Below: North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound.
Note marker at 36N -76W.
First the Press Release from the University of Pennsylvania:
North Carolina Sea Levels Rising Three Times Faster Than in Previous 500 Years, Penn Study Says
October 28, 2009
PHILADELPHIA –- An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise, at least in North Carolina, is accelerating. Researchers found 20th-century sea-level rise to be three times higher than the rate of sea-level rise during the last 500 years. In addition, this jump appears to occur between 1879 and 1915, a time of industrial change that may provide a direct link to human-induced climate change.
The results appear in the current issue of the journal Geology.
The rate of relative sea-level rise, or RSLR, during the 20th century was 3 to 3.3 millimeters per year, higher than the usual rate of one per year. Furthermore, the acceleration appears consistent with other studies from the Atlantic coast, though the magnitude of the acceleration in North Carolina is larger than at sites farther north along the U.S. and Canadian Atlantic coast and may be indicative of a latitudinal trend related to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
Understanding the timing and magnitude of this possible acceleration in the rate of RSLR is critical for testing models of global climate change and for providing a context for 21st-century predictions.
“Tide gauge records are largely inadequate for accurately recognizing the onset of any acceleration of relative sea-level rise occurring before the 18th century, mainly because too few records exist as a comparison,” Andrew Kemp, the paper’s lead author, said. “Accurate estimates of sea-level rise in the pre-satellite era are needed to provide an appropriate context for 21st-century projections and to validate geophysical and climate models.”
The research team studied two North Carolina salt marshes that form continuous accumulations of organic sediment, a natural archive that provides scientists with an accurate way to reconstruct relative sea levels using radiometric isotopes and stratigraphic age markers. The research provided a record of relative sea-level change since the year 1500 at the Sand Point and Tump Point salt marshes in the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system of North Carolina. The two marshes provided an ideal setting for producing high-resolution records because thick sequences of high marsh sediment are present and the estuarine system is microtidal, which reduces the vertical uncertainty of
paleosea-level estimates. The study provides for the first time replicated sea-level reconstructions from two nearby sites.
In addition, comparison with 20th-century tide-gauge records validates the use of this approach and suggests that salt-marsh records with decadal and decimeter resolution can supplement tide-gauge records by extending record length and compensating for the strong spatial bias in the global distribution of longer instrumental records.
The study was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Ocean Program, North Carolina Coastal Geology Cooperative Program, U.S. Geological Survey and National Science Foundation.
The study was conducted by Kemp and Benjamin P. Horton of the Sea-Level Research Laboratory at Penn, Stephen J. Culver and D. Reide Corbett of the Department of Geological Sciences at East Carolina University, Orson van de Plassche of Vrije Universiteit, W. Roland Gehrels of the University of Plymouth, Bruce C. Douglas of Florida International University and Andrew C. Parnell of University College Dublin.
I was curious, because this seemed a bit “off” to me based on other data that I’ve seen. So I went to the University of Colorado Sea Level data server and entered the coordinates for Albemarle Sound (36N -76W or in their usage 36N 284W).
The graph they serve up looks like this:
It’s low resolution, but does look rather flat. Fortunately they provide the data with the plot. You can read all about the Topex/Poseidon data preparation here.
I took that raw data and plotted it here in an expanded size and did a trend line, shown below:
The result was surprising. A slight negative trend.
I chose a different location to get closer to Pamlico Sound, also cited in the study. Unfortunately the interactive tool at UC is coarse on lat/lon and the closest I could get was 35N -76W, just off the outer banks.
The data from that point is plotted below. The source data for 35N -76W is available here.
Apologies for the slight cosmetic differences in line size between the two graphs. I had a computer reset between sessions and lost some settings.
So, if there is 3mm rise per year recently, since 1992, we certainly can’t see it. I can’t say anything for the other years in the study.
But in the press release they say:
The rate of relative sea-level rise, or RSLR, during the 20th century was 3 to 3.3 millimeters per year, higher than the usual rate of one per year.
If that is true, then the rate appears to have slowed significantly in the late 20th century to present. For 35N, -76W, the 1.12mm/yr rate certainly looks like the “…usual rate of one per year”.
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“The research team studied two North Carolina salt marshes that form continuous accumulations of organic sediment, a natural archive that provides scientists with an accurate way to reconstruct relative sea levels using radiometric isotopes and stratigraphic age markers.”
I’m curious, what exactly does this mean in relation to a region exposed yearly to the Atlantic hurricane season?
Kaboom says: International franchises for KaboomCover are now available!
There must be a gravy train that we can get on………..
BRILLIANT!!
I love seeing them cherry pick one location and conclude “sea level rose here for some reason, therefore global warming”.
I can do that too, look: Earlier onset of Santa Anna Winds this year, therefore, Patrick Swayze’s Pancreatic Cancer…
Well even with my lousy eyes, I can see that first black low res graph if it tilts any way, it tilts downward. and if it was rising 3 mm per year, which is at the low limit of their 3-3.3 range it would go 54 mm in the 18 years of that graph.
But any student who would present me with that data and claim it represents a straight line with a 3 mm per year upward slope; or for that matter say it represents anything other than noise; would get a failing grade.
So in 1998; the hottest year in the history of planet earth, and the ocean decides to expand in the negative direction; Yeah. Well in SFO right now we have a useless bridge I could sell you at a good price. I’d be happy to sell it because personally, I would never visit either end of that bridge. A Baghdad to Kabul bridge would be a lot safer.
There was an impressive string of category 3 & 4 hurricanes 1883 – 1899. http://www.nc-climate.ncsu.edu/climate/hurricane.php Cat3 – 1883, 1885, 1887, 1893(2x), 1896 Cat4 – 1899
Cassandra King says: ‘The ever alarmist BBC has just……’
Situation normal, Cassandra. For 3 years now I have been writing directly to BBC Director General Mark Thompson about their outrageous bias reporting climate change. I have received responses from BBC Propaganda (or Information Dept as they prefer to call it) but nothing from Thompson.
However he did respond to my MP and attached a document which contains the following statement: ‘The BBC Governors and BBC Management jointly commissioned a report, “From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel-Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century”, published in June 2007……’
This report concluded: ‘There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening and that it is at least predominantly man-made… the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus’.
So there you have it, for at least the last 2 years if you don’t sing from the BBC song sheet, you don’t sing at all!
I am continuing my efforts, through my MP to get an answer from Thompson (& the BBC Trust Chairman, Sir Michaels Lyons) to the question ‘On whose authority did the BBC cease to be an impartial Public Service Broadcaster, as required by its Charter, and become the judge, jury and sponsor of such dangerously specious political dogma so eloquently described as ‘…the consensus…’?
If you would like to write to Thompson, the address is: Mark Thompson Esq
Director General
BBC Broadcasting House
Portland Place
London
W1A 1AA
Good luck!
This is the kind of science you get when you throw a lot of money at a poorly understood (non) problem. Infant sciences make lots of mistakes.
Bull (04:34:35) :
3 millimeters is equal to 0.1181102 inches. I know that’s twice as long as Al Gore’s winkie, but even if the 3mm rise is true, it ain’t a whole heckuvalot.
I haven’t LOLed on this site in a long time, but this broke the ice, thank you!
That’s another thing: AGW believers have no sense of humor.
Here’s what Wikipedia’s initial paragraphs say about Michael Mann. He seems to be a real “player” in the world of bureaucratic / back-scratching / Establishment captial-S “Science.” (Curiously, one of the Google search hits for the Wikipedia article described him as “an American hockey stick manufacturer.”)
========
“Michael E. Mann (born 28 December 1965) is an American climatologist, and author of more than 80 peer-reviewed journal publications. He has attained public prominence as lead author of a number of articles on paleoclimate and as one of the originators of a graph of temperature trends dubbed the “hockey stick graph” for the shape of the graph. The graph received both praise and criticism after its publication in an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. In August 2005 he was appointed Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University, in the Department of Meteorology and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and Director of the university’s interdepartmental Earth System Science Center. He previously taught at the University of Virginia, in the Department of Environmental Sciences (1999 – 2005).
“He was a Lead Author on the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report (2001). He has been organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences ‘Frontiers of Science’ and has served as a committee member or advisor for other National Academy of Sciences panels. He served as editor for the Journal of Climate and has been a member of numerous international and U.S. scientific advisory panels and steering groups. Dr. Mann has been the recipient of several fellowships and prizes, including selection as one of the 50 leading visionaries in Science and Technology by Scientific American, the outstanding scientific publication award of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and recognition by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for notable citation of his refereed scientific research. Mann is one of several climate scientists who contribute to the RealClimate blog.
“He is best known for his paleoclimate ‘hockey stick’ reconstructions of the past several millennia from tree ring, ice core, coral and other data. See temperature record of the past 1000 years for more details and dispute. Mann’s recent work has been on modelling El Niño, and he has said that “we are already committed to 50 to 100 years of global warming and several centuries of sea level rise” and that reduction in fossil fuel emissions is required to slow the process down to a level that can be coped with.“
From the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway website.
Historical Time Line: Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal
Late) 1870’s First suggestions made that the federal government take over the canal, make improvements and provide an inland waterway.
Climate change or a bunch of government workers digging?
This thread has, as ever, been very fruitful – I haven’t gone deeply into the sea-level nonsense, other than to urge people to look at the years since the global temperature flat-lined and note that so did sea-level. If the temperature rise can be shown to be predominantly natural – which it can (peaking ocean cycles and recovery from the LIA), then the detail did not matter.
However, as several commentators point out – we are not dealing with a rational situation – rather a quasi-religious/political movement the likes of which the planet has not seen (is this the first global emperor with new clothes?). The situation in the UK and Europe can be more readily understood by the other era-defining phenomenon which is Tony Blair. He perfected the technique of repeating something over and over again despite any evidence that it was not true – in his case, ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq. He was caught out and the now infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ of evidence laid bare such that it is clear he knowingly lied. There are patriotic parents of soldiers who died in that war who will not shake his hand – even at a state function in a cathedral.
Yet, this man is being widely supported as the new President of the European Union (with some opposition, thankfully, for the above reasons).
The IPCC mantra of ‘settled science’, and the media hype of accelerated warming, Arctic melt-down and rising sea levels, are impervious to reason. The consequences of this incredible state of affairs are obvious daily: Borneo to be turned into biofuel, the Tana River wilderness in Kenya into ethanol, huge new pylons through the last Scottish wilderness to connect up all the giant wind turbines….and six new nuclear power stations in the UK to be given the go-ahead.
Climate Change is a political banner – and those rallying to its cause all expect some benefit but are in denial that they gain anything (subscriptions, circulation, sales, kudos, research funds) and of course BELIEVE they are saving the planet. I am very much afraid that rational discourse will have very limited effect – unless, that is, the globe seriously cools.
Yes but even if this study was correct that would be 2mm/year over 500 years. Or 0.004mm/year. So in 100 years the sea would rise 34 cm instead of 30 cm. I guess some one could get excited about that difference. And of course you should always use proxies instead of actual measurement in climate science
*snort*
Most of the Welsh coastline is composed of sudden drops from 100+ ft elevation down to the water. It’s really rather cliffy. Cardiff, Newport and Swansea are fairly low in elevation, but they’re hardly sea-level cities.
Have a close look at the rivers in that photo and you’ll notice that each and every one is “drowned.” Sea level has been rising, or rather land has been subsiding, in this area for a very long time.
Sea level changes because of changes in temperature profile, changes in the balance between inputs (rivers, groundwater, melting ice, precip) and outputs (evaporation), dynamic effects such as ocean currents, and salinity profile changes. Easy to point the finger at AWG–difficult to prove.
anna v (07:53:07) :
Online polls can’t be trusted anyway.
I have been looking for a place to retire. Can we get this UPenn report more press coverage, so I can get seaside property real cheap.
Don’t worry about it! My wife did a cannonball a couple months ago off of our cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean. At least I think we were in the Atlantic. Anyways she jumped in and water levels rise across the country. No worries smart people!
…and suggests that salt-marsh records with decadal and decimeter resolution can supplement tide-gauge records
A decimeter being about 4 inches, how does this help refine millimeter-scale rates ?
I forgot to mention the factor that produces very, very long-term sea level changes. Changes so long in time scale that they look exactly like a linear rise or fall in sea level at any time. Sea floor spreading.
Sea floor spreading produces a very flat-bottomed ocean basin when the spreading rate is slow, and a sloped bottom when the rate is fast. A flat-bottomed sea has much more room for seawater than does a sloped bottom, and, thus, draws the sea shore away from land.
I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but … I did pay attention in school. Seems to me that if I pour water into a pond, the depth of the pond increases equally across the pond, and not in one location. If I pour water into the pond and it “appears” that the depth has increased in one location, then I would assume that something else is afoot.
To me, this is just as dead-obvious as it gets: tide gauges don’t register sea level; they instead register sea level relative to the bottom to which the tide guage is fastened. How anyone of any intelligence or inquisitiveness at all can confuse relative sea level with absolute sea level is just bewildering.
I know: absolute sea level has not been available by direct measurement for all that long. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that fact, though.
How to pick millimeters of sea level change out from the noisy hash of other factors (daily solar and lunar tides, the the variation of those tides between periapsis and apoapsis, etc) with any confidence at all is another matter. I think the author’s linear curve fit probably would be more informative with error bars, but that would involve some more work. I doubt you could actually tell within a couple of millimeters per year what the sea-level change is.
And I’d bet you the answer would change if you linear-fitted between the final date sea level and the indentical DOY in the initial year.
“gauge”, not “guage”
I hate it when I do that.
So during the cold little ice age there was a reduced rise rate of 1mm/yr, as the sea returned to equilibrium the rate accelerated to 3mm/yr (due to thermal expansion), since the 90s its slowed / stopped. This tells us only 1 thing new, the warming trend must have stopped some years ago in this part of the sea.
Because sea level rise increased, doesnt in any way relate to or prove human co2 emissions had an impact unless you could first rule out all natural variation which climate models cannot do.
A good day for humour… Loco, thanks for the “Minnesotans for Global Warming” song link. The way they set their “If We Had Some Global Warming” to the tune of Bare Naked Ladies’ PC “If I Had a Million Dollars” was particularly exquisite. This would be a good theme song for this website! LOL!
This article:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090910-sea-levels-rise.html
discusses the “two foot rise” in sea level on the East Coast that Crosspatch mentions in the first comment. I discussed this with a couple of sailor friends (one a boatbuilder) from the Boston area. They say it simply didn’t happen – they would have noticed.
Maybe some other part of the East Coast? I’d write it off as the usual “they’ll say anything” from the warmingists, but they specifically say it’s not AGW (“unprecedented”!!!).
Apparently measuring sea level isn’t as simple as it sounds.
OTOH, rising “seal level” will cause obesity in Polar Bears, models show. Something must be done! 🙂
Best,
Frank