Climate Craziness of the Week: IPCC’s Pachauri claims 17cm of sea level rise made the Tsunami worse, but let’s check

From this article in The Hindu: (h/t to WUWT reader Adam Gallon)

“In the 20th century, sea-level rise was recorded at an average of 17 centimetres. If the sea-level was significantly lower, clearly the same tsunami would have had a less devastating effect. Therefore, sea-level rise is a kind of multiplier of the kinds of threats and negative impacts that will take place anyway,”

It seems to me that clearly Dr. Pachauri can’t mentally manage the concept of scale. Here’s the NOAA wave height graphic that was flashed around the world on news media shortly after the Tsunami Warning was issued, while the tsunami was still traveling across the Pacific:

Source: NOAA Center for Tsunami Research and NOAA Scientific Visualization Lab

Note the inset I added, now here’s that inset area magnified with the color key added and the 17cm Pachauri mentions marked:

Hmmm, for the people of Japan in the hardest hit areas, I don’t think it would matter much. But let’s compare the numbers and find out.

We can describe it another way in the scale of familiar human experience. Wiki gives this 2006 value for the average height of the Japanese people, the left figure is male, the right is female:

Let’s look at some other things:

Bonsai trees reach an average height of two feet (61cm)

From Wiki, the height of the sea wall at the Fukushima reactor site:

“The plant was protected by a sea wall and designed to withstand a tsunami of 5.7 [570cm] meters…”

The actual height of the Tsunami wave there:

…but the tsunami had a height of about 14 meters [1400 cm] and topped this sea wall

OK let’s make some scale imagery to help visualize these values:

Now let’s insert the image above into the image which shows the height of the Tsunami as reported at the Fukushima reactor complex:

Click the above image to present it at the actual 1 pixel = 1 centimeter scale on your monitor.

That 17 centimeters that Dr. Pachauri speaks of makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

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http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/23/climate-craziness-of-the-week-ipccs-pachauri-claims-17cm-of-sea-level-rise-made-the-tsunami-worse/

Bonsai trees reach an average height of two feet 

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