Promise Kept – Planet Healer Obama Calls It: In 2008, he declared his presidency would result in ‘the rise of the oceans beginning to slow’ — And By 2011, Sea Level Drops!

[Update: 8-31-12: Sea level rise did indeed slow, right after Obama’s election’ ]

President Barack Obama can take a bow. As Obama struggles with poor polling numbers, persistent high unemployment, the possibly of a primary challenge within his own party and a stagnant economy saddled with massive deficits and debts, one area where he can claim success is his prediction that he would slow sea level rise.

Obama — in similar fashion to baseball legend Babe Ruth calling his home run during the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series — called it successfully on sea level rise.

Obama declared in a June 8, 2008 speech, that his presidency will be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Obama’s prognostication occurred during his victory speech in St. Paul for the Democratic Party nomination.

Climate Depot can now announce it is official. Earlier this month, the European Space Agency’s Envisat monitoring, global sea level revealed a “two year long decline [in sea level] was continuing, at a rate of 5mm per year.”

In August 2011, NASA announced that global sea level was dropping and was “a quarter of an inch lower than last summer.” See: NASA: ‘Global sea level this summer is a quarter of an inch lower than last summer’

The global drop in sea level followed NASA’s announcement that sea level around the U.S. was declining in February 2011.

Most surprising, despite the fact that Obama said he would only “slow” the rise of the oceans, his presidency has presided over what some scientists are terming an “historic decline” in global sea levels. Obama appears to have underestimated his own powers to alter sea level.

Even more impressive for President Obama is the fact that just six months into his presidency, sea level started its historic reversal. In July 2009, sea level was already showing a “slowdown and was “still flattening.” See: Sea Level Rise: An Update Shows a Slowdown & See: Global Sea Level Updated at UC – still flattening’

President Obama’s success in lowering sea level has not gone unnoticed. The skeptical website Real Science, made sarcastic note of Obama’s “healing of the climate” and his sea level accomplishment on June 3, 2011.

“No hurricanes have struck the US since Obama became president, temperatures and sea level have

‘Report is worse than fiction, it is a lie!’ — Climate expert rejects claim of 300,000 climate deaths as ‘methodological embarrassment’ – ‘Absurd’

Roger Pielke Jr. May 29, 2009 Excerpt: The new report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum which makes the absurd claim that 315,000 deaths a year can be attributed to the effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment” because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable regions. […]

It is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed. […]

The report is worse than fiction, it is a lie. These are strong words I know. […] Let me first start by noting that the same group that did the analysis for the UN, the Geo-Risks group in Munich Re, earlier this year published a peer-reviewed paper arguing that the signal of human-caused climate change could not presently be seen in the loss data on disasters.

For Pielke Jr.’s complete analysis see here:

More Reaction to 300,000 climate death claim:

Columnist on claim of 300,000 deaths: ‘For $40 billion, even I might be tempted to peddle such despicable nonsense’

‘Simplistic disaster storyline will prevail for some time’

‘Dishonesty’: ‘Just transfers deaths by storms to the ‘global warming’ category’

Update: Kofi Annan defends: 300,000 climate death claim ‘could never be as rigorous as a scientific study’ – Excerpt: ‘We feel it is the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change today’

NY Times: ‘There are significant questions about robustness of numbers at heart of ‘ claim of 300,000 climate deaths – Excerpt: ‘Nearly impossible to isolate contribution from human-induced climate change to mortality from disasters’

‘There are simply no words to describe the lunacy’

Not The First False Claim About 300,000 Deaths

300,000 death claim is ‘poster child for how to lie with statistics’