Real facts on sea level rise
There was a letter in Friday’s Citizen which claimed that those concerned with sea level rise regarding the Cowichan Bay causeway rezoning are “denying scientific facts and common sense”. The writer refers to research he has done.
He quotes National Geographic Magazine reports of sea level rise over the last century. He conveniently mentioning that the data collected by NASA shows that the rate sea level rise planet wide to be double that rate for the last two decades and accelerating beyond that rate year by year.
He states that sea level measures based on land based tide-gauges are not reliable due to rising and falling lands. This is partly true, though he glosses over the fact that scientists also have access to more global data via satellites.
He states that ice-cap melting is not an issue. Again, this argument is only partly correct. Floating ice is only a problem in that removing it further increases the rate of warming from radiant solar heat, due to the simple fact that water (dark) absorbs more than ice (white).
However what is now happening in much of the Antarctic is that ice anchored on bedrock is melting, and that anchored on bedrock under water which backstops the land glaciers is going to disappear over the next few decades allowing more land-based glaciers to flow into the ocean. It also neglects to mention that the glaciers on Greenland, Antarctica, as well as smaller ones world wide (including our own) are melting/receding, and that water is all going into either the ocean or into the atmosphere as greenhouse gas (further positive feedback to climate change). Also, a third of the rise in sea levels is due to the expansion of the ocean water as its temperature rises.
The writer of that letter then states that he’s found websites that say it is “impossible to measure sea level rise or falls because of many many factors”.
There are dozens of well funded (fossil fuel lobby) sites, set up to fool the small minority of people of which the author states he is one.
I recommend, however, that people stay with peer reviewed evidence and good place to start is the NASA site, climate.nasa.gov/evidence/. It is a reasonable place to get summation of the current evidence presented in terms most people can understand.
I will not directly address the decision on the rezoning of the Cowichan Estuary which started this discussion but the denial of critical scientific facts always needs to be addressed. (As we are seeing with vaccines.)
Peter Lake
North Cowichan/Duncan
