Pres. Obama warned Thursday that a quarter of homes in his home state of Hawaii and one in five in Sec. of State John Kerry’s hometown of Boston are at risk from rising sea levels caused by climate change.
In a speech at the U.S. State Department, Obama issued his dire prediction:
“As oceans warm and sea levels rise, our lives and livelihoods are likely to change, too. Homes becoming uninhabitable. Floods devastating communities. Crops withering. Industries like fishing disrupted. Cultures that have coexisted with the ocean for millennia are forced to flee to higher ground.
“This is not a far-off problem; it’s happening as we speak. It’s happening here in America. By the end of this century, nearly one in five homes in John’s hometown of Boston could be at risk -- the same for a quarter of the homes of my childhood home of Hawaii.”
The situation has become so grave that he and Kerry actually discuss in the White House’s Situation Room, Obama said:
“I am obviously grateful to John Kerry for a whole host of reasons. But one thing that we all owe to John is his conviction that a healthier ocean and a healthier planet are about more than just our environment; they are also vital to our foreign policy and to our national security. So he has elevated the profile of climate change, ocean protection to the point where we have conversations about this not just in the Oval Office, but in the Situation Room. And that is critical in helping us mobilize all of government around the issues that all of you care so deeply about.”
Obama did not mention that the Earth’s surface has actually gained 22,393 miles of land mass, including 13,000 miles in coastal areas. And, as CNSNews.com reports, four recent peer-reviewed studies show “no observable” effect from man-made global warming on sea levels:
Four peer-reviewed scientific studies found “no observable sea-level effect of anthropogenic global warming.”
The Earth’s coasts actually gained land over the past 30 years, according to another study published August 25 in Nature Climate Change.
Researchers led by Gennadii Donchyts from the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands found that the Earth’s surface gained a total of 58,000 square kilometers (22,393 square miles) of land over the past 30 years, including 33,700 sq. km. (13,000 sq. mi.) in coastal areas.
“We expected that the coast would start to retreat due to sea level rise, but the most surprising thing is that the coasts are growing all over the world,” study co-author Fedor Baart told the BBC.