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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pwl says:
May 1, 2010 at 4:27 pm
The ice that’s melting in Canada must be letting the entire North American continent rise by the exact same amount to compensate… either that or North America is floating in the ocean.
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You are correct the North American continent is rising. It is called rebound.
“…”We already knew that parts of North America are slowly rising due to an effect we call post-glacial rebound…” Ancient Glaciers Still Affect The Shape Of North America
Dave Wendt says:
May 1, 2010 at 10:04 pm
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.
It looks to be related to the PWP. Since we’ve had more El Ninos in the past 30 years that area has likely been warmer. Thus, thermal expansion would be the greatest in that area.
I have been salmon fishing on a stretch of tide affected river since 1983. Their is a weir upstream that in 1984 the furthermost spring tide reach backed up the flow and caused a 2″ rise on the marker.
26 years later this is still just as rare an occurance and the mean high water mark has not moved upsream one iota.
The bottoms of the tide affected pools remain the same and I wade them at night, sea trout fishing, with a confidence that belies my aging aching knees.
I do not suggest that we should deprive children of lesser intellect the right to a University education, but depriving them of the means to take measurements in any form could spare them the need to exercise their inadequate capacity for reason and at the same time spare us from the attacks on our wallets by their peers, produced by the equally worthless political faculty.
A period of sustained economic growth has always been topped with froth, in the austerity that awaits UK and Euroland there will be no room for the nonsense that was CCAGW. The multitudinous green jobs predicated by the carbon free economy will not happen and will join Gordon Brown in his footnote in History.
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.
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The article is addressing “Warming to Cause Catastrophic Rise in Sea Level” There has been over a half a decade of industrialization. We are told we are at the tipping point, if the Arctic and glaciers have thawed then we old fogies should be able to see with our own eyeball evidence a Catastrophic Rise in Sea Level over that half decade.
A couple of inches of rise or fall ain’t a Catastrophic Rise in Sea Level
Sea level in the NYC area has been rising at about one foot per century. This has been well documented for at least the last eighty years. Of course, it is also well documented that the land is sinking. [The end of the ice age released pressure inland, and the whole plate is tipping down into the sea as the inland portion rebounds.]
They claim that the rate has accelerated, but the data I’ve seen seems awfully fuzzy and inconclusive.
I’m all for climate change mitigation if it will make people address the very real changes going on that have nothing to do with AWG! Stop building infrastructure in NYC as if the MSL were unchanged from 100 years ago!!
Are we agreed that sea level rise happens somewhere else, like in mid ocean?
Peter Plail
Here is a good paper explaining why Norfolk land is losing elevation, due to glacial rebound in Scotland.
http://rses.anu.edu.au/people/lambeck_k/pdf/152.pdf
magicjava
During the Middle Ages some people argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
In some places sea level is going up slightly due to warming of the oceans. In other places it is going down slightly. None of these even vaguely indicate a meltdown or metres of rise as quoted from National Geographic or Hansen.
Can you please stop arguing about tiny angels?
pkatt
The volume of the earth’s rock matter is fairly constant, so an increase in land height one place would have to be associated with a decrease somewhere else.
Peter Plail says:
May 2, 2010 at 4:07 am
Here is a concise map showing changes in UK sea level due to Scottish glacial rebound.
http://www.neccap.org/NE%20Adapt/Climate/futureClimate/images/ratesofisostatic.gif
“I thought that the issue of sea level rise was global average. Can you tell me why a single spot matters in that context?”
Are you actually implying that I can stand a barrel on end, and fill it with water. Then on your side the level could be 0.5 m higher than mine? Physics doesn’t work that way. Unless the ground is sinking or rising it shouldn’t matter.
Another point to be made is that this claim of “catastrophic” seal level rise in the next 100 years has been around for at least 10 years. There are only 10 decades in 100 years. 1 is gone that leaves 9. If we were in fact experiencing this rise it better start causing problems soon or James Hansen better start giving back the money he has been paid for his phony research.
In the (very) small Swedish village of Ratan at 64 deg North, there is a Water level mark, from 1749. That mark is now, 261 years later, several meters above sea level.
The reason is that the land is rising from the latest glacial period, with some 10 mm per year.
Some of us could really use some sea level rise. The walk to the boat gets longer and longer.
I am curious about one thing that I have not seen mentioned regarding sea level rise. How much displacement would cause a noticable, say 1-2 mm, rise in sea level? Everything that we put in the water causes some ammout of displacement.
I just watched a “How It’s Made” episode which showed Singaore burning all of their waste and tunring into ash and making a habital island out of it. Every single boat, submarine, and oil rig causes some small ammount of displacement. Add to that, the large amount of undersea volcanic activity, magma flows and ash from surface volcanos, rockslides, and sediments washed out by flooding rivers. I can imagine that there might be enough displacement caused by all of these factors together to account for most of, it not all, any perceptable sea level rise.
Has anyone given these items any consideration in any reports or papers that discuss rising sea levels? It would be interesting to know how many cubic meters of displacement it would take to raise the sea level 1 mm and to get a fairly accurate estimate of how much displacement is directly caused by man, and how much is caused by nature excluding ice melt.
stevengoddard says:
May 1, 2010 at 10:19 pm
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.
Exactly Steve, my Pop had his heart wrecked by scarlet fever, ran over by a buckboard, peeled spuds in the ranch house until his broken leg healed -no doc for either one, just Granma’s Mountain/Cherokee medicine-which may have been
better in some respects, Pop had TB and survived, unlike some of his family,
and lived to see me as a man. Which was his goal in life. I for one do not want the 1860’s again.
re: Halifax sea level rise
And some portion of this would be due to land rebound.
One other thing- my Wife’s mother had smallpox and survived, with little scarring,
and who can forget Iron Lungs…
Tillamook Rock Light House, Oregon. 1891-2009
1891
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Tillamook_Rock_Light_Station_1901.jpg
1917
http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/bigs/line2476.jpg
Present Day
http://www.oregon-coastdirectory.com/lighthou/tillamook/tilly1.jpg
http://ftp.wi.net/~census/OR-Terrible%20Tilly%20Lighthouse.jpg
i’ve been living by the sea in greece for much of the past 16 years. no noticable change to report.
There are several similar sea level rise rate maps to be found at http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/slr/LSA_SLR_maps.php. The one closest to your website’s is perhaps http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/slr/slr/map_txj1j2_spectrum.pdf
Often, climachondrias, such as the fear of rising oceans are a symptom of climatehausen syndrome, a mental disorder wherein the person makes up various and sundry climatological “symptoms” having little to do with reality. This causes them to do strange things, such as putting gas masks on cows to “show” how “bad” cows and methane are.
These climate mental disorders are remarkably resistant to the only known cure, which is actual science, facts, and reason. For now, powerful anti-psychotic drugs have been shown to be useful.
Is “sea level” just another of those convenient numbers that attempt to describe a whole batch of other measurements and assumptions? Is it used like “average global temperature” is to describe a wide variety of (often tenuously related) weather and climatological phenomena? Or maybe sea level is measured in the same sloppy way that temperature data is gathered? Maybe we need a “surfacestations.org” project to examine those widely scattered sea level measuring stations.
Actually when you are dealing with mass and rotation on a planetary level, sea level is not uniform. One reason why there is consensus on a global measure. The best evidence should be from a stable deep water island near the equator. And there are none. So New Guinea or Zanzibar would be my guess as to a choice location for an index.
We live in an age of hysteria. That said, the Warmists deserve special scorn for the evil they are perpetrating. They have taught our children and our simple-minded to fear the heat of Summer. I will be on Daytona Beach this summer and I will revel in the fact that it is hot as hell, as it has always been, and that the sunlight can burn you to a crisp in an hour, as it always has. I will not fear early Spring. I will not fear mild winters. I have these blessings because I have some age and a critical intelligence. But the psychological damage done by Warmists is absolutely unforgivable.
I live near the coast of the Baltic, on a precambbrian shield that is extremely stable tectonically. We do have some glacial rebound here, something like 3 millimeters/years, from the ice that melted 12,000 years ago.
Now in places with very flat shore, I can definitely see that the shoreline has advanced since I was a boy, so I can say with confidence that the sea-level has risen significantly slower than 3 mm/yr during the last 40 years.
pkatt says:
May 2, 2010 at 12:32 am
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?
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Reply:
Since the ocean basins are made of rock predominanatly heavier than the continents, they tend to be below sea level. That being said, the process of throwing up material onto a volcano (ie Hawaii) would tend to remove it from the underlying basement, so initially one would think the basin would sink and sea level along with it. However, isostacism operates in this case, with the heavier volcanic mountain now settling deeper into the basement material, making it bulge upward until equilibrium is achieved. Sealevel would be unaffected except for the disequalibrium caused by the immediate eruption, and perhaps local changes in basin shape.
Another way of putting it would be the situation where one takes a bucket of seawater and dumps it on the top of a very cold iceberg–cold enough that the water freezes, adding to the mass of the iceberg, but at the same time the iceberg settles lower in the water from which this additional water was fetched, thereby resulting in no change in overall sealevel (even though the iceberg will show a settling to offset the additional mass added to its top).