Guest post by David Archibald
Successful prediction of levels of solar activity suggests that prediction of other phenomena driven by solar activity might also be successful, and useful. Sea level rise is a concern of some people. President Obama said in June 2008 that his nomination in the Democratic primaries was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow”.
The above graph shows the satellite data from the University of Colorado from late 1992. A change of trend is evident in 2004. Prior to that, sea level was rising at 4.2 mm/annum, and after 2004 at 1.5 mm/annum. 2003 was the recent peak in solar activity in terms of flares, F10.7 flux and proton flux. It is likely that the lower rate of rise post 2004 is due to lower subsequent solar activity.
The CSIRO compiled tide gauge data from 1870. The graph above shows that data with the subsequent satellite data plotted together.
The modern retreat of glaciers began in 1860. Initially sea level rose at 1.0 mm/annum. After 1930, it almost doubled to 1.9 mm/annum. This is a well-defined uptrend, now 80 years long.
Our prediction of a 2° C decline in temperature for the mid-latitudes over Solar Cycles 24 and 25 suggests that sea level will stop rising, and should start falling at some point prior to 2032.
The graph above combines the satellite data with the prior ten years of tide gauge data and shows the bounds of the long term rise at 1.9 mm/annum post 1030. Sea level could remain flat for another ten years before that trend in sea level rise is broken.
I get it! “Sea Level Rise and Fall” is LIKE a thermometer! Right?
Don’t know where the setelites have evere measured 4mm/year sea rise but it certainly wasn’t at the seashore. E.g. see data from tidegauges around UK.
http://www.pol.ac.uk/ntslf/pdf/annual_reports/2008/2008report_gps.pdf
It’s 1mm/year. Looks like Albion is pretty safe from the Armagedon.
A straight line with a constant slope of 3mm/yr goes quite nicely from center of left end to center of right end of the scatterplot. It reveals a bulge of about +5mm above the centerline in 2005. Sea level varies from year to year a lot more than 5mm. During 1997 El Nino it rose by 20mm in one year and fell by 20mm the next year.
There is nothing to see here.
I am a bit puzzled by the slope shown in the graph of 1.5 mm/year. Here is a graph of the satellite data from the University of Colorado, showing a post 2004 slope of 2.1 mm per year, not 1.5 mm per year (http://tinypic.com/r/24ybus5/7). 1.5 mm per year post 2004 does not seem to be correct.
The reduction in land-locked glacial and ice-sheet mass (mostly at high altitudes and high latitudes) is likely to have contributed a substantial fraction of the measured rise in level. A reasonable expectation is that this melt contribution is roughly proportional to the increase in temperatures over the temperature where on average land-locked glaciers neither advance nor decline… perhaps a temperature comparable to some time in 18th century as the world came out of the little ice age (1.5C cooler than today?). It is also reasonable to expect expansion due to warming (mostly in the upper 700 meters, http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index.htm, but with slight warming below 700 meters) contributes to rising sea level. The accumulation of heat in the upper 700 meters turned essentially flat right around 2003, which coincides with the change in slope of the satellite sea level data. This suggests that the current rate of rise is due mainly due to the contribution of ice melt; near 2 mm per year. (Sea level budget over 2003–2008: A reevaluation from GRACE space gravimetry, satellite altimetry and Argo, Cazenave, et al 2009).
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The majority (~80%) of the melt contribution appears to come from high altitude glaciers, with the balance coming from ice sheets. Even if temperatures were to remain roughly constant over the next few decades, melting of ice would continue to raise sea level at a rate similar to that from 2003 to present.
Although I suspect I know what relationship you are suggesting we examine, I’d have liked to see your specific hypothesis on the causal physical relationship between the sun and the ocean (other than the one relating to beaches and suntan oil).
The NOAA link didn’t appear to copy right. This is the right one: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index.html
Interesting post. As other commentators have pointed out (and any mariner knows), the sea-level is not easy to measure and far from being constant! Still, I’ve found the following site encouraging in that at least the scientists acknowledge the difficulty of the challenge:
Measurements this sensitive will undoubtedly pick up any increases or decreases in the rate of change of sea-level in Australia at least. Yet more reason not to panic yet.
“A change of trend is evident in 2004.”
It is more likely the trend changed in 2002, during the TOPEX/Jason intercalibration period (from 15 January through 15 August 2002). Something was obviously messed up, I would not bet on either trend being firmly anchored in reality.
Uncertainties in local vertical land movements and specifically in Glacial Isostatic Adjustment models are just too large.
Isn’t a shift from a slope at 4.0 mm/yr to 1.5 mm/yr a pretty severe change? Did we run out of ice?
My thoughts.
1. I wonder about lots of circumstantial paired events. I don’t share them unless I am willing to be taken to school.
2. There is a false assumption that natural cold cycles and warm cycles cancel each other out. There are many things on Earth that heat and cool at different rates, on short, medium, and long term timelines. Therefore, at any given moment (IE short term), the Earth and everything on it all seem to be out of balance. Might this be a necessary component of a natural system? Will our null hypothesis be destroyed if oceans continue to rise? In my opinion, no.
3. Picking out incredibly small pieces of a very long term phenomenon, only recently subjected to measurement, and then graphing up the data on an enlarged fraction of a rise scale, leads to false amazement.
If you search for f 10.7 here in WUWT you will find the relation: Something really happened, small but meaningful in between 2004 and 2005.
The lab rat in me continues to look at all of this proxy data with a jaundiced eye – I simply don’t believe a mm resolution to any of this with ANY degree of confidence. Tidal gauges fixed to the earth, are anchored in a plastic substrate that moves all over the place, and you’re measuring the slop of a liquid that jostles around over the top, to a mm? I don’t think so. Someone’s going to have to make a convincing argument to me about the reference calibration standard that in and of itself is stable enough to calibrate the rest, to a mm. In my view the trend data of the aggregate doesn’t hold water – the measuring sites are too widely spaced for the calibration standard to be consistent. Like the fractional degree measurements for temperature, I think most of this science is “blowin’ in the wind”. The alchemy of tree ring pseudoscience doesn’t help the cause to increase “confidence levels” in any of this climate silliness…. 🙂
Solar activity is now what it was 108 years ago. SC23 was much like SC13, yet ‘sea level’ now is at 125 mm and ~1900 it was -50 mm. doesn’t seem to have anything to do with solar activity.
John Peter says:
December 1, 2010 at 12:52 am
Even the Topex/Jason combined graph hints at the “breakpoint” in 20034 but also shows a steep decline in global sea levels through 2010. http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global.jpg
But how can global sea levels fall by what looks like 10-15mm over a year in 2010? Looks impossible to me. So how accurate are these measurements?
No ‘inflection point’ on de graph you posted. Or is there? In that case I would like to point at the dramatic sea level fall between 1998 and 2001.
Anyway. The fluctuations in sea level appear to have a relation with El Niño/La Niña and this is not very suprising; it was already known that 2/3 or more of sea level rise over past century or so is due to expansion of warming surface layers of water.
@ur momisugly Steve Fitzpatrick
I checked the linear trend as well. You are correct on 2.1mm per year for the seasonally adjusted, non-Inverse Barometer data. For data with IB adjustment applied, the fit is 2.0mm per year.
TonyB says:
December 1, 2010 at 12:41 am
Sea levels are continuing to rise very gently at a similar trend to previous times in the last century.
Sea levels globally remain generally lower today than they were during the MWP and Roman optimum a fact curiously omitted from Chapter 5 of AR4
TonyB, do you have a link or chart for this? I was looking for this info yesterday. Thanks, Mike S.
Solar activity could affect ocean currents and move cold water to the surface and bury warm water, causing levels to fall. They could also affect the rate of glaciation and deglaciation by changes in precipitation patterns.
Cazenave & Nerem (July 2004) wrote a review paper (Present-Day Sea Level Change: Observations And Cause) in Reviews of Geophysics in which they estimated current sea-level rise to be 2.8 +/- 0.4 mm/year, though they acknowledge that this estimate is higher than the historic estimate of 1.8 mm/year. To what do you attribute the differences between their estimates and yours? And, can we really trust 19-th century estimates of sea level? How many tide guages were actually in use at that time?
The following paper from Caltech correlates solar activity from auroral observations with the Nile River water level records which have been kept since 622 AD.
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/39770/1/06-1256.pdf
It appears from the paper that the NAO index is clearly affected by solar activity. When the NAO is negative, jet streams move southward and arctic sea ice volume increases.
How does volcanic activity after 2004 compare with the previous century?
Inflection around 2004-5? Here is a step function Anthony throws up every once in a while.
http://i53.tinypic.com/27x1mcx.jpg
Its all coming unravelled
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/09/proper_glacier_estimate/
The NOAA link didn’t appear to copy right. This is the right one: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index.html
Just looked at that link above and expected to see 1998 as a peak (without really thinking). It’s trough. So is 2002 and 2005. All down as being HOT years for global mean temperature.
That suggests fairly strongly that the heat of those hot years came primarily from the oceans, not from outta space or our runaway CO2 greenhouse.
This is what the Met. Office call “internal variations” and they are not accounted for in the computer climate models.
These are just short term events but if the models aren’t accounting for variations in ocean currents, longer term variations like PDO are going to be ignored as well and likely be accounted for by an arbitrarily adjusted “climate sensitivity”.
Lawrie Ayers,
” Lots of dumb people down here.”
HAH!! I live in California.
(apologies to those Californians, like our Host, who do have some sense, You are outnumbered.)
Michael D Smith
Will you email me privately regarding your request?
tonyb