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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Mention has been made previously of the British Admiralties sterling effort a couple of centuries ago in mapping the world. The low low tide dry rocks were engraved and all the information about them in their thousands world wide is available. A targetted mission to only a few around the world would prove most helpful in determining the change or lack of in the last 200 years. Perfectly acceptable science photographically available and proven beyond a doubt any rise or fall. Unless the rocks in Australia are growing like coral, nothing much has changed down under. Perhaps a university doing marine research PHD material.
Looking at the coast of North Carolina it is sinking. The vast accumulations of sand, evident in the barrier islands etc. are evidence of this. Sea level rise here will be shown to be very high, compared to an area of zero sink. Actual sea level rise here will be roughly the same as everywhere else, within the confines of the geode.
As they say in real estate: “Location, Location, Location”. I did a bit of digging back in December 2009 when the Copenhagen gathering was the big issue, and we were all going to be inundated with seawater. My findings were rather interesting, to say the least! Within a 140km-per-side triangle, I had sea levels rising, falling, and staying the same – all with NOAA data!
If you can’t get consistency in a small geographical region, then how can you extrapolate two data sets to cover the world?
shanghai dan,
NOAA will be providing arks.
If it is Mann-made, it is human, humans are known to err.
I’m not surprised by this new “error”.
Wil says:
June 21, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Jim G
“You are correct – I am into Astronomy in a big way. I believe to understand earth weather/climate we also need to understand the cosmic forces at play here. BTW, good stuff.”
Me too. Have an 8″ SCT and a 4″ with some pretty good comet photos and some not so good planet shots and a few deep sky. Been too cloudy here for months now to do much. Must be that global warming . Very unusual for this area which averages about 270 sunny days per year (high desert). Any good publications you would suggest? I receive Astronomy and Sky & Telescope but they usually have a few good articles and lots of garbage as well as the mandatory AGW bow now and then.
Regards
Mr. Burns:
in the long beach ca. harbor there is an area about 2 miles in diameter where oil production caused a subsidance of about 24 feet during the period of about 1940-1950. because this was right in the middle of a navy yard the navy sued standard oil over it. (they had to massively reinforce a drydock that was about 1200×300 feet).
the oil company then started steam injection which brought some parts of the area back up 13 feet where it stabilized until about 2000.
what if the screamers had used this area as a the one and only data point.
would the screamers be having every one west of the mississippi building house boats.
C
And here was me, thinking, that this paper will contain more sea level proxies than NC mentioned in the abstract of thi first author presented at a student conference….
I wonder, why the paper wasn’t entitled “The reconstruction of sea level in NC”?
Good luck. When you try to explain basic economics to a Progressive, they tell you that ATMs and Airport Ticket Kiosks are costing jobs. If they can’t understand basic econ and admit they are wrong with respect to the economy, how the heck are they going to admit that client science is not settled?
Anybody who has visited the coast of North Carolina has noticed that the “land” there is mobile. It’s just sand, and it moves where the wind and waves push it.
There used to be three inlets into the sounds from the ocean, now only two. At the spot where lost inlet was, of course, a measurement would appear to show that sea level had fallen, since what was once wet is now dry.
I wonder. Did Mann and his colleagues visit the coast, or did they just manipulate somebody else’s series?
I am a long-time follower of a page produced by NASA entitled “Climate Change Key Indicators” at http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/. It has a number of graphs. Some of them are a little odd, like the one showing the decline in land ice in Antarctica. It looks impressive but if instead of just graphing the decline, they graphed the actual volume, it would be completely flat to within the nearest pixel on my home computer screen.
But I’ve been noticing that the sea level graph is getting father and father from the regression line. Today, I checked back. It has always been possible to get more precise data by clicking on the link which credits the source: CLS/Cnes/Legos. Through that you could get more recent data and with another click, a nice text file of numbers to look at closely. Today, I saw a new link that read, “Download data.” Except when you click, you don’t get data, you get a complex display that doesn’t seem well related to the graph. The CLS/Cnes/Legos credit is now just text, not a link.
But what do I look like, an idiot? I went to Google and entered “CLS Cnes Legos” and behold, the old page showed up. And, wow! See for yourself: http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/news/ocean-indicators/mean-sea-level/. Sea level is has gone completely off the reservation. We’re where we were three years ago. The rate is 3.23 mm/yr, whereas NASA shows 3.27 (noting that it’s 1993-2010, not 2011). But even that number is optimized. A ten-year rate would be less. A 30-year rate would be less. If you conveniently start right after Mt Pinutubo, you get something over 3.2 but every year, it gets weaker.
I wouldn’t assign motives to NASA, but it’s interesting that they removed the link to this page just when it began to show results they probably don’t want us to see.