Land subsistence is an actual scientific fact (btw, D.C. was not really built on swamp). Climate change is a hysterical political movement pushed by people who refuse to practice what they preach
Nation’s capital sinking into the sea, study says
To some, the results of a study that concludes the District of Columbia is sinking is a physical manifestation of the political environment in the nation’s capital.
But new research from the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Vermont shows that the land in the district — where the Lincoln Memorial was built on silt dredged from the Potomac River — is expected to fall 6 inches or more during the next 100 years, raising flood fears and adding to worries about the effect of rising sea levels on low-lying cities across the USA.
“It’s ironic that the nation’s capital, the place least responsive to the dangers of climate change, is sitting in one of the worst spots it could be,” Paul Bierman, a geologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington and senior author of a new paper about Washington’s descent, said in a statement. “Will the Congress just sit there with their feet getting ever wetter?”
It took them all of two paragraphs to whine about Hotcoldwetdry.
“This falling land will exacerbate the flooding that the nation’s capital faces from rising ocean waters due to a warming climate and melting ice sheets — accelerating the threat to the region’s monuments, roads, wildlife refuges and military installations,” University of Vermont researchers said in releasing the findings Tuesday. The paper was published online this week in the journal GSA Today.
Doom! Did you know that a whopping 1,350 acres of D.C. lie less than 6 feet below sea level? Getting beyond the notion that the sea rose a miniscule 7 inches during the 20th century, D.C. encompasses 43,710 acres. So, the majority is more than safe, even supposing that the sea rose 6 feet by 2100. Which won’t happen. Won’t even be close, except in the fevered pictures and GIFs of Warmists.
Tide gauges in the Chesapeake Bay have shown for 60 years that sea level “is rising at twice the global average rate and faster than elsewhere on the East Coast.” The hypothesis: Land in the Chesapeake region that had been pushed up by the weight of a prehistoric ice sheet has been settling down again since the ice sheet melted some 20,000 years ago.
The sea level trend for D.C. is 3.24 millimeters per year, which equates to 1.06 feet per century. Even taking subsistence out of the equation, that is below the rise one would expect during a Holocene warm period. What data is available showing long term trends for the Chesepeake do not show anything out of the norm, nor do any show anything other than a linear continuation of sea rise. There is not “speeding up” whatsoever.
This is all just taking the natural processes of the Earth and getting hysterical. For political purposes. Hey, at least they didn’t blame the subsistence on “climate change” this time!
