Scare Tactics

New York City Mayor Bloomberg spent $30 million of taxpayer money to fund a study of the impacts of global warming on the city.

To say that this study takes a more extreme position on climate change and its effects is an understatement.

It's like the IPCC report on steroids, and that report was seriously flawed.

The Daily News reports:

New York will be hotter, rainier and more likely to flood in the coming decades - with sea levels possibly rising more than four feet, a panel of scientists said Tuesday -

"All of the evidence from the science community is that the seas are going to rise," said Mayor Bloomberg as he unveiled the panel's report.

"It's pretty hard to not understand something's going on, very worrisome and scary, on this planet.

"The planet is changing, and we have to do what we can to make sure we can accommodate it," he added. "Did we, 10 years ago, think about water rising?

"Only a few people talked about it, and it was considered a communist plot. So by that standard, I suppose we have made some progress."

Academic experts and insurance executives on the panel concluded that average temperatures could rise up to 7.5 degrees by 2080, rainfall could increase by 10% and sea levels will rise two feet.

Some studies predict the polar ice caps will melt much more quickly, which could raise New York's sea level by 55 inches by the 2080s - more than 4-1/2 feet.

That likely means heavier and more frequent flooding from rainstorms and coastal flooding, the panel concluded, as well as heavier demands on all city infrastructure from electric power to sewers.

Weather experts say New York is due for a hurricane, and the city's Office of Emergency Management has drawn up evacuation plans that assume huge swaths of lower Manhattan and low-lying areas of the outer boroughs will be underwater during a moderate hurricane.

If you cherry pick your data and choose only the most extreme outcomes, you can say whatever you want. That's exactly what's happened here. The IPCC report didn't even produce as extreme results.

Now, note how many people involved in setting up that infamous report were climatologists: 20%. That's right folks, 80% of the hundreds of scientists involved were not climatologists. Many weren't even scientists at all and had no dealing with climate at all in their academic endeavors. The head was an economist, which was really the goal of that endeavor in the first place - it was to lay the groundwork for economic changes and redistribution of wealth through taxing carbon emissions.

Now, there are real concerns about hurricanes in the New York metro area. The region has been largely spared a devastating hurricane for decades, and it's a matter of time before such a storm comes ashore here. The Long Island Express did tremendous damage in 1930 - well before the notion of global warming - and such storms had happened in the past. They will happen again - without the scaremongering of global warming.

It is a good idea for localities to prepare for such occurrences, but Bloomberg's efforts aren't just to get emergency management to prepare for these scenarios, but to demand urgent economic and social policy changes.