New sea level dataset now available – still flat

Looking forward to extended data

It is interesting to see such a difference between the Global on the one hand and the Atlantic Plus Artic on the other. The latter shows a sharp rise between the early 1980s and 2003 whereas the former shows a significantly flatter rise. Post 2003, as you state, the Global is flat. However, the Atlantic Plus Artic is showing a fall. It will be interesting to see whether those trends continue over the coming decade.

The Thermosteric Sea Level Anomaly data is derived from the OHC data?
Any word from Josh Willis on the final update of the ARGO data?

Has anyone alerted the Australian authorities to this? Kinda makes their forecasts of Sydney waterfront properties being swamped and their other catastrophic claims look a bit dodgy, but they are attempting to sell a Carbon Tax!

So, after over 30 years of global warming:
the hottest decade on the record;
the hottest years on the record;
melting Greenland glaciers;
melting glaciers worldwide;
melting ice sheets in W. Antarctica;
water abstraction;
‘thermal expansion’……………………it’s worse than we thought! Head for the hills, evacuate the Maldives…..Ahhhhhh!

Millimeters. 25.4 of them to the inch. Wow.
Just think about it: The rise of sea levels is going at the pace of a glaciated snail.
Reminds me of one of those geological studies where they could see dirt & rock slowly creeping down a canyon into a stream over decades of still photos.
I’m not even sure that anyone bothered to take time-lapse photos of rising sea levels, the pace is so excruciatingly lethargic. Too late now: Rigor Mortis has set into sea level rise.

MattN says:
June 11, 2011 at 3:08 am
Are we sure the North Atlantic/Arctic data is correct?

Why aren’t you querying the Pacific and Indian ocean data Matt?

Hey Bob, very interesting, but even with the flattening We are not returning to 1990’s, 80’s, or 70’s, levels. Why? Because there is more heat in the oceans. Now some would say that heat is residual heat from ENSO events, but over such a long time frame, ENSO by itself, which is a balancing of heat or thermostat for the oceans, would not be adding so much heat to the oceans. It seems something else seems to be adding heat over a longer time frame. Of course, there is one theory as to what that something is, and that theory gets corroborating evidence from measurements of deeper arctic waters and the longer term decline of arctic sea ice that’s been going on. The 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700’s when factored into global climate models would explain this long term rise in ocean heat content as well as the long term decline in arctic sea ice, which, is melted from both solar insolation as well as warm water from below. The warmest waters in 2000 years have been found flowing into the arctic. Hard to not wonder as to the cause.

“Climate warming since 1995 is now statistically significant, according to Phil Jones, the UK scientist targeted in the “ClimateGate” affair.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13719510
“HadCRUT shows a warming 1995-2010 of 0.19C – consistent with the other major records, which all use slightly different ways of analysing the data in order to compensate for issues such as the dearth of measuring stations in polar regions.”
I particularly notice Phil’s unilateral declaration that:
“Since then, nothing has emerged through mainstream science to challenge the IPCC’s basic picture of a world warming through greenhouse gas emissions.”
So it is obvious, that Sea Level will commence a disastrous rise shortly. After-all, we can’t have significant rising temperatures and a flattening seal level… Can we?? GK

If we’re talking about the Arctic and North Atlantic. . . how does sea ice play into this record? Would a reduction in sea ice produce a fall in sea level for the purpose of this record?

DirkH says:
(to R. Gates) “Your (IPCC consensus) “theory” doesn’t explain the MWP.”
I put “theory” in quotes because the IPCC consensus “theory” doesn’t make a testable prediction (only untestable projections and scenarios, so it’s not a scientific theory.)

G. Karst says:
June 11, 2011 at 6:32 am
Jones is probably just trying to salvage some basis for respect ? – but frankly he will never gain it from the real science community. He’ll just have to stick to playing with his psycophantic buddies on the ‘Team’.

It is nice to have actual data and charts to look at. Thanks. As I understand this, the data are an attempt to describe an anomaly caused by a temperature change rather than a change in the mass of water. Further, the source of the temperature change is not considered. All interesting but in my mind a rather difficult thing to measure.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The juxtaposition of this and the previous post caught my attention: “Massive drifts and late-melting snowpack” indicates there is much ex-sea water piled on the mountains of western North America. It is a good sized patch of snow; not now moving, just waiting. There is a lot of water in North American rivers, much now classed as flood water, on its way to the ocean. It is muddy dark water sitting in shallow layers under an intense sun – warming on its slow descent to the sea. There is still more slow moving water. Saturated crop land has been a national issue in the US corn, soy bean, sun flower growing areas. All this has happened before. One of the first movies I saw was a black and white one (with serious music); a Corps of Engineers compilation of the Mississippi flood of 1927
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_1927
and then there was the non-stop TV coverage of the 1993 repeat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1993
By late summer a lot of warm fresh water will have floated out over the salty sea. There may be a bit of bump up in sea level.

Bob Tisdale says:
June 11, 2011 at 7:52 am
R. Gates says: “Hey Bob, very interesting, but even with the flattening We are not returning to 1990′s, 80′s, or 70′s, levels. Why? Because there is more heat in the oceans. Now some would say that heat is residual heat from ENSO events, but over such a long time frame, ENSO by itself, which is a balancing of heat or thermostat for the oceans, would not be adding so much heat to the oceans…”
Apparently you haven’t studied La Nina events. The model projections are rising, but the OHC data is not. Trenberth and Hansen acknowledge this. Trenberth is still looking for the missing heat and Hansen came up with a baseless volcanic aerosol rebound effect to explain the recent flattening.
______
Respectfully, I still feel you are side-stepping my point. The ocean heat content currently is greater than 40 years ago, regardless of whether or not it has increased in the past 10 years. ENSO events serve to keep the upper ocean within a range over the long term, during the charging (La Nina) and discharging (El Nino) cycles. The current record warm waters at even deeper levels below 700m has nothing to do with ENSO, and the warming of these deeper waters is implicated in both the warming of the western Antarctic as well as the Arctic with the associated mass loss in the western Antarctic glacial ice and the year-to-year reduction of Arctic sea ice. The 40% increase in CO2 and related forcing provides a viable explanation for the warming of the Arctic and long-term reduction of sea ice while short-term ocean cycles such as ENSO do not.
Ten years from now, if ocean heat content falls back to where it was in the 70’s, (and I fully admit there is a chance it could, as slight as it might be) then we’d have to look at other influences that a greater than the forcing from CO2. If this happens, I would look to the solar cycle GCR/cloud relationship for starters. But as it stand right now, a mere flattening from the increase in OHC does not in any way negate the possible forcing from CO2, but certainly might cause a refinement in the models to show that some other influence over the past 10 years served to counter the forcing from CO2, and need to be included in future global climate models.

R. Gates

Dirk, you suffer from the mistaken thought that all similar effects must have the same cause. The cause or causes of the MWP, don’t have to be the same as the cause or causes of the late 20th century warming.

One wonders then why it’s so important to show that the MWP never existed.
Possibly because if it did exist, there is no explanation as to why it existed, which weakens the “we can’t think of anything else, so it must be CO2” argument to explain current warming.
BTW, shouldn’t you be over on the “Chutspah” thread mocking those climate scientists that just published a paper explaining how AGW causes less snow?

DirkH says: “I put “theory” in quotes because the IPCC consensus…”
DirkH, I think that the word you are looking for is conjecture.
As in: “The IPCC conjecture doesn’t explain the MWP.”

My old geophysics professor, the late Sir Edward Bullard, would probably be puzzled why so little attention is paid by “climate scientists” to the role of plate tectonics in changing the shape, and thus the volume, of ocean trenches. Sea levels are directly affected, of course, by changes in the shape of the ocean floor. Tectonic movements at the mid-ocean ridge system, in particular, are immense. Moreover, they generate enormous amounts of heat. [Bullard E. 1954a. The Flow of Heat Through the Floor of the Atlantic Ocean, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A, mathematical and Physical Sciences, v. 222, n. 1150, A Discussion on the Floor of the Atlantic Ocean (Mar. 18th, 1954), p. 408-429.] Yet tectonics seem to be underplayed in most calculations of either sea level or ocean heat content.
“Teddy” Bullard would also be jealous of the power of the computer on which this posting is being composed. It is a big step ahead of the EDSAC 2 which he (and I) were using in 1960.

Now I am really confused. The article talks about “the significant drop in the North Atlantic+Arctic Ocean data”
How can the above statement be reconciled with the comments below?
R. Gates says:
June 11, 2011 at 5:45 am: “The warmest waters in 2000 years have been found flowing into the arctic.”
And as we have been told, the Arctic was supposed to heat up much faster than the rest of the earth.

We’ll know a whole lot more by 2020 as we’ll find out if OHC will continue to rise, stay flat, or perhaps even decline. What an exciting tine (sic) to be alive!

Fine. Just don’t force us down the wrong “fork” in the road while we’re waiting to find out.

Geoff Sherrington says:
June 11, 2011 at 4:40 am

In theory, one cannot calculate thermal expansion of an ocean with numbers from the top 700m. If there is to be ocean level rise from heating, the whole volume of the ocean has, on average, to heat (except that some different things happen in the 0-4 deg C range)

The only interesting thing that happens in the 0-4 deg C range is people exhibit their lack of knowledge of basic properties of materials. Unlike freshwater, seawater keeps right on increasing in density right up to it’s freezing point of -2C.
Write that down.

rbateman
Millimeters. 25.4 of them to the inch…
Ken in the Keys
My old geophysics professor, sir Edward Bullard …
Sea level rise of millimeters over decades is comparable to, and even slower than, the rates of tectonic drift (about the speed that fingernails grow).
Oh – that’s a thought…

I simply want someone to explain to me why CO2 with a specific heat of less than 1 joule/gram and approximately 0.06 % of the atmosphere by weight is more important to climate than water which has a latent heat ~2500 joule/gram and water vapour with specific heat of ~ 2 joule/gram and whidh is ~60 to 70 times more in concentration ?
For 0.06% of something to heat up the rest of the 99.04 % doesn’t it have to get really really hot – the tiny bars in my electric furnace have to get really hot to give off the small heat that you feel at less than 2 metres distant. Or am I wrong and I am simply wasting gas by boiling the kettle ?
Surely the answer can’t be the slow build up of energy continually reinforcing more heating because that sounds to me like our energy problems solved – a runaway thermal greenhouse effect in a sealed vessel rather than an open one like the atmosphere – pump in CO2 and water vapour from a coal power station for a few years, add sunlihjt and when the thermal runaway greenhouse effecr kicks in shut down the nasty beastie – the coal power station I mean..
Finally it seems to me that the IPCC crowd think it is all about radiation when it is not. Convection plays a much larger part in energy transfer in our atmosphere – otherwise why do they create fan forced ovens, fan forced space heaters etc etc? Conversly why do we use convection to cool down hot things we don’t want to overheat.
Where are the allowances for the work done in our atmosphere and oceans – the energy absorbed by biomass.
And last but not least the ridiculous notion that without greenhouse gases the earth’s blackbody temperature would be minus 18 C – I mean c’mon !
So the paltry sun, with a solar conatant of 1366 W/sq metre just above the earth’s atmosphere can only heat us to minus 18 C and “gtrrnhouse gases” can provide the extra energy ro heat some areas of the globe by another ~ 60 – 70 C. Temperatures above 40 C are common place – above 50 C are recorded.
I mean – c’mon !!

“New sea level dataset now available – still flat”
The Earth itself is getting flatter, according to NASA:
http://oi55.tinypic.com/2whqjr8.jpg

R. Gates wrote,
“The rise in OHC since the 1970′s is exactly consistent with the increase in water temps in the Arctic.”
The commenter was not referring to the overall (presumed) rise since the ’70s; he was referring to the decline in Arctic TSL since 2003 — precisely when Arctic warming appears to be greatest.

“Dave Springer says:
June 11, 2011 at 1:23 pm
…
Any sane informed person fears a cooling world not a warming one. Ice sucks. Write that down.”
Good one!

Garry Pearce
“Thermosteric, huh. Calculated from ocean heat content huh. Soon actual, real, observable sea level rise will be considered irrelevant. ”
Gary calculations of Thermosteric Sea Level rise are not intended to replace observations of actual sea level rise. They are intended to isolate the amount of sea level rise that has been caused by increased upper ocean heat content. By subtracting this from observed sea level rise you can estimate the amount of the rise from other sources such as melting ice sheets and glaciers.
Doug Proctor
“The difference between the North Atlantic and the Global sea level is over 1 cm. How is that sustainable? Or does this variations reflect complex tidal changes due to oscilations in the moon’s position? Are there variations in sea level worldwide attributable to moon-earth interactions?”
The difference in heights of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are mainly maintained by differences in evaporation and precipitation. Put simply more water evaporates from the Atlantic than enters it through precipitation and rivers and the reverse is true for the Pacific. The result is a difference in sea levels and a massive surface current around the tip of South America.

I note that the Envisat European satellite is currently showing no change in sea level since 2004.
If the components are:
– +0.3 mm/yr for the glacial isostatic rebound;
– +1.7 mm/yr from glacial melt;
– net thermostatic residual.
Then Envisat is showing that the global oceans are cooling by -2.0 mm/yr .
Jason2 would be showing 0.3 mm/yr of thermostatic rise since 2009;
and Jason1 would be 0.7 mm/yr of thermostatic rise since 2003.
Something as simple as how the satellites measurements are adjusted and which land-based sea level gauges they are calibrated to, will affect the thermostatic number by quite a bit. Envisat has a negative value, especially in the last 2 years.

Seawater at 15C, 1 atm has a CTE = 150 ppm/C. At 31C, this increases to 335 ppm/C, and at 4C, drops to 50 ppm/C. High pressure increases the CTE. The deep oceans, at 3 – 4 C and high pressure, still have a sizable CTE of about 200 ppm/C. With an average depth of 4300m, sea level should rise about 0.85 meter if the entire ocean temperature increases by 1 C. This is clearly not happening.
The total ocean mass is 1.36 x 10^21 kg. Raising the total ocean temperature by 1C requires 1.36 x 10^24 Joules of extra energy. The current energy anomaly, based on ARGO data since about 2005, is zero. This is a travesty…