Via Dr. Benny Peiser at The Global Warming Policy Foundation:
New Sea-Level Study Divides Climate Researchers
For the first time, researchers have reconstructed the rise in sea level over the last 2000 years. Their conclusion: Never before have sea levels risen as fast since the beginning of industrialisation. But critics fault the study with resting on shaky foundations. They see a major problem of the new study in the fact that it is ultimately based only on the finding from the coast of North Carolina. That could be too limited for a statement regarding global developments. “This study is therefore not suitable at all to make predictions,” says Jens Schröter from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. –Marcus Becker, Spiegel Online 21 June 2011
Who knows what the sun will do? I think it would be fair to say that in the past predicting solar behaviour has been little more than educated guesswork. I am reminded of a bold statement made in 2004 by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the United States. It said that the next solar cycle would be 30 – 50% stronger than the previous one “…according to a breakthrough forecast using a computer model.” The sun does seem to be entering a period of low activity – the first of the space age. It’s a fascinating time for solar science, and a challenge for science journalism. –-David Whitehouse, The Observatory, 20 June 2011
As the great global warming scare continues to fade away, the real problem is that our politicians have so much collective ego invested in this delusion that, even when hell freezes over, they will still find it impossible to admit they got it wrong. –-Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 19 June 2011
Why can’t climate scientists just bring themselves to admit that we haven’t even yet begun fully to understand the cause of climatic change? –Ross Clark, Daily Express, 18 June 2011
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Well if 1 tree in Yamal can work why can’t the coast of North Carolina stand in for the entire world?
It isn’t like coast lines rise and fall in different places at the same time. So one place could see land levels rise and just a few miles away they could see land levels decline. I mean that never ever happens anywhere. /end_sarc/
Well what a suprise, Mann thinks its worse than we thought and its all our fault, didn’t see that one coming, no sir not at all. I was going to draw the comparison with Yamal but I see LamontT has beaten me to it! Curse you sir. 🙂
What was wrong with the Jelgersma paper that presented sea level changes in the last 10,000 years (first reported by Shepard et al 1956) and was presented at the Imperial College Symposium in 1966?
From astronomy sources I am very familiar with – and speaking of earth water/sea level – aside from WHEN oceans appeared on earth no scientists or geologists or so called Global Warming “expert” have any idea of HOW MUCH WATER is in present day earth. Geologists have only a rough idea of the amount of water in earth’s mantle with estimates ranging from as much as 10 ocean masses down to a bit more than one ocean mass. The actual amount affect everything related to water/oceans discussed here and into the future profoundly.
It wasn’t the coast of North Carolina. It was two points on that coast.
So yeah, this is Yamal II.
I heard this mentioned as headline news on german radio last night (ARD german equivalent of the BBC).There was absolutely no mention that this study was restricted to the coastline of North Carolina. Absolutely shocking.Dangerous times indeed.
Mann’s sea level paper conveniently stops before sea level rise stops…..
They picked two North Carolina locations, Sand Point and Tump Point that showed what they wanted.
The most obvious one to use would have been Wilmington, North Carolina.
But Wilmington shows no sea level rise at all since the 70′s.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/scientific-bullshite-deepest-in-at-least-2100-years/#more-32885
The Corps of Engineers and University of Florida both said they could find no sea level acceleration,
and actually found de-celeration…………..
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/full/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00157.1
LamontT says:
June 21, 2011 at 12:03 pm
“Well if 1 tree in Yamal can work why can’t the coast of North Carolina stand in for the entire world? ”
Mann made a terrible mistake – and that for a scientist with his experience! He forgot to obfuscate the scarcity of samples! It worked so well with Yamal; why oh why did he not use the same technique here? It would have been so easy to get all kinds of proxies into the mix, then run it through decentered PCA or some other Mannian grinder to arrive at a predetermined conclusion, and another classic would have been born…. /sarc
One tree, one beach, what’s the diff?
cirby is exactly right. I was dumbfounded when I saw the story that they didn’t immediately assume subsidence and take pains to prove otherwise. Unless, of course, they couldn’t prove otherwise.
On a more serious note I just want to shake my head in amazement. I know that people don’t learn from history and repeat it over and over. But still it amazes me to watch it happen in front of me. I know that for years there has been a story around in science to teach a lesson in checking ones assumptions. And it has to do with 19th century science. Back then the geologists assumed that the ocean was a constant and they could measure land level changes relative to the ocean. At the same time the oceanographers assumed that the land levels were constant that they could measure ocean level changes in relation to land levels.
Well somewhere either in the late 19th or early 20th century, I forget which, some of them were talking and the assumptions came up in conversation and everyone was shocked to discover that the thing they used to measure changes in their specialty wasn’t a constant.
The story stuck around and I heard it in the mid 80’s in college as a warning about making assumptions with regard to your science. It appears that sometime since then this lesson has been forgotten.
Just last week we had the Colorado Sea Level Research Group changing their models to represent land level changes something they should have known about given that this story comes straight out of their field. They should have known it. And now we have Hanson using his two points and no indication that he took land level changes into account.
I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.
You people are too simple. Scientists are capable of things like this. I know one who counted the number of grains of sand in a thimble and with the assistance of a range of computer models he was able to define with certainty exactly how many grains of sand exist in the world. And by the way, the number is at it’s highest level in history due to the the increase in erosion that we are experiencing as a result of global warming.
Wil says:
June 21, 2011 at 12:20 pm
Earth’s total volume and mass continues to increase as we sweep through space and collect whatever tiny particles of space debris (including water) which are attracted into our gravitational field. That certainly has some effect on sea level, however minuscule.
Wil says:
June 21, 2011 at 12:20 pm
“From astronomy sources I am very familiar with – and speaking of earth water/sea level – aside from WHEN oceans appeared on earth no scientists or geologists or so called Global Warming “expert” have any idea of HOW MUCH WATER is in present day earth. Geologists have only a rough idea of the amount of water in earth’s mantle with estimates ranging from as much as 10 ocean masses down to a bit more than one ocean mass. The actual amount affect everything related to water/oceans discussed here and into the future profoundly.”
Hey, Wil. Good post. I assume from your comment you are also an astronomy buff, so here’s one for you. Since water is derived from oxidation of hydrogen, why all essoteric origins for Earth’s water; comets. ice ball collisions, etc in the astronomy publications I read. Has anyone ever postulated that the H was burned right here on (or in) the Earth during its composition. Either the H or the O had to be here first and the other arrive later, or be somehow separated and mixed later, but once they were here simulaneously the result is a forgone conclusion. Some rocket engines work that way, no ignition required. In that scenario, during the formation of the planet, water could be significantly greater in quantity than just what is in the mantle allowing the mantle water to be “refreshed” now and then or continuosly for that matter also ultimately affecting sea level as well. Unfortunately my geology is confined to rock collecting and a few amateur geology publications so I am at a disadvantage in this arena . If Earth was a gas ball with a rocky core at some point, one could visualize circumstances under which the water developed right here in giant fireball events.
“Newsbytes: not everybody believes to new Mann sea level study”
That headline doesn’t make any sense. Did you mean “in” instead of “to”?
In time more studies will be done using similar methodologies, and these will either confirm or disconfirm the recent findings. This is how science works, is it not? There are other studies available now which are confirming of this study, however. It is the rapidity of the change which is especially concerning along with other changes in the marine ecosystems. (temperature, acidity, loss of biodiversity, each of which have been observed, measured and reported in peer-reviewed papers.)
Is North Carolina somewhere near to the rest of the world, perhaps?
As far as historic sea levels go, anything more than a century and a half is based on various proxies. What is important to us is what the sea level is doing now and what it was in the immediate past when direct measurements exist. For that purpose the paper by Chao, Yu, and Li in the 11th April 2008 Science is most important and often neglected by “climate” scientists. when they talk about sea level rise. These authors went through all extant records of sea level rise in the twentieth century and discovered that water held in storage does have an influence on observed sea level rise. In order to correct for the influence of this water held in storage they obtained records for more than 70 thousand impoundments built in the world since the beginning of the twentieth century. They used these data to correct the reported sea level measurements for the influence of the known effect from impoundment and discovered that as a result the sea level curve, which had many irregularities in it, became linear. This corrected curve was linear for at least the last eighty years and possibly more. It\s slope was 2.46 millimeters per year. It is reasonable to assume that anything that has been linear this long is not about to change anytime soon. From the slope of that curve we can calculate a sea level rise of 24.6 centimeters or just under ten inches for a century. There are various recent satellite measurements that cluster around that and show some irregularities but they don’t tell us whether they have applied the corrections for water held in storage or whether they even know about it. As far as alarmism about sea level rise goes, I will stick to Chao, Yu, and Li. Their database includes part of the early twentieth century warming, the lack of warming from the forties to the nineties, and the step warming from 1998 to 2002, none of which made a measurable dent on their sea level curve.
Let’s see… North Carolina, a state whose coastline is routinely scoured by hurricanes, each of which removes and redeposits both beaches and the sea floor.
Yeah, like that won’t have an effect.
Benny beat me to it. I was going to post on the Spiegel piece tomorrow.
It should be noted that the German scientists are warmists.
Mann and Rahmstorf are getting desperate – the writing is on the wall.
http://notrickszone.com/2011/06/21/eu-parliamentarian-europe-climate-policy-dead-end-china-india-australia-waving-goodbye/
Hugh Pepper says:
June 21, 2011 at 1:10 pm
There are other studies that confirm this? Where?
Others in above posts have listed a large number of studies that disconfirm Hansen’s conclusions.
As to the other items you claim, temperature, acidity and loss of diversity. Could you please post references to peer-reviewd (not pal-reviewed) studies by reputable scientists (That excludes papers written by any advocacy group.)
Note to mods: See Mark Wilson’s note re: headline. “to” does not seem to make sense. Use “in” or “the” instead?
[Thanks, fixed. ~dbs, mod.]
Well, you only need one thermometer to prove global warming. Place the thermometer in a large desert as far as possible from human habitation and carefully record the night time minimum temperatures. After a period of about five years, to allow for seasonal variations, any trend should be a good indicator of global changes.
At the beginning of the end of the LIA (1620-1640) LOD rose rapidly, about 8ms in 3 decades, corresponding to a sea level rise of 80cm, presumably due to melting of grounded ice. While steric sea level rise (due to thermal expansion) has no measurable effect on LOD, eustatic rise (due to ice melting) certainly does, to the tune of about .1ms per centimeter. And whereas LOD variation is cummulative, its measurement is very accurate. And yet for the past 40 years, in spite of all the claimed rise in sea level, LOD has not increased, which leads me to concur with all you skeptics: sea level rise is dubious.
I’ll admit that it’s a pretty good trick to determine trends by anecdote–sort of like reporting T trends through personal experience–especially in places where the tide commonly ranges 30 feet. Moreover there are plenty of complications: northern seas may rise while southern seas do not due to ice loading and unloading–the relative centers of gravity of the lithosphere and cryosphere migrate, and the hydrosphere centers around their average. So that decreasing southern sea level could be explained by ice disappearing from Antarctica if it were not for the LOD constraints. And however we might appeal to core/mantle coupling, as the decades pile up with no increase in LOD such an appeal becomes ever more desperate.
While it might seem reasonable to suppose a causal correlation between T and sea level there are at the very least complications to the assumption. For one, formation and melting of sea ice (as opposed to land based ice) has no effect on sea level. For another, as the ice cores reveal, Milankovitch Cycles precede T and CO2 by roughly 5000 years, and the lag is best explained as due to ice sheet response. This explanation in turn suggests that it is ice sheet extension that determines T and not the reverse, at least on a millennial scale. In other words, there is a millennial correlation between sea level and T but it is one of T caused by ice melt as may be measured by sea level, not T forcing sea level, as might still be feasible in the short term. But a further complication, while sea level is proportional to ice volume melted, T forcing is relative to ice area melted, including any recent feedback due to diminished polar ice.
So it is marvelous indeed when proxy sea level dovetails with proxy T. It could prove only one thing: all current sea level rise is steric. But that seems about as likely as the reliability of this sea level proxy. –AGF
with 100,000 km grids I’m sure North Carolina covers the globe …