innocuous-sounding names like "First Street Foundation."  They email stories to coastal newspapers, whose editors know a great "hook" story when they see one.  They eagerly run 'em, and instantly another 100,000 voters become convinced that

• the planet is warming at a rate never before seen, and one that's dangerous;
• the warming isn't due to "natural" causes--no, no, not at all, no way--but to increases in the amount of...CO2;
• this allegedly dangerous increase in CO2 isn't coming from "natural" sources like volcanoes or fractional increases in the temperature of the ocean (which holds a billion times more CO2 than the air), but instead is due mainly to humans burning fossil fuels;

Of course 99.99% of readers of those papers--having essentially no background in science--have no way to rebut any of those claims, so they're easy pickins' for the scary articles.

But let's examine a graph of sea level rise with time--like the one below.  Sure enough, between the left and right ends it looks like sea levels have risen almost 15 meters!  OMG!!



But when you look a bit closer, a couple of things get clearer:  First, that entire rise was completed 2000 years ago--which, if I recall history correctly, was before humans started burning fossil fuels in any measurable quantity.

If so, what could have caused sea level to rise 15 meters by Roman times?

It's a mystery.  But it certainly was NOT human activity.

So let's look even closer.  Here's how sea level has changed in the last 300 years:

Most readers: "OMG!! Look at how fast it's going up!  Sell your coastal home NOW!  We're all gonna' DIE!!!"

But on closer inspection we see a couple of interesting things:  First, the unlabeled vertical axis is in millimeters, giving a rate of increase of about 1.7 millimenters per year since 1825, or about one-sixteenth of an inch per year.  If that rate keeps up, it would give 2.5 inches in 40 years.

The second thing to note is that the observed rise--which began after the cold snap called the "Little Ice Age"--started over a century before humans began using significant amounts of fossil fuel.  So again, humans weren't causing that rise--which again raises the question: What caused it?

The "OMG!" organizations don't have any explanation.  Instead they count on you being too busy working and raising your kids to look up the relevant date, or to realize what graphs like the two above imply.

"But surely," you think, "some of these organizations (and there are scores of 'em) must have scientists on staff who know about the historic sea levels, and their meaning in the debate over whether there's really a problem caused by human activity.  How can they ignore the obvious points just noted?"

Ah, now we're getting interesting.  Seems to me the folks heading up the OMG! organizations are one of two types:  One type is making a six-figure income from founding non-profits that get leftist bucks for doing PR work warning about global disaster.  The folks in this group rarely have a scientific background but do have PR experience.  They specialize in "cause-based marketing," regardless of the subject.

The second type has a science background, but they willfully ignore any data that don't support their theory of human-caused, CO2-driven global warming.  Its hard to imagine that the members of this group are simply unaware of the data that debunk their theory, but that might explain a small fraction.

But from what I can see, most of the scientific types are ignoring the contradictory data have an agenda:  They want the U.S. to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels.  Reason is, our productivity is linked to the amount of energy we use.  If you sharply curb energy use, what effect do you think that will have on our total output?

If that sounds paranoid to ya', take a look at the way these "experts" have structured EVERY climate agreement:  China, India and third-world nations have no meaningful restrictions.  In fact, for some years after the first Paris climate agreement China was opening an average of one new coal-fired powerplant every WEEK.  And not a peep from U.S. negotiators (socialist quislings).

Let me quickly add here that finding more-energy-efficient ways to do things is great.  LED lighting, better home insulation, 25-watt laptops instead of 250-watt "desktop computers--all those are great.  But doubling the price of a kilowatt-hour of electricity by forcing the closing of coal-fired plants, as Obama's EPA dictated?  No, thanks.