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.
“A Google search of “worse than we thought” and “global warming” yields a staggering 13,700 hits as of July 19, 2009. In spite of a cooling climate and increasingly skeptical research, the state of climate alarmism may be – LOL – worse than we thought. 😉 ”
No recorded searches on google 50 years ago before all this faster than expected warming flared up.
also warming is creating severe droughts which call for heavy rains and flooding. This heavy rain and flooding will raise the ocean much more than the several inches predicted by he time it runs to the sea. DO NOT lay on a towel at the beach. Take a chair because the water is rising.
Hey, look, a hockey stick! Mann was right, he just had it on upsidedown! 🙂
An initial response.
I am shocked they still haven’t released all the data, look at the dates. There must be a long tale behind the just into service Jason 2, perhaps they have major problems.
The dataset still has an irregular sampling period. (a beware anyone doing detail work) The supplied data does not document this, so don’t assume.
An offset has appeared from the previous release. (not checked earlier)
Early data seems untouched apart from the offset (about 1.8mm), later data is different, some by a lot. Seems just noise.
I’ve been meaning to show the software I am creating the Jason data. This can handle missing data but not irregular sampling yet. Not enough scatter to cause problems though.
A first result on release 2, leaving 3 for a check produced a surprise.
It models with no long term, just one strong factor, a 45 year wave. That is familiar and a quick web search finds plenty of references, papers and text books mentioning a 45 year cycle in sea level.
Ah, background processing has has just completed, a first cut. Still says 45y and R2=0.948 which is reasonable for noisy data.
Confident in that result? Nope. Looks too party trick to be right. What I don’t like is it forecasting shows a sharp rise to a peak 2010, then down the other side to a low ~2035. Amplitude ~52mm. Last low 1979/80.
Don’t like it, too off pat, yet nothing else is in there.
It’s a short dataset, not good for this kind of thing.
Maybe have more of a look eventually.
“No recorded searches on google 50 years ago before all this faster than expected warming flared up.”
Henry, that is to be expected since there wasn’t any Google 50 years ago. What’s Up With That?
“also warming is creating severe droughts which call for heavy rains and flooding.”
Could this be a new Quote of the Week?
“This heavy rain and flooding will raise the ocean much more than the several inches predicted by he time it runs to the sea.”
Only if it somehow manages to melt Greenland’s ice in the process. Not exactly peer-reviewed science, but maybe an outtake from the movie “Bruce Almighty” 🙂
“DO NOT lay on a towel at the beach. Take a chair because the water is rising.”
Are you serious? If you are, it speaks volumes as to why the warmists are so befuddled.
Brandon Dobson (21:28:05) :
It’s parody.
The flattening is probably the result of cold arctic ice & glaciers melting thus cooling the oceans and therefore reducing their volume and as a result lowering/stabilizing asl values.
NOT!
is this a sign of climate change doubt?
or we really need to re-invent good sciences on climate change issue
I dont think in all of these comments anyone has made a reference to the hundreds of miles of Carbon Dioxide that is permanently frozen by permafrost in siberia. I believe when that begins to melt it will be our point of no return.
for those who dont obviously see what i meant in my previous post the heat spike from the gases of so much decayed material will accelerate the melting of glaciers, if there is anything left to melt.
@ur momisugly henrychance (19:45:27) :
Brandon Dobson (21:28:05) :
If Brandon will admit to being American, we have confirming evidence of a long-nurtured British hypothesis that Americans don’t do irony!
Posted anonymously because of fiduciary obligations – Anthony keep up the good work.
I agree with Joe Miner. The varience in data points between ‘rel2’ and ‘rel3’ is daft. Points are moving so much you could be forgiven for thinking rel2 and rel3 are different datasets. Take for instance the start of the Jason data, in rel2 it falls between 0~10mm but has changed to -5~5mm – thats more than the claimed uncertainty. What gives?
OT:
Severe error in ice cover data, it appears.
Hudson Bay, Compare the 2:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.13.html
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent_hires.png
I’m really not sure how to inerpret this data. All things being equal, sea level rise (or fall) can have other factors that contribute as well, beyond the caps sucking in more to become ice. Localized rebound?
I still think gross numbers like this are a statistical game, wherer the tables should be by region, not global. This is meaningless pap.
That trend line they have on the graph is weighted towwards the mean they’ve established, so they can claim that in the long term, sea levels are continuing to rise. More stattistical skewing.
“henrychance – also warming is creating severe droughts which call for heavy rains and flooding. This heavy rain and flooding will raise the ocean much more than the several inches predicted by he time it runs to the sea. DO NOT lay on a towel at the beach. Take a chair because the water is rising.”
LOL – I just about spit up my coffee when I read this!
thealphamonkey (00:59:27) : Show a reference to where this alledged solid CO2 was measured.
Frank Lansner (03:05:42) :
OT:
Severe error in ice cover data, it appears.
Hudson Bay, Compare the 2:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.13.html
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent_hires.png
No you are making the mistake of comparing extent with area.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?A092001815
I went to NASA’s Climate Change Key Indicators site mentioned above, and screen grabbed their chart. I dropped the UofColo sea level chart on top (seasonal barometrically adjusted), scaled it to match, and NASA didn’t even come close. Their boldly stated 3.4 mm/yr is well above the Colorado 3.1, yet their chart’s slope is less than 2.7. Jr high students would do a better job charting. Can’t wait ’til they get their hands on health care.
I noticed also that the source for their global temperature is HadleyCRU. Apparently even NASA doesn’t trust GISS. And for ice, they have Arctic Ocean and Greenland. I guess Antarctica went the way of the Medieval Warm Period.
O/T but here is an extract from Stephen Leacock’s (the great Canadian humorist) story, “Soaked in Seaweed”:
He went below. In a few minutes he reappeared, his face deadly pale. “Blowhard,” he said, “the ship is sinking. One of the pirates (sheer accident, of course, I blame no one) has kicked a hole in the side. Let us sound the well.”
We put our ear to the ship’s well. It sounded like water.
The men were put to the pumps and worked with the frenzied effort which only those who have been drowned in a sinking ship can understand.
At six p.m. the well marked one half an inch of water, at nightfall three-quarters of an inch, and at daybreak, after a night of unremitting toil, seven-eights of an inch.
By noon the next day the water had risen to fifteen-sixteenths of an inch, and on the next night the sounding showed thirty-one thirty-seconds of an inch of water in the hold. The situation was desperate. At this rate of increase few, if any, could tell where it would rise to in a few days.
That night the Captain called me to his cabin. He had a book of mathematical tables in front of him, and great sheets of vulgar fractions littered the floor on all sides.
“The ship is bound to sink,” he said, “in fact, Blowhard, she is sinking. I can prove it. It may be six months or it may take years, but if it goes on like this, sink she must. There is nothing for it but to abandon her.”
That night, in the dead of darkness, while the crew were busy at the pumps, the Captain and I built a raft.
Unobserved we cut down the masts, chopped them into suitable lengths………..
If this were a stock chart, I’d be dumping my longs. I’d not be going short as yet, but I’d call the up trend broken. It would be confirmed by sustained rising again, but it would be a short if it broke ’07’s lows.
Just MHO,
At least, we hope it’s parody. It did sound pretty strange, but indistinguishable from some of the people at Real Climate. I never underestimate the religous fervor of the warmist camp.
The Great Lakes are rising.
http://www.9and10news.com/category/story/?id=158871
LUDINGTON, Mich. (AP) — Great Lakes water levels are rebounding after a decade-long slump.
A couple of years ago, Lake Superior set a record low while Lakes Michigan and Huron nearly did likewise. But they’ve all recovered to near their long-term average levels, while Lakes Erie and Ontario are above theirs.
Scientists say the biggest reason for the rising waters is cooler weather and greater precipitation the past couple of years.
It’s unclear how long the comeback will last. Scientists say global warming may cause the lakes to recede by up to 3 feet this century.
Will the usual obeisance to global warming.
Re: Great Lakes comment:
Scientists say the biggest reason for the rising waters is cooler weather and greater precipitation the past couple of years.
Two years does not a climate make. But it does make the CO2 FORCING harder to sell.
This is HUGE.
How about this introduction to a best-seller on Global Warming? 😉
“Seeking the truth about global warming, I journeyed northward across the Canadian border, toward the land of the midnight sun. Who knows what horrors of climate change would be revealed there.
There was not a polar bear in sight. Driven by relentless waves of CO2, there was little doubt they had stampeded past the Arctic Circle, seeking the comfort of trackless fields of ice. But alas, the climate modelers proclaimed that the ice would be gone, never to return. The polar bears, crazed by polar drought, would pause but briefly on the edge of Amundsen Bay. But the rising sea levels had rendered it unrecognizable, and they plunged over the edge like lemmings at the cliffs of Dover. Ocean acidification would quickly do it’s work, and the bodies would never be found.
I stood by a riverbank, pondering the catastrophe. The water sped past at unheard-of speed, born of distant glaciers melting in the intense, statistically-adjusted anomalous .2 degree heat of global warming. Where was the ice pack that was here only 15,000 years ago? I had seen enough. Only a slide show, a book, and a lucrative business in carbon trading would prepare the world for what I had witnessed with my own eyes.”
Carl Chapman (03:47:32) :
The oceans are on a roughly spherical surface, are shallow compared to the diameter, and change perimeter as they rise or fall.
If water is in a narrow tube, it will rise in linear manner to temperature, like a thermometer. If it’s on a flat plate with infinitely gently sloping edges, it will rise to about the square root of temperature increase, because of the area change. I’m wondering about the correct power to relate global spherical temperature increase to rise in sea level, because a sphere and a narrow tube are different cases.
It’s a bit like Mandelbrot’s length of coastline problem, but not the same. I suspect a power with a decimal that some folks might relate to fractal. Except that continental shelves and their extensions do not have similar nor near infinite sloped edges, so the power would change with level.
BTW, the paper by Ablain et al seems, on first pass, to be excellent.