Aix Marseille University in France has said that 40 U.S. scientists have “answered the call” it put out earlier this month offering safe harbor to fleeing Americans. Scientists in the U.S. under the Trump regime are facing a sudden loss of funding and stricter regulations on speech and areas of research. According to Aix Marseille University President Eric Berton, some of them will find a home in France.
In a press release about its “Safe Space for Science” initiative, the University announced that the 40 U.S. scientists included people from Stanford, Yale, NASA, the National Institute for Health, and George Washington University. It said that most of their research topics were related to “health (LGBT+ medicine, epidemiology, infectious diseases, inequalities, immunology, etc.), the environment and climate change…as well as the humanities and social sciences…and astrophysics.”
Aix Marseille University put out the call to American scientists on March 7 as news continued that the Trump administration was pulling funding from many universities and putting heavy restrictions on research topics. “We are witnessing a new brain drain,” Benton said on March 12. “We will do everything possible to help as many scientists as possible continue their research. But we cannot meet all the requests alone.” He then called on the French and European governments for help.
This isn’t the first time France has pulled a stunt like this.
Despite generous French offers of financial support, last time France offered safe haven, many climate scientists stayed in the USA.
Perhaps this time things will be different, and all the alarmist climate scientists will move to Europe.
To be fair, France has a well funded academic system, but that is pretty much where it stops. There is a reason France isn’t home to startups like Google and Facebook. High taxes and excessive regulations in France deter US style entrepreneurs and startups.
The very phrase “laissez-faire” is of course French, a phrase coined in the 17th century, back when French philosophers saw economic freedom as a path to liberation from feudalism and economic stagnation. The French sadly retreated from this glorious moment of near freedom, and in modern times have in my opinion re-instated elements of the ancient feudal system, which has created a tightly controlled command economy overseen by feudal bureaucrats, a straightjacketed form of capitalism where the French and European state is always firmly in control.
Despite all this, for scientists who never plan to ever do anything economically productive, France could be a good opportunity. Being a court philosopher in a feudal state is a well paid job, so long as your philosophy pleases the lord.
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A recent New York Post (NYP) article, “Scary Map Reveals Major Coastal Cities Rapidly Sinking into Sea”, reports that a study from NASA claims that several major coastal cities are sinking at alarming rates due to a combination of land subsidence and rising sea levels. The NYP specifically mentions sea level problems in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities, suggesting that their problems are due to a combination of subsidence and rising seas, the latter exacerbated by climate change. The latter point is misleading. Land subsidence is a well-documented problem in some cities, largely driven by local human activities such as groundwater extraction, poor urban planning, and natural geological processes. Subsidence is not due to climate change. However, despite NASA’s claim, long-term sea-level rise trend data does not support claims that seas are rising at historically unusual rates. In fact, seas have been rising at a modest and steady rate for over a century, with no significant acceleration linked to human-caused emissions.
“In many parts of the world, like the reclaimed ground beneath San Francisco, the land is moving down faster than the sea itself is going up,” writes Marin Govorcin, the lead author of the NASA study. who specializes in remote sensing at NASA’s Propulsion Laboratory.”
Commenting on the study, Alexander Handwerger, another researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said, “The speed is more than enough to put human life and infrastructure at risk.”
“Accounting for this descent, sea levels — which are on the rise due to climate change — could creep up more than twice as much as previously forecast in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 25 years,” the NYP commented, but the key to the statement and the study itself is land subsidence, not rising seas.
Land subsidence is a localized issue caused primarily by excessive groundwater extraction, infrastructure issues, sediment compaction, and tectonic shifts. Climate change is not a factor in subsidence.
The study, published in Science Advances, cites short term data from satellites to imply that global sea-level rise is accelerating, an implication the NYP fails to question. However, real-world tide gauge data does not support this claim.
Long-term records from tide gauges—considered the gold standard for measuring local sea-level changes—show no evidence of unusual acceleration.
For example, NOAA’s tide gauge data from New York City’s Battery Park station, which has recorded sea levels since 1856, shows a steady rise of about 2.85 millimeters per year—a rate that has remained consistent for more than a century. This aligns closely with global tide gauge records, which show that average sea levels have been rising at a rate of 1-3 millimeters per year since the 1800s. Importantly, this gradual rise is not accelerating, despite increasing CO₂ emissions over the past several decades. See Figure 1 below:
Figure 1: Tide gauge derived plot of sea level trend since 1856 for New York City. The relative sea level trend is 2.94 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.09 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1856 to 2024 which is equivalent to a change of 0.96 feet in 100 years. Source: NOAA Tides and Currents.
Similarly, tide gauges in San Francisco show a steady sea level rise trend that is even lower than that found in New York City. (See Figure 2, below)
Figure 2: The relative sea level trend is 1.98 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.17 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1897 to 2024 which is equivalent to a change of 0.65 feet in 100 years. Source: NOAA Tides and Currents
Los Angeles’s rate of sea level rise, shown in Figure 3 below, is lower and slower still.
Figure 3: The relative sea level trend is 1.05 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.21 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1923 to 2024 which is equivalent to a change of 0.34 feet in 100 years. Source: NOAA Tides and Currents.
These three tide gauges from cities mentioned in the NYP article show no short- or long-term acceleration in sea level rise. Globally, in fact, there is little if any acceleration of sea level rise as data presented in Climate at a Glance: Sea Level Rise, demonstrates. Even if recent increases in the rate of rise recorded by some satellites are fully attributable to man-made climate change, it adds only 0.3 inch per decade more to the preexisting historic trend, and is still lower than the rate of rise that has occurred across many periods since the Earth entered its most recent interglacial 18,000 to 12,000 years before present.
Recent modest sea level trends contradict claims that climate change is making sea levels rise at “scary” and accelerated rates. In fact, multiple studies have shown that sea-level rise has remained relatively constant since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 19th century, here, here, here, and here, for example. If greenhouse gas emissions were truly driving an acceleration, we would expect to see a sharp upward trend in tide gauge records over the past 50 years—but we don’t.
A 2022 study highlighted in Climate Realism found that media claims of accelerating sea-level rise are often based on cherry-picked satellite data that fails to align with ground-based tide gauge measurements.
By conflating land subsidence with sea-level rise, all too often media outlets like the NYP mislead the public into believing that climate change is primarily or even solely responsible for coastal flooding threats. This is scientifically inaccurate and distracts from the real issues with subsidence that cities face. By focusing their efforts on the causes of land subsidence, such as ground water extraction issues, and compaction of unstable soil and fill used to add land to city oceanfront, rather than being distracted by the minimal or non-existent role greenhouse gas emissions are having in on sea level rise, policy makers could have far more direct and substantial impact on preventing flooding and losses.
The New York Post got the story half right. Its reporting would have been better had it eschewed any mention of climate change as a factor in the problems facing certain coastal cities.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Mark Carney, our next prime minister, has floated a climate policy plan that he says will be better for Canadians than the “divisive (read: widely hated) consumer carbon tax.”
But in reality, Carney’s plan is an exercise in misdirection. Instead of paying the “consumer carbon tax” directly and receiving carbon rebates, Canadians will pay more via higher prices for products that flow from Canada’s “large industrial emitters,” who Carney plans to saddle with higher carbon taxes, indirectly imposing the consumer carbon tax by passing those costs onto Canadians.
Carney also wants to shift government subsidies to consumer products of so-called “clean technologies.” As Carney told the National Observer, “We’re introducing changes so that if you decide to insulate your home, install a heat pump, or switch to a fuel-efficient car,those companies will pay you — not the taxpayer, not the government, but those companies.”
What Carney does not mention is that much of the costs imposed on “those companies” will also be folded into the costs of the products consumers buy, while the cause of rising prices will be less distinguishable and attributable to government action.
Moreover, Carney says he wants to make Canada a “clean energy superpower” and “expand and modernize our energy infrastructure so that we are less dependent on foreign suppliers, and the United States as a customer.” But this too is absurd. Far from being in any way poised to become a “clean energy superpower,” Canada likely won’t meet its own projected electricity demand by 2050 under existing environmental regulations.
For example, to generate the electricity needed through 2050 solely with solar power, Canada would need to build 840 solar-power generation stations the size of Alberta’s Travers Solar Project, which would take about 1,700 construction years to accomplish.
If we went with wind power to meet future demand, Canada would need to build 574 wind power installations the size of Quebec’s Seigneurie de Beaupre wind-power station, which would take about 1,150 construction years to accomplish. And if we relied solely on hydropower, we’d need to build 134 hydro-power facilities the size of the Site C power station in British Columbia, which would take 938 construction years to accomplish.
Finally, if we relied solely on nuclear power, we’d need to construct 16 new nuclear plants the size of Ontario’s Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, taking “only” 112 construction years to accomplish.
Again, Mark Carney’s climate plan is an exercise in misdirection — a rhetorical sleight of hand to convince Canadians that he’ll lighten the burden on taxpayers and shift away from the Trudeau government’s overzealous climate policies of the past decade. But scratch the surface of the Carney plan and you’ll see climate policies that will hit Canadian consumers harder, with likely higher prices for goods and services.
As a federal election looms, Canadians should demand from all candidates — no matter their political stripe — a detailed plan to rekindle Canada’s energy sector and truly lighten the load for Canadians and their families.
