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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What strikes me funny is that the undersea volcanic chains (ie Hawaii) build tall mtns under the surface of the ocean.. it would seem to me that rock would displace more water then ice already floating.. well wouldnt it?
Surely one of the greatest examples of disappearing sea levels is the Ancient City of Ephesus which was once a thriving port on the Aegean Sea and now is 8 kilometres inland. You can still see the ramp where arriving sea farers would walk into the city after mooring their ships.
Time will tell whether rising sea levels caused by global warming will overcome the rising silt from the river where Ephesus was built and if ships will once more be able to sail into the city. But I wouldn’t be betting on it anytime in the next few thousand years:
http://www.archaeologyexpert.co.uk/Ephesus.html
Some of the Cinque ports on the southern coast of Britain are a long way from the sea.
The Roman port of Chichester is so far inland that you can just see its spire from the coast with binoculars.
The local empirical evidence then points the other way,
Thus do I refute thee Wiki………….
Thanks Theo Goodwin. Surely there are a lot of other WUWT readers who live on sea water who can provide their own eyewitness testimonies?
I was one of those innocent gullible people who fell for Al Gore’s movie (I was horrified by it), until I stepped out of my front door and walked over to the water and looked at the tide gauge, and realized I’d been hoodwinked. And the fact that he has invested millions in luxury waterfront properties since making the mockumentary, and leaves a bigger carbon footprint than almost any other human being on Earth, tells me that either (a) he doesn’t believe a word he says, or (b) he is a sociopath, willing to contribute to the planet’s destruction for his own profit and comfort. Maybe he’s a bit of both.
How many of his group behave the same way? We saw in Copenhagen the astounding display of private jets and limos by people telling the rest of us we had to ride bicycles and read by candlelight. If any of them really believed in their CO2 dogma, their extraordinary “polluting” would be genuinely evil. And that goes for Sting, given that he had all the grand ancient trees in front of his mansion chopped down quite a few years ago, much to the dismay of his Green neighbors.
Does Michael Mann walk to work and avoid air-conditioning and heating? What about James Hansen et al? Since, seemingly, none of the leaders of the AGW counterinsurgency practice what they preach, I assume that what they preach is as worthless as they treat it.
1. The sea level is sinking in Scandinavia – the highest rise of the land is in the middle of the bay between Sweden and Finland, more than 1 cm pr year. At the coast of northern Norway where I come from, the oldest farms have names telling about these things too, and it has been researched for many years. The beach where I played as a kid 50 years ago, was at that time sand only, and now, trees grow at some of the places, as it is obvious the high tide doesn’t reach up to those highest points and cover them any longer.
2. The age of buildings made out of concrete is set to 20 years, after which they can be torn down rather than renovated, in urban areas. In Norway we often see buildings torn down after 50 years of use, also because the community itself has changed, making it better to tear down and build anew. This means that even if there should be a sea level rise anywhere, the community alongside the rising sea level has enough time to move inland, abandon old buildings which would have been abandoned anyway, and build new buildings, which they would have done anyway.
Surely many ports around the world has detailed records on sea levels several hundred years back in time?
John Daly is recalled in several comments here and deservedly so. His contribution to the climate debate was vast. A fitting tribute, I suggest, would be a review on this site of his historical analysis of sea levels in particular. Clarification of several issues would be most welcome.
Following are examples referred to by etudiant (May 1, 2010 at 4:14 pm). (Corrected values are given). They are based on a mark chiselled into a rock face on the Isle of the Dead in 1841. Daly established that the mark corresponded to the Mean Sea Level (MSL) back then and that
MSL in 1888 was about 340 mm lower than the 1841 mark and
MSL to-day is about 315 mm lower than the 1841 mark
indicating that
(1) MSL has risen just 25 mm since 1888 (0.22 mm/year)
(2) MSL dropped 340 mm between 1841 and 1888
Item (1) is consistent with the photos of The Cove given in the story but, of course, only a small fraction of official estimates.
To what extent can item (2) be attributed to land uplift? Apparently, the Tasmanian site was chosen for the mark because of its reputation for geological stability.
http://www.john-daly.com/deadisle/index.htm
One thing not considered by the CAGW doom mongers is variation in the amount of water locked in by biomass and deep in the Earth’s crust, trapped in the rock itself or in large lakes.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/070228_beijing_anomoly.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6904318.stm
Until we fully understand the complexities of total water distribution/volume changes simple measurements of sea level change will remain meaningless.
magicjava says:
May 1, 2010 at 6:18 pm
[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.
I look forward to the demonstration that sea levels are rising.
The Global Warmers are at it all the time in Norway.
Here is a Google translation from NRK, the BBC of Norway. Drange is working for Bjerknes Center, which will have lead authors for the next IPCC report.
So dont expect any change from the IPCC.
http://translate.google.no/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=no&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nrk.no%2Fnyheter%2Fdistrikt%2Fsorlandet%2F1.6727286&sl=no&tl=en
As usual they say NOTHING about the fact that their source is ….models ( !! )
It is presented as scientific facts.
The Baltic sea has very little in the way of tides. The same is true of the Kattegat, the sea between the north of the Jutland peninsula in Denmark and Sweden. (The Kattegat connects the Baltic to the Skaggerak and hence to the North Sea). The absence of tides means that any changes in sea level in the Kattegat should be relatively easy to spot in photographs and paintings.
At the mouth of Giberåen (the River Giber) south of Aarhus in Denmark there is a house called Fiskerhuset (Danish for “Fisherman’s House”) that was built in 1856, almost on the beach. The first people to live there were my great great grandparents.
Fiskerhuset’s location would cause it to be extremely vulnerable to any rise in sea level. Because of its picturesque location many artists have painted it over the years and many photographers have taken pictures of it. There are links to three of those photos, taken about 100 years apart, below.
http://www.lundskov.dk/grafik/aarhusfoto/aarhus-169.jpg
http://fb-net.dk/files/products/10457/c/1.jpg
http://www.dialog09.dk/custom/site/stiftenimg.asp?id=40676
The second photo was taken in 1908. The first is about the same age or slightly older and the third was taken last year.
There is no obvious sign of a change in sea level, but I admit a century might be too short a period for any rise to show up.
Bob Highland: Your URL doesn’t work because it contains a comma. Here’s the corrected URL:
http://www.easyart.com/canvas-prints/Charles-William-Wyllie/All-On-A-Summers‘s-Day,-At-Bosham,-Sussex-215878.html
But the photo was taken at low tide, and the tidal swing is a meter. The actual sea level fall is much less than a meter — it looked about half a foot in an apples-to-apples photo I saw on his site a year ago.
I like the Google Earth plugin giving the location and data of PSMSL stations.
And until now I could not find a single station, which shows anything like an unprecedented sea level rise.
What does Hansen have to say for himself now. The westside highway should have been under water since 2009 according to his prediction. How many false predictions is he allowed btw?
La Jolla is one of the stations referred in the Douglas et al. study. It is also one of the sites I’ve identified where sea level is going down pretty fast:
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2009/07/subida-e-descidas-dos-mares.html
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/search/label/english
Ecotretas
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.
I can relate that a favourite beach of my youth was Holkham on the North Norfolk (East UK) coast. It had miles of flat sand which was washed by the tide twice a day (it was never more than a foot deep within hundreds of yards of the high water mark) in the sixties. Now it appears to be becoming a salt marsh. Not a lot of evidence of rising sea levels here, but to be fair I do believe Britain is tilting with the East side rising.
You may be interested to know that this beach was used to represent the V1 (buzzbomb) testing site on the Baltic coast in the film Operation Crossbow (1965), so if you have access to the film you can judge the condition of the beach in the sixties.
I’m now in Sarawak Malaysia sitting at a boat club that I forst visited in 1980. The frontage suffered badly during king tides and I organised piling and rocks to cater fro the worst of it and to stop losing the club front. In 1981 the local village flooded so badly that we couldn’t get through for 4 days. It used to happen every 10 years 61, 71, 81, etc. The situation is far less severe than it was then, the front of the club is absolutely stable and there has been no flooding since 1991. I row on the river and sail in the sea there and there hase been no rise in sea levels. I keep a boat on the south coast of england where it has been for 30 years, yes you’ve got it, no change in sea levels. Where does this catastrophic rise come from?
Were the photos taken at high or low tide ?
The thing that struck me the most about the two photos was the marked increase in greenery, i.e. growing plants.
The “Greens” want the earth to be greener, but they simultaneously want to severely reduce the primary factor that is making the earth greener, which is increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
I guess that someone should let them in on the secret that plants need CO2 (and that we need plants).
[quote Willis Eschenbach says:]
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:
[/quote]
Yes, I should have pointed out that nearly everything on the planet has been claimed to related to the LODD.
LODD Caused By Global Warming, Making Days Shorter:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/234089/studies_show_global_warming_could_change.html?cat=58
LODD Caused By Global Warming, Making Days Longer (From _same_ web site as previous link):
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/242658/length_of_day_may_change_for_global.html?cat=58
LODD Caused By Atmosphere:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=15
LODD Cause By Atmosphere, Land, And Oceans (which is _literally_ everything on the planet):
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005JGRB..11008404C
And the list goes on.
But at the end of the day, the LODD curve doesn’t match the sea level rise curve.
Is it hard to measure the sea level because of tides? Like even if you measured the highest tide each day, wouldn’t that be a different height each day? Sometimes you get a really big tide when everything lines up right, I’m sure.
How did you take that into account when comparing the photos?
P.S.
Here are the two curves:
Sea Level Rise:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SeaLevel_TOPEX.jpg
LODD
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gif/lod.png
[quote stevengoddard says:]
Is it time to start evacuating all the coastal cities?
[/quote]
Just present the facts as they are. Sea levels are rising but at no where near the rate claimed by Gore. Instead, they’re rising at the same rate they’ve been rising since before the industrial revolution. And in the last few years, the rate of the rise has actually decreased.
But the recent photo shows the ocean’s horizon height, relative to the old photo, to be much taller! That must mean we have visual evidence of much more sea level rise in the “pipeline”!! Must be the moon’s gravity is holding on to this sea level rise, preventing it from being measured at the shoreline and when CO2 levels get high enough, will interfere with the moon’s ability to hold back the flood (just kidding). Remember, they recently reported on NPR (no kidding, I heard this report) that all the oil drilling/oil extraction may be causing the increased volcanic activity!