Study suggests that global sea level is less sensitive to high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations than previously thought.
From STANFORD’S SCHOOL OF EARTH, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Ice sheets may be more resilient than thought, say Stanford scientists
But there may be some good news amid the worry. Sea levels may not rise as high as assumed.
To predict sea level changes, scientists look to Earth’s distant past, when climate conditions were similar to today, and investigate how the planet’s ice sheets responded then to warmer temperatures brought on by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In a recently published study in the journal Geology, PhD students Matthew Winnick and Jeremy Caves at Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences explored these very old conditions and found that sea level might not have risen as much as previously thought – and thus may not rise as fast as predicted now.
To better understand global sea level rise, Winnick and Caves analyzed the middle Pliocene warm period, the last time in Earth’s history, approximately 3 million years ago, when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were close to their present values (350-450 parts per million).
“The Pliocene is an important analogue for today’s planet not only because of the related greenhouse gas concentrations, but because the continents were roughly where they are today, meaning ocean and climate circulation patterns are comparable,” said Winnick.
These similarities are why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group responsible for global sea level rise projections, focuses on the mid-Pliocene warm period to inform their computer models.
Previous studies of the mid-Pliocene warm period used oxygen isotope records to determine the volume of Earth’s ice sheets and, by proxy, sea level. Effectively, the oxygen isotope records act as a fingerprint of Earth’s ice sheets. By combining the fingerprint with models of ice sheet meltwater, many previous researchers thought that sea level was likely 82 to 98 feet (25 to 30 meters) higher during the Pliocene.
Such high sea level would require a full deglaciation of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and as much as 30 percent of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet – enough to cover New York City under 50 feet of water. But these estimates arose because the researchers assumed that the Antarctic ice of the Pliocene had the same isotopic composition, that is, the same fingerprint, as it does today – an assumption that Winnick and Caves challenge in their new report.
To understand the isotopic composition of Pliocene ice, Winnick and Caves began in the present day using well-established relationships between temperature and the geochemical fingerprint. By combining this modern relationship with estimates of ancient Pliocene surface temperatures, they were able to better refine the fingerprint of the Antarctic ice millions of years ago. In re-thinking this critical assumption, and by extending their analysis to incorporate ice sheet models, Winnick and Caves recalculated the global sea level of the Pliocene and found that it was 30 to 44 feet (9 to 13.5 meters) higher, significantly lower than the previous estimate.
“Our results are tentatively good news,” Winnick said. “They suggest that global sea level is less sensitive to high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations than previously thought. In particular, we argue that this is due to the stability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which might be more resilient than previous studies have suggested.” However, a rise in global sea level by up to 44 feet (13.5 meters) is still enough to inundate Miami, New Orleans and New York City, and threaten large portions of San Francisco, Winnick cautioned.
While the study helps refine our understanding of Pliocene sea level, both Winnick and Caves point out that it’s not straightforward to apply these results to today’s planet. “Ice sheets typically take centuries to millennia to respond to increased carbon dioxide, so it’s more difficult to say what will happen on shorter time scales, like the next few decades,” Winnick said.
“Add that to the fact that CO2 levels were relatively consistent in the Pliocene, and we’re increasing them much more rapidly today, and it really highlights the importance of understanding how sea level responds to rising temperatures. Estimates of Pliocene sea level might provide a powerful tool for testing the ability of our ice sheet models to predict future changes in sea level.”
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The back downs have started.
Well, backing down by ten feet. Or even a bit more. That’s not down by much.
Of course they could also start to question how long it is going to take for the remaining ice sheets to melt. Ten years? A hundred years? A thousand years? Ten thousand years?
Personally, I’d guestimate between 1000 and 10000 years, assuming a warming of at least 3 to 5 C, or less but disproportionately distributed at the poles. “Forever” assuming warming of 0 to 2 C.
And of course, climate change can cause enormous SLR. It certainly has in the past:
Of course this figure shows SLR going up steadily if slowly across the entire Holocene, except maybe for a LIA dip near the end. It’s difficult to tell at the scale of the figure, but it looks like order of meters over the last 9000 years, including the Holocene Optimum. Rates of 1 to 3 meters per century did occur as the Wisconsin ended and the Holocene began. Of course the largest single rise was the freshwater pulse from the melting and draining of Lake Aggazi from the Laurentide sheet, which was kilometers thick ice spread out over pretty much all of Canada and down into the US as far as Pennsylvania. Outside of that, rates appear to have been order of less than one to as much as one and a half meters per century. So 13 meters (around 40 feet) would take at least 1000 years, more likely 2000 or 3000, and that is IF temperatures on the Greenland and Antarctic plateaus, which are both high enough to not warm easily, rise enough to melt at all.
rgb
The Eemian was at least that much warmer, yet only the Southern Dome of the Greenland Ice Sheet melted by perhaps a quarter, but that interglacial lasted five thousand years longer than the Holocene has.
Sea level has been quite a bit higher during the Holocene, as in its Climatic Optimum (more than 5 ka BP), the Minoan (3 Ka), Roman (2 Ka) and Medieval (1 Ka) Warm Periods. How much of that MSL rise came from melting ice sheets, I can’t say. Possibly not much.
Wasn’t the 3 mya era still when glacial periods occurred at a 40,000-year frequency? With a 20,000 up / down cycle, what was the steady state versus current 20,000 up / 80,000 down?
It’s hard to take any of this science serious….when they start out by saying it was just like now…and CO2 is the driver
DD More:
About 2.6 Ma the glacial cycles began. For the first ~1.4 million years or more, their period was ~40,000 years. This switched between 1.2 Ma to 800 Ka to the present roughly 100,000 year cycle.
The climbdown begins…
And the cycle is glacials of around 100,000 years, followed and preceded by interglacials of a more variable period, from 10,000 to perhaps 60,000 years, but mostly under 20,000. Every 400,000 years there appears to be an extralong interglacial. The Holocene might prove to be one, like that of 400 Ka and 800 Ka.
10 feet? Or even a bit more? 82-98 ft vs 30-44 ft means they backed-off by over 50 ft.
Once again I’ll go with Nils-Axel Mörner, who has studied SLR DATA for years and years, that 1 mm/year is probably the maximum to expect over the next 100 years. I consider him the SLR expert of note (and so does he by the way…).
works better for me.
Most of Antarctica is more than 10C below freezing year round. It’s going to a lot more than just 5C of warming to melt it. And that’s where the vast majority of the ice is.
How much melting do you project for warming in the range of 0.2 to 0.5C, which is much more likely.
MarkW
September 4, 2015 at 6:08 am
Very little melting would be expected from such a small amount of warming over the next century.
+1
Yes indeed, Prof. Morner was correct all along, good man.
This tree says it all:
J. Philip,
More criminal behavior by so-called “scientists”.
This is simply the pattern the press follows – alarmist statement goes front page, covered by Mooney, Borenstein and every two-bit twit on Salon.com or the Huffington Post. Retraction – passing mention, buried with ‘conditional language’ such as ‘not as high as assumed’ with the subtext that ‘it’s still just really, really bad’. Doesn’t really matter what the specific scare study is focusing on, temps, sea levels, ocean acidification, bacteria, polar bears, giant spiders – always based on projections from models without ever questioning the basic premise, and maybe with a salting of anecdotal evidence, like say, a glacier melting in August.
Rinse, repeat.
Golly gosh – can these people be trusted??
How about “Sea levels may not rise ……. as assumed.”
I am worried about their futures
as PHD students I hope that they are granted their doctorates and not “failed” for not towing the company line. very brave people to choose this topicfor a paper.
“Toeing the line”, not “towing the line”.
(Where do people get the “tow” from? I’ve never seen it written anywhere except on the Internet.)
Maybe they think someone is hauling a rope?
BTW, did I ever tell you of my neighbor who used to complain that things were pitch quiet?
Sure, I prefer ‘toeing the line’, but ‘towing the line’ is a new variant, arisen because of the similarity of meaning and because it is homonymous.
===================
I was told a long time ago, probably apocryphally, that “towing the line” is a bastardization of “toeing the line” that came from the poor/working class/common man on docks, where they would use lines for ship activities and conversationally understood it in that context.
It hasn’t died since “Tow” is pulling something with a line, it’s an easy visualization to make for people when they can say that “candidate X tows the party line” where they are “pulling” the party along the platform. Most people don’t innately understand the “toe” coming from the foot race where you are supposed to start out with the big toe not extending past the end of the line.
I am honing-in on the answer.
Towing the line
A form of advertising performed by a small aircraft.
Sometimes people get tired of “carrying the water,” so they tow it instead, leaving a line in the sand. It just looks like they are “towing the line.”
When will they wake up to the fact that Sea-Levels are INsensitive to CO2!!!
Since 1880, CO2 has risen about 38%, a stunning increase, no doubt, and much has been made of it. Oceans, on the other hand, in tectonically inert places (neither rising nor subsiding) have NOT increased their rate of rise, and it is minuscule in fact. This is a decidedly outrageous inconvenience for the upcoming Paris Climate Talks. 2 examples: Portland Maine’s Tide Gauge measured (not modeled) Sea-Level is 3mm lower than 10 years ago, and IDENTICAL (to the mm) to what was measured in 1947. The West Coast’s Alameda Naval Air Station’s Tide Gauge has a similar (read zero) trend.
The Sea-Level Rise paradigm is simply an utter failure, and the Paris talks should follow suit!!!
And look at (for example) Sitka, Alaska– SL has been going down for 75 years!
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9451600
The coast of Alaska is rising from tectonic activity. Meanwhile, the land under Hudson Bay and eastward to Bain and Baffin Island is rising from glacial rebound. In some places, Hudson Bay coastline has receded almost 20 miles over the last 1,000 years as the tilting crust spills the water out into the North Atlantic.
How much water is the rising land displacing, thus raising sea levels elsewhere?
Has anyone been measuring the rise and fall of the oceanic plates?
Correction: the coast of Alaska is rising from tectonic activity and glacial rebound.
Or how many people are measuring the rate of creation of new ocean floor and how much rise it causes?
Thank you for making the case that plate tectonics and glacial rebound have a major influence on observed sea levels. Most of the people who fret about SLR flooding the coasts, seem to be ignorant of the effect of plate tectonics.
Yup!
But… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vdl3TRxv0c
The Baltic Sea is shrinking due to rising land levels due to the end of the last ice age. Britain is tilting for the same reason – rising in Scotland but sinking in the south-east.
You are correct that CO2 has no direct impact on ice. On the other hand, the warming that is caused by CO2 does impact ice.
Or perhaps the warming that affects the ice also affects the C02 ?
It is hard to study Pliocene glaciation on Greenland, covered as its surface is today by an ice sheet.
Before three million years ago, its southern and eastern mountains probably already had ice caps and the northern dome of its present ice sheet might also have existed to some extent.
The uplift of its western mountains and the Rockies might have led to more snowfall, but the generally fingered culprit for the formation of its Pleistocene ice sheet is the closure of the Inter-American Seaway about three million years ago.
CO2 drop has of course been touted as well, but without good evidence.
Ref: Gloria Swansong at 2:00
A poster: Closure of the Panama Seaway During the Pliocene
http://www.paleo.bris.ac.uk/~ggdjl/conferences/agu2006_panama.pdf
Thanks!
An excellent poster, even if it does involve modeling, which IMO can be useful when used properly.
There are data upon which to base and check the modeled effect on ocean currents of the closure.
” By combining the fingerprint with models of ice sheet meltwater, many previous researchers thought that sea level was likely 82 to 98 feet (25 to 30 meters) higher during the Pliocene.
Such high sea level would require a full deglaciation of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and as much as 30 percent of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet”
They are not admitting it was warmer are they?
Sea level was as much as 50 metres lower than today and as much as 30 metres higher than today in the Pliocene. CO2 has nothing to do with it. I am completely amazed how climate science can publish papers aboutclimate change-induced sea level changes without at least looking at the already published high resolution sea level reconstructions. Its like the whole science has never looked at another field ever.
From Miller 2005.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~ncb/Selected_Articles_all_files/19_Science%20310.1293.pdf
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5752/1293/F4.large.jpg
I have been noting this myself, Bill…they are all completely oblivious to what is known of Earth history. Completely.
Publishing in the field of climate related sciences these days requires one to completely ignore any facts or bodies of knowledge which might contradict the CAGW meme, or the notion that unprecedented events are occurring due to human influence.
Of course, the opposite is true. Nothing unusual has ever been demonstrated to be occurring.
And yet they build the unsupported house of cards ever higher…even when they backtrack.
No they are not oblivious to it, they are acutely aware that it is the elephant in their goldfish bowel. That’s why they completely ignore geological history
I should have said “…seem to be completely oblivious…”
Thank you Robert.
Ditto.
Best wishes,
William
Higher sea levels do leave evidence in the geologic record–was going to ask what the measured elevations (compared to current “sea level” ) of the pliocene sea level markers are. Thanks for the chart.
JVC
But Bill,
The consensus is that Sea Level = C x CO2 concentration providing that the continents are roughly in their present location. At least that is what I gather from these Stanford scientists.
you’re joking,
Robert Austin on September 3, 2015 at 7:58 pm
with ‘But Bill,
The consensus is that Sea
Level = C x CO2 concentration providing that the continents are roughly in their present
location.’
______
CO2 is
CO2norm + CO2norm * tA*(temp * K + (sea level * L) + B)
is a first approach.
______
model along. Hans
Hope these two weren’t planning a career in climate science!
Claim That Sea Level Is Rising Is a Total Fraud:
http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Calen7/MornerEng.html
What a terrific article! I most heartily recommend it–clear, definitive, honest, scientific.
Thank you for the article!
Very consistent with the last 150 years of data showing less than 10-inches of rise per century. Also, if you curve-fit the sea-level data for the last 25 years (approximately) the rate of rise is actually decreasing, not increasing. That is to say that for the curve fit: x=a+bx+cx^2, the term c is negative, and the regression analysis shows better residuals than a linear fit.
Thanks for posting this excellent article. And especially thanks to Dr Nels-Axel Morner for writing it. As the acknowledged expert on the subject, his withering criticism of the IPCC, and its free-loaders, is an exemplary example to others, who may be cowed by the apparent weight of numbers ranged against them.
Armchair academics with computers – NIL. On-the-ground observers of reality – 1, and counting…
Yet solar scientists are predicting 30-50 years of global cooling…
I can’t stand the intro –
“To predict sea level changes, scientists look to Earth’s distant past, when climate conditions were similar to today, and investigate how the planet’s ice sheets responded then to warmer temperatures brought on by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
That alone would, in any sane ‘scientific’ treatise (as opposed to ‘Religious’ doctrine), falsify it given that the paleo records show CO2 levels Always lagging behind and only rising long after global temperatures have risen.
Sitting here in England tonight with the fire blazing because of how unseasonably cold it is – and has been throughout most of August with no signs of it improving – I get ever angrier at the warmists such as our Met Office who will issue fallacious press releases about ‘hottest July on Record’ (by 0.001degC !!) based upon a 2 minute temperature spike of 0.9 degC at Heathrow airport which coincided with a short-lived wind direction change and an airliner turning off the taxiway next to their thermometers … But issue No Press Releases about how very cold August and so far September have been .
A day of reckoning is long overdue for all the ‘climate change’ charlatans on the gravy train.
Give em a break! How would they get published?
Consider these two statements in the above Press Release:
When an experiment is run, usually the variable of interest is modified to understand how the system reacts to that change. Or you study in paleo records when that variable changed and how the system responded. Yet here they have a relatively constant CO2, and an isotopic measurement system for SLR that surely has large error bars, and they are trying to understand how the system in play 3 Millions ago responded to steady CO2? Then they contend it relates in any way to today? And the fact that the East Antarctic ice sheet is at least 20 million years old and is stable today has been apparent for decades.
About the only thing you can conclude is that this study says little to nothing about CO2.
Now, I do not doubt the potential for a SLR of 13.5 meters is currently locked away in Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheet. That is simply a matter of the measured ice mass balance entering its liquid phase and returning to the oceans. And if the Holocene were to last long enough, then the odds increase that eventually an anomalous D-O heating event of sufficient duration could finally produce that melt.
But the link of sea level to atmospheric CO2 levels of the ancient past is purely hypothetical, with too poor a temporal resolution to establish cause-effect.
“Sea level may not rise as high as assumed”.
The key word being “assumed”
Assumed by who?
When?
It was assumed by alarmists who believed their own lies and propaganda, nervous nellies, assorted bedwetters and Chicken Littles, and those who just believe whatever they are told.
Actual scientists never assumed any such thing.
Actual science does not work by a process of making broad assumptions about anything…ever!
So anyone making this statement is admitting they have been unscientific, and jumped to premature and possibly completely erroneous conclusions.
Just my first thought.
Menicholas, I suspect they picked that word assimed very carefully because it is very non-committal. If they used the word predicted then they are making an admission that the climate scientists got it wrong. Can’t have that can we? The ones in this whole climate change debate who use the word assume should be the ones downstream of the climate scientists – the ones who use the predictions of the climate scientists about where the climate is heading. For example the biologists who try to estimate what will happen in the sphere of biology.
AND this is another computer program=stupid in turns into real stupid out.
Yup, ‘assumed’ is a red flag. In a way, it is a merely a nod to prevailing narrative, in another way it can be a subtle dig at it. Very intriguing, let’s have more of it.
======================
Raising CO2 from 300 ppmv to 400 ppmv over the last 70 years hasn’t resulted in any increase at all in the rate of sea-level rise.
At most coastal tide gauges, measured sea-level is rising at a rate of less than six inches per century. At many locations, measured sea-level is actually falling (because the land is rising), and at the locations with the highest measured rates of sea-level rise most of that rise is due to the land sinking.
Dr. Steven Koonin was President Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the Energy Department during Obama’s first term. After he left that position, he finally felt at liberty to tell the inconvenient truth. He said, “Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today.”
In fact, “70 years” is an understatement. The rate of sea-level rise hasn’t increased (accelerated) since the 1920s. You can see it yourself in just about all of the best GLOSS-LTT long-term tide gauge records of sea-level. Here they are, sorted by record length, with the longest records at the top. Just click on the station locations to see NOAA’s plots of sea-level for each station:
http://sealevel.info/MSL_global_trendtable4_Xr.html
Sometimes NOAA’s site goes down. In case that happens when you’re trying to use it, here are few good, long-term records:
Australia: http://sealevel.info/680-140_Sydney_uncropped_2014_1p5ar.png
Germany: http://sealevel.info/120-022_Wismar_2015-4e2_sq_75pct.jpg
San Diego: http://sealevel.info/9410170_San_Diego_uncropped_2014_1p5ar.png
If you know how to read a graph, it should be obvious to you that there’s been no acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise in response to anthropogenic CO2.
If you don’t feel like clicking on all those tide station links, you might enjoy viewing them set to music. Yeah, that’s right:
https://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/sea-level-data-set-to-music-yeah-thats-right/
(Caveat: those graphs are about 3 years old. However, nothing much has changed in those 3 years.)
Refs: http://www.sealevel.info/
My favorite sea level inanity is a recent one…producing graphs that [splice] satellite altimetry projections of sea level onto tide gauge data for the most recent years…then announcing that the trend is accelerating.
Brandon Gates posted just such a graph recently, in an attempt t rebut my contention that sea level rise as measured by tide gauges is showing no accelerating trend at all.
In fact, the monthly and annual variations dwarf the rate of rise, so much so that in places like Miami, there were months and years in the 1940’s that had higher levels than recent years.
Other places like New York City’s Battery Park, with records going back over 150 years, has sea levels back in the 1800s that were very close to the most recent months of data!
Mods, should be : …that splice satellite …
I’ve always said there has been no discernable rise in sea level for my area. I looked at the data for the first time and it shows a sea level rise of 2 inches over the last 60 years. For the last 30 years it has dropped 3 inches. After the 97/98 El Nino discharge it dropped 11 inches. The trend for 110 years is a rise of 2 mm/yr.
IPCC AR5’s worst, worst, worst, worst case scenario RCP 8.5 modeled the largest ice melt and sea level rise – taking until 2500 to be realized.
Climatstrologists assume that man made GW will increase moisture in the air. This should cause the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to grow, since it can’t possibly warm up enough to melt it. Same should apply to the Northern Dome of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which while not as cold as the EAIS, rarely warms enough to melt.
I argued this point for a long [time] Gloria…falls on deaf ears for some reason…it is never anywhere near freezing even in the middle of summer down there, anywhere but the coast.
The interior of the ice sheet even 100 miles in rarely gets over 0.0 F. And is more commonly cold enough to make dry ice even in summer
“To predict sea level changes, scientists look to Earth’s distant past…”
No…they look to their models.
They forgot to mention the part where they develop a conclusion first, then seek out any shreds of vacuum thin “evidence” they can in an attempt to demonstrate that they have a clue.
They have no clue.
I cannot remember the last time I read anything from any of these guys that sounded like they looked at evidence, and THEN reached a conclusion.
I’ve observed no sea level rise on the Oregon Coast since 1950, nor since my granddad built the Turnaround at Seaside c. 1921.
A mark I made as a six year old vandal in 1957 on Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach is still visible with the same amount of rock below it at low tide.
With a clam shovel. It feels good to get that crime off my chest.
sturgishooper I’ve often wondered how future geologists are going to account for the separation of rock strata that was caused by teams of boys rolling boulders down hillsides for millennia. The practice I think has pretty much come to an end with urbanization and the great post WWII butt whippin’ for boys that let one bound into town.
Wonder what they will make of the artificial reefs which are/were created by dumping stuff offshore? Will it be taken, by future oceanographers, that sea levels were hundreds of feet lower during certain years of the 20th and 21st century, as evidenced by large swaths of artifacts, in deep water, which were obviously on dry land when they were made?
There are a lot of ways to get something wrong.
Making seemingly valid assumptions based on logic is one way…but failing to look at all available evidence is a far more efficient way to be incorrect.
We need more vandals like you to come out of the closet…
fossilsage: In 1960 when I was in Jr. High, 7 or 8 of us guys loosened and pushed a boulder about the size of a small VW car down a steep, grassy grade about 500 feet above a little-traveled dirt road. Wouldn’t you know it, a truck came around the bend going the same speed, over the same distance of their soon-to-cross paths. We stood their almost wetting our pants with visions of doing time for reckless endangerment. Fortunately the driver must have seen the boulder coming and sped up, because the boulder crossed the road about 1 meter behind the truck!
In 1946 the good-weather king tides [normal BP] used to cover our lawn by about an inch and trickle into the well unless we kept a levy bank around it.
The lawn and the well are exactly the same so guess where those same king tides come to 7 decades later?
9 inches lower!
Good benchmarks come in handy as evidence against these climinals.
Fossilsage:
A friend of a friend was consistently throwing stones uphill when they were walking together. Curious, my friend asked why he did this. (You can imagine how confusing this would be to future geologists.)
He replied that as someone with a good understanding of physics and entropy, he was doing his bit to stave off the heat death of the universe.
Fossilsage, as a great practitioner of that art of rock-rolling, a couple of friends and I gave it it’s own verb. We called it ‘trumbling.’ We rolled some big rocks. Once we did it while accompanying another friend who was operating a surveying instrument along a high ridge. He bitched us out for making the ground shake. BTW, we had a full and clear view of all the downhill topography for several miles, risking the lives only of yucca, prickly pear and insects and small rodents.
Later in life, I discovered the pleasure of a similar, but much safer activity, which I called trumble-weeding. On a very windy winter day, take a walk along a rural fence line, and pick up it’s captured Russian Thistle skeletons (ie. tumbleweeds) and set them free again, watching them roll across the prairie, to be captured far down range by some other fence line. Make an attack formation, or try to keep a straight line formation. Mesmerizing.
Oh yeah, and measuring sea level rise is very difficult and fraught with complexity.
“…and investigate how the planet’s ice sheets responded then to warmer temperatures brought on by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
Excuse me? Either some very poor sentence structure or even worse science right there.
As Bill Illis said above, sea levels in prior interglacials were higher than present. IPCC AR5 acknowledges this in the Executive Summary of Chapter 5, “Information from Paleoclimate Archives.” They say:
Apparently CO2 during the last interglacial was less than today. It should be obvious that the relationship between sea levels and CO2 is a non-issue. CO2 didn’t cause the higher sea levels 129,000 years ago. Why would they be considered the primary cause today?
Based on paleoclimate data, we should be prepared for sea levels at some time in the future to be several meters higher than present, hundreds or thousands of years from now. Sea levels have been steadily rising since the last glacial maximum 26,000 years ago without any help from humans and may continue to do so for some time. At current global rates of 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr it will take 1,500 years for sea levels to rise another 5 meters, so cancel your trip to that beach front vacation rental on South Padre Island in 3515. It won’t be there.
Evil wasn’t present in the CO2 back then like it is now 😉
“Evil…CO2…”
It was turned to the daft side. Never underestimate the power of the Farce.
Maybe the amount of ice sequestered on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has been steadily growing for a long time, or even “growing unsteadily? Maybe it snows more in those places during some glacial epochs than others. Or maybe some things have occurred to make them melt away more slowly this time?
In any case, it is obvious that sea level is highly variable in any time scale more than a hundred years…or at least it can be.
So why, as the liberals news outlets were proudly proclaiming last week, did we just spend over $150 billion to rebuild a city which is below sea level and sinking more every day, and located in one of the most hurricane prone regions of the entire world?
Why is the Army Corps of Engineers so dang proud of their decades long efforts to contain and channelize the Mississippi river, and hence starve southern Louisiana of the much needed sediment that keeps that area high and dry, and instead allowing it to be transported ever further offshore and causing a permanent zone of eutrophication in the gulf, which simultaneously wasting the very material that gives rise to the protective wetlands on the coast of that state?
Some things are known, and settled science…and the process that gives rise to a healthy delta region is one of them.
My head hurts…
S. Hooper,
You’re not the first person to vandalize rocks. Here’s a pic from the late, great John Daly’s website, showing the Mean Sea Level in 1841, and the MSL from 2004:
http://www.john-daly.com/photomrk.htm
Ah, but that was government-sanctioned Science, not childish vandalism!
I know, sometimes that’s a distinction without a difference.
Haystack Rock, 1941:
http://www.cbhistory.org/userfiles/Haystack%20Rock%20and%20mine.jpg
2015:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EdRl3Ml2-Qc/VPYSAvNrolI/AAAAAAAAAkU/ENAH4nz32xQ/s1600/haystack%2Brock.SAS.JPG
Graphic, but I don’t know what that needle off to the left is in the present day shot. Maybe some art shot comparing another sea stack with Haystack.
Gloria, clearly not taken from the same angle, unless you are suggesting that global warming makes rocks rise out of the sand. Also, is the tide in or out in each picture?
A recent picture up close.
Most of us know how to search Google these days so there is little point trying to show sea level rise with old pictures. They don’t show anything. 2 inches or 3 inches of change won’t show any catastrophic evidence.
http://www.notjustahousewife.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/haystack-rock.jpg
More out than in in both cases. At low tide, you can walk to the rock, no problem. Sometimes it has a bit of a pool around its base.
Couldn’t find photos from exactly the same angle and position. But lots of Pacific NW people are familiar with the rock and the average level of the sea around it truly has not changed in the lifetimes of anyone now living or their recent ancestors.
Here is one from a place which no kid ever touched in hundreds of years, but some very sick and hypocritical group of so-called adults did:
http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/i/newscms/2014_50/804461/141211-nazca-greenpeace-kns-1600_3d34af2886486bfc0c8a4941597ccfc9.jpg
The future is not renewable until it’s past.
Apparently Greenpeace is not a fun place to work for as a funds solicitor. They are pretty hard nosed about meeting weekly quotas per the San Diego Reader a few weeks back.
Seems like they are in more for the power and money than for the environment.
The nasa map is wrong if its supposed to highlight a 6 meter rise. It shows areas I know are dozens of meters abc sea level colored in red.
Yup. Caught the same thing. Published the ‘official’ 1 meter for the US and then the globe in Gaia’s Limits. Hard to find any red at all.
While we wait for observational evidence of in your face cooling, due to the astonishing abrupt change to sun which is ongoing, and past the time discussing nonsense cult of CAGW papers here is something interesting.
As the planet has warmed, we all assumed (or at least I did) that the cult of CAGW’s fundamental calculation (done more than 20 years ago by a half dozen specialists led by the founding father of CAGW, Hansen) of how much surface forcing a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will produce without ‘feedbacks’ is reasonable, in the right ball park. We all assumed the problem why the IPCC’s general circulation models (GCMs) predicted warming does not agree with measured warming (satellite which to this point has not been tampered with) is due to incorrect modeled cloud feedback, incorrect assumed water vapor amplification of the forcing, and possibly a delay in forcing response, as opposed to the fundamental no ‘feedbacks’ AGW calculation, itself.
The infamous without ‘feedbacks’ cult of CAGW’s calculation (this is the calculation that predicted 1.2C to 1.4C surface warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2) incorrectly/illogical/irrationally/against the laws of physics held the lapse rate constant to determine (fudge) the estimated surface forcing for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. There is no scientific justification for fixing the lapse rate to calculate the no ‘feedback’ forcing of greenhouse gases.
Convection cooling is a physical fact not a theory and cannot be ignored in the without ‘feedbacks’ calculation. The change in forcing at the surface of the planet is less than the change in forcing higher in the atmosphere due to the increased convection cooling caused by greenhouse gases. We do not need to appeal to crank ‘science’ that there is no greenhouse gas forcing to destroy the cult of CAGW ‘scientific’ argument that there is a global warming crisis problem to solve.
There is a forcing change due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 however that forcing change is almost completely offset by the increase in convection. Due to the increased lapse rate (3% change) due to convection changes (the 3% change in the lapse rate, reduces the surface forcing by a factor of four, the forcing higher in the atmosphere remains the same) therefore warming at the surface of the planet is only 0.1C to 0.2C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2, while the warming at 5 km above the surface of the planet is 1C. As a warming of 0.1C to 0.2C is insufficient to cause any significant feedback change, the zero feedback change for a doubling of CO2 is ballpark the same as the with feedback response.
P.S. The cult of CAGW no ‘feedbacks’ 1-dimensional calculation also ignored the overlap of the absorption of water vapor and CO2 which is also a physical fact. As the planet is 70% covered in water there is a great deal of water vapor in the atmosphere at lower levels, particularly in the tropics. Taking the amount of water vapor overlap into account (before warming) in the no ‘feedbacks’ 1 dimension calculation also reduces the surface warming due to a doubling of atmospheric to 0.1C to 0.2C. Double trump.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.ca/2015/07/collapse-of-agw-theory-of-ipcc-most.html
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B74u5vgGLaWoOEJhcUZBNzFBd3M/view?pli=1
Transcript of a portion of Weart’s interview with Hansen.
P.S. NOAA for fun has been propping up the sunspot numbers. As it is no longer possible to visually see the sunspots, they have been counting ‘sunspots’ using an enhanced image of the solar surface which can see the very, very weak tiny sunspots by using the Zeeman shifting effect of a magnetic field on the spectrum of iron. The practical problem with that scam is as the magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots continues to decline the magnetic ropes that rise up to the surface of the sun to form sunspots are now torn apart in convection zone so there is nothing on the surface of the sun to count. The change in sunspots number will therefore appear as an abrupt drop in sunspot number which has never happened before which will also coincide with an abrupt drop in planetary temperature. No surprise what has happened to the sun has happened before and also no surprise there was abrupt cooling, when what is happening to the sun happened before. The interesting twist is explaining why there was a delay in cooling.
William, when I brought up this issue of what appear to me to be sun specks, being counted as spots, I was told in no uncertain terms by a prominent person on his blog that I was wrong and the spots are counted the same way today as they have been for over a hundred years. I as specifically told that they use, in some cases, the same telescopes.
Not having sufficient level of expertise in how spots are counted to begin with, I was unable to respond.
Are you saying that you have specific knowledge that spots are being counted differently in the past several years than in previous solar cycles?
I note that the sun spot trend charts are once again well below the projections on the same charts. They (whoever “they” are) have been revising these projections downward, and forward in time, for most if not all of this entire cycle.
Take a look at area 2410.
I had to look very closely to see anything, after dusting off my screen! This has been going on for quite some time, on and off:
http://solarham.net/regions/map.htm
http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/solar-cycle-sunspot-number.gif
In reply to Menicholas September 3, 2015 at 9:16 pm
Hello,
Yes, there is current, silly, comically obvious manipulation of sunspot number where tiny pores that cannot be see with a telescope are count as a sunspot. Sunspot number is just a number. The issue that cannot be explained away will be significant global cooling.
Proof of that is that measured solar flux is now dropped to a level that only occurs when the sun is spotless.
http://www.solen.info/solar/
As noted above the so called 1 dimension without ‘feedbacks’ calculation of the change in surface forcing (the 3.7 watts/meter^2 that Gore used to support his claim for the millions of tiny light bulb analog) for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 ignored the fact that an increase greenhouse gases causes there to be an increase convection cooling which reduces the surface warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 1.5C to a very conservative 0.1 to 0.2C due to the water vapor/CO2 overlap fudge.
Secondly the without ‘feedbacks’ calculation of the surface warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 also ignored the reduction in the CO2 forcing in the lower atmosphere due to the overlap of the CO2 absorption spectrum with water vapor. As the planet is 70% covered with water there is a great deal of water vapor in the lower atmosphere particularly in the tropics. A peer reviewed paper published in 1982 noted the calculation ‘error’ and noted the surface forcing is reduced by a factor of four if the overlap of water and CO2 is included.
The corollary of what appears to be an astonishing fact – the entire scientific basis for any significant global warming due to an increase in atmospheric CO2 is an obvious white lie, fib, and so on – is that almost all of the warming in the last 150 years was caused by solar cycle changes. How the sun cause changes in planetary cloud cover amount, properties, and lifetimes (low level and cirrus) is more interesting than counting sunspots.
Observational proof of the assertion that the majority of the warming in the last 150 years was caused by solar cycle changes would be the complete and rapid reversal of the warming that has occurred in the last 150 years, due to the extraordinary change to the sun.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%281982%29039%3C2923%3ARHDTIC%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Best wishes,
William
I wanted the image of the sun to display as a picture, not a link:
http://solarham.net/regions/regions_sep3.jpg
Any idea where the August number will go on the trend chart?
June and July showed not much change, but I was looking almost every day, and they did not look the same to me.
The 10.7 cm flux chart shows more closely what I, and my admittedly amateur eye, saw.
Looks like the ice is going to melt and we are all going to drown, after all.
The El-Nino has taken it’s toll on the global climate. Roy Spencer has updated UAH global for Aug. at 0.28 deg.
By UAH, the Pause has shortened by 2 months to 18 yrs. 4 months
http://i57.tinypic.com/2md5gmh.png
(click to embiggen)
When a pause “shortens”, it’s called a trend.
Five years from now, the pause may well be 30 years…or a hundred.
Monthly play by play may not be very meaningful of an analytical tool.
Just sayin’.
If there was to be a drop of about 0.1C per decade over the coming years the ‘pause’ would extend backwards in time and would therefore lengthen at both ends.
However, the Super El Nino of 1998 caused temperatures to spike upwards by about 0.25degC (this is a one off and isolated warming event, and is the only warming event, over and above seasonal variation, seen in the satellite data) so to push backwards in time by a large amount will require quite a significant future drop in temperature over the coming decade or so.
But some suggest (even Julia Slingo of the UK Met Office who is a die hard and committed warmist) that there will be no resumption to warming before 2030. If over the next 20 years, the temperature anomaly does not remain simply steady but drops at a rate of say 0.11 deg C per decade, then it is likely that by 2035, the trend in the satellite data as from 1979 will not be statistically different to zero!
Of course, no one knows how the future will pan out, but if that were to come to pass, it is inevitably that there would be a plethora of papers over the coming years suggesting ever lower figures for climate sensitivity to CO2, and some suggesting that this may be close to zero (or at any rate not statistically significantly different to zero).
If there is no resumption to warming (lets assume that 2016/7 will bring a La Nina cancelling out this years El Nino) within the next 5 to 8 years, it is difficult to see how CAGW will survive and be anything other than a recognised political delusion based upon sketchy science bolstered by the demise in the scientific process.
Interesting. From 1980-1995 there is zero trend.
Love the phrase – “the continents were roughly where they are today” So continents can move (sarc)… but CO2 is a problem??? When will they start to blame continental shift on human behaviors?? Once the temps drop and the sea stays put?? I can see the headlines now – Australia heading for the West Coast of the USA!! Moving at an alarming rate of 1mm/century! Government declares a continent tax to prevent further movement!
Erosion of a coast is almost invariably now blamed on climate change.
So, we are nearly there.
In former years coastal cliffs were eroded steadily over the millennia by a natural on-going process.
These days, such cliffs are only ever demolished by climate change induced extreme weather and sea-level rise.
These basic principles should be summarized in a handbook for journalists, just so that nobody ever accidentally ruins their own career by attempting to describe the real (non-alarming) situation.
(some sarc. here)
Generally the continents were indeed in about their present positions, but there was one major difference, far more important than CO2. That was the fact that the global circumtropical ocean circulation was further interrupted by the closure of the Inter-American Seaway by the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, about three million years ago.
My understanding was that this took place more than 3 million years ago and so I quickly googled it.
According to wiki (and we all know that has issues) it suggests that formation began some 12 to 15 million years ago and was complete at least 4.5 million years ago. At what stage it was effective to cut circulation is unclear but it would appear that this was more than 4.5 million years ago,
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Panama
“A significant body of water (referred to as the Central American Seaway) once separated the continents of North and South America, allowing the waters of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to mix freely. Beneath the surface, two plates of the Earth’s crust were slowly colliding, forcing the Cocos Plate to slide under the Caribbean Plate. The pressure and heat caused by this collision led to the formation of underwater volcanoes, some of which grew large enough to form islands as early as 15 million years ago. Meanwhile, movement of the two tectonic plates was also pushing up the sea floor, eventually forcing some areas above sea level.
Over time, massive amounts of sediment (sand, soil, and mud) from North and South America filled the gaps between the newly forming islands. Over millions of years, the sediment deposits added to the islands until the gaps were completely filled. By no later than 4.5 million years ago, an isthmus had formed between North and South America. However, in April 2015, an article in Science Magazine stated that zircon crystals in middle Miocene bedrock from northern Colombia indicated that by 10 million years ago, it is likely that instead of islands, a full isthmus between the North and South American continents had already likely formed where the Central American Seaway had been previously.[2]”
I thought that was an early Miocene event?
Isthmus of Panama formed as result of plate tectonics
http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2008/07/uf-study-isthmus-of-panama-formed-as-result-of-plate-tectonics.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-dating-panama-formations-cast-doubt-ice-age-origins/
Steve,
Connections between the Americas have come and gone.
The latest connection occurred during the Pliocene, c 3-5 Ma.
Richard and Verde,
The fact that the main Inter-American Exchange of organisms didn’t occur until about three million years ago remains a problem for those arguing for a complete closure of the Seaway by 4.5 Ma.
The latest study (this year) supporting an earlier closure relied on zircons from Panamanian volcanoes found in Columbia. This doesn’t rule out the possibility of a volcanic arc connected on one end to South America but still open on the Central American isthmus side, or a chain of islands.
The jury is still out on the timing of full closure. There is also some evidence that it reopened shallowly in the early Pleistocene.
However, even full land connection before 4 Ma doesn’t mean that closing the seaway didn’t contribute to Pleistocene glaciations, as part of a complex of events leading over around two million years to deep global cooling.
But Gloria,
Over geological times spans, and they are very, very slow, just “when” do you have “enough” land mass closure to “close” the Panama Isthmus to the massive west-east ocean circulation required to affect the world’s climate?
It’s a very, very tough question, because the mere fact that a “mountain” and “plate
geologist says “The Istumus closed 3.768547 MYA” means, well, really nothing. See, “climate” requires some 1.23456789 billion/trillion/quadrillion gals/cubic meters/cubic kilometers of salt water per second/day/week/month/year to be affected by the waters from the east Pacific flowing into the west Atlantic, then up towards the north Atlantic, right?
So, at what point in the long rise of the present Panama mountains (pre-Canal dig) did they rise far enough to reduce that water flow low enough to “close” the west-east water flow off and begin the Gulf Stream flow we know right now? Did that flow cut off in Year_0.001, and the Gulf Stream begin Year_0.0011? Or one hundred years after the “marshes and swamps” began? Or 112 years? Or 12,101.101 years later? Can we really tell when it began? Can we actually even define when the Panama Isthmus was “closed”?
Now, making that analysis more difficult is the nature of the water flow itself, and of the rising land mass’s ability to resist erosion. The only reason for water to flow from ocean to ocean is a change in height (potential energy) or a change in density and wind pressure. Thus, the Gulf Stream flows because of a change in density and salinity between its source (the warm gulf-Caribbean waters) and the colder north sea, added by the world’s centrifugal/centripetal/Hadley cell rotations. But how much pressure is actually present between the east Pacific and west Caribbean ocean? (They are not now at the same elevation, even today!) How strongly will the newly risen land (if not an abrupt single volcanic event – which IS a possibility in the final few years after tectonic forces have gone on long enough! So, the Gilbralter Straits might “close” one year, but water flows again 1000 years later when a stream cuts through, then stops again. The Everglades are a low, flat frfesh water river that is incredibly shallow but very wide? Is it a swamp, or a river, or what? Certainly, even as a 2-4 foot (one meter) deep “river” it is enough to affect the Gulf Stream’s flow past Cuba – a very well-defined rocky mass.
To compare: The Mediterranean Sea is evaporating, and is fed by the European and Asia and African rivers. But without continuous flow from the Atlantic, it will empty and be much, much lower than the Atlantic Ocean. So, if the Suez Canal were not present, eventually the Med would evaporate into a salt flat fed by the Danube, Nile, and southern French and Spanish rivers if Gibraltar Straits were to rise. But, if the rising sea floor were cut by even one soft spot between the lava flows, that one spot would cut ever deeper as the Med’s water receded, and you’d eventually get a massive canyon, or another strait free-flowing like Cape Horn or the Gulf of Aquaba does. Eventually, the Great Rift Valley will also cut through the rock as the Gulf waters flow through.
So cutting off ocean flow into a deep gulch is very, very difficult. But the low pressure of a circulating force between the Atlantic and Pacific is much easier to stop. We still just cannot claim “It stopped 3.000000 MYears ago, and thus this began 3.000000001 years ago.”
or can we?
RA,
Not just ocean currents, temperature and salinity but wind and moisture patterns were affected by the progressive closure of the Seaway during the late Miocene and Pliocene. Even today, related winds are more important in maintaining the equable climate of Europe than is the Gulf Stream itself.
The Seaway was closed as a deep channel long before it became dry land for its whole length. During its shoal phase ~10 Ma, it was a nursery for the extinct giant shark Carcharocles megalodon.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0010552
Whether its effective closure occurred three or 4.5 Ma is not IMO material to the significance of this tectonic event in the onset of the Pleistocene. Both physical evidence and modeling show the importance of the demise of the Seaway on climatic evolution at the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition, to include the formation or expansion of ice on Greenland, prior to the first vast continental ice sheets.
IMO the closure was a necessary but not necessarily sufficient step in the onset of the Pleistocene NH glaciations.
How many humans caused the CO2 rise in the Pliocene?
That was the fault of the australopithecines.
Luckily, they all moved to Australia causing it to break off from the rest of the world and float away….
That was a good thing, right?
“Maybe the dingo ate your baby.”
“Ice sheets typically take centuries to millennia to respond to increased carbon dioxide, so it’s more difficult to say what will happen on shorter time scales, like the next few decades,” Winnick said.
Wow, I never knew that ice and sea levels responded directly to CO2. CO2 must be even more powerful and magical than I thought.