There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when Dr. Roger Pielke mentioned a couple of weeks ago in a response to Real Climate that “Sea level has actually flattened since 2006”.
Today the University of Colorado updated their sea level graph after months of no updates. Note it says 2009_rel3 in lower left.
Source here. Here is the next oldest graph from UC that Pielke Sr. was looking at.
The newest one also looks “flat” to me since 2006, maybe even a slight downtrend since 2006. Let the wailing and gnashing begin anew.
Here is the text file of sea level data for anyone that wants to plot it themselves. In fact I did myself and my graph is below, with no smoothing or trend lines.
Here’s what UC says about the graph. They also provide an interactive wizard to look at specific areas.
Since August 1992 the satellite altimeters have been measuring sea level on a global basis with unprecedented accuracy. The TOPEX/POSEIDON (T/P) satellite mission provided observations of sea level change from 1992 until 2005. Jason-1, launched in late 2001 as the successor to T/P, continues this record by providing an estimate of global mean sea level every 10 days with an uncertainty of 3-4 mm. The latest mean sea level time series and maps of regional sea level change can be found on this site. Concurrent tide gauge calibrations are used to estimate altimeter drift. Sea level measurements for specific locations can be obtained from our Interactive Wizard.
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Hillary: We are responsible for most of it !!!!!!
MUMBAI, India — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton opened a three-day visit to India on Saturday by urging India not to repeat American mistakes in contributing to global pollution…..”.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g3lGTbp2KLrD4mzkA_ebmlLJFg7wD99GR47G1
According to Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, Head of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden President, (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, Leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project:
From: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we18.htm
“The record from 1992 to early 2000 (Fig 4) lacks any sign of a sea level rise; it records variability around zero plus a major ENSO even in year 1997.”
According to Morner, a tilt was introduced in 2003 but that tilt “represents an inferred factor from tide-gauge interpretations.”
Once that tilt is corrected, the 1992 -2003 trend is zero.
INQUA’s Commission on Sea Level Changes forecast for 2100 is 10 cm +/- 10 cm.
The rate of rise in recent centuries has been about 10 – 15 cm per century, and there is no reason to think that will change significantly, if at all.
Unless you are Al Gore, of course, and then it will be 20 feet.
The capital, Malé, has a population of ~83,000 — living on an atoll that is only six hundred yards across! Most have no work. Australia provides financial aid, as does the UN.
The freshwater lens is disappearing due to over pumping/over population. Fresh vegetables only arrive sporadically by ship. The people are being told that global warming will cause the sea to cover their islands. Naturally, they demand financial compensation even though there is no evidence of an unusual sea level rise.
Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost is a very funny travelogue of the situation [you can find it used for a few dollars]. Highly recommended for anyone interested in seeing what it’s like being out in the middle of nowhere, living almost on the equator with 80,000 other people, and waiting for the ocean to wipe them off the map.
Of course, an unusual sea level rise isn’t really happening. And coral atolls are perfectly capable of building up faster than 2 mm a year. But since the country is represented in the UN, they are able to use the threat of “global warming” to extract money for a fictitious problem. The UN gets to pretend it cares about Tuvalu, and it uses the islanders for its alarmist global warming propaganda.
Win-win… unless you’re a taxpayer footing the bill.
Along with the sea levels remaining flat the sun is back to full idle mode with the SOHO MDI magnetogram as calm as I have ever seen it. The Oulu cosmic ray station is still at a 44 year record high after a slight dip from one major sun spot. Last months geomagnetic AP index was at 5 which is up from 2 in December. (Peak of 44 in 1991). I have not yet found a summary source for cloud cover or total albedo that is updated regularly. Despite the NOAA temperature anomaly map showing red over most of the oceans one has to believe the oceans have stopped warming. The Argo data also shows a flattening of heat content:
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/global_change_analysis.html
After seeing this post, I scrambled this morning to update my Sea Level data. For those who are interested, it’s broken down by global, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific datasets. I’ve presented it raw, smoothed and “annualized.”
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/sea-level-update-through-march-2009.html
Merrick: Have you compared the amount pumped from wells to the water in the oceans? And where is the pumped water going? Also, if the water table dropped it indicates that the water source is not closely connected to the ocean thus pumped water isn’t being replaced by ocean water. Now please excuse me while I munch on this yummy pond plant.
With sea levels rising in some areas and falling in others, is it taken into account that the land areas below those measurement points themselves maybe rising and sinking creating part of the effect?
I love this site. 🙂
Sea level rise should be viewed in its proper context.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
It has been rising for over 20,000 yrs, and at a very slow pace overall for the last 8,000 yrs.
Patrick Davis (05:44:58) :
Well, I will say this, if you dig through very old Royal Naval (UK) maritime records, hundres of years old, you will see there is *NO* sea level rise of any significance. These records are now lock from public view, which is a shame. Not sure when that happened.
The whole south coast of England, an old naval nation after all it was ships in “Great Britain’s” time which made it a “suprepower”, and all the records show no significant change in sea levels. Hundreds of years of measurements, not just 30 years of “data”.
And yet the UK saw fit to invest over $1billion in the Thames barrier and had to use it with increasing frequency.
How is sea level measured with such granularity ?
Our oceans don’t lie.
This in contrast to the UN and the political establishment that is ruthlessly prepared to con us, rob us, shackle us, control us and kill us if they don’t like the numbers.
But don’t be afraid, they are a minority and many of them still depend on your vote.
It’s going upwards slowly yes but not flattening…
It looks like the last part of Anthony’s graph shows a rising sea level.
Sandy (06:00:30) :
The battle of Thermopylae was fought by the sea in 480 BC. The sea is a long way away now.
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Actually the region where the battle took place is covered by sea now…
How long before we have beach front here in Ky?
Klem: Why did I vote for him, I forget.
Because it was a choice between Tweedle-Dem and Tweedle-Dumb?
Even though the Atlantic Ocean has not showed much “rise” at all, my region of the Chesapeake Bay, has seen some significant sea level ri….
Well, rather….er um….
….land SUBSIDENCE….not sea level rise.
You see, the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and its areal land sits over one of the largest impact craters on Earth, over a mile deep and 50 miles across. And the slow compaction and subsidence in the soft Coastal Plain, continues.
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/6/507
While being close enough to Washington DC where Holdren and his henchmen are saying: “See….I told you so….sea levels are rising….islands are disappearing…..blah blah blah”…
…the reality is that some parts of the Earth are sinking just a bit….the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater region notwithstanding.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
nofreewind, (04:45:44) and Lindsay H,
The ocean temperature does not appear to have much correlation with sea level, from data measured at Hilo, Hawaii.
See http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2009/05/sea-level-surprises-at-hilo.html
Sandy (06:00:30) :
The battle of Thermopylae was fought by the sea in 480 BC. The sea is a long way away now.
———————————————
the_Butcher (08:27:40) :
Actually the region where the battle took place is covered by sea now…
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Look again. The site of the battle is now 9km from the shoreline in places. A highway now passes by the area, with a modern monument to King Leonidas I marking the location.
Steven Hill,
At 4 inches per century, and if you are located 1000 ft above sea level at some spot in KY, then do the math.
Answer: about 3000 years.
Except there isn’t enough ice to push sea levels that high.
I.e. you don’t have to worry about it.
the_Butcher (08:27:40) :
Sandy (06:00:30) :
The battle of Thermopylae was fought by the sea in 480 BC. The sea is a long way away now.
———————————————
Actually the region where the battle took place is covered by sea now…
___________________________________
Not according to this picture…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thermopylae_ancient_coastline_large.jpg
“The battle of Thermopylae was fought by the sea in 480 BC. The sea is a long way away now.”
The Pacific ocean is about 2 meters lower now than it was at its peak, about 7000 years ago. There are flat-topped micro-atolls in the Pacific that barely protrude above the high tide mark. As sea levels vary, the growth layers of the coral can be sampled at these atolls and it can be determined what the maximum height of coral growth was and when.
See “Microatoll record for large century-scale sea-level fluctuations in the mid-Holocene ” Ke-Fu Yua, Jian-Xin Zhaob, Terry Donec and Te-Gu Chena
So large fluctuations (.2 to .4 meters) over short periods (less than a century) happened before human beings developed agriculture, let along SUVs.
I live on a barrier island on the coast of Georgia , and have no plans to leave over sea rise . There has been some beach erosion , but I would think that if the sea were rising it would be evident in the surrounding marshes . It isn’t . Hurricanes are a far more serious threat .
By chance I had downloaded and analyzed the data yesterday, so my timing was good …
There are two oddities to me:
1. The nature and size of the distribution of the changes in measurements. The satellite makes one complete pass every 9.9 days. The RMS average of the difference in sea level between passes is 3.7 mm. Now, in ten days the change in the the global average sea level is vanishingly small … so that would mean that the accuracy of the instrument is about ± 4 mm. This is not far from the calculated annual change of about 3 mm/year … but that’s not the oddity.
It is tempting to think that the errors would be normally distributed about the mean, but the oddity is that that is not the case. Skew = -0.23, kurtosis = -0.09, Jarque-Bera normalcy test = 181 (wildly non-normal). Clearly, there is some error in the signal which is not simple instrument error. My first guess would be some kind of drift in the instrument itself. The difficulty with measuring sea level this way is that to measure to 1 mm accuracy means that you have to measure to an accuracy of one part per billion in both the short and long term … not an easy task even in the lab.
Clearly they have been able to do this in the short term, since they have repeatability of about 4 mm. However, the non-normality of the errors indicates that there is some slow drift in the instrument. This brings up an interesting possibility, which is that we may be able to calculate the size of the instrumental drift by adjusting the data until the error is in fact normally distributed … I’ll have to think about that a bit.
2. The second oddity is the shape of the “seasonal signal”. According to their data, there is no seasonal change for the first half of the year (Jan-June). During the second half of the year, the sea level increases by 10 mm, then goes back down again. This seems unphysical to me.
Any assistance in the understanding of these oddities would be much appreciated.
w.