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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I’m living in Ravenna, Italy and here there are several structures that were built around 500 AD and are currently around 1 -3 meters below grown level. This was part of a river delta and the rivers prograded out towards the sea, so that the nearby port of Classe was on the sea is now landlocked by several miles.
I would bet that the change in ground level from the 5th to now would be a pretty good proxy for sea level rise over 1500 years, and since the ancient structures here are 1-3 meters gl, sea level rise would be around 1.5 m/1500 years. With almost all of that before present day ravenna (downtown has been pretty static for 200 years)
http://farsouthofi-10.blogspot.com/2009/10/theodorics-tomb-and-sea-level.html
noaaprogrammer says:
May 1, 2010 at 5:55 pm
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!
I was curious about this once too. Accounting for the sediment load of the worlds rivers yields an annual sea level rise of about .02 mm per year-not very much.
The word dramatic is being overused dramatically for dramatic effect and yet we’re seeing nothing dramatic in the real world except the dramas of overdramatic journalists, politicians and activists behaving like drama queens.
If anything Steve, there’s more grass and trees in the latter images. What’s up with that? Why are humans turning the world prettier when they are dramatic world destroying monsters?
There are paintings of the various bays, canals and rivers of the world which date back to before the invention of photography. Compare them to their modern equivalents too.
joe,
Thanks for the information about Ravenna, Italy.
I’ve never been there, but I am guessing that the sea level rise since 500 AD was probably not associated with generating electricity or driving automobiles!
Steven, do you surf? Cause you seem to have caught the tide just right in the two pictures. 🙂
John A says:
May 1, 2010 at 5:34 pmThis is the daily MSL from Halifax, Nova Scotia from 1920-2009. It looks like sea-level rise to me.
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_oCeMiYptlC8/S9y1rHkVWYI/AAAAAAAAAvc/_1DdxEqAc1M/s800/halifaxmsl19202009.jpg
It also looks like it’s slowing down, to me. So much for “accelerating” SL rise.
But apocalypticism is a time-honored fave—especially when it’s all our fault!
I found another interesting map at the AVISO website. I can’t imbed the image because it doesn’t have a URL, but it’s on this page below the rising sea level graph.
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/news/ocean-indicators/mean-sea-level/
It’s called Regional MSL from Oct-1992 to Jul 2009. It seems to show that the global trend has been driven by a high trend area in the eastern Pacific north and east of Australia. There is also a very intriguing band of globular high trend hotspots in a back round swath of low trend waters across the southern ocean. It would be interesting to know if anyone has a theory about what could generate such a pattern.
Glenn,
I’m not a surfer, but I am pretty good at breaking Wal-Mart stryofoam boogie boards. My main sport these days is trying to stay upright on my bicycle in the Colorado wind.
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram
No doubt the world was better off before we had parks, grass, restaurants, electricity and flushing toilets. I think it would have been fun growing up in a world full of Smallpox, Typhoid, Polio, rats, and TB.
It is simply awful what man has done to this planet.
Everyone, the SL rise has been masked by the syphoning of oil. The two have balanced out. Good thing we stopped drilling recently. Whew, that was a close one, …..
I zoomed in on the animation and noticed that both images have nearly identical waves breaking on the rocks. That is pretty cool ….
[quote netdr says:]
He also mentioned an interesting fact, that we should be able to measure a slowing down of the planet’s rotation proportional to the sea level rise. It is like a figure skater letting her arms go out and she slows down.
Has this been done?
[/quote]
Yes. There’s no correlation to sea level rise and Length of Day Delta (LODD). See:
http://magicjava.blogspot.com/2010/02/more-on-water-vapor-length-of-day-delta.html
[quote Theo Goodwin says:]
magicjava writes:
“All valid arguments, none of which require us to claim that sea levels are not rising when it’s demonstrable that they are.”
Can you demonstrate it without using statistics? Without using contrived bundles of measurements rather than actual empirical measurements? I didn’t think so.
[/quote]
It’s been demonstrated. There really is no valid debate that sea levels are rising.
I hear Al Gore just bought an ocean-view villa on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool at Montecito.
If he’s not worried, I’m not worried. 🙂
GeoFlynx says:
May 1, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Real scientists use many precise ways of measuring sea level. Yours is not one of them.
What are you going to believe – your own eyes (and that of many others posting here) – or “precise” ways of measuring?
Those disputing the validity of matching the two La Jolla photos might want to look a bit closer. The high water mark is clearly visible on the black and white one. I would suggest that if the water has risen by much since then that the beach is effectively unusable at high tide. I would bet, however, that the high water mark is in the same basic spot.
Given the shallow slopes of many beaches, any rise in high tide is very noticeable.
Anyone can check sea level rise for themselves by buying an old atlas and comparing the maps of coastlines shown there with the current views available on Google Earth. Even allegedly ‘vulnerable’ locations like the Maldives and Nauru show no visible sea level rise when examined in this way.
Sea levels are rising but not currently enough for anyone to really notice over an average lifetime. On the list of issues that may be of concern related to AGW, sea level rise is probably very low on that list.
Meanwhile, based on final JAXA data for May 1, current 2010 arctic sea ice is now slightly less than for the same date in 2009 (and doing so a few days earlier than I thought it would). This is still within all margins of error on this data and is only interesting from a statistical persepctive, but I think will get more interesting later in the summer as the summer minimum drops back near (but not quite) to the levels we saw in 2007– around 4.5 Million sq. km. based on JAXA data. The thinner first year ice seems to be melting fast…
I have a sea level anomaly map from NASA on my site, but can no longer find the map on NASA’s site. Does anyone know if this map exists at NASA, and where I can find it?
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/sea-level-decreases-since-1993.html
The map also shows sea levels decreasing just west of North and South America, and rising to the north of Indonesia. There is also a very curious spot just south of Cape Town, where it appears the water is stacking up then falls off into a hole to the south. If this continues it should be interesting.
Pointe du Hoc, Normandy in 1944 (see the cliff behind)
http://www.olive-drab.com/images/rangers_pointe_du_hoc_700_03.jpg
Pointe du Hoc in 200X
http://www.d-daytours.com/gallery_images/pointe_du_hoc1.jpg
Iwo Jima, 1945
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_jcNQzBZlLiE/S5w-2YUiznI/AAAAAAAAMYc/ESiZjmV_mHk/iwo_scenery_overhead_008_from_surabachi.jpg
Iwo Jima, 2010
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_jcNQzBZlLiE/S5w9_DIRJlI/AAAAAAAAMX8/HVr43AwH3J4/_MWU3984.JPG
View from Mount Suribachi on invasion beach, 1945
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_jcNQzBZlLiE/SYpssgzBuqI/AAAAAAAAJ0o/N7xuc9cnd84/nasmcory6.jpg
and again, 2010
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_jcNQzBZlLiE/S5l0tBhn0qI/AAAAAAAAMVI/yfWCDElF1p8/_MWU3985.jpg
magicjava,
Is it time to start evacuating all the coastal cities?
magicjava says:
May 1, 2010 at 10:52 pm
Not true. The length of day is often used in sea level calculations, and there’s a heap of scientific papers about it. To pick just one, see here. The abstract says:
There’s lots of other papers, here’s one.
While it certainly may have been demonstrated, merely stating so doesn’t get much traction. If you could point to such a demonstration, netdr would have something to chew on.
Thank God for James Hansen. Every other alarmist talks in generalities and imply that a few cm of sea rise will eventually spell the end of civilization. But Dr. Hansen, on the other hand, he’s willing to predict the drowning of whole nations like Bangladesh within a 100 years. Of course, his record of correctly predicting thing over the last 30 years hasn’t been stellar… in fact, it’s been bloody awful, but it’s still very refreshing to have an activist make a solid falsifiable prediction. Which, like the others, proves to be wrong year after year.
What’s truly wonderful about his predictions is this: Alarmist activists can’t help but defend him, even as they recognize his increasing penchant for the fabulous. They’re in a bit of a monkey trap that way. I delight in their squirming discomfort. I needn’t address their arguments or propositions, no, merely the indefensible flights of fancy authored by the good Doctor. Dr. Hansen, you are the wind beneath my wings.
I wonder if anyone has attempted to determine if there might be natural negative feedback effects governing sea level rise. This might be the case if the average near-shore slope gradient, especially in the tropics, becomes more level away from the sea so that any small increase in sea-level exposes a progressively larger water surface area to rapid evaporation.
It might be interesting to see a plot of world-wide average land slope near sea level. Perhaps such a graph could be made from a high-resolution global contour map database.
Who needs tidal gauges, sediment cores, and satellite measurements to measure the sea levels (fallible) when one can rely solely on photographs (infallible). There is no finer instrument than the human eye, afterall.