Five Major US cities will be 100% Flooded by 2100
Miami, New Orleans, Galveston, Norfolk, and Atlantic City will be 100% under the waves by 2100, according Emeritus Professor Jim Flynn in his book No Place to Hide – Climate Change, A short introduction for New Zealanders. Flynn also predicts that eight other US cities will be at least 50% flooded with an 8-metre (26.2 feet) sea level rise due to ice melt and thermal expansion of the oceans.
Should we be alarmed? The
answer to that will become self-evident. First, let’s look at the professor and
why he wrote No Place to Hide.
Here is the blurb from the
back cover of the book:
Millions of educated people all over the world feel
powerless in the face of climate change and its consequences, partially because
the literature on the environment is so vast it is difficult to know where to
begin. This short book is intended to make their search for the truth
manageable. It allows the reader to isolate the crucial issues and form his or
her own opinion, and while it addresses a world audience it has a particular
relevance for New Zealanders.
Its strongest claim is that there are really two kinds
of skeptics we must rebut: not just climate change deniers but also climate
change engineering deniers. The latter acknowledge the problem of climate
change but deny the need for large-scale engineering intervention in Earth’s
climatic system.
In No Place to Hide, Professor
Flynn argues that we must face the fact that climate engineering is necessary to
buy the time to achieve carbon-free energy, and unless this is implemented
soon, we will pass a point of no return. We need proposals that governments
around the world can accept without committing political suicide.
No Place to Hide is a short but enormously important
book that will give the reader the information they need to make a difference.
Then below the blurb a little
about the professor:
Jim Flynn is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the
University of Otago, an Honorary Doctor of Science, recipient of the Gold Medal
for Distinguished Career Research, and a fellow of the Royal Society of New
Zealand. In 2011, Jim was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Humanities
Aronui Medal for his outstanding work in political philosophy and his discovery
of historical gains in IQ – known as the Flynn effect. Recently, Jim realized that
he had no educated opinion about the chief moral psychological problem of our
time, global warming, and felt disadvantaged – hence this book.
Reading the blurb and flicking
through the pages in the bookshop left questions unanswered. Why did the
professor claim to have no educated understanding of climate change while
calling it the most important issue of our time? Why, after including many
accepted historical facts about climate in the book, did he arrive at
conclusions that were not consistent with those facts? Did the Professor of
Politics fall victim to the greatest political trap known to man in the mindset
known as confirmation bias, where the believer believes what he wants to
believe and all else is false?
The book was purchased without
further hesitation. I had to know the answers to the questions.
The first 25 pages of No
Place to Hide gave an accurate summary of the history of Earth’s climate,
and how it has changed naturally over hundreds of millions of years, how it is
a complex, chaotic, but self-regulating system, but the next 60 pages are
devoted to drawing fantasy conclusions from the factual evidence, and
stunningly so. I asked myself, was it me who was the victim of confirmation bias
but remembered that I had once been a climate alarmist who thought that the
planet was headed for disaster. Two things changed my mind; the predictions of
climate doom were failing to materialize, and my knowledge of meteorology,
politics, and history jolted me back to reality. There was also a third good reason for not
being alarmed about global warming. It is generally assumed by alarmists that a
warmer climate will be bad for man and the planet, but that is a flawed
assumption. We should all know that a warmer climate is generally better than a
colder climate. A warmer climate means more food, less sickness and disease,
and fewer people dying of cold. Of all the features of the planet’s surface,
snow, ice, and desert are the three most useless features, while the tropics
have an abundance of life in all its forms. I had to know what drove Jim Flynn
to the conclusions found in his book, so I did some research on him.
Jim Flynn is famous for having
discovered the Flynn effect. He discovered that man is becoming progressively
more intelligent, and that we are each generally more intelligent than our
grandparents. But hold on a moment, Jim. Do we really need a university
professor to tell us that our ability to reason has been expanding ever since
our most ancient ancestors crawled from the sea billions of years ago? Please,
Professor, tell us something new and intelligent.
Flynn describes himself as an atheist,
science realist, and social democrat. But putting God aside, science realist
and social democrat raise questions here about whether he does in fact tend
towards confirmation bias. According to Britannica, social democracy is a political ideology that originally
advocated a peaceful evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to
socialism using established political processes. In the second half of the 20th
century, there emerged a more moderate version of the doctrine, which generally
espoused state regulation, rather than state ownership. However, Jim Flynn
appears to be still locked onto the earlier shackles of state ownership and
control, and one of a growing number of extreme-left hard-liners who see the
United Nations, not as a vehicle for international co-operation, but
international control.
As a ‘science realist’ he fails to make a realistic connection between
climate history and his predictions for the future. Flynn makes many erroneous assumptions
about how a warmer climate would affect the planet. Like many climate
alarmists, his claims of wilder weather events, larger deserts, and outrageous
sea-level predictions, points of no return (or tipping points) are not borne
out by real science. A warmer climate would see more rainfall as the tropics
extend their reach into the current temperate zones with increased evaporation
from the seas. The tropical zones, like the Amazon region, already have an
abundance of tropical growth and food. A warmer climate will not turn the
Amazon basin into a desert, and there is no science to support that.
While the first part of No Place to Hide is well-researched and
written, it fails to join the dots between the past and the future. It finishes
as a limp left-wing plea to trust us; we know what is best for the world. But
unfortunately, Jim Flynn’s climate flea is somewhat smaller than his political
dogma.
Published in 2016, some of the predictions for 2020 have already failed
and others in the short term are looking impossible to meet. The climate
engineering proposals are equally ludicrous, with mirrors in the sky reflecting
the heat back to the Sun, pumping the cold sea floor waters to the surface and
the warm surface water down, pumping liquid sulphur dioxide into the
stratosphere, and fleets of ships spraying sea salt into the sky to make the clouds
brighter to reflect the incoming heat. These whacky ideas in the sky are just
pie in the sky, and talking of pie, thanks to industrialization, a slightly
warmer climate and more carbon dioxide, a larger proportion of the world
population is now getting a bigger slice of the economic pie.
No Place to Hide is not a book to be taken seriously, but if I were its author,
I’d have reason to be seriously looking for somewhere to hide.
