Contradictory Studies – IPCC Struggling to Pinpoint Rising Sea Levels

Call me a cynic and a pessimist, but I think there is little chance that it will NOT be bogus.

It’s going to be really hard to pin this down……
…what with the sea floor sinking and all
/snark

The entire premise is bogus. The UN has no responsibility whatsoever to move people that live in places that will already be flooded by moderate typhoons or moderate floods. They either move themselves or they might die. That is pretty much their choice either way. There is no accelerated rise in sea levels. Therefore any paranoid fantasies of doom to the contrary are just children’s games of “what if” and boogeyman propaganda stories for sheep.

The article does not mention the data provided by the University of Colorado at Boulder showing satellite derived global sea level rise rates starting downward about the year 2002. This data is unequivocal in demonstrating that the rate of sea level rise is not accelerating as claimed by climate alarmists but that sea level rise is clearly declining. Not good news for the alarmists.

Bystander says:
July 16, 2011 at 10:44 am
@ F Ross – if you lived in a low lying coastal area you’d care. A lot. It isn’t like you can simply pick up whole cities and move them by 2100 easily.
D. J. Hawkins says:
July 16, 2011 at 11:24 am

I have lived in the same community [which incidentally does have low lying beach frontage] for the last 67 years and have observed no changes in sea level even though I pass through that area on an almost daily basis. If sea level rise were ever to be a real problem here I’m sure that the owners of the many expensive motels/hotels in the beach area would long ago have demanded some sort of barrier to be erected. And …building in the beach area continues apace.
Storm surge is a horse of a different color, but to me the projected sea level rise is just that: “projected.”

Bystander says:
July 16, 2011 at 10:44 am
“Notice there really isn’t a question of if levels are rising but instead of exactly how much?”
A prognosis of falling sea levels has no chance of attracting any funding so it’s useless for today’s government scientists and will only be explored by self funded amateurs.

Thanks to Stefan Rahmstorf with his disintegrating WAIS scare tactic, the Dutch government is already preparing to spend billions on a fairytale future sea level rise.
http://members.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/fig4metgrav.gif

Estimates of sea level rise by 2100 currently differ by almost five meters (16.5 feet)? Is that between Al Gore’s and the high end of everyone else’s estimates?
While Googling about Al’s Inconvenient “20 foot” figure, I found this 2008 piece which highlights how quickly the “overwhelmingly settled scientific consensus” has altered:
Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ says sea levels could rise up to 20 feet. Is this true?
Asks Steve from Florida

…
Although he doesn’t give a clear time frame for the 20-foot sea level rise, Gore’s statement seems to contradict several recent reports, including one published in 2008, that predict much smaller rises during this century.
Scientists say that the two main causes of rising sea levels are water expanding as it warms, known as thermal expansion, and melting land-based ice, such as ice from Antarctica and Greenland.
In 2007, the International Panel on Climate Change, an organization composed of scientists and policy makers around the world who monitor human-caused climate change, estimated that sea levels would rise 0.18 to 0.6 meters (0.59 to 2.0 feet) over the next 100 years. The IPCC based this prediction primarily on how much the ocean waters are expected to warm and expand.
The panel also factored in the ice melting from Greenland and Antarctica based on how much these bodies have melted in recent years—from 1993 to 2003. But the estimates do not account for any changes in the speed of the weakened ice that flows from the glaciers into the ocean—either from melting ice or iceberg break-off, which may happen in the future. The IPCC acknowledged the limitations of their projections and said that sea level rise could be higher if the ice sheets break down more rapidly.
The IPCC did not include changes in ice flow because these types of changes are not very well understood. However, a study published this year in the journal Science attempts to set an upper limit on sea level rise by 2100.
“We have estimated limits on sea level rise during the next century by considering simple constraints on glacier and ice sheet motion,” says Joel Harper, an author of this study and a glacier expert at the University of Montana in Missoula. “Our work suggests that a 0.8-meter [2.6 feet] sea level rise is plausible, two-meter [6.5 feet] is only possible under extreme conditions, and more than two-meter is unlikely,” he says.
To make their calculations, the researchers took into account the rate of ice flow from Greenland, Antarctica, and glaciers and ice caps from other parts of the world. They took current values of glacial ice-flow speeds and adjusted the values based on changes that they think could reasonably occur in the future, such as accelerated ice flow from certain glaciers. They then used these modified values to come up with low, medium and high estimates of future sea-level rise.
The researchers also determined that Greenland’s glaciers—specifically, the ones with outlets under water—would have to move about 40 times faster than they do now to achieve a rise of two meters over the next 100 years. And this increased ice-flow speed would need to start immediately and continue for the rest of the 21st century.
“Even by assuming vastly accelerated rates of discharge, the glaciers can’t surge fast enough to meet the required sea-level rise targets [of two to five meters] within a hundred years,” says Vivien Gornitz, a geologist at Columbia University, who was not involved in this study.
…

From the abstract:

We consider glaciological conditions required for large sea-level rise to occur by 2100 and conclude that increases in excess of 2 meters are physically untenable. We find that a total sea-level rise of about 2 meters by 2100 could occur under physically possible glaciological conditions but only if all variables are quickly accelerated to extremely high limits. More plausible but still accelerated conditions lead to total sea-level rise by 2100 of about 0.8 meter.

Gore’s docudrama: 20 ft “in the near future”
IPCC 2007: 0.18 to 0.6 meters (0.59 to 2.0 feet) over the next 100 years.
2008 paper: 0.8 meter by 2100 plausible, >2m “physically untenable.”
Now, in the Spiegel Online piece:

NASA climate researcher James Hansen, for example, warns in a paper published this month that sea levels could rise by five meters in the next 90 years — nine times higher than the maximum cited in the last IPCC report. He insists that he has found indications that sea levels in the future could rise by as much as five centimeters per year.
Hansen, say some climatologists, is risking his reputation with such an extreme forecast. Three years ago, researchers found that a rise of over two meters per century is impossible because so much ice simply can’t melt in such a short time. Furthermore, current measurements show a rise of just three millimeters per year.

The surprising part? Hansen still has a reputation to risk.

An additional recent study, written by Jim Houston from the Engineer Research Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi and Bob Dean from the University of Florida in Gainsville for the Journal of Coastal Research, argues that sea levels have risen steadily for the last 100 years — and that there has been no acceleration at all in recent years.
A reply was not long in coming. In the current issue of the Journal of Coastal Research, Stefan Rahmstorf, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research argues that Houston and Dean only included sea level calculations beginning in the 1930s. He says that if one chooses a year from the previous century, an accelerated rise can be seen.

Got that? It’s a problem to look at the period with the great “unprecedented” CO2 and temperature rises, you must start from when CO2 and temperatures (and the amount of purported “CO2 greenhouse effect”) were lower to see an accelerated rise now. Gee, does it have to be a year from the 1800’s? Don’t we have the proxy data to start from the beginning of this interglacial? Wouldn’t that show a spectacular current accelerated rise in sea level?
In 2008 the science said: At worst it’ll be less than a meter by 2100, Greenland and Antarctica can’t melt fast enough to contribute to anything more.
Not alarming enough. Research funding and schemes for UN-led Global “Carbon-based Unit” Control are at risk. Therefore…
Now Climate Science™ says: Could be five meters by 2100!
Resistance is futile! You will allow your economic distinctivenesses to be eliminated and you shall be assimilated into the Collective! The alternative is Extinction!

in 100 years from now they will still be down by the sea side debating is it 1mm or 2mm rise

rbateman says:
July 16, 2011 at 1:54 pm
“Does anyone know of a plan-of-action should sea levels drop precipitously?”
Well, yes, be the first to get to the choice spots such as the coasts of Europe and the Mediterranean. You can find huge archaeological treasures that were covered as recently as 2600 years ago. And you will have no competition from the Warmista or those deluded by them.

I don’t get it.
Why should I have to pay for some rich connected guy living in a $20 M mansion on the beach in
Florida. Ya got 80 years….move ahole!

John Birch was right

@ F Ross – if you lived in a low lying coastal area you’d care. A lot. It isn’t like you can simply pick up whole cities and move them by 2100 easily. Even if you don’t personally live in a low lying costal area you should care becuase these will likely be systemic costs that we’ll all have to contribute to.

This is rubbish. The coastal dwellers around the world have moved upslope 120 meters in the last 25,000 years and in some cases even abandoned their island homes and did not require one government dollar to do so. And it isn’t even like we don’t have recent experience with mass flooding causing permanent dislocations.
http://www.clui.org/lotl/v28/b.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory
New Orleans has been steadily sinking for ever. It should have been allowed to sink out of sight but people are resilient (perhaps to the point to stupidity) and find work-arounds, so there today, unbelievably, sits New Orleans yet, still sinking.
And then there’s all the glacial lakes that have come and gone with hellish fury, leaving behind such metropolises as Portland, Spokane, and Salt Lake City. Sea level change does not happen on these short time scales and so will not be even approximately as hellish. And sea level has never been constant, in any event. Don’t pretend it can be made constant.
People are resilient, as mentioned. Or at least they were before the government teat became mandatory for everything we do.

“On the other, sea level measurements have yet to prove any meaningful rise though there is agreement that they are, on global average, rising.”
======================
Did anybody catch this stupid nonsensical statement?
What the hell are they saying? Must be lost in translation I will give them the benefit of the doubt.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

The outstanding statement in the article was that 125K years ago the temperature was 2C warmer and the oceans were 6 metres deeper. This gives rise to a couple of questions that would seem to disprove the basic concept of AGW. 1. Why was it hotter in the last interglacial by 2C? 2. How can one gauge the ocean height on a high and dry reef when around 1mm every 20 years of rising land mass would give you six metres. The question of why it was hotter is damning as we are now close to the end game in our interglacial and those 2C degrees would be a bonus. Though it has been postulated that a warming burst is noted as the end game of an interglacial that ends in tears and ice.

Blade;
No, watermelons.
Which implies, just about everything.
_______
What’s the list and ranking of the current alarmist scares? At random partial sample:
Runaway warming.
Wild and destructive weather.
Ocean rise.
Ocean acidification.
Ocean overheating.
Unpredictable climate flip-outs.
Loss of arable land.
Excess population, in raging migrations looking for food and mobile phones.
Warmistas, please provide your ranked lists, and maybe we can develop a threat consensus!

Doesn’t the concept of sea live rise depend on the belief that the continents are fixed and immovable? We know this not to be true. Wouldn’t continental drift and other factors such as earthquakes, tidal and other erosion, additional magma seeping from vents need to be considered in determining whether there is really any rise at all? and how many factors cause this. Is sea level rise really linear? Must another idiotic unscientific hockey stick be refuted?
The concept of sea level rise from an assumed reference point seems as bogus as an optimal termpature for the earth.

I feel sorry for the IPCC. They are looking for a second tidal gauge in the world that is showing an increase, besides the one in Hong Kong Harbor that is registering an increase (actually it is measuring the sinking geology it sits on), so they can input these two data streams into their worthless, ever-wrong, computer projections.