Maybe I shouldn’t read The Seattle Times anymore.
Over the past weeks, there have been a number of climate-related stories and views/cartoons that have beensimply wrong. Eliminate factual errors or exaggerate/exaggerate the effects of global warming.
And there are dozens of additional examples of serious flaws in Seattle Times climate articles over the years, some of which have been discussed in this blog. The press should convey the truth, not support a certain political point of view.
The citizens of a democracy must be well informed on the important issues of the day, in which the press plays an important role. As shown below, the Seattle Times is failing in its responsibility.
Worse still, the Times has suppressed information that contradicts its problematic information.
Let me provide some recent examples.
Is Climate Change Overwhelming the Quinault Country on the Central Coast of Washington?
It started with an article on how the Fed provided funds to move Quilayute Village off the coast because of climate change: ST blamed rising sea levels and stronger storms from global warming to the cause. core.
The article is quite specific about this:
And the Seattle Times doesn’t stop there. David Horsey, the Seattle Times cartoonist editor, has a “Climate Carol”. Nearly all are wrong.
And he makes a claim to the village of Quinault. Oceans are rising and coasts are sinking due to climate change. And there are storms that get bigger and bigger.
Problem? None of this is true. And it can be PROVED to be untrue.
Let’s start with the claims that hurricanes on the Washington Coast have increased. This is not the truth. For illustration below is a graph of annual maximum sustained winds (in blue) and gusts (red line) on the Washington Coast over the past 50 years. There is no long-term trend.
The same is true for other parameters (like the lowest pressure on the coast). Hurricanes Are Not Getting More Powerful The UW Climate Impact Team examined regional climate models for the coming century (link here) and found no increase in hurricanes in our area:
What about claims of rising sea levels on the Washington Coast due to global warming?
Well, turns out the sea level is not rising because the land is rising! Yes, sea levels are slowly rising as the earth warms. But if land rises, the actual water level on the coast may stay the same or decrease.
Washington’s coastal terrain is UP, with sea level DOWN or steady.
There are two reasons for this. One has to do with the deep ice covering the northern Olympic peninsula, pushing the mainland down. When the glaciers melted about 16,000 years ago, the ground began to recover again. And it’s still recovering.
Along the coast, another geological feature is contributing to the uplift of coastal land: subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate under the North American plate (see figure). When the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is pushed downward, the coastal land is lifted.
In fact, using very sophisticated measurements derived from GPS, the Pacific Northwest Geodetic Plate has found that the area around the coastal village of Quinault in question is increasing by about 2 mm per year (see below).
Based on satellite altimeter, sea level rise offshore approximately 2 mm per year (see results from 1993-2020 below). Again, global warming is contributing to this.
Based on this information, you wouldn’t expect sea levels to rise along our coasts because the land is rising. But check out the data from NOAA.
Neah Bay, on the northwest side of the Olympic Peninsula, has a 1.74 mm drop in sea level a year. The uncertainty is small compared to the trend (+-.27 mm/year)
Astoria also has sea level declines, but much less (0.16 mm a year) and greater uncertainty than trends.
Toke Point, near Westport, has a much shorter track record (starting in the mid 70’s). Nominally, it shows a small uptrend (0.38 mm a year), but the uncertainty is large (twice the trend). The problem with such a short record is that the trend will change with a slightly different starting date). For example, starting around 1980 there was basically no trend.
The bottom line in all of this is that the Seattle Times claim that global warming is causing more flooding in the coastal village of Quinault is clearly bogus.. Sea levels do not rise much at the coast (and decrease in many locations), and the storms that will push water to the coast do not.
In another blog, I’ll describe the factual errors in another recent Seattle Times article, claiming that global warming is causing a “tipping point.” for the Western Red Cedars. You will be stunned by the sloppy way of writing.
The Seattle Times Moderates Conflicting Opinions.
This is probably the first “Twitter file” for the Seattle Times’ climate news. On some of their problematic articles, I sometimes leave comments, providing information about the current state of scientific knowledge. I have published more than 150 articles, many on Northwest weather and climate.
Imagine how surprised I was to learn that The Seattle Times removed all of my comments from all articles and froze my ability to leave anymore. Below is the message. They accused me of providing misinformation about climate change.
I oppose this obvious ploy to silence differing views and ask for a single example of me making scientific errors. Cricket. I ended up emailing the Seattle Times management and that resulted in them reversing the decision.
David Horsey is constantly editing climate cartoons. The Seattle Times wasn’t happy about people’s comments about his “work” and now they ban comments. Here is their message:
You must feel sorry for the Seattle Times. Because it took so long to moderate/moderate comments on Horsey’s work, they killed the ability to leave comments.
I learned a lot about the Seattle Times’ censorship of opinions, with their article Changing the Sea in 2012. They claimed that increased CO2 was killing baby oysters in home facilities. machine. That’s not true and the oyster business has been doing pretty well over the past decade. But I criticized their science in a blog at the time and they stopped talking to me after that.
The strange thing is that I used to have a very close relationship with the Seattle Times when they were interested in the truth. When they have dedicated science journalists like Hill Williams and Dedtra Henderson. They want to get the truth right. But everything changed in the newspaper.
Either way, the decline in scientific coverage and the shift in favor of climate change at the Seattle Times isn’t in anyone’s best interest, especially the Times. They are misinforming the public. Global warming is a serious problem that requires facts and science-based responses.
