From Watts Up With That?
Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 17 January 2024
Don’t you love it when new words are introduced into the language? I do, especially when the inventor of a new word is Google Translate.
This issue is raised by tangentially by Dr. Judith Hubbard [ @JudithGeology ] in a Xweet (pronounced ‘sweet’?) here:
The word “landification” doesn’t exist in English, but appears on this Google-translated webpage (from Japanese).
Long-time readers will know how fussy I can be: I checked to make sure that it was Google Translate that made up the word. If you are as fussy as I am, compare these two versions: Google Translate version of the Japanese page with the English version provided by the publisher. The English page uses the phrase “Land emergence”. We’ll save this little incident for a future essay on the wide latitude accepted when dealing with the alleged intellectual value of an AI that hallucinates and ”makes stuff up”.
The topic is brought up by the inestimable Roger Pielke Jr. who is one of the few climate scientists that straddles the line between the Climate Crisis crowd and the Climate Realist crowd, at least when seen in the public arena. “Love ‘im or hate ‘im”, he is a very effective communicator with a huge presence and broad influence. The more often he speaks out, the closer he moves towards the Climate Realism corner—my corner—of the climate debate triangle.
Triangle? Yes, the Climate Debate TriangleTM — the Climate Crisis crowd in one corner, the Climate Skeptics in another, and the Climate Realists in the third. I prefer the triangle view to the two-pole view and think it reflects the ongoing differences of opinion and viewpoint far better. However, you may prefer to see it as a square, if you want to include (who knows why…) the Climate Crazies (these are the “edgers”, those way out on the edges of their respective viewpoints, such as “We are all doomed, five years left, the Earth is on fire, give up and die!” sliding down to “The whole thing is an utter hoax, there has been no warming and never will be!”. The total range of opinions is galactic in scale.
So, Landification? “the emergence of new land area.”
In the Climate Crisis world, only land-loss is considered. Land which is being eroded away by the ongoing dynamics between the waters and the dry land at the edges of the seas, rivers and lakes. Of course, this includes dry land that is being covered by water as the surface levels of various bodies of water – seas, oceans – rise. We are all familiar with the usual suspects: Low Lying Islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans or the disappearing deltas of great rivers that have been channelized. Even lesser erosion losses have been blamed on climate change, such as that of villages built on river bends in Alaska.
The other side of the coin is “land emergence” — or the gaining of dry land. How does this happen? Ask a geologist. Continental masses rise up, coral islands and reefs accrete (gain) sand and expand their shores, oceanic volcanoes grow and poke their heads above the waters and river deltas build up through deposition sediment washed down by the water.
Pielke Jr. dives into the question based on the paper noted in Dr. Hubbard’s xweet: “Coastline change caused by the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake detected by ALOS-2 SAR satellite image (Jan. 4, 2024)” [ original Japanese version here ]. Asking: “What are long-term trends in global landification?
In the process, Pielke Jr. exposed a bit of pure-evil NASA propaganda aimed at the youngest of our children, the subject of my OpEd the other day.
But what is this whole thing about Land Emergence? Is it real? Is there more land today than 20 or 50 or 100 years ago? Really? We know sea levels have risen anywhere between 8 and 12 inches over the last century. That must have reduced the amount of dry land. Yes? No?
The research question of the Japanese-led study was coastline change caused by the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake. The earthquake happened on New Year’s Day 2024, and the paper was published before 12 January 2024. Marvelous rapid research starting with posing an important question through collecting relevant information, collating and writing up that information in a scientifically useful way followed by bi-lingual publication – all in less than two weeks — under the auspices of the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan. The paper is almost entirely comprised of before and after satellite photos of the shorelines affected.
It concludes “The shoreline shifted seaward approximately 200 m at most.” That’s a lot of new land.
Is this the only study about land emergence? No.
Yongjing . Mao et al (2021) explored the use of Google Earth to determine changes in land area at high tide on coasts, helping to eliminate the confusion that can be caused by large-area tidal flats.
Nienhuis et al. (2020) — “Global-scale human impact on delta morphology has led to net land area gain” — studied river deltas and found “Here we show how the morphology of about 11,000 coastal deltas worldwide, ranging from small bayhead deltas to mega-deltas, has been affected by river damming and deforestation. We introduce a model that shows that present-day delta morphology varies across a continuum between wave (about 80 per cent), tide (around 10 per cent) and river (about 10 per cent) dominance, but that most large deltas are tide- and river-dominated. Over the past 30 years, despite sea-level rise, deltas globally have experienced a net land gain of 54 ± 12 square kilometres per year (2 standard deviations), with the largest 1 per cent of deltas being responsible for 30 per cent of all net land area gains.” And that’s another additional 1620 km2 of land surface.
In Southeast Asia, Anthony et al. (2015) found evidence that various human activities have adversely affected land area of the Mekong Delta through “(1) a reported significant decrease in coastal surface suspended sediment from the Mekong that may be linked to dam retention of its sediment, (2) large-scale commercial sand mining in the river and delta channels and (3) subsidence due to groundwater extraction” resulting a loss of land area.
You may recall studies finding similar results about the U.S.’s Mississippi Delta covered in posts here at WUWT.
Holdaway et al. (2021) — “Global-scale changes in the area of atoll islands during the 21st century“ — found “As a result, the global response of atoll islands coincident with sea level rise remains uncertain. Using rich collections of Landsat imagery, this study analyses changes in land area on 221 atolls in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Results show that, between 2000 and 2017, the total land area on these atolls has increased by 61.74 km2 (6.1 %) from 1007.60 km2 to 1069.35 km2. Most of the change in land area resulted from island building within the Maldives and on atolls in the South China Sea. Since 2000, the Maldives have added 37.50 km2 of land area, while 16.57 km2 of new islands have appeared within the South China Seas Spratly and Paracel chains.”
Webin Shen et al. (2015) — “Evidences of the expanding Earth from space-geodetic data over solid land and sea level rise in recent two decades” — claims to have found that the Earth itself is expanding at a combined (land and ocean) rate of “0.35 ± 0.47 mm/a in recent two decades.” [Note: I have very little faith in the results of this particular study, as it was performed in an openly stated attempt to justify satellite calculated SLR of 3.4 mm/yr when in-situ physically-measured SLR is approximately 2 mm/yr — kh] They may be right in their finding that the Earth is expanding ever so slightly, which would result in more land area.
Donchyts et al. (2016) — “Earth’s surface water change over the past 30 years“ — came to the conclusion that “Earth’s surface gained 115,000 km2 of water and 173,000 km2 of land over the past 30 years, including 20,135 km2 of water and 33,700 km2 of land in coastal areas.”
I have studied and written a great deal about sea levels, their rise and fall, and the impacts these might have in general and on specific locations. On the whole, I agree with Pielke Jr. on this:
“Sea level rise is important to coastal management. Of this, there is no doubt — it will continue, regardless of what changes are made to energy policies. Sea level rise will cause impacts around the world and require adaptation regardless what is done on global energy policies. …. At the same time, the consequences of sea level rise for coasts around the world is not as simple as rising seas inexorably encroaching upon static land. Human influences such as sedimentation and reclamation make a big difference on outcomes. So too do natural processes of erosion and deposition.”
Bottom Lines:
1. The consensus view, regardless of the contention regarding the rate of rise, that rising sea levels will simply continue to submerge land under the sea and cause land loss through eroding land edges is not factual and is not supported by physical evidence.
2. The Earth is gaining land area despite rising sea levels.
3. Yet again, the physical evidence is counter-intuitive [contrary to intuition or to common-sense expectation (but often nevertheless true)] and once more runs contrary to the general worldview presented by the IPCC and its acolytes.
4. The points above do not obviate the fact that many low-lying cities have been built in harm’s way, built on ephemeral sand bars, in danger of massive destruction by hurricane winds and storm surge, and others are in danger of simple being flooded even by the slow gradual rising sea levels of the last century. These areas, with Miami, Florida as a good example, need to begin adaptation and mitigation efforts yesterday (actually, they should have begun decades ago).
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Author’s Note:
Seeing every issue as black-or-white is a very serious cognitive error. Almost nothing, even some moral issues, are almost never so clear cut.
The seas are rising. The non-linear dynamical interactions of the atmosphere-ocean coupled system means that there will be storms – some of them unimaginably powerful. This is unavoidable – Lorentz demonstrated this in the 1960s. We do our societies harm if we ignore this.
But, the fact of rising seas does not mean “millions are going to eventually drown”. That is a bizarre-world pronouncement of the Climate Crazies, like those who show maps of the calculated sea levels “if all the ice in Greenland were to melt”.
I wrote a chapter on sea level rise for the CLINTEL publication: The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC. (also here) Chapter 5: Accelerated Sea Level Rise: Not So Fast. In it, I show that the IPCC-consensus view is not supported by physical measurements of the actual levels of the sea surface where it hits the land. Sea levels are rising, but they are not accelerating, not rising faster or slower.
And, the Earth is gaining land area, not losing it.
Thanks for reading.