Among the most terrifying scare tactics used by climate-change alarmists is to spread the notion that coastal cities are in imminent danger of being drowned by quickly rising sea levels. But a new study shows that, despite modest sea-level rise over the last century, satellite data is showing that, globally, coastlines seem to be expanding instead of retreating.
“Prograding” is the scientific term for when a coastline advances toward the sea as a result of the accumulation of waterborne sediment, and that seems to be what is occurring. Satellite data compiled from 1984 to 2019 from the Landsat Series appear to show that, globally, coastlines are expanding at a rate of +0.26 meters/year.
Researchers at the University of Queensland’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences in Brisbane, Australia, admit that there’s more work to do in order to validate their research, but they believe that their method shows great promise in exposing actual threats to coastlines, as opposed to ones made up by the global-warming zealots.
“Although it requires further validation, the global application of our method demonstrates the significance of this approach in identifying potential threats to coastal zones, especially in complex tide-dominated environments, which can facilitate effective coastal management,” the research team explained in their abstract of the study.
“In general, we found that accretion is the dominant trend over erosion across the world, suggested by the percentage of accretion/erosion along each latitude and longitude as well as the statistics for each continent. The globally averaged shoreline change is about 0.26m/year, which is slightly larger than zero, and suggests the global coastline is prograding,” the study says.
The researchers studied high-resolution satellite images beginning from 1984 until 2019 and found, for the most part, global coastlines are expanding — not retreating as climate hysterics would have you believe.
The numbers aren’t very big, but they do show a net expansion. According to the researchers, Australia’s coastlines are expanding at a rate of 0.10 meters/year, Asian coastlines are expanding at a rate of 0.64 meters/year, Europe’s coastlines are growing at a rate of 0.45 meters/year, and Africa’s coastlines are expanding at 0.31 m/year.
One continent appears to be receding slightly — but, again, the numbers are extremely small. North America lost 0.29 m/year over the time frame observed. South America showed no noticeable change at 0.0 meters per year.
It’s more affirmation of several studies that show terra firma may not be in quite as much danger from sea-level rise as climate hysterics are claiming.
A 2018 study from the University of Auckland showed that the tiny island nation of Tuvalu, which was featured in carbon-credit salesman Al Gore’s science-fiction film An Inconvenient Truth as a near-certain victim of sea-level rise, had actually grown by approximately 73 hectares (just over 180 acres) between 1971 and 2014.
Yet another study released earlier this year from University of Auckland researchers showed that the lowest-lying nation on Earth, the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, had actually expanded by more than six percent between 2000-2017.
Climate-change hysterics always depend upon predictions of future calamity in their bid to completely change the world. When they’re wrong — as they generally are — they simply shrug, refuse to acknowledge their mistake, and kick the can down the road a few decades.
When the speculative science of climate change meets the real world of observational science, the climate doomsayers tend to lose the argument that they pretend doesn’t exist.
