Republican lawmaker: Rocks tumbling into ocean causing sea level rise

[hollodero]

(05-18-2018, 09:16 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I wish there was someone there that could've pulled up a whiteboard and worked out the math for the mass of land required to fall into the ocean to raise the sea level by one inch.

Quote:How large would the volume of these rocks have to be to explain sea level rise? Washington Post reporter Philip Bump did the math. With an estimated sea level rise of 3.3 mm per year spread across an estimated surface area of 362 million square kilometers (140 million square miles) of ocean, that's a total volume of about 1.2 trillion cubic meters (42.3 trillion cubic feet) of water. To displace that much water, you'd need to drop that same volume of rocks into the ocean.

That amount of matter is equivalent to "a sphere of earth a bit over 8 miles [12.8 km] in diameter," Bump wrote. "If the sphere were stone, it would weigh about 6.6 quadrillion lbs. [3 quadrillion kilograms]."

Drop that much stone into the ocean once a year — every year — and, yes, you could see the annual sea level rise scientists have reported.

So, are Earth's coastlines losing 6 and a half quadrillion lbs. of stuff to the sea every year? That's highly unlikely. To put it in terms of one of Brooks' own examples, the Cliffs of Dover dumped an estimated 100 million lbs (45 million kilograms) of chalk into the sea after a sudden collapse last year, the BBC reported. That's a lot of chalk — but avalanches like that would have to happen 66 million times every year (or 180,000 times a day) in order to raise the entire sea level by 3.3 mm.

Brooks wasn't wrong for suggesting a link between erosion and sea level rise, though. Numerous studies have observed a connection between the two forces, just not the in the way Brooks proposed: Rising sea levels are definitely resulting in more and more coastal erosion, the literature says — not the other way around.

https://www.livescience.com/62613-erosion-causes-sea-level-rise-mo-brooks.html


...so, that whole thing of course ranks right among the guy who brought the snowball to congress, or the one who claimed global wobbling is an issue nefariously neglected by science, or the guy who used ice cubes in a glass of water to prove melting ice can't rise sea levels.

Just making up stuff to disprove scientists for ideological reasons and banking on enough people believing you out of very similar reasons is one of the more annoying traits of some US politicians. No major party elsewhere in the advanced world sails on that ship any more.