Looney Toons Still Lives in California ! Part 1

A wild claim from California Governor Jerry Brown, reported by the Lame-Stream Media, without any scepticism by the L.A. Times. It was a Looney Toons moment.

Brown's remarks came a day after the release of two studies finding that a slow-motion and irreversible collapse of a massive cluster of glaciers in Antarctica has begun and could cause sea levels to rise worldwide by four feet within 200 years.

''If that happens, the Los Angeles airport's going under water.'' Brown (photo right) told reporters at a presentation of his revised state budget proposal in Los Angeles.  He added ''So is the San Francisco airport.''  Really?  Anthony Watts checks the evidence - and finds Brown is talking pure Looney Toons.

Ok, let's do the math, first look at the sea level rate from the Los Angeles tide gauge operated by NOAA:

LAX airport elevation is 125 feet = 38100mm.
At the rate of 0.83mm/yr sea level rise seen at Los Angeles (from the NOAA graph Above) it would take 45903.6 years to reach 125 feet!  We'd be in a new ice age by then and sea levels would be falling.  So at current rates.....Brown's claim is bogus.But he's saying the study says it will be due to Antarctic's western ice sheet melting. The NASA says of this study paper:

              Even as Rignot and his excited colleagues suggest that loss of the Amundsen Sea embayment glaciers appears inevitable, it remains extremely difficult to predict exactly how this ice loss will unfold and how long it will take. A conservative estimate is that it could take several centuries at least. The region contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 4 feet (1.2 meters).
              Four feet....and LAX is 125 feet above sea level. SFO airport is also mentioned by Brown...and its elevation is 13 feet above sea level. Governor Brown is a gross error with his claims.

Meanwhile....on the other side of Antarctica. the sea ice has expanded to cover the largest area recorded since satellite mapping began more than three decades ago, in stark contrast to this year's record melt on the northern pole. (See Antarctic Ice Chart Below). The expansion continues a trend of increasing Antarctic ice cover of about 1 % a decade and is at odds with predictions of climate change models that continue to forecast a long-term decline.

While on the other side of the United States, Washington in particular, nobody's listening to these facts. The Obama administration predictions of catastrophic climate change ignores this growing body of data suggesting that its claims don't square with the facts, say critics who point to figures indicating that the planet stopped warming around 1998 and in the past 18 months a cooling trend is being observed.

The National Climate Assessment released by the White last week depicts potentially dire consequences from global warming, which it claims ''is causing sea levels to rise and glaciers and Arctic Sea ice to melt.''  This ties in with claims by the chairman of the I.P.C.C. warning that failure to act could result in large-scale glacier melting with devastating effects for hundreds of millions of people in Asia alone. But the panel's reporting on the glacier issue has been marred by missteps in the past.

Its 2007 report contained embarrassing errors, for example, exaggerating the percentage of the Netherlands that is below sea level. The report claimed 55% of the country was below sea level, even though the figure is closer to 20%. The climate panel's also erroneously reported that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 (copying Al Gore's favourite scare mantra). The actual data indicated that this event would not occur until 2350! (Start playing the Looney Toons Theme Song!) 

Dominik  Jung - Meteorologist

Interestingly, a German meteorologist and ex-warmist, Dominik Jung, wrote in the Huffington Post that Austrian weather data from the Alps shows that winters there have become much colder during the past two decades. In fact, he explained last year that ''Germany had its 5th colder-than-normal winter in a row.''  and that changed his mind about following the warming mantra. Did you know, a few years ago, climatologists counselled businesses in the Alps to cut their investments in skiing and other winter sport facilities because rising temperatures would render these products obsolete? Now, according to Jung, local residents want o know what happened to the warming they had been promised. (Cue the Looney Toons Theme again!)

The Way I See It....A study published by The Cryosphere, a website of the National Snow & Ice Data Center, found that glacier melting occurred more rapidly from 1900 to 1950 than during the second half of the 20th Century. This conflicts with global-warming theory, which holds that the increased emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide would warm the planet and cause glaciers to melt more quickly and dangerously.

With CO2 now 25% greater in the atmosphere since 1998, the climate data to date does not demonstrate that any catastrophic melting has taken place other than the western edge of Antarctica where it seems to be compensated by mounting ice on the other side of that continent. Instead, it shows that the melting of glaciers began slowing around 1950.

I'm reminded by a statement in the press from Athumani Juma, a guide and veteran hiker at Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania who laughed when questioned by a reporter in 2012 about Al Gore's alarmist prediction about that mountain's snowcap would soon disappear. He told the newsman that glaciers there had stopped shrinking and started growing two years earlier. You think Al would get the hint by now .