From the Niels Bohr Institute – Studies agree on a 1 meter rise in sea levels
New research from several international research groups, including the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen provides independent consensus that IPCC predictions of less than a half a meter rise in sea levels is around 3 times too low. The new estimates show that the sea will rise approximately 1 meter in the next 100 years in agreement with other recent studies. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.
Since IPCC published the predictions in 2007, that the sea would rise less than half a metre in the next 100 years, it became clear that there was a problem with the prediction models as they did not take into account the dynamic effects of the melting ice sheets. The estimates were therefore too low.
Better prediction models
However, the new model estimates, from international research groups from England, China and Denmark, give independent support for the much higher predictions from other recent studies.
”Instead of using temperature to calculate the rise in sea levels, we have used the radiation balance on Earth – taking into account both the warming effect of greenhouse gasses and the cooling effect from the sulfur clouds of large volcanic eruptions, which block radiation”, explains Aslak Grinsted, PhD in geophysics at the Centre for Ice and Climate, the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
The research is based on observations of sea levels from the 1700s to the present and estimates of the radiation balance through approximately 1000 years.
The sun’s heat varies periodically and currently there is a solar minimum, but even if solar radiation were to reach its lowest level in the past 9300 years, it will have only a minimal impact on sea levels. Some have suggested that you could inject sulfur into the atmosphere and get a kind of artificial volcanic eruption cooling effect, but the calculations show that it would only slow down the rise in sea levels for 12-20 years. What are important are greenhouse gasses like CO2, the research shows.
Reduced emissions
The results are that the sea level will rise between 0.7 and 1.2 meters during the next 100 years. The difference depends on what mankind does to stop the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If we seriously reduce the emissions of CO2 globally, the sea will only rise 0.7 meters, while there will be a dramatic rise of 1.2 meter if we continue indifferent with the current use of energy based on fossil fuels.
In the calculations the researchers assume that we continue to emit CO2, but that we move more towards other energy supplies and reduce our use of fossil fuels and with that reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. This scenario would give a rise in sea levels of around 1 meter.
Other energy sources important now
Even a one meter rise in sea levels would have a big impact in some places in the world with low lying areas, which will become much more susceptible to extreme storm surges, where water could easily sweep over the coasts.
”The research results show that it is therefore important to do something now to curb the emission of CO2 – there is about a half meter difference in sea level depending on whether nations of the world continue to pump greenhouse gases from fossil fuels into the atmosphere or whether we slam on the brakes and use other energy sources”, explains Aslak Grinsted.
h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
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“What are important are greenhouse gasses like CO2, the research shows.”
Research? This article describes model runs, not research. They have discovered that their models, into which they have programmed a highly improbable degree of CO2 sensitivity, show that the sea level is highly sensitive to changes in CO2. Spot the circular argument anyone?
Whatever this is, it ain’t research!
One meter? Is that the worst? We have idiots predicting 7 m at conferences on land use in Australia. Even if it was true its not a problem.
In 100 years 60 to 80% of the coastal urban development in the western-world will be demolished and rebuilt twice over. We don’t build building to last forever any more. So the cost of replacement and renovation is only the difference between building on the existing foundations and building a meter higher. Raising road surfaces, resort amenities and parks are minimal challenges and these often need to be redone after a hurricane anyway in the tropics.
There may be a few hundred historical sites that need expensive work but even stone building can be moved intact today. One of the homes of the USA’s founding fathers, in Boston, was jacked up slid over one building, under another onto a road, and is now in a park dozens of yards away.
In the third world it is radically different the marginal cost for adaptation to a meter of sea level rise is virtually zero since almost all of the third worlds coasts need renovation, modernising and the development of whole new agriculture system is needed. We also need to replant millions of hectares of coastal forest, mangroves and estuarine marsh. That wont happen unless we find a way to craft these ecosystems into productive farming systems and agroforestry with some aquaculture.
That leaves a few percent that will be unusable for conventional housing and a few places that are below sea level like some parts of New Orleans. The solution there was known before Katrina; several people were blocked in their attempt to build floating houses below sea level. It would have saved lives. The simple solution of making a house that floats still stands and its getting cheaper and becoming more accepted.
Will all these mitigations cost money? Yes even if greenhouse is not real and there is no sea level rise most of these things will be done anyway. Will it break the bank? No its already broken! We need a new system anyway. Big government and big banks don’t need any help from natural disasters, their quite able to go broke by them selves.
My guess is that we will get 20 cm in 100 years and a few interesting law suits from people who got ripped off because they believed in sea level rise and sold at a loss.
Why did the IPCC hide the incline? Perhaps they thought it was a bit alarmist.
Looks like snow and ice is returning to the UK, wonder what odds I would get for a BBQ summer?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265638/Time-coats–forecasters-say-SNOW-way.html
OT
Hey, I’ve just been looking at the UAH graph, and I’ve realised something. The 1998 record high el nino took place in January through to April. The 1998 peak was higher than todays peak. That means this current record high we’re experiencing is not an ‘all time record’ , it’s a 12 year record.
Without explaination, the UAH high res graph chops off the data mid 1998, so that a January April 1998 – 2010 comparision is not possible.
See for yourself
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/ … ?amsutemps
What a crock! The Danes have a century to build a 6 foot wall around their peninsula and the islands, and are telling us it can’t be done? Wonder what the Hollanders are thinking? (as if it needs doing)
Love this site and read it all every day, but can’t help wondering if I’m wasting my time. We live in a world of steadily increasing ignorance and there must, must be a “tipping point” when our Marxist teaching profession finally succeeds in producing a population of complete idiots. We need, not to re-educate the useful idiots who push this inhuman nonsense down the throats of the masses, but to take them out the back door and “Ceausescu” them. Snip away, McDuff, this is what reasonable people are coming to believe.
It is very easy to get a computer model to predict the end of the world. You just need a tiny bit of excess positive feedback and run it for years. By the end of the run it will drown out everything else in there. If you have a PHD and think public policy should be determined by an inaccurate computer model run for 100years predicting the end of the world, you should give it back for the sake of your peers.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2qVNK6zFgE&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
“Instead of using temperature to calculate the rise in sea levels, we have used the radiation balance on Earth – taking into account both the warming effect of greenhouse gasses and the cooling effect from the sulfur clouds of large volcanic eruptions, which block radiation”.
Forgive me for being flabbergasted. Shouldn’t the temperature and the radiation balance be interchangable and therefore give exactly the same result?
If not, then why and how do you calculate the temperature from the radiation balance in the first place? And if temperature and radiation balance do give different results, then how do you know which result to use?
For all I know they could both be wrong.
This is more “Rahmstorf” crap. I have yet to find a single scientist who is willing to place bets on even just 6mm/yr SLR over the next 10 years. Not one!
Those that claim SLR over a meter by 2100 are just blowing hot air.
O/T but new research organized by Donna Laframboise indicates that the IPCC overstated its reliance on “peer-reviewed literature” in AR 4 by 30%. Of the 18,531 references in 44 Chapters, 5,587 were not peer-reviewed. 21 of the 44 Chapters, would receive an F (59% or lower peer-reviewed reference citations):
http://hro001.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/uns-climate-bible-gets-21-fs-on-report-card/
OT – news just in
BBC – 14 April 2010 11:28 GMT
‘No malpractice’ by climate unit
First the bad whitewash news:
Now the good news – maybe:
Now the suspicious news:
Is there any reason to think that sea level could rise another 0.5, 1.5, 3.0 meters or more over the next few hundred to few thousand years? Sure. Sea level was 3 to 5 meters higher than it is now during the previous interglacial (Sangamonian/Eemian ~130 kya). There’s no reason to expect the Holocene sea level to behave any differently than the Sangamonian sea level.
How about over the next few decades? Is there any reason to think that sea level might rise 0.5 meters or more by the year 2100? Well, to answer that question, we have to look at how sea level has been behaving over the last few decades to few centuries and see if it has been behaving anomalously over the most recent few decades.
Here is CU-Boulder’s record of global sea level change since 1993…
Sea Level Since 1993
I took the liberty of pasting a 6-inch ruler onto the chart so that we can keep recent sea level changes in perspective as we expand the time horizon. Total sea level variation since 1993 has bee less than 3 inches. The rate of sea level rise has been ~3.2mm/yr over that period. However, if you look closely at the data, you’ll see that the slope changed back around 2003…
Sea Level Since 1993 Part Deux
Since 2003, the rate of sea level rise has declined by more than 30%. Is this sort of sea level rise unusual? Is the variation in rate unusual? Unfortunately, the Jason/Topex data only go back to 1993… But, there is an excellent sea level reconstruction available that goes back to 1700. Jerejeva et al., 2008 produced an isostatically corrected sea level reconstruction from 1700 AD to 2002 AD. Here is the Jerejeva reconstruction with the CU-Boulder data tied in using a static shift…
Jerejeva & CU
It looks to me as if the post-1993 satellite data fit right into a trend of sea level rise that began in the 1700’s (during the warm up from the Little Ice Age). If we take a closer look at the 20th Century portion of the Jerejeva reconstruction, we can see a pattern of alternating rates of sea level rise…
Jerejeva Mini-Trends
It looks like sea level has been experiencing alternating ~30-yr phases of ~3mm/yr rises and hiatuses since the end of the Little Ice Age. The rise in the late 20th century was statistically indistinguishable from the rise in the early 20th century; and the late 20th century rise has been slowing down since 2003.
It appears that the change in sea level over the last 20 years is not anomalous when compared to the last 100 years and it appears to be a continuation of a pattern established in the early 1800’s.
So, how does the last 300 years of sea level change fit into the “big picture”?
Let’s look at sea level change since 4000 BC by comparing Jerejeva to a couple of Holocene/Pleistocene sea level reconstructions…
Sea Level Since 4000 BC
When viewed in the context of the last 6,000 years, the sea level rise since the 1700’s becomes insignificant.
Now let’s keep expanding the time frame. First stop: 20,000 years ago during the last Pleistocene glaciation…
Sea Level Since 20,000 BC
Now, let’s go back a bit over 300,000 years to take in a couple of full glacial cycles…
Sea Level Since 300,000 BC
That 6-inch ruler is now totally insignificant… But let’s keep the time machine rolling. Now we’ll use Miller’s (2005) Phanerozoic Eon sea level reconstruction and go back to 2,000,000 BC and the Lower Pleistocene…
Sea Level Since Lower Pleistocene
Now on to the Mid-Cretaceous… 100 million years ago…
Sea Level Since Mid-Cretaceous
Modern sea level changes are simply not anomalous at any scale.
Could sea level rise another 1, 3 or even 5 meters before the end of the current interglacial? Sure. It rose that high in the previous interglacial.
Could sea level rise another 1 meter over the next 90 to 100 years? No. There is no historical or geological evidence to support such a scenario.
Assuming Earth stays in the warm phase of the 1,500-yr cycle until at least 2100 (not a huge assumption), the maximum possible sea level rise by then will be a bit more than 0.25m above current MSL…
<a href =http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/SeaLevelProjection-1.png
1/4 of a meter… A bit less than 1 foot… That’s it… That’s the worst case scenario that is actually possible in the real world.
The climate modelers make me think of an Aubrey McClendon (CEO of Chesapeake Energy) quote:
“That kind of analysis, I think, can only come at the dangerous intersection of Excel and PowerPoint. It can’t happen in reality.”
re ” IPCC prediction of less than half a meter rise in sea level is 3 times too low” Is this supposed to mean they think the rise will be 3 times what has been predicted ? i.e. one and a half meters. If so, what would 2 times too low mean ? Would it mean the sea level would rise 2 times what has been predicted ? i.e. one meter, and what would one time too low mean? Anything times one stays at one. So no rise. Then what would zero times too low mean? This would also presumably mean no rise. So have I proved one equals zero? I dont think so. But I hope to have shown that “three times too low” is sloppy ambiguous use of language. What I think they are trying to say is that the IPCC predicted rise is one third of what they predict. But lets look at it from the other end. Predicted rise is half a meter.One time (s) that could mean alternative prediction is for one whole meter. Two times could mean one and a half meters and three times would indicate a predicted rise of two meters. Not the same as the one and a half meters, which is what you get if you count it the other way. What all this boils down to is we should not say predicted rise is three times too low,we should say previously predicted rise is one third of what we newly predict , if this is what we mean, or one quarter of what we newly predict if this is what we mean. This is not about sea level.It is about use of language.A clear statement is not one which can be understood, rather one which cannot be misunderstood.
Eduardo at Hans von Storch’s website has a short piece on sea level rise, asking: “Where’s the acceleration?” http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/04/cant-you-see-acceleration.html. That’s a good question. Eduardo goes on to say:
“For those of you who may be wondering, this fit implies a 95% probability for 35 cm or less of sea-level rise in 2100.”
Correction to David Middleton (04:45:29) :
<a href =http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/SeaLevelProjection-1.png
Should be…
Jerejeva & CU Projected to 2100
Yeah!
And all of Denmark will be under the sea, except for Møllehøj on which they put a lighhouse.
How Does One Spell Relief for Sea Level Rise?
“Eyjafjallajokull Glacier!” (That’s ‘Mother Nature’ Spelled Backwards)
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/04/14/iceland.volcano.evacuation/?hpt=T2
As part of my charitable giving, I am going to be buying beach front property for fractions of a penny on the dollar. Since all of these properties will be under water in a few short years, I am going to be helping all the poor mansion owners currently living on the ocean.
Why own a house under water and worthless, when you can sell it to me and at least get a few dollars compensation?
Hey can I win a Nobel Peace prize for my charitable giving like Al?
The word is “ADJUSTMENT”. One has to understand that no one can measure anything accurately, even going back to the 1700s. Thus, everything needs to be adjusted, because with 20/20 hindsight, these scientists know EXACTLY what the real measurements should have been.
Models will fail egregiously as long as the real factors, particularly the negative forcing factors (water cycle), that mediate our climate are properly included. However, that will not be forthcoming until these “scientists” de-politicize their morals and go scientific in themselves.
Models are NOT science.
where’s the sea level rise already? I was promised some sea level rise by now, I don’t see any yet. I want my money back.
Why didn’t they mention ocean heat content (and the much delayed pick up of heat from any radiative imbalance) as the most important variable for future Sea level rise? Didn’t they check the latest science about the revised Ocean heat content here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/31/nodc-revises-ocean-heat-content-data/ It was downgraded!
Even at 3.2 mm/yr you barely get a rise of just over a foot in a century) but the rise over the last ten years has only been about 25mm (~one inch). That means that you’d need a rate of almost 11mm/yr to get to a one meter rise by the end of the century.
It used to be when everyone used sliderules that you could just say that you misplaced the decimal point somewhere, but they don’t even have that excuse anymore.
The sea level rise seems to be attributed to land snow/ice melt. However over the past 150 years of popuation growth and resultant urbanisation what portion can be attributed to draining of wetlands and storm drainage. Whereas the ground now covered buildings and ashphalt would previously had soaked up, and retained large volumes of rainwater it is now efficiently flushed out to sea through our storm drainage networks
This takes the biscuit:
“The likelihood of flooding due to storm surges increases greatly if the ocean rises one meter. Such a rise in sea level will not flood large areas of land, but what is regarded as exceptionally high water level will occur at least 1.000 times more often in vulnerable areas.”
Except, gradually, over 100 years, “what is regarded as exceptionally high water level” will change.
The human monkey is quite good at adaptation. It can even cope with tides much higher than a meter. Twice a day.
Don’t Danish climatologists ever go to the seaside?
They are making a derivatives market for carbon, so why not do something for something just as stupid as sea level rise. We haven’t done enough to the markets, we need to really send them down in a blaze of glory!
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aXRBOxU5KT5M
How big is the current derivatives market? No one really knows, but some have put it at over $700 Trillion, with US banks holding “notional” derivatives contracts worth $212 Trillion, increasing $8.5 Trillion from last year. And if you look at page 23, you will see that JPMorgan is exposed 78-1; B of A is exposed 44-1; Citibank is exposed 34-1; Wells Farge is exposed 4-1; but the one that takes the cake is Goldman Sachs, they are esposed 457-1! Yeah…we need more of that.
http://www.occ.treas.gov/ftp/release/2010-33a.pdf
And we shouldn’t forget that more gold certificates are being sold than there is actual gold, making that commodity quesitonable as well. Instead of selling on a one-to-one ratio, traders are selling at a ten-to-one ratio. From a former Goldman Sachs commodities trader: