"This is consistent with historical analysis showing that, throughout the 20th century, there was a modest rise in global sea levels of about 20cm, or 1.7mm per year on average."

That's the whole of the 20th century. 20 cms. Global warming, solar flares, man made or not. 20 cms. This is entirely natural and over the span of the age of the earth, expected.

The Ree's Gov predictions of the demise of coastal NSW has more with the demise of the NSW ALP than scientific fact.

Geoff,

The article in SA was in my opinion overly optimistic in relying heavily on technologies that have yet to be commercially viable being deployed and economical. If this eventuates, then their scenario is valid, however, as many of these technologies have intrinsic barriers to success, I have serious doubts as follows:

Hot rocks requires huge volumes of fresh water to compensate for losses,
Wave generators generally are beaten to scrap by storms,
Solar power delivers power when demand is low.

The best so far is wind power, which is at best intermittent, requiring massive distribution networks for peak power whilst delivering about 33% of capacity on average.

As for storage, this in itself has several weaknesses:

1- No extra power is generated by the expenditure on storage,
2- All storage has losses i.e. 50% for Hydro and compressed air, etc for batteries. (this means that 2MW of generation and 1MW of storage is required for 1MW of delayed power)
3 Batteries have a finite life: 100 cycles for Lead acid if taken to near full drainage, and thus have a cost per cycle of use.

Having spent many years looking at energy storage for voltage mitigation in complex system, including even Commissioning a 3MW super conductive battery from NASA, I have a fascination of the subject and am keen for it to succeed.

The single most promising storage is the hot salt solar, and I am avidly following it, but there is a dearth of details (for commercial reasons I bet)

Unfortunately, what I see so far is significantly far from delivering what we need. My call for nuclear is not for a love of nuclear, it is simply that I see a long delay before renewables can step up to the plate, and I strongly feel we need to do something about AGW before it is too late.

I don't have time to get involved in this debate, but I can't help putting something in on the sea level rise. There were two sea level rise stories yesterday and I did a blog post on them. http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/003595.html.

It's rising much faster on the west coast. That was reported by the ABC. Both sides in this debate cherry pick. And everyone thinks measuring sea level height is a simple process, when it isn't. And before anyone jumps down my throat, I know I've simplified (but not over-simplified) in the blog post.

Yeah Cheryl, keep back pedaling. And perhaps next time don't fire off such simplistic statements. The story did say the global level has accelerated to 3.1 mm/year over the last decade or so, and that's a concern.

Graham Y, thanks for noting the alternative versions of the story. And you're right, estimating global sea level rise is not simple, there are local variations in many places that have to be accounted for. And you wouldn't generalise from Australian measurements to the world, which makes this discussion a bit pointless. I only joined it because Cheryl put out such a simple demand it was easy to meet it. Now of course she's allowing it's more complicated.

What frustrates me most about the argumentation around contentious issues like climate change on OLO is when people refuse to acknowledge when they are in error. It seems to me there's little point in continuing to try and debate such people.

Yes, both 'sides' tend to cherrypick facts, but the debate can go nowhere if people who are shown to be factually incorrect refuse to acknowledge it.

Yes, but Geoff we know there are some things that are wrong. Such as Al Gore's claims about sea rise (or Robin Williams who claimed a sea rise in excess of all the water in the world). I'd like to see him/them being jumped on in the same way that others making the reverse claims are jumped on. That the traffic is only one way from the "consensus" speaks volumes for me about the debate.