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!
magicjava says:
May 2, 2010 at 5:33 am
You are missing the point. A number of things in fact ARE related to the LODD. The main organization in this field is the IERSS, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. From their web site:
As you can see, the motion of the various fluids of the earth are in fact related to the length of day. There is a constant exchange of momentum between the rigid surface and the various fluids (ocean, atmosphere, etc.), which changes the LOD. It’s not just people making absurd claims as you suggest. It is hard science.
Being a suspicious fellow, my general practice is to download the data and run the numbers myself. The sea level data is available here. The LOD data is available here.
I calculate that the correlation between the sea level data and the LOD data is -.66. Including the expected delay increases the correlation to -0.75. This is a very significant correlation. The fact that it is negative is what we’d expect. Like spreading out a skater’s arms, the increasing sea level slows down the earth’s rotation (negative correlation).
This is very well understood physics. As I mentioned, LOD is used to diagnose what is called the “sea level budget”, and this has been the subject of numerous scientific papers.
Theo Goodwin says:
May 2, 2010 at 8:51 am
We live in an age of hysteria. That said, the Warmists deserve special scorn for the evil they are perpetrating. … But the psychological damage done by Warmists is absolutely unforgivable.
_________________________________________________________________________
It is especially unforgivable to frighten children on a world wide level in an effort to extract money from their parents and deprive everyone of their freedom. I prefer the extortion of the mob, at least they were honest about their motives and leave you with enough to live on. These economic vampires seem to be determined to slowly kill us extracting the last ounce of blood as they do.
I love the age of hysteria, by the way. A very good description.
I live in Southport, on the NW coast of England, about 17 miles North of Liverpool. My house sits 500 yards from the Irish Sea. The very long, very flat sandy beach at this sea-side resort is famous for high tides that can be as far out as a mile or more. Visitors often bemoan: “What’s happened to the sea!” The very shallow approach of this shoreline renders it very susceptible to any rapid rise/fall in sea levels. Over a period of several decades, such changes would have a notable impact on tidal movement and even the town, parts of which are only 3 foot asl. I have known this town and its beach since childhood (over 50 years) and there has been no discernable change to the pattern of sea movements in that time. The last time the town experience flooding was in the 1930’s, following a prolonged period of heavy rain, combined with a very high spring tide and a strong off-shore storm. A partial seawall defence was installed 10 years ago, which had litte difficulty withstanding a similarly severe weather conditions 3 years ago. On the shoreline a few miles South of the town, human and animal remains that date from 5000 to 6000 years ago can be readily found. At that time the sea was much further out and folks could have walked almost “across the sea to Ireland”, as the sea level was ~ 50 ft lower than today. Climate change? What climate change? We don’t know we’re born!
London inundated, this prediction has quite a tradition: “A still more singuilar instance of the faith in predictions occured in London in the year 1524. (…) As early as the month of June 1523, several of them concurred in predicting that, on the 1st day of February, 1524, the waters of the Thames would swell to such a height as to overflow the whole city of London, and wash away ten thousands of houses. The prophecy met implicit belief. (…)”, writes Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
rsprojects says:
May 2, 2010 at 12:28 pm
This is a common misunderstanding. Rising sea levels are due to a couple of things. One is “steric” sea level rise, due to the fact that when water is heated, it expands. Another is the melting of ice, but not floating ice. It is from melting land-based glaciers and ice caps. However, the total sea level budget is not well understood. There is a good article on this here.
Gail Combs says:
May 2, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Yeah, we used to live in the Holocene, but now we live in the Hysteriacene …
speculativebs said:
“Showing images of regions that have been selected for the specific purpose of trying to make a spurious claim isn’t an argument. Most of these are probably at low tide anyways.”
The example I gave was from the Kattegat where the maximum tidal range is very small. I have a painting from early in the 20th century which shows the height of the water in much more detail than in the old photos in the links I mentioned. The sea level looks just as high in the painting as in the photograph from last year. I also have other photos taken in the same area in the past 100 years that suggest there has been no change.
The very low tidal ranges of the Kattegat, Baltic, Mediterranean and Black Seas mean that those are the areas where any significant rise in sea level would first become noticable to observers without specialist equipment.
http://www.smhi.se/klimatdata/oceanografi/havsvattenstand/1.2260.1242050870
Sorry – the previous link may not be working. The above should link to an excel file with yearly data fron 1883, with corrections for land rise.
Bob(ScepticalRedcoat),
Thanks for your wonderful description of the tide at Southport. I am really enjoying the many personal descriptions of nature found in this post. And thanks to all others who have done the same.
GeoFlynx says:
May 2, 2010 at 10:42 am
There appears to be a very small Post Glacial Rebound (PGR) of 0.09 ± 0.03 mm/yr in La Jolla, as determined by GPS. Details here.
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 2, 2010 at 1:58 pm ; Response: Wish it was Hysteriacene and not heard, …
Spector writes:
“etudiant says: (May 1, 2010 at 4:14 pm) Mike, 1.8mm/yr over 130 years translates to 234 mm, about 9.2 inches. Most places that swing will get blurred by the tidal swings, but the evidence for even this amount of increase is not that good.”
“This Wikipedia article on this topic also says that sea level has been rising at 1.8mm/yr for the past century and data from 23 long tide gauge records in ‘geologically stable environments’ indicate a sea level increase of about 8 inches per century.”
Do we have no common sense at all. My mother is 94 years old and as spry as a fifty year old. If sea level rose 6, 7, or 8 inches a century, she would be able to show us where the Atlantic “used to be” at Daytona Beach.
DocMartyn (May 2, 2010 at 8:31 am)
Thanks for those links. No problem using the 1891 and 2009 pics of the lighthouse to show that SL is lower now!.
[quote Willis Eschenbach says:]
As you can see, the motion of the various fluids of the earth are in fact related to the length of day. There is a constant exchange of momentum between the rigid surface and the various fluids (ocean, atmosphere, etc.), which changes the LOD. It’s not just people making absurd claims as you suggest. It is hard science.
[/quote]
Never said folks were making absurd claims. I said they’re were lots of contradictory claims.
And I think if you smooth out the data to get rid of the the annual “buzzsaw” effect of the solar ephemeris and extend the comparison back earlier than 1992, the correlation isn’t so good. LODD goes up and down and up and down. Sea levels go up.
This Indian city was drowned by global warming – 9,000 years before the soccer mom was invented.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm
I like the comments about Dunster & the Cinque ports. This makes me think of how some coastines are eroding, others are ‘growing’ dues to sedimentation.
In order to make a convincing case that temperature increase is causing a rise in sea level, one would have to make a convincing case that the shape of all the ocean basins is static & stable. It seems to me that there would have to be some analysis of sedimentation mass from all the rivers, undersea volcanic growth, and any deepening or widening of undersea trenches.
We do not live in a stable world.
Re: Willis Eschenbach on May 2, 2010 at 1:17 pm
(to grab a comment where LOD is discussed…)
But big earthquakes are making the planet spin faster (shorter days). Here is a NASA article. The recent Chilean 8.8 quake took off 1.26 microseconds, the 2004 Sumatran 9.1 quake took off 6.8 microseconds. Is this getting figured in for such “sea level budget” calculations?
[quote Steve Goddard says:]
Can you please stop arguing about tiny angels?
[/quote]
It’s more about strong arguments vs. weak arguments. We already have strong arguments that sea level rise isn’t a significant problem. There’s no need to put effort into replacing those strong arguments with weak arguments involving old photographs with a title that questions if sea level rise is even occurring.
“A C Osborn says:
May 2, 2010 at 11:05 am
It has been said for some time that in the UK the mainland is rising in the North and sinking in the South.”
But evidence proves that due to sedimentation, England’s southern coastline has expanded by at least 2 miles since the Romans first landed…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4870732.ece
REPLY: Actually he’s dead wronger than wrong about sea level rise prediction, at least in his own back yard. See this prediction from the good doctor twenty years ago that we covered last year. It was a prediction about New York City, just a couple of blocks from his office. Hansen said:
“Then he explained, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water.”
See this: A little known 20 year old climate change prediction by Dr. James Hansen – that failed badly
Of course you won’t see the NYT or the Guardian mention his big dead wrong prediction. Only here – Anthony
—————–
That is not a creditable source. If you had a published article by Hansen, that would be credible. If the author here had published that quote back when he talked to Hansen that would be fairly credible. But a quote taken from memory from over ten years ago is not. I am not saying Hansen is correct, just that his views should not be dismissed.
The main factor that could cause catastrophic sea level rise is whether or not major glaciers melt rapidly. There is no consensus on this. I assume you’ve seen this discussion:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/ippc-sealevel-gate/
REPLY: Hansen has not refuted it, and he (and his RC buds) know about it. If it was wrong, taken out of context, fabricated, whatever, you’d think he’d be screaming bloody murder about it. He isn’t, and he isn’t because he knows he’ll be taken to task. So its credible whether you like it or not. -A
Willis
The most common cause of apparent sea level rise may well be subsidence of the land relative to the ocean.
thanks for information , keep writing thanks for sharing 🙂
stevengoddard says:
May 2, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Thanks, Steve. In some areas the subsidence is quite significant. In others (see my cite above about La Jolla) it is not.
Presumably, however, if the land is sinking in one place it is rising in another, so you’d think they would somewhat average out.
Those who have participated in this discussion and who believe that sea level has risen in the last century are now talking about “apparent sea level” rise. As with all Warmists or fellow travelers, when confronted with first person testimony about observable facts of sea level rise, they respond by saying that they were not actually talking about those observable facts at all. They were not talking about where the Atlantic lies on Daytona Beach or any other beach in the world. Rather they were talking about a multiplicity of factors covering all conceivable changes of land and sea that might have some bearing on where the sea lies on the beach.
Sorry, that strategem will not work. If your topic was not “observable change in sea level at particular places and times around the world” then it is up to you to say so. If your topic is not observable changes in where the oceans lie on the beaches then please choose another name and please choose a descriptive one. Please specify what observable phenomena are relevant to your hypotheses. I demand this because I know that you cannot do it. You have no interest in the observable phenomena whatsoever. It strikes me as the very height of irony that someone would treat natural history as not being about observable phenomena.
Almost exactly for the period spanned by the pictures, a study by Church, John & Neil White, 2006. A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise. Geophysical Research Letters 33: L01602, taking account of all relevant factors (land subsidence, regional differences, oceanic currents change, and so on) conclude that the worldwide average sea level (please underline the words “worldwide average”) increased by 19.5 cm between 1870 and 2004, what boils down to an average speed of 1.45 mm per year. The speed accelerated in , but not by much: the 2007 IPCC reports (hardly known for understating the effects of climate change) reckons that sea level has been rising at pro¬gres¬sed at 1.8 mm/yr in 1961 to 2003 and accelerated to 3.1 mm/yr in 1993-2003, although the latter is too short a period to base long-term projections on (IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, The Physical Science Basis, 2007:419). IPCC projections of cumulative rise from 1980-99 to 2090-99 (i.e. 105 years between midpoints) range from 28 ±10 cm in the most benign scenario (B1) to 42.5±16 cm in the most pessimist (A1F1), therefore with annual speeds from 2.66 to 4.04 mm/yr (give and take margins of error). Certainly an acceleration from 1870-2004 though in line with recent speed observed in 1993-2003. Not quite catastrophic. A very flat coast land with a 1% slope (one meter over sea level at 100 metres inland) would lose some 30 metres of beach or mangrove along a century, over the 20 metres or so that were lost in the preceding century. Very few coastal areas are that flat, and many are uninhabited. Some polders in Holland, and perhaps the low wall on the seaside at Piazza San Marco in Venice as well as the famously uneffective defences in N.Orleans would have to be topped-up by about 30-50 cm to keep up with the rising seas. May be tough in some places, but I bet we’ll survive.