Pirate's Cove

According to Excitable Sarah Frostenson, Florida is at risk of Extreme Sea Rise!!!!!!!!!! so Trump should totally care about anthropogenic climate change because

Trump doesn’t believe in climate change, but it’s going to drown Mar-a-Lago

President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and a very expensive “tax” on American businesses that make the US less competitive. He has threatened to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord, in which countries around the world pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to keep temperatures from rising past the critical 2°C mark.

And yet climate change is already imperiling Mar-a-Lago, the crown jewel of Trump’s extensive real estate portfolio and his preferred location for carrying out many of his official presidential duties. Rising sea levels are causing more frequent and more damaging tidal floods on the Florida coast, and projections suggest that the risk to lives and property from climate change-related flooding events is only going to increase dramatically in the coming years.

There’s even a scary graphic!

The National and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has put out a variety of different estimates of rising sea levels in Southern Florida. The more conservative finding suggests that they could jump anywhere from 3 feet by 2050 to 7 feet by 2100.

But in January, the agency put out new “extreme” sea level projections — its doomsday scenario, in other words. In this scenario, we’d see a 10- to 12-foot rise in sea level in the US by 2100, which would have dramatic consequences for places like Mar-a-Lago, as you can see in the photo above.

The article even says there is an acceleration of sea rise (there isn’t). The one thing it doesn’t discuss is what the sea rise has been, or note where any data is. One would think that, with all the doomy prognostications, someone would be actually capturing hard field data on the sea rise in Florida, especially southern Florida. The Miami Beach monitoring station hasn’t been active since 1981 (data starts in 1931, and shows just .78 feet over 100 years). The closest working station shows 1.19 feet over 100 years, closer to what one would expect during any low level Holocene warm period. The next closest Atlantic station with long term current data is in Mayport, showing .85 feet over 100 years.

Fernadina Beach is .69. Key West is .79. You see similar numbers as you move to the Gulf Coast of Florida. It’s not doom, it’s normal to below average sea rise for a warm period.