Images spanning 130 years show non-effects of sea level rise
By Steve Goddard
Above, imaginary alarmist imagery: London Drowning from the BBC
One of my favorite CAGW climochondrias is worry about sea level. From Wikipedia:
Hypochondriasis (or hypochondria, often referred to as health phobia or health anxiety) refers to an excessive preoccupation or worry about having a serious illness. Often, hypochondria persists even after a physician has evaluated a person and reassured them that their concerns about symptoms do not have an underlying medical basis or, if there is a medical illness, the concerns are far in excess of what is appropriate for the level of disease.
Warming to Cause Catastrophic Rise in Sea Level?Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic NewsUpdated April 26, 2004Most scientists agree that global warming presents the greatest threat to the environment. There is little doubt that the Earth is heating up. From the melting of the ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest peak, to the loss of coral reefs as oceans become warmer, the effects of global warming are often clear. However, the biggest danger, many experts warn, is that global warming will cause sea levels to rise dramatically.
The esteemed Dr. Hansen has made the threat clear :
a study led by James Hansen, the head of the climate science program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a professor at Columbia University, suggests that current estimates for how high the seas could rise are way off the mark – and that in the next 100 years melting ice could sink cities in the United States to Bangladesh.
That sounds serious. New Year’s Eve in Manhattan could be rough if Times Square was underwater.
But I keep thinking that if sea level was rising significantly, some of the billions of people who live along the coasts might have noticed? My favorite snorkeling beach in California is The Cove in La Jolla. I first went there around 1960, when Raquel Welch (Tejada at the time) was named Homecoming Queen at La Jolla High School. I went snorkeling there again last summer. The beach is still there and hasn’t changed. Below is a photo of The Cove from 1871.
https://www.sandiegohistory.org/timeline/images/80-2860.jpg
And a recent photo :
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/090207-LaJollaCove.jpg
And here is the animation with the two images matched to scale and overlaid:
(click on the image to see animation if is is not visible)
A lot of erosion has occurred over the last 130 years. In the blink animation above (click on the image to see animation) note that the rock under the three people standing on the right in the 1871 image is gone, and has formed a small island of boulders with three people sitting on it in the recent image. There is no evidence that sea level has risen.
A few Palm Trees have been planted, but the sea appears to be in exactly the same place it was 130 years ago. In fact the rocks on the upper right are higher above the water now than in the earlier picture (high tide.) There is no glacial rebound in San Diego, and the faults in the region are strike-slip (horizontal) faults. They don’t cause vertical movement. Prior to the March quake this year, the last large quake to hit the region was in 1862.
http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/FaultMaps/117-33.gif
The land in La Jolla hasn’t moved up or down in the last 130 years. Neither has the ocean. Where is this sea level catastrophe happening? On a sandbar? At current melt rates, it will take 300,000 years for Antarctica to melt.
Often, hypochondria persists even after a physician has evaluated a person and reassured them that their concerns about symptoms do not have an underlying medical basis or, if there is a medical illness, the concerns are far in excess of what is appropriate for the level of disease.
WUWT has hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. If any of you have personally seen sea level rise at your favorite beach over the last few decades, please speak up!
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When zfoxcis writes of “millions of scientists” supporting the AGW story you just know that he has a grasp of this subject that is going to put the rest of us to shame.
(Hey, Clive, get some popcorn for me too, please.)
Sedimentation and increased water usage by farming, industry and consumers does not exist in computer models.
speculativebs says:
May 2, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Not true. What you are calling the “current increase” is solely the satellite record. The tide gauge records alone show no such increase. Nor does the satellite record alone. Your error is, the satellite record cannot be compared to the tide gauge record, because (for unknown reasons) it reads higher than the increase measured by the tide gauges. So your claim of an “increase” doesn’t hold water.
Nor does the satellite record show any signs of acceleration. In fact, it has decelerated in recent years. Here’s the record:
Will it start rising again at the earlier rate? Quite possibly. Is it accelerating? No way.
Ummm … well … first you have to show, not claim but show, that sea level rise is accelerating. Come back when you’ve done that, and we can talk about throwing balls downwards and the like. Here’s two different analyses of the tide gauge records, one by Church and White, and one by Jevrejeva
See any acceleration there? Well, until you do …
Curious. His name is linked to a wordpress blog that is “Protected” thus not for public viewing. Google does have a cached copy snapshotted April 22 of the latest post from April 18, thus it used to be public. Blog is titled “CIS 211” with this post being “Lab 3.2” and outlining a computer science project. Other recent posts are: Observer/Observable, Ships and Movement, LAB 2.2, and LAB 2.1. There are two recent comments, one indicates another post “Inanimate Object Hierarchy” which is also cached. Both posts have a single tag, “CIS GAME”, and wordpress insists there are no posts with that tag which to me indicates those posts may have been deleted.
Conclusions:
1. There is likely a crazed CompSci student out there who stopped here to post a rant, although it may be an instructor (rigid layout of posts, like presenting an exercise).
2. I will trade sleep for an opportunity to search for interesting knowledge, even trivial facts, and the pursuit itself is the most rewarding part for me. I live for the hunt. 🙂
magicjava says:
May 2, 2010 at 8:28 pm
True, the web is an amazing place.
My bad, I meant high quality data. There is data going back before that, but it shows none of the detailed changes shown by the satellite data.
The sea level data actually has a funny shape, it’s not a simple sinusoidal wave over the seasons. It’s an odd jagged shape, and one which matches the LOD variations quite well. This is unlike say the annual temperature variation, which is a much poorer fit.
Your graph doesn’t show sea level. The correlation between annually resolved LOD and sea level (Church and White) from 1962 to present is -0.69 (p = .025). However, that correlation is likely high, due to autocorrelation and due to the fact that the sea level rise is nearly linear.. But there is a clear relationship even at the longer time scale.
I’ve never said that it is only the sea level that determines the LOD. I have said it affects the LOD. Remember my quote from before, from the guys that measure LOD:
So you are correct, not all of the change in LOD is due to sea level. But when sea level rises, the earth slows down. It has to, due to conservation of momentum.
Thanks,
w.
brc:
Sorry, but you are plain wrong when you say (at May 2, 2010 at 3:47 am).
“People in London shouldn’t worry too much. The average street level rises by a couple of feet or so per century, as evidenced by centuries-old now-cellars with brick windows because the street rose up outside and buried them, and street-side monuments that you now have to view down through a grill in the ground, as well as lost steps to old buildings and half-underground windows. Ever wonder why it is you always look down on the Tower of London? It’s because the roads continue their rise, ever upwards. A resurface here, new materials there, it all adds up over time.
Street level change exceeds sea level change by orders of magnitude.”
The South East of England – including London – is sinking at a rate much faster than any possibly existing sea level rise. And Scotland is rising from the sea at similar rapid rate. This is a result of eustatic rebound from loss of the ice over Scotland at the end of the last age (it ended ~10,000 years ago).
The weight of ice pushed Scotland down and the South Eat of England bulged up. So, the loss of the ice is now resulting in recovery that is the eustatic rebound.
The London Barrage was built to defend against the resulting rise of the sea relative to the level of London. The barrage has to be closed to high spring tides rising the Thames . London would have flooded (as shown in the image in the above article) several times except that the London Barrage has prevented this.
The eustatitic rebound is a result of global warming that happened ~10,000 years ago. Humans are not capable of causing global warming of similar magnitude.
All estimates of global sea level rise are dubious because the land is rising and falling in various places. But, overall, there probably is global sea level rise as an effect of continuing recovery from the last ice age.
Richard
You’re right, I hadn’t looked into it before. It doesn’t appear to be linear, either, though; indeed, if you look at it alongside global temperature anomaly data, they appear to relate to each other quite well, so sea level changes realistically will vary in accordance with changes in temperature, something that, if I recall correctly, you don’t believe in. So if warming accelerates, sea level rise will accelerate as well. This connection probably doesn’t matter to you, but as someone generally convinced by the evidence for AGW, this does concern me.
For the sake of completeness, you should probably draw in the little bit past 2008, where it appears that the change is increasing again. Of course, over such a short timespan, it’s unrealistic to claim that any trend can be drawn, but I spent about two minutes wondering why my chart in Excel looked different from yours.
Thanks for correcting my misconception.
As for the ball thing, it’s still illustrative in a general sense; people frequently try to approximate non-linear relationships as linear relationships. The point was to show that the difference can be quite large; 0.64 seconds and 100 seconds are very far apart. One example of this is technological progress; the future is always closer than we think it is, because our brains approximate advances as if they’ll proceed linearly, so something that feels like it’s 100 years off might be 15-20 years off.
Or something.
Anyone care to calculate the mass of a city like New York, and it’s effect on local sea level readings? Land is rebounding from glacier receding, why wouldn’t it sink with that kind of mass change as well?
It’s been observed that more than one person crowing hysterically about man-made global warming and rising sea levels owns property at or near the coast.
Al Gore has a condo in San Francisco, for example, near the bay. If he really believed sea level was going to rise catastrophically, would he have bought it? Or does he believe his actions will save it?
Don E.
It is hightly likely that errosion will cause problems long before “sea level rise” for the people who have been living in the same coastal homes for generations.
If you compare sea-level rise to a hill of beans, the hill of beans wins.
pwl, if the ‘States are floating, we better get that immigration situation under control. You know, the whole thing could tip over if we get too many people 😉
Oh say can you see”… 20th Century Sea Level Changes, When Viewed in a Geological Perspective?
The answer is, “No.”
Willis and several other commentators have also pointed out the fact that the sea level rise of the 20th century is far less than the typical tidal amplitude. The total isostatically corrected MSL rise since 1700 is about 30 cm – About half of the ideal lunar tidal amplitude (54 cm) or about equal to the ideal solar tidal amplitude (ideal tidal amplitude assumes no land masses and a uniform ocean depth).
The Earth began to warm up from the Little Ice Age in the early 1600’s; sea level started its most recent rise about 180 years later (~1780). Since 1900 sea level has exhibited alternating ~30-yr periods of ~3 mm/yr rise and hiatus. Since 2003, sea level rise has been decelerating into a hiatus phase. If no for the strength of the current El Niño the d-MSL since 2003 would be less than 2 mm/yr and flattening.
RE: Theo Goodwin: (May 2, 2010 at 4:15 pm) It strikes me as the very height of irony that someone would treat natural history as not being about observable phenomena.
I believe the issue here is there can be a difference between observable and measurable. You may not be able to observe the long-term average sea level in a single picture or set of pictures even if taken over a long period of time, but you may be able to measure it by averaging a continuous set of tide gauge readings.
I personally do not regard these minor documented sea level fluctuations as particularly threatening because in the end, what goes up must come down. There is no evidence, as far as I can see, that our overall climate is demonstrably abnormal.
There was a little noticed posting on the site “climate sanity” suggesting that “sea level rate rise leads global temperature”:
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/sea-level-rise-rate-leads-global-temperature/
albeit from a limited recent period. There is a plausible (speculative) basis for this – sea level rise rate (not sea level per se) could be an index of the rate of energy flow into the upper ocean. Thus the current slowdown in rate of sea level increase could reflect decreased heat input into the upper ocean. This in turn could be predictive of a downturn in tropospheric temperatures and a cooler climate. Anyway – we will find out in due course.
@Digsby:
You’re not talking about Water World, are you? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114898/
Well that makes sense because the delta-CO2 lags behind the warming.
The oceans expand as they warm, causing sea level to rise.
The warming oceans cause the atmosphere to warm.
The warming oceans de-gas and release CO2 to the atmosphere.
Now… What could possibly warm the oceans?
Willis Eschenbach says: May 3, 2010 at 1:38 am “See any acceleration there? Well, until you do …” But that is the Church and White data, which the IPCC says DOES show acceleration (see Figure 5.13 in AR4 WG1 p510). “Church and White (2006) determined a change of 1.7 ±0.3 mm yr–1 for the 20th century. Changes in global sea level as derived from analyses of tide gauges are displayed in Figure 5.13. Considering the above results, and allowing for the ongoing higher trend in recent years shown by altimetry (see Section 5.5.2.2), we assess the rate for 1961 to 2003 as 1.8 ± 0.5 mm yr–1 and for the 20th century as 1.7 ± 0.5 mm yr–1.”
Now can you see it?
David Middleton
What warms the oceans is sunshine and clear skies, something which GCMs have very little skill at modeling.
Space dust lands on the Earth continually according to Ian Plimer in his book. “Heaven + Earth : global warming : the missing science.”
Depending on which regions this dust accumulates, this must have some impact on the relationship of land and sea levels?
Also as the Earth has tectonic plates which are moving continually, this must affect land levels as plates bump into each other.
Neither of these two effects have anything to do with supposed climate change from CO2. Are they taken into effect by the computer models?
John Galt says:
May 3, 2010 at 1:12 pm
@Digsby:
You’re not talking about Water World, are you? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114898/
_____________________________________________________________
No, Water World was a not very intelligent Hollywood ripoff of Ballard’s The Drowned World. It was full of illogicalities, although it was a good enough sci-fi romp, I guess.
John Galt says:
May 3, 2010 at 1:12 pm
@Digsby:
You’re not talking about Water World, are you? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114898/
=======================================================
No, Water World was a not very intelligent Hollywood ripoff of Ballard’s The Drowned World. It was full of illogicalities, although it was a good enough sci-fi romp, I guess.
Last year we visited friends in Wales and one of the sites we saw was Harlech Castle in Gwynedd. It was built in the 1200s on the Irish sea.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlech_Castle
“Harlech is also notable for an unusual feature: the “way from the sea”. Edward’s forces were often in danger from land-based attack, but he enjoyed total supremacy on water. Many of his castles included sally ports which allowed resupply from the sea, but Harlech’s is far more elaborate. Here, a fortified stairway hugs the rock and runs almost 200 feet (61 m) down to the foot of the cliffs, where (at the time of construction) the sea reached. Today, the sea has retreated several miles, making it more difficult to envisage the concept in its original setting. James of St. George’s plan was a triumph; when the castle was besieged during Madoc ap Llywelyn’s campaign, this stairway was used to supply the castle.”
Sea rise, ummm not so much.
The Iceman Cometh says:
May 3, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Nope, I still can’t see it. Like Groucho Marx said, “Who are you gonna trust, the IPCC or your own lying eyes?”
If you look at their numbers, there is absolutely no statistical difference between the entire century (1.7 ±0.5 mm) and the latter forty years of the century (1.8 ±0.5 mm). Look at the graph I showed above, which is showing the Church and White numbers that the IPCC is talking about … then point out to me the acceleration.
Note also that to get even that tiny “acceleration” the IPCC is combining the satellite record and the tidal gauge record … bad IPCC, no cookies.
I don’t in any way see an isolated example as indicative of a larger trend; cherry-picking is a stupid way of going about such things. Even so, I couldn’t help but let out a chuckle just because of the proximity of this story to stories of massive flooding in the South-Eastern United States. Just one of those odd timing things.
speculativebs
Please explain how the volume of the oceans can increase, and have that not affect sea level in California. Can you add water to a swimming pool, and raise the level at only one end? That would be a good trick.