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!
Typically, in the temperate zone, the tidal range is a couple of metres. In La Jolla, where the photos are, it is 1.8 metres. Jevrejeva estimates the change between the two pictures at around a quarter of a metre …
Given that, you’d have to take the pictures at exactly the same stage of the tide, and even then it would be very tough to see the change, since every wave is much bigger than the change in sea level over the last 140 years.
Which should tell people something … but hasn’t …
GeoFlynx
People wore hats in the 19th century.
I carefully scaled the images from the rocks on the bottom to the top of the cliff. The recent picture was taken from slightly higher on the same hill.
My best friend’s family owned all of that property 100 years ago.
The beach I am most famialiar with is on Port Phillip Bay, Mebourne, Australia. I have been going to Altona beach for over 50 years and sea levels do not appear to have altered. The high water mark on the pier is as it has always been. Admittingly I probably would not have noticed 0.9mm rise.
Has anyone attempted to compute sea level rise due to freshwater sedimentation and/or the planetary accretion of extraterrestrial material? -add another stone to the soup!
Steve,
I’m absolutely with you on this.
I live on the east coast of Australia and 47 years ago I helped build a reinforced concrete sea wall about about four chains [80 metres, 264 feet] long in a coastal estuary on alluvial sand. It was on a family property and we built the bottom step of this wall at the then well known king tide level. This step is also four chains long and today it is all still straight and true so there has been little or no movement.
I have checked the twice-yearly king tides [as well as many others] over that near half century and the only ones that have come above that step are when they coincide with a cyclone and/or a flood .
They often do not reach that step.
The last king tide in midsummer [which was also rated as a HAT {highest astronomical tide}] was 20 cms [about 8 inches] below that step.
Various harbour improvements over that half century hav increased the tidal flow and this has reduced the low tides, increased the mean tides but has not affected the high tides except to possibly make them higher due to possible surge.
It has not made them lower yet they are lower.
Not too much SLR here!
“magicjava says:
May 1, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Are we arguing that sea levels are not rising now? Because they most certainly are.
Better arguments might be that sea levels have been rising for at least 150 years (probably much longer), that the rate of sea level rise has slightly decreased over the last few year and was rising much, much faster in the distant pass, and that the amount of sea level rise is dwarfed by other natural factors we already deal with, such as tides.”
OK
So one of the main arguments was that low-lying countries such as Bangladesh would be inundated within a very short period. Yet Bangladesh has been GROWING in land area.
Similarly, London, Amsterdam and Venice are all very close to sea level – yet have not been inundated. Nor were they inundated in the medieval warm period or Roman optimum. Perhaps the AGW proponents are too close to Holywood calamity film makers?
The data I have seen say that the 20’th. century saw an 8-inch rise in sea level. The two centuries before that saw a rise of roughly 12 inches each. More significantly, sea level rise for the past 12,000 years, since the end of the last glaciation, has been about 360 feet. That equates to an average rise of 3-feet per century. Most likely, the rate of rise was even faster initially, then slowing to the more recent rates. It would appear that the rate of rise is trending toward zero. In past warm interglacials, sea level has been 20-feet higher than at present.
No SLR here in 2000 years:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1066712/Uncovered-lost-beach-Romans-got-toehold-Britain.html
In a recent post on this topic, there is an excellent comment by a David Middleton showing sea level trends for the last few years, decades, centuries, millenia and so on from the available literature, and showing that nothing unusual at all is going on. I believe that comment merits being a post all by itself.
Look for:
David Middleton
April 14, 2010 at 4:45 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/13/ipcc-sea-level-prediction-not-scary-enough/#comments
The water level is lower in the recent picture. The best point of reference is the small rock island on the right side.
Subsidence would have the opposite effect of making sea level appear to rise. The Cove is protected and gets very small waves. That is one reason why it is good for snorkeling.
(Posting from my Droid.)
Well, I for one, have seen an alarming rise of water near where I live.
The water level in my water feature (in the back yard) has risen 6 inches just this winter!
At this rate, my entire neighborhood will be part of my water feature in only 20 years!
….. or… I could open the drain.
[quote Ian W says:
So one of the main arguments was that low-lying countries such as Bangladesh would be inundated within a very short period. Yet Bangladesh has been GROWING in land area.
[/quote]
All valid arguments, none of which require us to claim that sea levels are not rising when it’s demonstrable that they are.
It’s one thing to say that rising sea levels are not a major, or even a minor, problem. It’s another to claim sea levels aren’t rising.
Hoskibui
If you know of a beach which is being drowned, please post the information.
Another great reality check. But we’re probably just at the tipping point and things will kick in to catastrophic mode starting, say, next Tuesday.
Love this from Willis: “every wave is much bigger than the change in sea level over the last 140 years.”
So many crises per day. It must get tiring.
Magicjava
Some places sea level is rising a little. Other places it is falling a little. Hansen is talking about drowning cities.
In the 70’s I lived for a while in the village of Bosham, in Sussex, England. This is the place where King Canute (Cnut) allegedly commanded the sea to go back. (I tried it too, but it didn’t work.)
The houses on the southern side of the main street are directly exposed to the tide. From the back verandah, I could sit on the steps with my feet in the sea. The following painting is dated 1888, and the scene is remarkably similar to the present day.
http://www.easyart.com/canvas-prints/Charles-William-Wyllie/All-On-A-Summers's-Day,-At-Bosham,-Sussex-215878.html
Those houses have been there for at least 300 years, and the village has been there for more than 1000 years. The Saxon church (10th century) is built on the site of a previous Roman basilica.
How fortunate we are that no one had the benefit of advice from the very wonderful James Hansen, otherwise none of this would exist.
Fortunately the real world is a good benchmark for the virtual one.
Glad to see this post, Steven. I was born in La Jolla and have surfed, swam, and snorkeled at various spots around town as a returning visitor. The Cove has a special magic for most who have spent a few hours in its waters — and is quite stable as you point out.
I have written about similar firsthand knowledge of the coast in the past for any who are interested:
http://talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/sea-level-essentially-unchanged-yawn/
Living memory is not enough to notice the amount of sea level rise.
Not in the 50 years I have seen my favorite beaches has there been any.
Sure is nice to see before/after comparisons.
Puts the squash to catastrophic.
Here’s the USGS definition of sea level change: “Sea-level change
Variation in the relative vertical position of land and ocean waters. Caused globally by changes in the distribution of ice masses and the shape of the oceans, and locally by the rate of uplift or subsidence of the land surface. Includes both global (eustatic) and local (relative) sea-level variations.”
I take from this that the term “sea level” in and of itself denotes absolutely nothing about the volume of water in the ocean. No local measurement is important at all, because one first has to determine whether the land is rising or falling. Also, I notice that continental drift also plays a factor, since they include “the shape of the oceans.” In addition, even this definition ignores possible shifts in the land level at the ocean floor. So even if we had a satellite that could monitor the distance from the center of the earth to the average surface of the ocean, this could not tell us whether the volume of water had changed. Finally, the volume of ocean water is affected by its temperature. Given all these complex variables, some of which we cannot yet measure (such as shifts in the floor of deep oceans), I doubt whether it’s possible even to measure changes in the volume (or, more importantly, the mass) of ocean water.
This is what I’ve been arguing for years. I live in Florida on salt water, and the water has not rising in my entire lifetime. Long-term residents of Key West–the most obvious Florida canary in the coal mine–can also testify to the fact that the seas are not rising. Key West, just as where I live, is at sea level.
Beach erosion, especially during tropical storms, sometimes requires beaches to be replenished with fresh sand (Key West doesn’t really have any beaches, unless one wants to define “beach” very generously), but this has been going on for a century, and in all that time the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic have not gained an inch in height.
With all the scare stories, and the hundreds of millions of people who believe them, why have none come forward with evidence of local rising seas? All we get, instead, are charlatans in the Maldives pretending the water is rising in order to get millions of dollars from other governments, and stories about a sandbar in India swamped by overdevelopment along shores, but described by the AGW hucksters as an “island sinking as a result of global warming.” Meanwhile, Al Gore buys three salt waterfront properties for millions of dollars each, while telling the rest of the world that all coastal areas are doomed.
Warmists ignore the empirical evidence and stick with their models. One even told me that homogenized and otherwise adjusted satellite data on sea level rise was far more reliable than what I could see with my own eyes and measure with my own stick. Many of these people do not live on the ocean and have no point of comparison, but what excuse do the others have?
[quote Steve Goddard says:
Some places sea level is rising a little. Other places it is falling a little.
[/quote]
True. And overall, sea levels are going up. Not much, but up none the less.
[quote]
Hansen is talking about drowning cities.
[/quote]
And the way to debunk that claim is with the facts, not with exaggerations in the opposite direction.
REPLY: Wrong brackets
Steve Goddard says: “Hansen is talking about drowning cities.”
And he’s got photographic evidence from a documentary by Nobel prize winner.
When winds, tides, barometric pressure, floods etc. mound up SLs in any part of the ocean a current of considerable speed quickly develops to return SLs to equilibrium.
So levels are changing all the time but not for long.
But I wonder how accurate are our measuring devices when the earth is a pear-shaped geoid with flat spots and the satellites would be hard pressed to maintain a parallel orbit.
I suspect these SLs are only known to within a couple of inches and a good ol’ GCM takes over from there.
IOW it’s a statistical exercise.
Anybody know about the finer details of these measurements?
I’m finding that the time between hitting the “Post Comment” button and the time the post shows up has increased greatly in the new format. It’s a disappointment.