The Expansionist

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Eroding Reality. I watched with disgust as Bob Woodruff of ABC News asserted today, in knowing falsehood, that an Amerindian tribe is being forced to evacuate a small Louisiana island because it is being destroyed by a rising sea level produced by global warming. In the video, tho not in the text version that also appears on the ABC News website, Woodruff expressly asks the tribe's chief what is happening:

Woodruff: Is the water rising or just spreading out over the land?

Chief Albert Naquin: It's spreading. This used to be real narrow.

In Woodruff's closing summary of that story, however, he claimed the island was being submerged by rising seas. Nowhere did he produce so much as one iota of science to support that assertion.
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I wanted to email him directly to reproach him for his fraudulent misrepresentation, but couldn't find an email address. So I'll make this an open letter to him and his bosses at ABC.

Mr. Woodruff:

You willfully misstated the facts in your report on Amerindians who have to move from southern Louisiana, as their being forced out by climate change and rising seas. Within the report itself, the chief you spoke with expressly rejected your assertion.

What has really happened is that southern Louisiana was, geologically, formerly part of the Mississippi Delta, land created by the regular flooding of the Mississippi out of its banks and far out into first the ocean and then the low wetlands that regular deposition of Mississippi silt had theretofore produced. But then people canalized the Mississippi, hemming it in with levees. That ended the deposition of silt away from the axis of the river, instead out directly into the Gulf of Mexico. The Delta, to the extent it is growing at all now, does so only at the terminus of the river. Everywhere else, the former Delta is being washed into the sea by EROSION. There was always erosion, but it was overbalanced in prior eras by deposition. Now there's no deposition, only erosion, so of course the land, which was formed by lite silts, is washing away. It would do so if sea level remained the same or even fell, and whether the climate were getting warmer, getting colder, or staying the same. YOU LIED, and I have lost all respect for you.

It is this kind of arrant distortion of reality that has produced the public misunderstanding that somehow human activity is producing climate change that in turn is producing dire consequences for humanity. But it's all lies.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,367 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

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