Archives de catégorie : climate-debate

climate-debate

Doomsdays that didn’t happen: Think tank compiles decades’ worth of dire climate predictions

by P. Homewood, Sep. 19, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Doomsdays that didn’t happen: Think tank compiles decades’ worth of dire climate predictions

by Paul Homewood

By Paul Homewood

 

 

From Fox:

 

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently suggested Miami would disappear in “a few years” due to climate change. The United Nations is convening a “Climate Action Summit” next week. And climate activist Greta Thunberg is on Capitol Hill this week telling lawmakers they must act soon.

But while data from NASA and other top research agencies confirms global temperatures are indeed rising, a newly compiled retrospective indicates the doomsday rhetoric is perhaps more overheated.

The conservative-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute has put together a lengthy compilation of apocalyptic predictions dating back decades that did not come to pass, timed as Democratic presidential candidates and climate activists refocus attention on the issue.

The dire predictions, often repeated in the media, warned of a variety of impending disasters – famine, drought, an ice age, and even disappearing nations – if the world failed to act on climate change.

An Associated Press headline from 1989 read “Rising seas could obliterate nations: U.N. officials.” The article detailed a U.N. environmental official warning that entire nations would be eliminated if the world failed to reverse warming by 2000.

Then there were the fears that the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” That claim came from an “international team of specialists” cited by The New York Times in 1978.

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better to know...?, climate-debate, to keep an eye on...

German Climatologist Werner Kirstein Unloads: “IPCC Is To Deceive People”…Calls Michael Mann’s Chart “A Fake”

by P. Gosselin, Sep.17, 2019  in NoTricksZone

German climate scientist Professor Werner Kirstein was interviewed by alternative media outlet NuoViso,  and since the video was released early this month on Youtube, it has been viewed over 130,000, times.

Politics commissioning reports for money

In the interview Professor Kirstein tells moderator Robert Stein that CO2 emissions have no effect on the climate and that “politicians commission climate scientists to produce expert reports for money.”

“Public is being deceived”

Prof. Kirstein talks about the “conscious deception” of the public and how all research projects and publications by “climate scientists” only have the goal of confirming “man-made climate change” and that different scientific views are not welcome.

According to Kirstein, the public is being deceived with the false information and that the aim of politics is to find a way to collect further taxes and to collect levies.

“We currently see this with the climate tax, which is to be introduced soon,” Kirstein says.

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Ruan et al., 2019   

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Climate Hysteria: Rising Number Of Children Treated For ‘Eco-Anxiety’

by P. Homewood, Sep. 16, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the recent fires in the Amazon and apocalyptic warnings by the teenage activist Greta Thunberg have prompted a “tsunami” of young people seeking help.

A group of psychologists working with the University of Bath says it is receiving a growing volume of enquiries from teachers, doctors and therapists unable to cope.

The Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) told The Daily Telegraph some children complaining of eco-anxiety have even been given psychiatric drugs.

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climate-debate

Une brève histoire du climat

by Egbert Egberts, 12 septembre 2019, in ScienceClimatEnergie

ATTENTION ! Cet article pourrait permettre d’économiser des milliards d’euros…

Après un été avec des températures au-dessus de 40°C, les prédictions de catastrophes sont allé bon train. “Si on ne fait rien, …” Nos politiques, pressés par une (petite) partie de leur électorat, proposent des mesures à faire pâlir les contribuables impuissants que nous sommes. Pensez aux mille milliards d’euros que veut dépenser la nouvelle présidente de la Commission européenne pour juguler le climat et limiter le réchauffement climatique.

Dans l’ensemble, on traite cette question sans aucun regard en arrière. Comme si le changement climatique était un phénomène nouveau, qui nous est tombé dessus parce qu’on roule en voiture. Cependant, il ne s’agit pas d’un phénomène nouveau et le monde francophone est particulièrement bien placé pour le savoir. Nous possédons un livre fouillé sur l’évolution du climat entre l’an 58 avant Jésus-Christ et 1842 A. D., un véritable trésor ! Pourquoi ? Parce que cela nous donne le recul indispensable pour mieux comprendre ce qui nous arrive aujourd’hui. En 1845, Joseph-Jean-Nicolas Fuster a publié son livre de 503 pages Des changements dans le climat de la France : histoire de ses révolutions météorologiques aux éditions Capelle à Paris.[1] Son livre nous résume ainsi l’évolution du climat pendant presque deux millénaires.

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climate-debate

LONG-TERM US DROUGHT AND PRECIPITATION TRENDS

by R. McKitrick & J. Christy, Sep. 14, 2019 in WUWT

Ross McKitrick and John Christy have published a new paper in the Journal of Hydrology.

Abstract : We estimate trends in US regional precipitation on multiple time spans and scales relevant to the detection of changes in climatic regimes. A large literature has shown that trend estimation in hydrological series may be affected by long-term persistence (LTP) and selection of sample length. We show that 2000-year proxy-based reconstructions of the Palmer Modified Drought Index for the US Southeast (SE) and Pacific Coast (PC) regions exhibit LTP and reveal post- 1900 changes to be within the range of longer-term natural fluctuations. We also use a new data base of daily precipitation records for 20 locations (10 PC and 10 SE) extending back in many cases to the 1870s. Over the 1901–2017 interval upward trends in some measures of average and extreme precipitation appear, but they are not consistently significant and in the full records back to 1872 they largely disappear. They also disappear or reverse in the post-1978 portion of the data set, which is inconsistent with them being responses to enhanced greenhouse gas forcing. We conclude that natural variability is likely the dominant driver of historical changes in precipitation and hence drought dynamics in the US SE and PC.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Greta, Germany & Green Energy

by J. Curry, Sep. 10, 2019 in BigPictureNews

Anyone who still thinks green/renewable energy is the answer is invited to click over to a web page that monitors Germany’s celebrated Energy Transition (English translation here). The most recent six-month update has just been published. Despite a multi-billion-euro price tag, Germany’s attempts to ditch fossil fuels isn’t going well. At all.

Only six of the transition’s 14 goals (43%) appear achievable by 2020. Here are the two absolutely critical data points:

#1 – Germany’s CO2 emissions reduction targets won’t be met.

#2 – Its previously robust electricity grid is now vulnerable and insecure.

The story of Germany’s energy transition boils down to this: Something that used to work well has been deliberately broken, undermined, degraded, and crippled. A ton of money has been spent. To make things worse.

Over at Forbes, Michael Shellenberger discusses how this latest report card is being covered in the German press. In his words:

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climate-debate

EXTREME COLD RIPS THOUGH NEW ZEALAND’S SOUTH ISLAND — HELICOPTERS FLOWN-IN TO PROTECT THE HARVESTS

by Cap Allon, Sep. 10, 2019 in Electroverse

Frost-fighting efforts have shifted into overdrive on New Zealand’s South Island as a brutal Antarctic blast rips through the region — the first blast of many, according to NIWA forecasts.

Otago, a southeastern region of NZ’s South Island, is home to the buds of millions of dollars worth of stone-fruit. Forecasters say temperatures in central Otago plummeted to a bruising -5C (23F) on Tues morning, Sept 10.

Sprinklers were turned-on so as to deliberately encase the tender fruit in a protective clear-ice casing — an age-old method of frost-fighting. While helicopters and wind machines were also drafted-in to blow warm air over the orchards.

“It’s all hands on deck,” said Tim Jones, chief executive of 45 South Orchard and Packhouse in Cromwell, who expects the cold to stick around for at least another month.

“NIWA has got some news out there that this could be a challenging spring,” Jones added.

New Zealand has a higher-than-usual risk of sharp cold snaps and unsettled weather during the first half of the season, according to the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

A rare sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event is occurring 30-50 km above Antarctica which is already leading to unusual and extreme weather in parts of the Southern Hemisphere.

 

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climate-debate

Nearly Half Of 53 Tidal Gauges Show Negative Sea-Level Rise

by K. Richard, Sep. 10, 2010 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The West Coast of North America has 20 long-term (90+ years) tide gauges measuring relative sea-level changes.

The East Coast has 33. Of the 53 total tide gauges, 45% (24) are negatively accelerating, 14 document falling sea levels, and just 11 have sea levels rising more than 3 mm/yr.

mage Source: Boretti, 2019

A cooling/non-warming North America

A few months ago, Gan et al. (2019) reported that the North American continent as a whole (180-0°, 15-60°N) “is one of the major cooling centers” in the Northern Hemisphere, with temperatures dropping after 1998 and no significant net change since the early 1980s apparent.

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climate-debate

‘Alarmism Enforcement’ On Hurricanes And Global Warming

by J. Curry, Sep; 9, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

I used to be concerned about ‘consensus enforcement’ on the topic of climate change.  Now I am concerned about ‘alarmism enforcement.’

Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, any hurricane causing catastrophic damage has been seized upon by climate alarmists as evidence of the horrors of global warming.

As if the record-holding hurricanes from the 1920s through the 1950s never happened.

The catastrophic damage to the Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian is no different.  The ‘official’ statement from the alarmist contingent of climate scientists appears to be this article in the Guardian, by Mann and Dessler:

Unfortunately for the alarmists, there are several factors that are getting in the way of the public promotion of the Mann/Dessler narrative:

Alabama-gate:  President Trump’s insistence on defending his erroneous statements about the forecasts for Dorian impacting Alabama.  A good article summarizing all this was co-authored by one of my former students at Georgia Tech, Brandon Miller [link].

After the Alabama National Weather Service office made a statement that Alabama was not at risk from Dorian, NOAA issued a statement defending President Trump  [link].

A WaPo article describes this latest development [link], and the subsequent outrage among scientists and NOAA employees (past and present.

This whole situation is taking the oxygen out of the room in terms of discussions regarding Dorian and global warming.  Gotta wonder if this was the strategy?

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climate-debate

UK: New “Beast from the East” could cause one of the coldest winters in three decades

by Charles the moderator, Sep. 9, 2019 in WUWT

The UK could be set to experience one of the coldest winters in three decades, scientists have warned.

Meteorologists say an even more extreme version of the “Beast from the East” could see parts of the country hit with blizzard-like conditions throughout much of January and February next year.

Using ground-breaking analysis of sea temperatures and air pressures, scientists have been able to predict one of the longest-range UK weather forecasts ever recorded – according to The Sunday Times.

Mark Saunders, professor of climate prediction at University College London (UCL), said: “This would rank the 2020 January-February central England temperature as the coldest winter since 2013.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

THICK ARCTIC ICE STOPS YET ANOTHER SHIP OF CLIMATE CHANGE DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS

by Cap Allon, Sep. 9, 2019 in Electroverse

The MS MALMO is the latest in a long list of ships to have gotten stuck in surprisingly thick Arctic sea ice this year.

The Swedish vessel, built in 1943 and refurbished in 2014, was on an “Arctic tour” with the noble mission of ferrying a team of Climate Change documentary filmmakers to the front line. The teams intention was to capture some of the catastrophic ice melt being reported by the worlds media — ice melt which it would appear still refuses to manifest despite decades of furious willing from the UN & IPCC.

The MS MALMO came to a grinding halt on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen, the Svalbard Archipelago, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, when it encountered impenetrably thick ice:

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climate-debate

Climate Warriors Stuck In Arctic Ice (That All Melted Years Ago!)

by P. Homewood, Sep. 8, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Arctic tours ship MS MALMO with 16 passengers on board got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen, Svalbard Archipelago, halfway between Norway and North Pole. The ship is on Arctic tour with Climate Change documentary film team, and tourists, concerned with Climate Change and melting Arctic ice. All 16 Climate Change warriors were evacuated by helicopter in challenging conditions, all are safe. 7 crew remains on board, waiting for Coast Guard ship assistance.
Something is very wrong with Arctic ice, instead of melting as ordered by UN/IPCC, it captured the ship with Climate Change Warriors.

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climate-debate

WMO Secretary-General Warns Against Climate ‘Doomsters and Extremists’

by  Anthony Watts, Sep. 6, 2019 in WUWT

London, 6 September: The General-Secretary of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that the alarmist narrative on climate change has gone off the rails and criticised the news media for provoking unjustified anxiety.

Speaking to Finland’s financial newspaper Talouselämä (“The Journal”) on 6 September 2019, Petteri Taalas called for cooler heads to prevail, saying that he does not accept arguments of climate alarmists that the end of the world is at hand.

Dr Taalas also spoke of the dangers of green extremism:

“While climate sceptisism has become less of an issue, now we are being challenged from the other side. Climate experts have been attacked by these people and they claim that we should be much more radical. They are doomsters and extremists; they make threats.”

And he called for the media both to challenge experts and allow a broader range of opinions to be heard.

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climate-debate

The Gestalt of Heat Waves

by Clyde Spencer, Sep. 6, 2019 in WUWT

Abstract

Tmax and Tmin time-series are examined to look for historical, empirical evidence to support the claim that heat waves will become more frequent, of longer duration, and with higher temperatures than in the past. The two primary parameters examined are the coefficient of variation and the difference between Tmax and Tmin. There have been periods in the past when heat waves were more common. However, for nearly the last 30 years, there has been a reversal of the correlation of increasing CO2 concentration with the Tmax coefficient of variation. The reversal in differences in Tmax and Tmin indicate something notable happened around 1990.

Introduction

There was much in the press this Summer about the ‘global’ heat waves, particularly in France and Greenland. For an example of some of the pronouncements, see here. The predictions are that we should expect to see heat waves that are more frequent and more severe because of Anthropogenic Global Warming, now more commonly called “Climate Change.” The basis for the claim is unvalidated Global Climate Models, which are generally accepted to be running to warm. The simplistic rationale is that as the nights cool less, it takes less heating the next day to reach unusually high temperatures. Unfortunately, were that true, that would lead one to conclude that heat waves should never stop.

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Fig. 1. U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index, 1895-2015

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-high-and-low-temperatures

If the predictions of worse future heat waves were valid, one might expect to be able to discern a change occurring already, inasmuch as it is commonly accepted that Earth has been warming at least since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

climate-debate

Historical European Sea Level Records

by Kip Hansen, Sep. 6, 2019 in WUWT

I have been working on another sea level related essay and in the process stumbled upon a paper published in 1990 by thePermanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL).  The title is: “On The Availability Of  European Mean Sea Level Data  by P.L. Woodworth, N.E. Spencer and G. Alcock  (1990)”,  The paper is listed on the PSMSL page of “Publications Relevant to the PSMSL and GLOSS” but is not available there.  [ a  .pdf is available here  courtesy of the library at the University of New Brunswick, Canada ].

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climate-debate

Recent global heat waves are correlated to an exceptional solar cycle 24

by J. Van Vliet, Sep. 5, 2019 in ScienceClimatEnergie

Belgium and France were recently affected by an extreme heat wave that took place between 24 and 27 July 2019. This heat wave was in many aspects presented as unprecedented and it has therefore unlocked a large scale reaction by many media. After a few days to cool down, the time has come to express a non-emotional and non-political opinion about such a strong heat wave.

Emotional reactions were normal in such circumstances: the temperatures were extreme and even if France and Belgium were much better prepared that for the 2003 heat wave, the present heat wave has led to important suffering for many poor people or people in bad health and without access to air conditioning.

The heat wave unlocked also many political reactions: it was an opportunity to press once more the threatening mantra of United Nations[1] and IPCC that mankind is responsible for this catastrophic warming and is destroying its own and only planet. A whole caste of politicians, countless academics and so-called “experts”, lobbyists, bureaucrats and NGOs claim that it is urgent to take “strong” measures going up to the replacement of democracy by climatist[2] despotism: even children are enlisted in the political arena. These people number in hundreds of thousands and probably more and they communicate loudly and repeatedly at the UN, through IPCC reports and COP events, in the media and in the streets. Does this imply they are right ? Has mankind something to do with these high temperatures ?

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climate-debate

Medieval Warmth Was GLOBAL…Confirmed By Over 1,200 Papers At Google Maps

by P. Gosselin, Sep. 3, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

More than 1,200 publications show the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global – an embarrassment to global warming alarmists who claimed it was regional.

Global-warming-alarmist scientists like claiming that the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was mostly a regional, North Atlantic phenomenon, and was not global, and so we should just move along and stop questioning man-made global warming.

For example, the online Britannica entry on the Medieval Warm Period written by John P. Rafferty writes that it occurred “predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere from Greenland eastward through Europe and parts of Asia.”

Britannica does state that the claim of a global extent is highly controversial, though it really isn’t as we are about to see.

More than 1,200 papers evidence it was global

Indeed the claim that it was global is now backed up by a huge body of scientific studies meticulously compiled by Dr. Sebastian Lüning of Die kalte Sonne and presented at Google Maps here.

climate-debate

Summer Heatwaves? It Was Hotter In 1707!!

by P. Homewood, Sept.2, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

To read the headlines in the last month or two, you would think we had been having a Mediterranean summer.

The truth is much more mundane however.

The numbers for last month’s CET are now out. August ended up at 17.1C, meaning that there have been 32 Augusts as warm or warmer. Last month was no warmer than 1801, 1842 and 1932.

Summer as a whole ranked 48th hottest, tied with 1935.

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The summer of 1976 still remains top of the list, but second hottest was way back in 1826.

Indeed there have been warmer summers on 28 occasions prior to 1900. Notably, one such summer was 1666, the 18th warmest. That was, of course, the year of the Great Fire of London, which swept through London between the 2nd and 6th of September.

climate-debate

The Great Failure Of The Climate Models

by Tyler Durden, 26 August 2019 in ZeroHedge

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Christy is not looking at surface temperatures, as measured by thermometers at weather stations. Instead, he is looking at temperatures measured from calibrated thermistors carried by weather balloons and data from satellites. Why didn’t he simply look down here, where we all live? Because the records of the surface temperatures have been badly compromised.

Globally averaged thermometers show two periods of warming since 1900: a half-degree from natural causes in the first half of the 20th century, before there was an increase in industrial carbon dioxide that was enough to produce it, and another half-degree in the last quarter of the century.

The latest U.N. science compendium asserts that the latter half-degree is at least half manmade. But the thermometer records showed that the warming stopped from 2000 to 2014. Until they didn’t.

In two of the four global surface series, data were adjusted in two ways that wiped out the “pause” that had been observed.

The first adjustment changed how the temperature of the ocean surface is calculated, by replacing satellite data with drifting buoys and temperatures in ships’ water intake. The size of the ship determines how deep the intake tube is, and steel ships warm up tremendously under sunny, hot conditions. The buoy temperatures, which are measured by precise electronic thermistors, were adjusted upwards to match the questionable ship data. Given that the buoy network became more extensive during the pause, that’s guaranteed to put some artificial warming in the data.

The second big adjustment was over the Arctic Ocean, where there aren’t any weather stations. In this revision, temperatures were estimated from nearby land stations. This runs afoul of basic physics.

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climate-debate

What Greenland Heatwave?

by P. Homewood, September 1, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Let’s start with Qaanaaq (Thule), which the Mirror reporter visited during w/e 25th August. She wrote:

 

A heatwave is gripping The Arctic, melting away Greenland’s ice sheet on an unprecedented scale and threatening a global rise in sea levels – an urgent reminder of the climate crisis we are now all facing.

Kids splashing each other in the sea and locals wearing t-shirts were unheard of here in August 10 years ago.

But now, alongside teenage girls wearing skirts to school and increasing mosquitoes, it is a common occurrence for the residents of Qaanaaq, in north-west Greenland, one of the world’s most northerly cities situated 700 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

This is the frontline of climate change…..

The country is also experiencing record-breaking temperatures. In mid-June, along the eastern coast it was 9C warmer than the 1981-2010 average.

Just as western Europe has baked in a heatwave with record temperatures at the end of July, the hot air moved as far north as Greenland with the gauge hitting 22C on August 1. The average high is around 7C….

 

According to Weather Underground, however, daily maximum temperatures at Qaanaaq never got above 47F that week. The highest temperature of the month was 63F on the 1st.

KNMI confirm that the record temperature at Qaanaaq is 67F, and that a temperature of 63F was also recorded way back in 1959.

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climate-debate

Week in review – science edition

by Judith Curry, August 31, 2019 in Climate Etc.

A few things that caught my eye this past week.

Several papers of fundamental importance:

*Important new paper by Peter Minnett:  The response of the ocean thermal skin layer to variations in incident infrared radiation [link]

*A provocative paper with many implications:  Increased atmospheric vapor pressure deficit  [link]

*Does Surface Temperature Respond to or Determine Downwelling Longwave Radiation? [link]

*Reframing the carbon cycle of the subpolar Southern Ocean [link]  Synopsis [link]

Something new and interesting from Russian scientists. A new approach to local climate dynamics, integrating bifurcation analysis, control theory and climate theory. Start with Section 7 for an overview worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.114

Climate change is altering winter precipitation across the Northern Hemisphere [link]

The influence of weather regimes on European renewable energy production and demand. [link]

Hemispheric Asymmetry of Tropical Expansion Under CO2 Forcing [link]

How predictable were this summer’s European temperature records? [link]

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climate-debate, to keep an eye on...

A Skeptic’s Guide To Global Temperatures

by Clive Best, August 30, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Climate change may well turn out to be a benign problem rather than the severe problem or “emergency” it is claimed to be.

This will eventually depend on just how much the Earth’s climate is warming due to our transient but relatively large increase in atmospheric CO2 levels.

This is why it is so important to accurately and impartially measure the Earth’s average temperature rise since 1850. It turns out that such a measurement is neither straightforward, independent, nor easy.

For some climate scientists, there sometimes appears to be a slight temptation to exaggerate recent warming,  perhaps because their careers and status improve the higher temperatures rise.

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climate-debate, to keep an eye on...

NASA: We Can’t Model Clouds, So Climate Model Projections Are 100x Less Accurate

by K. Richard, August 30, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

NASA has conceded that climate models lack the precision required to make climate projections due to the inability to accurately model clouds.

Clouds have the capacity to dramatically influence climate changes in both radiative longwave (the “greenhouse effect”) and shortwave.

Cloud cover domination in longwave radiation

In the longwave, clouds thoroughly dwarf the CO2 climate influence. According to Wong and Minnett (2018):

  • The signal in incoming longwave is 200 W/m² for clouds over the course of hours. The signal amounts to 3.7 W/m² for doubled CO2 (560 ppm) after hundreds of years.

  • At the ocean surface, clouds generate a radiative signal 8 times greater than tripled CO2 (1120 ppm).

  • The absorbed surface radiation for clouds is ~9 W/m². It’s only 0.5 W/m² for tripled CO2 (1120 ppm).

  • CO2 can only have an effect on the first 0.01 mm of the ocean. Cloud longwave forcing penetrates 9 times deeper, about 0.09 mm.

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climate-debate, to keep an eye on...

Climate Scientists Admit Their Models Are Wrong

by Bud Bromley, August 30, 2019 in PrincipiaScientificInternational

Climate scientists who support human-caused global warming, for example Ben Santer and Michael Mann, authored a peer reviewed paper which acknowledges that their climate models are wrong, although their admission is buried in weasel words and technical jargon:

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In the scientific method it is not the obligation or responsibility of skeptics or “deniers” to falsify or disprove hypotheses and theories proposed by climate scientists.  It is the obligation and responsibility of climate scientists to present evidence and to defend their hypothesis.  Alarmist climate scientists have failed to do so despite the expense of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

https://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2973.html

http://climatechangedispatch.com/the-pause-in-global-warming-is-real-admits-climategate-scientist/

Read more at budbromley.blog

climate-debate

La hausse du niveau de la mer accélère-t-elle l’érosion des côtes? (3/3)

by Prof. Y. Battiau, 30 août 2019 in ScienceClimat Energie

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6. Conclusion

A la question initiale qui avait été posée – “la hausse du niveau de la mer accélère-t-elle l’érosion des côtes?”- on peut répondre qu’elle ne joue qu’un rôle mineur, comparé à celui des tempêtes. Dans l’état actuel des recherches, on peut dire aussi que le réchauffement climatique n’augmente pas la fréquence et l’intensité des tempêtes. Tout cela va à l’encontre de ce que l’on entend habituellement dans les médias, mais le scientifique a le devoir de rétablir la réalité des faits.

Pourtant, on ne peut nier que les risques littoraux s’aggravent dans beaucoup de régions et que leur gestion est de plus en plus coûteuse. Mais la plupart du temps, cette aggravation résulte de facteurs anthropiques. Alors que les hommes ont longtemps évité la proximité immédiate du littoral, ils ont depuis plus de 150 ans, entrepris d’installer habitations, infrastructures et complexes industriels le plus près possible de la côte. Face à cette vulnérabilité accrue, il a fallu ensuite “défendre contre la mer” tous ces biens, une stratégie qui n’a fait que renforcer ou déplacer l’érosion marine. La seule façon de prévenir efficacement les risques littoraux est de travailler avec les processus naturels et surtout de respecter la ressource sédimentaire du système côtier, en évitant d’entraver la mobilité naturelle du trait de côte. Mais ce serait là l’objet d’un autre article…

La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse