I got a couple of emails today saying that I should take a look at the most recently posted sea level graph from the University of Colorado shown below:
The reason for the interest is that it dropped the rate of change from 3.3 mm/yr to 3.2 mm/yr. as shown in the next graph. That’s hardly news, since it is well within the error band of +/- 0.4 mm/yr.
But I thought it might be interesting to go back and see what I could find in the UC sea level archive of graphs. I’ve presented all of the ones I’ve found below. I should note that in some years, UC may only release 2 graphs (as indicated by the release #) or up to 5 in one year like they did in 2005. For the sake of presentation simplicity, I’m only presenting the last graph to be released in any year.
I realize there has been a great deal of interest in the flattening of the 60 day smoothing line that started in 2007 and continues to the present. But the trend line will take awhile to reflect any appreciable change in the rate if it continues to flatten. The yearly rate of rise has been between 3.0 and 3.5 mm per year since 2004.
Many projections by various models predict the rise of sea level:
Note the trend of the observations line from 1950 to 2000, if you follow the linear trend, it will end up somewhere between 20 and 30 cm by the year 2100. The graph above is from Wikipedia’s “global warming art” which for some reason doesn’t show the observations back that far.
Here is a better graph, from New Zealand’s Ministry of the Environment, which shows more of the historical record, all the way back to 1870:
It seems sea level has been rising for awhile, and that the observation line in black, if you follow the linear trend, will also end up somewhere between 20 and 30 cm by the year 2100.
To put it all in perspective, some example images are useful.
Here is what 3 millmeters of sea level rise in 1 year looks like. This is a tiny fuel cell chip, just 3mm x 3mm in size:
I know that many people are concerned about sea level rise over the next century. In the rate of 3 mm per year continues, we’d be at 300 mm (30 centimeters) of rise in 100 years. Here is what 30.48 cm (12 inches) looks like:
And finally, here is what the tide gauge at Anchorage Alaska looks like:
Anchorage Alaska boasts the world’s second highest tides: varying over 40 feet (1219 cm), low to high tide. Ok, that is an extreme example, how about this one in France:
Mt. St. Michel on the north coast of France at low tide (left) and high tide (right).
The water surrounding this island is the Gulf of Sant-Malo.
Low tide
The point I’m making is that in 100 years, for some places that extra foot won’t make much of a difference. Some low lying areas will be affected certainly, but even some of the lowest lying areas of the earth won’t see all that much impact from a third of a meter of sea level rise in 100 years. Probably the worst place to live is in a river delta which is almost at sea level anyway. Even so, 30 cm falls short of the lowest notch on this graph of 1 meter.
Bangladesh is another low lying river delta where it is not desirable to live, yet many do. Even so it appears much of it is 1 meter or more above sea level.
Florida is often talked about as being at risk. yes there are a few places there that might be touched by a 30 cm rise in sea level 100 years from now.
Looking at the whole world, at the rate we are going, I’d say it will take awhile.
There appears to be a great difference between tide guage-measured and satellite altimeter-measured results. For example, Holgate (2007) estimated 2.03 mm/yr (1904-1953) and 1.45 mm/yr (1954-2003). Domingues et al. (2008) estimated ~ 1.5 mm/yr for the last 50 years, while Wunsch et al. (2007) estimated 1.6 mm/yr also for the last 50 years. Morner is even lower. Woppelmann et al. (2007) found that correcting for exact GPS position also reduced the rates.
We know that there is great regional variability (up to two orders of magnitude larger than the mean) from altimeter measurements (and tide-guage?), but I believe that this variability is greater with altimetry. Since altimeters are to some extent set to tide guage records, it probably depends on which ones they are standardised against.
Morner had a comment (don’t know where) that recent altimetry was set to a Hong Kong tide guage that showed an unusually high rate.
While we also know there is considerable lifting and sinking of land masses, how can we resolve the differences between these two methods, tide guage and altimetry?
Refs cited above are:
Domingues, C.M., Church, J.A., White, N.J., Gleckler, P.J., Wijffels, S.E., Barker, P.M. and Dunn, J.R. 2008. Improved estimates of upper-ocean warming and multi-decadal sea-level rise. Nature 453: 1090-1093.
Holgate, S.J. 2007. On the decadal rates of sea level change during the twentieth century. Geophysical Research Letters 34: 10.1029/2006GL028492.
Wunsch, C., Ponte, R.M. and Heimbach, P. 2007. Decadal trends in sea level patterns: 1993-2004. Journal of Climate 20: 5889-5911.
Woppelmann, G., Miguez, B.M., Bouin, M.-N. and Altamimi, Z. 2007. Geocentric sea-level trend estimates from GPS analyses at relevant tide gauges world-wide. Global and Planetary Change 57: 396-406.
And if you can’t out run that, they I suspect you are doomed from more things than just sea level rise!
Why are humans so arrogant to think that they can just sit their asses down somewhere and expect the universe to move around them? Such idiots.. If the sea is getting too close to you move!
Andrew P (01:52:43)
The converse is also true:
If the seal levels are falling, polar bears have less to eat.
Less food for polar bears = reduced population thereof.
Less seal levels = less polar bear levels
Less seal and polar bear levels = less mass.
Less mass = less displacement.
Andrew P = A Big “F”.
QED 🙂
To my previous posts, I am wondering, is it cheaper and more plausible to stop sea level rise, or to move your ass somewhere else?
Mike Bryant (00:52:24) :
I can’t quite figure it out, but there seems to be something rather odd about the evolution of the 2003 spike… Has it been lowered with respect to the 2004 spike? Are these adjustments more evidence of human caused sea level rise? I guess sometimes these graphs must be tortured into submission…
Sid Brooks Australia (01:41:02) :
Regarding satellite sea height measurements. I worry about the accuracy of the published data for the following reasons:
1/ I don’t believe that the parameters of the satellite orbit are known to within millimeters.
The altitude of the obits are affected by many things such as orbit decay, the position of the moon, diurnal effects from the sun, mass concentrations in the earths crust (masscons) etc.
I am on the same page. It is only yesterday or so that on the Lindzen thread we were told that the UV spectra had to be corrected because the satellites were losing height, or something like that. I wonder if this correction is in ? If they are losing height they will be measuring a smaller distance to the sea, taking it as rising waters? who knows. As this error favors the alarm I would suspect, like the surface station data, nobody will be correcting for it. It is erendipity that it goes the other way for UV?
Just heard on the greek radio an alarmist announcement: things are much worse than we thought, we will all drawn.
too m
Katherine (01:42:19) :
> I also noticed that the Jason readings aren’t static.
I noticed that too. (Sticks out more than that seal thing….)
Who does the blink comparator images? I’d really like to see one comparing 2009_rel2 with 2009_rel1, Unfortunately, with the change in the Y axis, the result will be a bit muddy unless we get raw data from UoC. Or, we could just ask them why. Offer them a guest post and all that.
“Craig Allen (01:02:02) : Because sea levels have been relatively constant for a few thousand years, dune systems have built up along many coasts. As the erosion kicks in, a small rise is likely to cause much bigger changes to inundation regimes than otherwise would be expected.”
Sea levels have been relatively constant? Could you show a source for that? Only sources I can find show some major increases in the past, and pretty much the same slow, steady gains that we see now for about the last 8K years or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Sea_Level.png
It is interesting that the graphs show the rise slowing or stopping for the past few years (definitely below trend line). This would appear to correlate with the cooling which has also occurred in the same timeframe. In other words, since we are about to head into several decades of cooling, I think we have bigger things to worry about than sea level rise!
meanwhile, the folks over at tgdaily continue the charade…
Survey reveals massive loss of Antarctica glaciers
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/41949/178/
but, but , but….this can’t be the case…
Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly above the historical average
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg
unbelievable!
I would suggest that ordinate scale to be expressed in NANOMETERS
and ocean level variation observed through a SEM 🙂
By the way, right now, BBC keeps on “promoting” (it seems a paid ad)the dissapearance of artic ice.
DJ: Your second link leads to pictures of the Tuvalu Met Office. We’ve discussed Tuvalu Sea Level numerous times here at WUWT. There are multiple reasons why Tuvalu becomes inundated with sea water. I’m sure others will elaborate.
The following is a link to a graph of the Sea Level data for the coordinates of 8s by 179E (Tuvalu’s coordinates) from the University of Colorado Sea Level wizard. Link to Sea Level Wizard is here:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/wizard.php
Tuvalu’s Sea Level graph is here:
http://i39.tinypic.com/219wcpy.jpg
Using the smoothed data as reference, Sea Level at Tuvalu rose a whopping 3.6 cm from Jan 2000 through the end of the data. Prior to that, the data is skewed by the 1997/98 El Nino, which caused the dip at that time. And before that, the data is impacted by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo.
And here’s a graph of the Byron Bay Sea Level (28S, 154E):
http://i42.tinypic.com/2zgfcds.jpg
Can’t get a much flatter trend line than that. There must be something else going on in Byron Bay.
Craig Allen (01:02:02) :
Several others here have pointed out problems resulting from building homes in unstable conditions.
Its just a part of human nature to build where it doesn’t really make sense. Several factors contribute to this: overcrowding in cities, nice views, etc.
Here in Colorado we have many of the same issues.
People have these fantasies about a cozy little cabin overlooking a pristine mountain valley; surrounded, of course, by a lovely pine or aspen forest. So, they build a home in the mountains.
A few years later, we get a forest fire. The Hayman fire, started by a government employee who was paid to ‘protect us’, destroyed 700 structures and burned over 137,000 acres. Many of those structures were people’s dream homes. Everything seemed fine when the homes were built, but it wasn’t so fine during a year (2002) that saw only 56% of normal snowfall over the state.
Jefferson county neglected to inform people building those lovely homes on Green Mountain just West of Denver the soil there was prone to sliding. See http://myapa.planning.org/landslides/docs/KBerryoutline.pdf. Lots of legal squabbles since then.
We spent a lot of money building Denver International Airport. One of the reasons given was the complaints from people living in the flight paths. Now there are new developments by the airport. Sure enough people are complaining about the noise of the planes.
Others are finding out there are no sewage lines out to their little ‘nest in the west’. Some are having to pay hundreds of dollars every month to have their septic tanks emptied. Seems the neighbors don’t like driving on roads covered with raw sewage. See http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_11954468.
Do we see a pattern here?
Why is it, even when warned, people insist on building where it doesn’t make sense? And after the inevitable occurs, want the government to fix them up?
Sigh.
One nice thing about these types of problems: they tend to be self correcting. If the oceans the rise high enough to take out a neighborhood, that is that.
Sid Brooks
I couldn’t agree more. As an engineer who struggles to get plants to work within the limits you quote how are these people able to measure parameters with such massive global and time variations to fractions of a degree or mm? How do people write programmes for such a massively complex system as climate and claim accuracy? Just impossible.
“Now, back to satellite altimetry, which shows the water, not
just the coasts, but in the whole of the ocean. And you measure
it by satellite. From 1992 to 2002, [the graph of the sea level]
was a straight line, variability along a straight line, but absolutely
no trend whatsoever. We could see those spikes: a very rapid
rise, but then in half a year, they fall back again. But absolutely
no trend, and to have a sea-level rise, you need a trend.
Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC’s]
publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it
changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per
year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so
nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but
they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original one which
they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction
factor,” which they took from the tide gauge. So it was
not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I
accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow—
I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not
a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite,
but you don’t say what really happened. And they answered,
that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten
any trend!” -Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner
Alan the Brit, John Hulquist re sedimentation of deltas.
I think there are not enough geologists on this site (although its not WUWT’s fault). The most significant blogs on this thread are the two above who have noted the well known phenomenon (to geologists anyway) that when sealevel rises, river deltas rise, too. With a sealevel rise, the river flow is slowed a bit upstream and it drops its sediments early, building up the delta to its original level. Indeed, the level of the delta is decided by the sealevel itself! During the last ice age, the Mississippi delta was 130 metres below what it is today. As the water rose, the delta kept pace with it and when sea level more or less stabilized, the delta grew outward into the gulf.
I haven’t seen any models of current conditions (people seem to be building only doomsday models these days) but the mechanism is so simple that a credible model would be easy to design knowing the river burden of sediment per year and volume of water average per year, and the delta area and profile below the sea level, one might show that with a 30cm sea level rise a century, the Ganges delta may actually continue to grow in areal extent above sea level. I would say, that this has happened already in the 20cm sea level rise since 1870 shown by the NZ tide guage.
This flooding of the Ganges Delta has figured so prominently in the AGW arsenal of disasters to come and is a fixture on BBC’s doomsday documentaries that gets trundled out every time there is something new to say, that I think WUWT should find a professor of geology to do a post on this item. When I graduated, my calculator was a slide rule so I’m not computer graphics savvy enough to make a contribution in the pretty form that it deserves. Anyway, this pesky drowning of the Bangladeshis has got to stop.
Using the most up-to-date data into 2009, the sea level rise from the Jason-1 satellite has fallen to 2.37 mm per year.
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_J1_Global_NoIB_RWT_PGR_Adjust.gif
But there is something funny going on with the different algorithms used to adjust for the seasonal signal and sea level pressures (inverse barometre adjustment etc.). I think they were designed for the 3.4 mms per year world and they are not working as well in the current environment where sea level is not rising as fast in the majority of the ocean basins.
Look at the North Atlantic with all the corrections applied that one should normally use (and this is typical of all the ocean basins right now except for one).
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_J1_NorthAtl_IB_RWT_PGR_Adjust.gif
This is the only outlier, the Indian Ocean, which was rising rapidly (and when averaged into the overall ocean sea level numbers caused sea level rise to be as high as 2.4 mms per year) is declining now after being loaded up by successive El Ninos from 1997 to 2006.
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_J1_Indian_IB_RWT_PGR_Adjust.gif
The observations of Dr Nils-Axel Mörner “The Greatest Lie Ever Told” casts serious doubt on these satellite measurements as well as other assertions of rising sea levels (unless the sea is rising and the land is rising, ie earth puffing up).
Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner also pointed out”
“There’s another way of checking it, because if the radius of the Earth increases, because sea level is rising, then immediately the Earth’s rate of
rotation would slow down. That is a physical law, right? You have it in figure-skating: when they rotate very fast, the arms are close to the body; and then when they increase the radius, by putting out their arms, they stop by themselves. So you can look at the rotation and the same comes up: Yes, it
might be 1.1 mm per year, but absolutely not more.”
So LOD measurements should help either verify or put the lie to the 3.2 mm/yr… unless those are also being adjusted…
for Craig who is worried about road maintenance –
the entire US interstate system has been built since the 1940’s. What is that? The time required for sea level to rise 5 inches?
I am 64 years old and your warning that I would have to say goodbye to my “favorite beach” by 2100 terrifies me. If Venice, Italy is any proof of what people will do in response to such issues, I would have to believe that man can deal with worse.
I am an optimist, I see the situation in reverse. Obviously, sea level rise created the beaches we now have (it has been rising for a very long time). Why would that process stop?
I think that what is “astronomical” is the tendency to hyperventilate about something that few of us will ever see.
Re Craig Allen (01:02:02) :
Just eight points I’d like to make.
According to the charts there has been ~ 10 CM of sea level rise since 1950.
IF your points were valid you should be able to point to these effects NOW.
Can you show where “Those ecosystems will therefore have nowhere to go and will diminish” has occurred?
Can you show evidence that this statement is true: “much of the world land is inhabited and farmed right up to the current high tide mark” (I’ve traveled a bit and I’ve never seen anyone farming right up to the high tide mark as seasonal storms make the land well beyond that point too salty for traditional crops)
Finally, “we saw recently that the wealthiest nation on earth couldn’t even keep one city safe”, ah Craig, that was due to a HURRICANE, not rising seas, and the area in New Orleans that flooded was approx 9 FEET below sea level, so once the levees got breached it was all over but the shouting. To claim that this multiple levee failure was in any way shape or form relavent to cities currently above sea level is just scare mongering.
Arthur
So we have three independent measures observing ocean decline in rate of warming:
Flattening in rise of temperature with direct measurements, sea-level rise by flattening of temperature-controlled thermal expansion, and flattening of rise of MLO measured atmospheric CO2 owing to Henry’s Law–temperature controlled partial pressure of CO2 in the oceans.
All confirming the tail is wagged by the dog and the tail cannot possibly alter its behavior.
While putting sea level rises in perspective, 3 mm is equivalent to two stacked pennies.
See http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/index.cfm?flash=no&action=coin_specifications.
Our fingernails grow around 3 cm per year. That is ten times faster than the rate of the sea level rise. It also about 33% slower than the rate the North American plate is moving towards Asia.
See http://cddis.nasa.gov/926/noamtect.html.
And here is a fun fact: the above implies your fingernail is growing at the rate of 1 nanometer per second. That’s right. You can see one billionth of a meter change in a natural process by simply watching your fingernail. It takes your fingernail 2.5 seconds to growth by the width of a DNA molecule.
This reminds me of another issue I have with “increase” graphs.
Here is CDIAC/BP’s graph of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions
Here is Mauna Loa’s graph of seasonally-adjusted CO2 rise, with the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions curve tucked in.
MLO’s emissions curve does not have the shape of the CDIAC/BP curve at all. It’s veeeeery smooth. Makes one wonder.
OT – things are still looking grim for the Catlin team; it’s still minus 35’C, and the lastest updates mention chronic hypothermia, slurred speech, and dreams of croissants in Paris. I really worry for the safety of the team members, I fear that their determination to find thin ice and open water will lead take them well beyond their own capabilities, and could lead to tragedy. http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/
“It seems sea level has been rising for awhile, and that the observation line in black, if you follow the linear trend, will also end up somewhere between 20 and 30 cm by the year 2100.”
Except that the sea level rise trend before 1900 was less than the slr trend after 1900. Which is exactly opposite of what you expect from a “little ice age recovery” which should have the fastest response early on and then slow. Except that the whole point of AGW is that we _don’t_ expect the trend to just be linear if we keep pumping GHGs into the atmosphere. And the projections you show are the IPCC projections which specifically note that they don’t include any acceleration from greenland or Antarctic ice melt, which, while still not well understood, certainly seems unlikely at this point. So, if we’re _lucky_ SLR will be less than 30 cm in 2100. But if, heavens forbid, all the people on this site are wrong and we’re unlucky, we are looking at a meter of SLR, which won’t matter to people living in Colorado, but will matter a lot to people who are living near coasts, especially anywhere were there are already storm surge problems…