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?

Note to other bloggers: feel free to use these graphics under “fair use” terms, but please provide a link back to this article at:

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 

View the original article here

Spending chief in charge of protecting the public purse claims £4,000 for one-minute walk

By Rebecca Evans

The man whose job is to ‘protect the public purse’ claims a travel allowance of £4,000 a year for a daily one-minute walk from his hotel to office.

Eugene Sullivan, the £180,000-a-year chief executive of the Audit Commission, also spends £18,000 of taxpayers’ money each year staying in the luxury hotel.

The 62-year-old receives £5,000 a year for train fares, taxis and car mileage, on top of his £4,070 travel allowance.

Each week, Mr Sullivan spends three nights at the £160-a-night Westminster Mint Hotel that is only 164 yards from his office at Millbank Tower.

At weekends, he travels back to his £500,000 family home in Ilkley, West Yorkshire.  Mr Sullivan, who was promoted internally from the post of managing director, has basic pay of £165,004.  This is topped up by an £18,000 ‘additional responsibility allowance’ and £43,704 in pension contributions.  His total package comes to more than £250,000.

[more...]

Bill Bard says:

Greedy rip off bastards.  We know there are many more doing the same thing.

View the original article here