New sea level dataset now available – still flat

If we’re talking about the Arctic and North Atlantic. . . how does sea ice play into this record? Would a reduction in sea ice produce a fall in sea level for the purpose of this record?

DirkH says:
(to R. Gates) “Your (IPCC consensus) “theory” doesn’t explain the MWP.”
I put “theory” in quotes because the IPCC consensus “theory” doesn’t make a testable prediction (only untestable projections and scenarios, so it’s not a scientific theory.)

G. Karst says:
June 11, 2011 at 6:32 am
Jones is probably just trying to salvage some basis for respect ? – but frankly he will never gain it from the real science community. He’ll just have to stick to playing with his psycophantic buddies on the ‘Team’.

It is nice to have actual data and charts to look at. Thanks. As I understand this, the data are an attempt to describe an anomaly caused by a temperature change rather than a change in the mass of water. Further, the source of the temperature change is not considered. All interesting but in my mind a rather difficult thing to measure.
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The juxtaposition of this and the previous post caught my attention: “Massive drifts and late-melting snowpack” indicates there is much ex-sea water piled on the mountains of western North America. It is a good sized patch of snow; not now moving, just waiting. There is a lot of water in North American rivers, much now classed as flood water, on its way to the ocean. It is muddy dark water sitting in shallow layers under an intense sun – warming on its slow descent to the sea. There is still more slow moving water. Saturated crop land has been a national issue in the US corn, soy bean, sun flower growing areas. All this has happened before. One of the first movies I saw was a black and white one (with serious music); a Corps of Engineers compilation of the Mississippi flood of 1927
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_1927
and then there was the non-stop TV coverage of the 1993 repeat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1993
By late summer a lot of warm fresh water will have floated out over the salty sea. There may be a bit of bump up in sea level.

Bob Tisdale says:
June 11, 2011 at 7:52 am
R. Gates says: “Hey Bob, very interesting, but even with the flattening We are not returning to 1990′s, 80′s, or 70′s, levels. Why? Because there is more heat in the oceans. Now some would say that heat is residual heat from ENSO events, but over such a long time frame, ENSO by itself, which is a balancing of heat or thermostat for the oceans, would not be adding so much heat to the oceans…”
Apparently you haven’t studied La Nina events. The model projections are rising, but the OHC data is not. Trenberth and Hansen acknowledge this. Trenberth is still looking for the missing heat and Hansen came up with a baseless volcanic aerosol rebound effect to explain the recent flattening.
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Respectfully, I still feel you are side-stepping my point. The ocean heat content currently is greater than 40 years ago, regardless of whether or not it has increased in the past 10 years. ENSO events serve to keep the upper ocean within a range over the long term, during the charging (La Nina) and discharging (El Nino) cycles. The current record warm waters at even deeper levels below 700m has nothing to do with ENSO, and the warming of these deeper waters is implicated in both the warming of the western Antarctic as well as the Arctic with the associated mass loss in the western Antarctic glacial ice and the year-to-year reduction of Arctic sea ice. The 40% increase in CO2 and related forcing provides a viable explanation for the warming of the Arctic and long-term reduction of sea ice while short-term ocean cycles such as ENSO do not.
Ten years from now, if ocean heat content falls back to where it was in the 70’s, (and I fully admit there is a chance it could, as slight as it might be) then we’d have to look at other influences that a greater than the forcing from CO2. If this happens, I would look to the solar cycle GCR/cloud relationship for starters. But as it stand right now, a mere flattening from the increase in OHC does not in any way negate the possible forcing from CO2, but certainly might cause a refinement in the models to show that some other influence over the past 10 years served to counter the forcing from CO2, and need to be included in future global climate models.

R. Gates

Dirk, you suffer from the mistaken thought that all similar effects must have the same cause. The cause or causes of the MWP, don’t have to be the same as the cause or causes of the late 20th century warming.

One wonders then why it’s so important to show that the MWP never existed.
Possibly because if it did exist, there is no explanation as to why it existed, which weakens the “we can’t think of anything else, so it must be CO2” argument to explain current warming.
BTW, shouldn’t you be over on the “Chutspah” thread mocking those climate scientists that just published a paper explaining how AGW causes less snow?

DirkH says: “I put “theory” in quotes because the IPCC consensus…”
DirkH, I think that the word you are looking for is conjecture.
As in: “The IPCC conjecture doesn’t explain the MWP.”

My old geophysics professor, the late Sir Edward Bullard, would probably be puzzled why so little attention is paid by “climate scientists” to the role of plate tectonics in changing the shape, and thus the volume, of ocean trenches. Sea levels are directly affected, of course, by changes in the shape of the ocean floor. Tectonic movements at the mid-ocean ridge system, in particular, are immense. Moreover, they generate enormous amounts of heat. [Bullard E. 1954a. The Flow of Heat Through the Floor of the Atlantic Ocean, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A, mathematical and Physical Sciences, v. 222, n. 1150, A Discussion on the Floor of the Atlantic Ocean (Mar. 18th, 1954), p. 408-429.] Yet tectonics seem to be underplayed in most calculations of either sea level or ocean heat content.
“Teddy” Bullard would also be jealous of the power of the computer on which this posting is being composed. It is a big step ahead of the EDSAC 2 which he (and I) were using in 1960.

Now I am really confused. The article talks about “the significant drop in the North Atlantic+Arctic Ocean data”
How can the above statement be reconciled with the comments below?
R. Gates says:
June 11, 2011 at 5:45 am: “The warmest waters in 2000 years have been found flowing into the arctic.”
And as we have been told, the Arctic was supposed to heat up much faster than the rest of the earth.

We’ll know a whole lot more by 2020 as we’ll find out if OHC will continue to rise, stay flat, or perhaps even decline. What an exciting tine (sic) to be alive!

Fine. Just don’t force us down the wrong “fork” in the road while we’re waiting to find out.

Geoff Sherrington says:
June 11, 2011 at 4:40 am

In theory, one cannot calculate thermal expansion of an ocean with numbers from the top 700m. If there is to be ocean level rise from heating, the whole volume of the ocean has, on average, to heat (except that some different things happen in the 0-4 deg C range)

The only interesting thing that happens in the 0-4 deg C range is people exhibit their lack of knowledge of basic properties of materials. Unlike freshwater, seawater keeps right on increasing in density right up to it’s freezing point of -2C.
Write that down.