THE NEXT ICE AGE - NOW!

Deceptive reporting hides truth
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Written by Elaine Kurtenbach and entitled “Rising seas threaten Shanghai, other major cities,” the article “is one of an occasional series of stories leading up to December's climate conference in Copenhagen, reporting on the impact, future and responses to climate change.”

At least, that’s how the editor of the Seattle P-I puts it.

I think it would be better described as one in a series of propaganda articles.

The caption on the accompanying photo says that Shanghai “is among dozens of great world cities, including London, Miami, New York, New Orleans, Mumbai, Cairo, Amsterdam and Tokyo, threatened by sea levels that now are rising twice as fast as projected just a few years ago, expanding from warmth and meltwater.”

Photos and their captions, of course, are what people look at first, so putting this  photo caption together with the alarming title hammer the point home.

You have to read nine paragraphs – count ‘em, nine! – before you get to the truth.

Here’s what you see when you get to the tenth paragraph:

     “Chinese legend credits Emperor Yu the Great with taming floods in Neolithic
      times by dredging new river channels to absorb excess water. In modern times,
      the city has been sinking (italics added) for decades, thanks to pumping of
      groundwater and the construction of thousands of high-rise buildings.”

Did you catch that? The city is sinking. It has nothing to do with rising sea levels.

Trouble is that most people won't read that paragraph. Most people read only the first five paragraphs. Do you think the truth twisters know that?

The story continues:

     “Today, Shanghai's engineers are reinforcing flood gates and levees to contain
       rivers rising due to heavy silting and subsidence (italics added).”

The word subsidence means sinking. It has nothing to do with rising sea levels.

You have to wade through another 19 paragraphs to get to this gem:

     “Traces of former sea walls show that much of today's Shanghai, which sits
      between a flood basin and the sea, was under water or marshland until the
      7th or 8th century AD. Over thousands of years, ancient settlements expanded
      and withdrew as water levels ebbed and rose (italics added).”

In other words, sea-levels around Shanghai have been rising and falling for thousands of years, long before the Industrial Revolution.

The article also mentions in passing that “some Pacific islands, like tiny Tuvalu, are expecting complete inundation.”

I find this one particularly humorous, because measurements taken by Tuvalu’s official meteorological agency during the 1990s showed that sea levels around that tiny group of Pacific Islands were actually were declining - falling! - but Tuvalu somehow “lost” the records. (See Pacific Ocean - sea levels falling)

You tell me. Is this deceptive reporting?

See entire article, entitled “Rising seas threaten Shanghai, other major cities,”
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1104ap_as_climate_09_the_rising_seas.html
Thanks to Phil Brennan for this link