The same things are happening as before, for the same known reasons. But now we must allude to climate change.

From an article in the Smithsonian, recommending the best science books of the year.

Click to enlarge.

The book is Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island recommended by Marjorie Hunt, folklorist and curator, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

The text above is:

This excellent book vividly captures the traditional ways of life and work of the watermen of Tangier Island, Virginia, and the dire threat posed to the Island's existence by climate change as the waters of the Chesapeake Bay continue to rise and land disappears at an alarming rate. As someone who has conducted fieldwork with watermen on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland, I am captivated and moved by this meticulously reported, beautifully written and compassionate story of the intricate interconnections between people, place, history, and nature.

Just one of the dozens of instances I come across almost daily where some already occurring event is lazily linked to climate change, not because there is an actual causal relationship with climate change, but because it is the trope all journalists mimic.

While in college, circa 1980, I read a long-piece reporting in the Washington Post on the fate of an island in the Chesapeake Bay. Whether it was Tangier Island or not, I don't recall. But everything else was the same - the theme of change and erosion, the disappearance of an ancient way of life, the nostalgia for old "intricate interconnections between people, place, history, and nature."

Nearly forty years ago (and I suspect even longer ago than that), journalists were doing pieces on the loss of Chesapeake Bay islands due to erosion. However, there was no talk about it being caused by global warming. Land subsidence has long been a well-known factor causing flooding in the Chesapeake Bay area as well as shifting riverine and tidal flows.

Indeed, river levels have been 3-400 hundred feet higher or lower over the period of recent glaciations.

Currently, the US Army Corps of Engineers estimates that more than half of flooding in the Bay is caused by land subsidence. Whether sea levels are rising in the Chesapeake remains unknown. From the same study:

There is presently no evidence of a statistically significant increase marking an acceleration in RSL rise at any of the five bay stations. Small but steady increases in RSL rise rate with time are still a possibility as RSL trend confidence intervals remain too large for statistical inference.

The Chesapeake Bay is hydrologically very dynamic. Land use influences, land subsidence, sedimentation and river bed changes are all contributing to both erosion as well as embankment growth.

There is no basis for knowing that Tangier Island is threatened by climate change, as opposed to all the other dynamics at play. Islands have been eroding for centuries. Ocean surface levels have been rising since the end of the Younger Dryas and the beginning of the current Holocene some 11,000 years ago.

It is quite possible that we might be in the midst of a sea level rise in the area of Chesapeake Bay, as is hypothesized. But we cannot yet measure that rise - all the numbers are within the margin of measurement error. Even more critically, no one has even begun to attempt to parse how much Chesapeake erosion is occurring from land subsidence, land use practices, normal hydrology or speculated, but not measurable, Chesapeake Bay sea level rises, much less such rises due to AGW.

The Smithsonian Magazine is supposed to be dedicated to knowledge. From their mission statement:

Smithsonian magazine informs and inspires readers with knowledge they can trust through a balanced editorial blend of topical, relevant issues and historical perspective.

How can we trust them if they make statements that are so easily checkable (it took about sixty seconds to find multiple reliable sources which indicate that there is no measurable rise). Granted, the recommender, Marjorie Hunt, is a folklorist rather than a scientist. However, one would think that the editors were checking their facts before allowing statements which are not known to be true.

Were it not for the fact that I read such a similar article in the Washington Post nearly forty year ago, the glaring inconsistency would likely not have been so obvious.