Further proof that our political discourse is no longer about facts. It's just about using data to express your opinion:
IPCC Claims 17cm of Sea Level Rise Made the Tsunami Worse
Mr. Watts is clearly an intelligent and apparently well-educated person. But he makes a giant logic error because it fits with his view that climate change is harmless.
Dr. Pachauri at the IPCC notes:
“In the 20th century, sea-level rise was recorded at an average of 17 centimetres. If the sea-level was significantly lower, clearly the same tsunami would have had a less devastating effect.“
Mr. Watts states:
"clearly Dr. Pachauri can’t mentally manage the concept of scale."
He then uses this lovely graphic to show that the size of the tsunami (17m) is much bigger than the sea-level rise (14cm):
And then draws the conclusion that the sea-level raise did not make the tsunami worse at all.
But the logical failure is that something being big and something being small doesn't automatically mean that the small thing doesn't exist.
The sea level rise made the tsunami 1.2% higher. That's not a lot. But it's not "nothing". Using these numbers, we could assume that the sea level rise increased the "devastation" by 1.2%. But that would be understating the effect of the sea level rises.
If a 14-meter tsunami killed 18,000 people, does that mean that a 7-meter tsunami would have killed 9,000 people? It's unlikely. We know that the area was fairly well prepared for a tsunami of about 5 meters -- primarily through a 5.7 meter sea wall built to handle such an event.
So a 3.5-meter tsunami would have caused very little damage. A 7-meter tsunami would have caused more damage, but much of it would have been allayed by defenses in place. The following table seems plausible. It is certainly more plausible than assuming a linear relationship (or, as Mr. Watts would prefer, no relationship):
| Height | "Devastation Units" |
| 3.5 meters | 0 |
| 7 meters | 10 |
| 10.5 meters | 40 |
| 14 meters | 90 |
This is the same effect we see in baseball, where runs scored has an exponential effect on wins. Scoring twice as many runs as an average team will lead to a win-loss ratio that is four times higher.
So, let's assume that a 17 cm (1.2%) increase in the size of the tsunami caused about 3% more "devastation":
The tsunami caused $300 billion in damage. Three percent of that is $9 billion. Nine billion dollars.
The tsunami killed more than 18,000 people. The sea level rise is responsible for more than 500 of these deaths.
I understand that most of the damage was caused by the earthquake. But some of it was attributable to the sea-level rise, including the deaths of more than 500 people. This is in a country with about 500 homicide per year. If Japan managed to completely eliminate all homicides, that would be front page news. But Mr. Watts would like to write off these deaths from sea-level rise as if they never happened.
