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!
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Next thing, you’ll be saying that increasing low cloud cover might actually cool the oceans.
I think it was Nir Shaviz (or was it Tom Segalstad?) who said that, “The climate modelers are doing the equivalent of looiking for their car keys at night by only looking under the street lights, because that’s where they can see.”
The lack of GCM modeling skill explains this chart.
@stevengoddard
I’m reasonably certain that I never made such a claim.
As for the swimming pool, if I could construct it in a rotating system that isn’t about the center of the pool, you couldn’t raise the level on one side and not the other, but you could increase the level much more on one end than the other. Insanely silly example, and I’m sure that with a strange enough swimming pool where the center of rotation can somehow shift in response to the total mass of water in the pool, we could construct a magical swimming pool in which you could add water and raise the level at only one end.
If you meant in a real swimming pool, then that would indeed be quite a trick.
I believe the accepted sea level rise measurements cannot be rejected on the basis of simple observations. Before this can be done, I think real evidence is required showing that the actual data collection process for those readings was flawed.
If one could, for example, demonstrate that the apparent sea level rise might be the result of the typical tide gauges in use gradually sinking into the sand, then these readings might be discounted. So far, I have not heard anybody say this is even possible.
I do not consider the current established sea level increase rates to be a threat or any portent of a global catastrophe.
stevengoddard says:
May 4, 2010 at 5:12 am
speculativebs says:
May 4, 2010 at 8:35 am
The oceans of the world are not a swimming pool. When measured from a fixed reference, such as the reference ellipsoid, the “levels” of the oceans vary by 100 meters or more. See the map on page 3 of this PDF linked by David Ball above
http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Earth–Atmospheric–and-Planetary-Sciences/12-808Fall-2004/A740D69D-9E59-401D-89E9-BE2F0EFD0194/0/course_notes_3b.pdf
Some of that variation is persistent based on variations in the gravitational field of the planet, but enough of it is random and chaotic that predicting how,what, or where the effects of relatively insignificant changes in the MSL will be evidenced is a fruitless task.
Spector said on May 4, 2010 at 11:46 am:
*ahem*
Back at the comment by GeoFlynx on May 1, 2010 at 4:24 pm was:
Which is interesting reading BTW.
Dave Wendt
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/01/if-sea-level-was-rising-wouldnt-someone-have-noticed/#comment-382148
I’m with you mate.
Claimed accuracy is unlikely with radio altimetry. Laser altimetry perhaps but that is pretty much a spot measurement.
The ocean surface is constantly shifting, how do they obtain a sufficient average?
DaveE.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) [May 4, 2010 at 2:09 pm] “…you are projecting there, nobody suggested that it was precise, simply not noticable”
Perhaps this is true if the word ‘precise’ is replaced by the phrase ‘not happening.’
I believe it is reasonable to expect sea level changes to follow global surface temperature anomaly changes. When one thinks back over time, it is hard to notice changes in either parameter. I suppose if we were now in the middle of the Little Ice-Age, some people might be worried about slowly falling sea levels cutting off navigation to coastal cities and expanding mountain glaciers engulfing the continent.
Here are two photos of Wilson’s Beach (Auckland NZ) taken at high tide 92 years apart, showing that the sea level has not risen.
This one was taken in 1918:
http://i39.tinypic.com/141nzog.jpg
I took this photo at high tide this morning:
http://i42.tinypic.com/x4pvyb.jpg
In the background is a large sewer pipe supported on concrete legs.
At high tide the sea laps just under the pipe. Today the high tide was not as high as in 1918. Of course there will be slight daily variations in height.
The sewer pipe is about to be removed so a temporary roadway for that purpose has been built on this side of the pipe.
Is the flooded Parliament building a bug or a feature?
I have found one paper by John Hannah of New Zealand, “The Difficulties in Using Tide Gauges to Monitor Long-Term Sea Level Change” that indicates pre-1980 tide gauges were susceptible to mud building up in the float stilling well. Over time, this could gradually limit the maximum downward excursions of the float and bias the instrument to yield higher than true average readings. I presume this is a maintenance issue.
http://www.fig.net/pub/fig2010/papers/ts10i%5Cts10i_hannah_3786.pdf
Over the past 100 years, the estimate global sea level rise is estimated to be only about 8 inches or 20 cm. I would think that any observation set attempting to disprove this would need to be accurate to within at least a third of this value.
I have not, as yet, found a standard reference defined for measuring absolute sea level. One standard, the geoid, actually appears to be based on current mean sea level. If one uses the center of the Earth, then thermal expansion/contraction of the Earth as a whole would affect both sea level and land levels.
David Middleton says:
May 3, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Now… What could possibly warm the oceans?
stevengoddard says:
May 3, 2010 at 2:48 pm
David Middleton
What warms the oceans is sunshine and clear skies, something which GCMs have very little skill at modeling.
Less cooling by upwelling can count as warming, combined with – as Steve says – sunshine and clear skies. Take the east Pacific and the ENSO system as an example. Note that deep water below the thermocline is 0-3C in termperature, above the thremocline (by definition) water is a hot-tub by comparison, especially near the tropics. In a La Nina year, you get big-time upwelling of deep ocean water off the Peruvian coast – it fuels plankton blooms and a massive anchovy fishery. But in an el Nino year, the trade winds which pull the upwelling in a La Nina year are absent, so no cold upwelling and increased unemployment among Peruvian fishermen. The big warm patches on the pacific that everyone gets excited about are due to the absence of the “normal” upwelling. As Pamela Gray once pointed out, the sub-tropical sea surface in the doldrums can heat up very fast under the tropical sun.
So the balance of downwelling and upwelling tied to the THC can cause changes in heat exchange between deep and surface ocean water, with the possibility of century-scale oscillation in this exchange due to the timescale of THC.
@phlogiston says:
May 5, 2010 at 1:02 am
The upwelling rate in the Eastern Pacific definitely is cyclical and it did show an anomalous jump in 2003 at several measuring stations.
David Middleton says:
May 5, 2010 at 6:54 am
@phlogiston says:
May 5, 2010 at 1:02 am
The upwelling rate in the Eastern Pacific definitely is cyclical and it did show an anomalous jump in 2003 at several measuring stations.
How do they measure upwelling?
In metric tons per second per 100 m of coastline…