Tag: Climate change
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Silting, Resilience and Climate Change
by James A. Bacon Louisiana’s coastline is shrinking. Humanity’s impact on the state’s massive but fragile wetlands — levees accelerating Mississippi River water flows, the criss-crossing of marshes with canals — has aggravated the natural phenomena of subsidence and sea-level rise to inundate some 1,900 square miles of coast land over eight decades. It’s an object lesson for Virginia,…
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What Climate Change Could Mean to Virginia
by James A. Bacon The political debate over catastrophic global warming won’t end until the climate either fulfills the dire forecasts of mainstream climate scientists or refuses to cooperate, thus disproving them. Stephen Paul Nash’s book, “Virginia Climate Fever,” is not likely to change many minds on that score. But if you’re wondering how global warming — if…
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Diet Denier
Perhaps you could call Nina Teicholz a “diet denier.” The journalist and author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Health Diet,” is part of the growing backlash against a half century-long orthodoxy that aimed to limit fat and cholesterol in the American diet. That orthodoxy, which ruled the medical establishment and the…
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A Timely Reminder of the Anti-Agenda 21 Distraction
by James A. Bacon Here in Virginia, the anti-Agenda 21 zealots have managed to stay out of the headlines for quite a while. I don’t know if that’s because they are quietly re-energizing themselves or if the movement is falling apart. But it never hurts to be reminded of the bizarre nature of this populist splinter group, which has done…
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Smart Growth: A Good Idea even without Climate Change
by James A. Bacon To a large degree, the Smart Growth movement in the United States has hitched its wagon to catastrophic human-caused climate change as the primary justification for building walkable, mixed-use, transit-friendly human settlement patterns. Off and on, I have warned that the emphasis on global warming could be a political mistake. If…
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Visualizing the Unthinkable
by James A. Bacon Combine the power of a Katrina-scale hurricane with the geographic proximity of a Hurricane Sandy, aim it at Hampton Roads, and what do you get? Old Dominion University professors Joshua G. Behr and Rafael Diaz cranked up their supercomputer to visualize what might happen. A “Sandtrina” catastrophe would extend way beyond…
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Virginia Missing from White House Climate Conversation
by Rachel Cannon On November 1st, 2013, President Obama signed an Executive Order “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change” – the newest addition to the Administration’s Climate Action Plan. One part of the Executive Order establishes the Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience: a collection of state, local and tribal leaders…
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Moonrise at Murrell’s Inlet
The water and sky are spectacular down here on the South Carolina coast. No sign of global warming this week — temperatures were blessedly and unseasonably cool yesterday. Good thing the Bacons aren’t adventure kayaking in the Arctic this summer. According to the Danish Meteorological Institute, the extent of Arctic sea ice is 50% greater…
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Oysters and Other Biological Breakwaters
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to go about buttressing Virginia’s waterfront communities from flooding, storm surges and other risks associated with rising water levels: with hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure. Hard infrastructure consists of walls, levees, berms, jetties, pipes, pumps, sand replenishment and other expensive, engineered solutions. Soft infrastructure entails building up of biological…
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Climate Alarmists Admit: They’re Flummoxed
by James A. Bacon Well, well, well, Justin Gillis with the New York Times has acknowledged an inconvenient truth: “The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have…
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A Tale of Two Controversies… or Really Only One?
by James A. Bacon There is a fascinating sidebar to the Teresa Sullivan firing/rehiring at the University of Virginia that has gone unremarked upon in the Virginia press yet has inspired articles and blog posts among journalists and commentators following the Global Warming debate, including, recently, the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. The question…
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Moral Hazard and the Federalization of the Disaster Business
According to a graphic displayed on the “Morning Joe” show on MSNBC this morning, Hurricane Sandy will be the second most expensive hurricane in United States history, after Katrina. The usual suspects will use information like this to argue that a bigger, stronger federal government is needed (a) to respond to natural disasters, and (b)…
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A Rising Tide Raises… Questions. Lots of Questions.
A new William & Mary Law School clinic will address prickly legal and policy questions arising from endemic flooding in Virginia’s vulnerable Tidewater lowlands. by James A. Bacon No one knows how fast the sea level off Virginia’s coast will rise by the end of the century. It could be more than a foot, if…
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The Madness of Building in Flood-Prone Areas
My skepticism of Global Warming alarmism is well documented on this blog. But being skeptical of chicken-little, the-world-is-going-to-end hysteria is very different from being skeptical of the fact that global temperatures are rising and so is the sea level along with it. We can argue how rapidly sea levels are rising but not the fact…
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Record Heat Wave? Not in Virginia.
The U.S. State Climate Extremes Committee established by the National Climatic Data Center has updated and refined its national database of climate extremes. Now anyone can conduct a Web search to find the dates of extreme climate records in their home state. The chart above shows the numbers for Virginia. Notice how the hot-weather extremes…