Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Various pundits and scientists keep talking about a threatened acceleration in the sea level rise. Here’s the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:
Anthropogenic forcing is also expected to produce an accelerating rate of sea level rise (Woodworth et al., 2004).
The usual font of misinformation says:
Church and White (2006) report an acceleration of SLR since 1870. This is a revision since 2001, when the TAR stated that measurements have detected no significant acceleration in the recent rate of sea level rise.
Over at the inversely named “SkepticalScience” blog, which is inadequately skeptical, we find:
The blue line in the graph below clearly shows sea level as rising, while the upward curve suggests sea level is rising faster as time goes on. The upward curve agrees with global temperature trends and with the accelerating melting of ice in Greenland and other places.
The Guardian gets in their licks:
Sea levels are already on the rise as a result of increasing temperatures, because the oceans expand as they warm up, but until now scientists have had a poor understanding of how quickly ice sheets such as those in Greenland and Antarctica will begin to disappear.
Meanwhile, back in the world of reality we have the latest satellite data up to September of 2010:
Figure 1. Satellite-measured sea level rise. Errors shown are 95% confidence intervals. Data Source.
The smaller trend of the recent half of the record is statistically different from the larger trend of the first half. Will this reduction continue into the future? Who knows? I’m just talking about the past, and pointing out that we sure haven’t seen any sign of the threatened acceleration in the satellite record. Quite the opposite, in fact.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled warnings of global inundation from accelerating sea level rise …
w.
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onion says:
January 8, 2011 at 5:10 am
I guess people might want to check the SkepticalScience article that the article quotes but does not link to:
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onion, That post was made Oct 2009, referencing a paper written two years earlier 2007.
@August Bjarnason
http://www.john-daly.com/altimetry/topex.htm
Thank you for the link. John Daly wrote:-
“But while T/P has proved successful in these other areas, its use as a global sea level monitor is highly restrained by the limitations on its accuracy once millimetric scales are sought. To suggest that changes in the global level of the heaving oceans can be determined to a resolution of tenths of a millimetre, or even a centimetre, is to make unsustainable claims about the inherent capabilities of the technology itself. Statistics cannot compensate for the limitations imposed by the electronics and by radiation physics and claims to the contrary are simply not credible.”
My understanding of John Daly’s commentary is that the satellite data is accurate to plus or minus 457 mm (1.6ft). How the sattelite deals with swells in the ocean is beyond me.
You know what, if you want something on climate or related issues come to Watts up With That.
Perhaps all of this debate is best left to the market to decide just as is the case with the constant debate about gold, silver, oil, etc. If you believe then sell short, sell your ocean-front property while it’s still above water and move inland with your family and possessions, confident that history will illustrate your genius. If you don’t believe then go long the market. Buy those cheap ocean-front villas being abandoned by the land-lubbers and hold for the inevitable parabolic upturn in value.
I think we already know where AlGore stands.
We are pretty much going to see the same pattern before and after the 2009-2010 El Nino as we did back in 98.
A steep rise and then a flattening curve for 1-2 years and then the climb will continue. This time it will climb slower though.
The steep rise has allready happened after 2009-2010 El Nino and now we can expect the sea surface level to be virtually flat until the end of 2011 and possibly into 2012 before a slow rise resumes.
Willis,
there is pumping of ground water and also of fossile water, mainly for food production, which includes approx. 300 km3 per year. This takes place in arid countries. There is a recent paper on this topic, which, I thought, was presented on WUWT. UNESCO does not really provide any data on ground water level changes, so do not the US. I learned that altogether approx. 1200 km3 are pumped worldwide, but 900 km3 are considered to be pumping just ahead of the rain fall. 1 mm sea level raise corresponds to 350 km3 water.
It should also be mentioned that all usable fossile water under the continents comprises of approx. 20 million km3 water, which is about the same amount as stored in the two ice sheets of Greenland and Antartica.
onion says:
January 8, 2011 at 5:10 am
I guess people might want to check the SkepticalScience article that the article quotes but does not link to:
How much is sea level rising?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php?p=3&t=104&&a=68
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Beautiful! hahahahahhaahhhahaha Thanks onion! Once again, the alarmist community is touting a graph that splices two distinct data sets into one graph. Onion, send John my thanks. At least he has an inset and a paragraph about it. Onion, those are apples and oranges. They don’t belong together. More, that very subtle (almost imperceptible) arc on the graph is probably indicative of the graphing technique employed.
But speaking of links not posted, from Cooks’ article, “…… Indeed, deriving millimeter-level accuracy from orbit is a stunning technical feat so it’s not hard to understand why some people find such an accomplishment unbelievable. In point of fact, researchers demonstrate this height measurement technique’s accuracy to be within 1mm/year. …….. ”
Yeh? Calling bs on that one. They’re not accurate to 1mm at any particular time, much less over a year. Of course he didn’t link proof of that assertion. From his intermediate tab http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Sea-Level-2.gif
Now, enlarge it. See the end of the graph? Much like the new found phenomena of warmcold, we see slowerspeeding up.
More, from this fountain of misinformation of the omitting type, “Tidal estimates from sediment cores go even further back to the 1300’s. They find sea level rise is close to zero in the early part of the sedimentary record.” Hmm, now I wonder, why and how could that be? Let me think…….just taking a WAG at this, but it may have something to do with THE WORLD WAS INTERRING THE LITTLE ICE AGE!!!! You know, that period of time where much of the earth’s water was transformed into ice.
Is it that you guys wouldn’t be happy unless you have something to be terrified about or do you like scaring children? Look at the ice on the Antarctic. (That’s the place where much of the earth’s solid H2O is kept from the seas). Quit letting Cook or anyone else think for you. Apply a little logic to this. Until the temps of the Antarctic raise over 32 F, it isn’t going anywhere.
Here, the hottest and most northern place in the Antarctic today, in the midst of their summer, http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/?lat=-63.40000153&lon=-56.97999954&zoom=8&pin=Base%20Esperanza%2c%20Antarctica&type=hyb&rad=0&wxsn=0&svr=0&cams=0&sat=1&sat.num=1&sat.spd=25&sat.opa=85&sat.gtt1=109&sat.gtt2=108&sat.type=VIS&riv=0&mm=0&hur=0
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/88963.html
High of 41 F. I think we’ll ok for a bit.
I took some measurements off the above graph on the blue line. Transferred the data into excel, and got a poly fit. To make the arithmetic a bit easier, I called 1993, year 1, etc. The result is the sea level anomaly as a function of time (years)
SLA = -.0755t^2 + 4.59t -22.88
The SLA velocity will be the derivative of the above equation:
dSLA/dt = 2*(-.0755)t + 4.59
which give SLA velocities of 4.4mm/year in 1993 and about 2.0 mm/year in 2010
NOW… the acceleration is the derivative of the velocity, vis:
D^2SLA/dt^2 = 2*-.0755 = -.151 mm/yr^2
i.e the acceleration is negative, which means at present the sea level velocity is decreasing. If that continues the sea level velocity will eventuall reach zero… no change in sea level.
Why can’t these people remember their basic calculus and physics???
This place here, ephesus, was a centre in the roman empire with temples for ancient gods. Like for example Artemis.
It was a harbour there back then. Look at it now;
http://maps.google.no/maps?hl=no&biw=1699&bih=836&q=artemis%20temple&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
Some parts of the land rise, some sink. Not easy to know what you are actually measuring in a harbour. The harbour sinkin or rising, or sealevel sinking or rising?
Therefore satellite data is nice.
The latest issue of New Sceintist goes big on how Greenland ice is melting and how it has the capacity to cause the sea level to rise by 7 meters. Quite honestly I switched off after reading the headlines because I do not trust the magazine to write balanced articles on AGW.
Its the place just south of Izmir in Turkey. Zooming in on Izmir, you find it just to the west of Selcuk. Its a fantastic place. They even had water-closets in the ancient roman empire.
NOAA’s sea level trends are interesting, odd what’s happening in the West Pacific, but not the East Pacific. Also there seems to be a bubble rising near the South West of Greenland. Of course this could be to do with other things rather than indications of overall global sea level rising. Just wondering how these ‘high’ spots skew average? Not that you’d be interested in a ‘world’ average rather more what was happening on your own beach. That of course, as we all know, could involve many other factors.
http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/SeaLevelRise/slr/map_txj1j2_blue2orange.png
It looks like the 3.1 mm/yr (since 1992) value might have been cherry picked from the century long record with a value of 1.6 mm/yr (since 1900). See:
http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/Acceleration.htm
Hmm …
All of these climate disaster scenarios are no more probable than a large impactor causing havoc. Climate and sea levels have changed in the past and will continue to change and the variables that cause this change are multiple as discussed many times over on WUWT. What we do as a species has little or nothing to do with any of it.
1.Ralph of Malta
In the bay of Naples, far above the sea sits a large Roman villa. In the cliff face under the villa sits a sea cave containing a fish farm designed to hold and breed lampreys. A Roman delicacy. These need the circulation of fresh sea water and indeed function today, at sea level as designed and operated by the Romans. There has only been one modification to the set up, they no longer feed recalcitrant slaves to the lampreys.
2, Jim
Where I live you can walk into sea caves through the rice paddy fields. You can see clearly the undercuts and places where the sea beat upon the shore. These must now be about 3 metres or more above sea level. These are a common feature throughout South East Asia and relate to the previous sea level maximum.
One of the best long-term sea level gauges in the world and still working fine after 30,000 years. Nicely decorated, too.
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/archeosm/en/fr-medit-prehist.htm
Mike Haseler,
I too have been trying to find out about sea levels at Bo’ness 2000 years ago, with the same result as you, although a local archaeologist thinks that the Romans took boats as far up the Carron as Camelon, which would make sea level higher at that time.
Hi Willis
I have often said here that sea levels are an even greater distortion of history than the hockey stick was. The problem is that we need to know where we have been in the past in order to put modern day trends into their proper context and the IPCC researchers rarely do this.
I have some 20 studies from a variety of authors researched for my own three part article ‘Historic variations in sea levels’
This covers research from the Roman and Medieval Warm Period which, combined with much physical evidence- such as sea castles stranded as levels dropped following their construction- enable us to consruct an accurate picture of the past.
A useful graph is shown here covering the period 200AD to 1999 (sea levels have very arguably risen some 15mm since that time-see later citation)
http://icons.wunderground.com/data/climate_images/sealevel200-2000.png
It is part of a more general article on sea levels here;
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1240
Extract;
“Figure 1. Global sea level from 200 A.D. to 2000, as reconstructed from proxy records of sea level by Moberg et al. 2005. The thick black line is reconstructed sea level using tide gauges (Jevrejeva, 2006). The lightest gray shading shows the 5 – 95% uncertainty in the estimates, and the medium gray shading denotes the one standard deviation error estimate. The highest global sea level of the past 110,000 years likely occurred during the Medieval Warm Period of 1100 – 1200 A.D., when warm conditions similar to today’s climate caused the sea level to rise 5 – 8″ (12 – 21 cm) higher than present. Image credit: Grinsted, A., J.C. Moore, and S. Jevrejeva, 2009, “Reconstructing sea level from paleo and projected temperatures 200 to 2100 AD”, Climate Dynamics, DOI 10.1007/s00382-008-0507-2, 06 January 2009 ”
As can be seen levels have been higher in the past but the IPCC have tried to alarm people with extraordinary projections showing accelerated sea level rise which simply is NOT happening.
Satellite measurements are notoriously inacurate-tide gauges and physical observations are much better-and there is no such thing as a global sea level dating back to the 1800’s-the gauges were simply not available ot have been moved. The IPCC base their ‘historic’ records on 21 tide gauges for the ENTIRE globe.
Tonyb
Werner said
Quote
1 mm sea level raise corresponds to 350 km3 water.
Unquote
So how many cubic kilometers of spoil are eroded and dumped into the sea every year bu natural processes. I seem to remember the Bangladesh report mentioned how much is dropped there every year and its a substantial amount.
Jim Clarke says:
January 8, 2011 at 8:02 am
One thing that is always missing from these discussions is the fact that coastlines are not static. Even if we leave out subsidence and uplift, other factors have an impact on the ‘height of the coast. Plants are constantly trying to build up the land along the shore. Waves can can deposit sediment along the coast or take it away, depending on many different factors.
Bangladesh, one of the supposedly more vulnerable places on Earth to sea level rise, has seen a tremendous gain in ‘dry’ land area due to these processes.
It is not scientifically feasible to take the current rate of sea level rise, project it out hundreds of years, then draw maps of flooded regions. It won’t happen that way.
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Thanks, Jim. I cannot comprehend how people with even a basic understanding of geography can use the term ‘sea level rise’ in the way that they do – and when they start talking about mm/year on a global level, it is just a joke. It is pretty hard to justify even at a micro level – and as many WUWT posters have pointed out, there are many places where sea levels have not changed noticeably for a couple of hundred years.
In popular parlance, it is as if the Earth was flat (with levees at the edges), and if the ice at the Poles melted, we would all be flooded – since water seeks its own, equal level.
I won’t even start about the issues to do with mapping coastlines – including ice boundaries at the Poles. But, any geographer will know what I am talking about. Numbers like 0.01, or even 0.1, are very suss in that context.
Willis, referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise , says,
While correcting the text of a warmist Wikipedia article may be a fool’s mission, it is often possible to add resilient External Links to articles. I’m not planning to do it, but some reader might want to add a link to this post there.
Current external links on that article include “The Sinking of Tuvalu” at http://www.thesinkingoftuvalu.com/ , another topic dear to Willis.
There is a warning on the article that some of the external links there may violate Wiki guidelines and should be removed, but this post is more relevant than many of the others.
Before I read any article in Wikipedia I look at the discussion tab. If I see the name:
William M. Connolley
In the discussion I rate the article as propaganda. The wikipedia article on sea level rise is just such an article.
The simple fact is that Wikipedia has been taken over for political purposes to generate money for a select group of scientists in the name of “saving the world”.
Tonyb
Simply, the sea is gravitationally flat. Add one inch in one place results in a one inch rise everywhere. Slight variations due to wind, land shape and pressure of course.
Thus in truth a single well sited tide gauge subject to neither uplift or sinking is all you really need.
In that sense, its not really rocket science but the devil is in the details.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it allow one author to delete the work of another. A very simple bot is all that is required to monitor web pages for changes. For example:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/8133/this_bot_babysits_your_web_sites.html
You can quickly confirm for yourself what is going on. Try and correct any climate related article on Wikipedia. Within a matter of seconds your work will be undone. For all practical purposes this could only be achieve by the use of an automated monitor. As such, trying to manually fix Wikipedia cannot work.
There are perhaps 2 ways to solve this:
1. publicly expose the problem.
2. build bots to combat the bots.
Ralph says:
January 8, 2011 at 7:08 am
Exactly where are these? Do you have photos? I assume that’s a geologically active area, but I suspect the activity is mostly strike-slip faulting (sideways) instead of thrust faulting (with a veritcal component). I hope I have that right.
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Geoff says:
January 8, 2011 at 4:41 am
This looks helpful wrt the next item, thanks.
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Dave in Delaware says:
January 8, 2011 at 4:47 am
Does anyone have corroborating reports about this from the non-Mörner side? I’ve been keeping my eyes open for that since hearing it last May from Mörner. It certainly deserves more exposure.
Where’s John Daly when I need him?
mjk says:
January 8, 2011 at 4:17 am
MJK, you seem to be confusing “going up”, which the sea levels are certainly doing, with “accelerating”, which they are not doing.
Acceleration means an increase in the speed or rate at which something is occurring.
w.