National Geographic – Fooled to disgrace itself
The September issue of National Geographic was devoted to the idea that we are facing a disastrous flooding in the near future. They had the bad taste to illustrate this with a picture of the Statue of Liberty with the sea reaching up to her waist some 70 m above the present sea level. This is a complete misconception of physical possibilities in nature itself.
The firm scientific facts fully to dismiss all such flooding ideas have been presented by Professor Don J. Easterbrook last week on WUWT, and I don’t need to add further facts.
There is another side of this tragedy, and that is the question of how and on what grounds a top-magazine can be fooled to disgrace itself so very much. The IPCC and its supporting boy-scouts seem totally to have lost contact with reality in their claims of sea level rise and disastrous flooding events of low-lying islands and coastal areas.
Claims of a sea level rise by 2100 in the order of 1-2 m or more are simply impossible because it would upset all knowledge and all observational facts we have achieved over the entire time of scientific investigations.
In the article in National Geographic references were given to three scientists who were said to be responsible for the “facts” presented. Those persons are:
Philippe Huybrechts (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Richard S. Williams Jr (Woods Hole Research Centre, US)
James C. Zachos (University of California, US)
They should all know better than to allow the falsification of facts and the discarding of all accumulated knowledge in geology and physics.
Sea level can never rise faster than 10 mm/yr, the rise documented at the Pleistocene/Holocene transition, when temperature rose drastically and ice receded at a enormous rate (e.g. by 300 m/yr in the Stockholm area). Ice cannot melt faster than the calorie supply allows (from the air, the ocean and the bedrock).
Three million years ago, Greenland was ice-free and the global temperature was significantly higher than today. But then things happened. We went into a new tectonic regime: the Neotectonic Period. The global orography changed: mountains rose and basin formed. Most important, maybe, was that the Tibetan Plateau was formed, and from that time on the world started to experience alternations between warm interglacial and cold Ice Ages.
We cannot upset the physics of sea level rise, we cannot upset the physical laws of ice melting, and we can absolutely not re-shape the Earth and down-fold the Tibetan Plateau and the general orography of the Earth.
And still, this is what the claims and picture in National Geographic would imply. Sometimes it happens that it knocks at the door and when you open, there is a Jehovah Witness, who tries to convince you about the creation discarding evolution and all what we have learned in palaeontology, biology and genetics including DNA.
There is no reason to argue: these people are blind for facts and desperately hanging-on to their own conviction. This is basically utterly uneducated.
The views presented in National Geographic and said to refer to “facts” given by Huybrecht, Williams and Zachos have the same magnitude as the creationism concept: it discards all our accumulated scientific knowledge and insists on an unscientific and demagogic view.
Obviously, National Geographic has been fooled and misguided by a group of persons that set aside scientific facts and principles, allowing themselves to violate well-established facts in geology and physics. Therefore, the September issue is nothing but a regrettable blunder.
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