UPDATE: An Australian science paper I located from 1990 says that century scale sea level trends are 1-1.1 mm per year, and Sydney was 0.54 mm/ year. See below.
UPDATE2: a graph of the current SLR for Sydney is now available. See below.
From the Australian Telegraph:
SENIOR bureaucrats in the state government’s environment department have routinely stopped publishing scientific papers which challenge the federal government’s claims of sea level rises threatening Australia’s coastline, a former senior public servant said yesterday.
Doug Lord helped prepare six scientific papers which examined 120 years of tidal data from a gauge at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour.
The tide data revealed sea levels were rising at a rate of about 1mm a year or less – and the rise was not accelerating but was constant.
“The tidal data we found would mean sea levels would rise by about 100mm by the end of the century,” Mr Lord said yesterday.
“However the (federal) government benchmark which drives their climate change policy is that sea levels are expected to rise by 900mm by the end of the century and the rate of rise is accelerating.”
Mr Lord, who has 35 years experience in coastal engineering, said senior bureaucrats within the then Department of Environment Climate Change and Water had rejected or stopped publication of five papers between late 2009 and September this year.
Full story at: Australian Telegraph
=======================================================
This paper by E.A Bryant in 1990 at the University of New South Wales has some interesting things to say. http://ojs.library.unsw.edu.au/index.php/wetlands/article/viewFile/166/228
UPDATE2: David Archibald provides this graph of Sea Level Rise for Sydney, Ft. Dennison from the long term data. The .5 mm trend/year shown above in the 1990 Bryant paper still holds. There does not appear to be any evidence of acceleration.
The NSW Govt. has a page for Fort Denison but you have to contact a data manager for the data: http://canri.nsw.gov.au/nrdd/records/ANZNS0001005063.html#metainfo
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You have a “Climate Change Commissioner”?
Oh, my goodness. How much is THAT costing Australia? How many people in that office? Is it an entire department of government? Oh, it appears worse than I thought: “Department of Climate Change”! http://www.climatechange.gov.au/ Oh, good grief. These people are absolutely robbing the Australian taxpayer! You have an entire government department based on fiction. Sure, climate is changing, it always does, but there is absolutely nothing that the government of Australia is going to do about that, one way or the other, no matter how much money it spends. All of their efforts will make no difference and no effort at all will make no difference. Australia can absolutely not make an iota of difference in the global atmosphere no matter WHAT it does.
I read an article today on another blog where a military installation spent $3.1 million on a solar array that is expected to save taxpayers $55,400 per year. Sounds like a good deal until you consider that had they taken that $3.1 million into town to the local bank and obtained a certificate of deposit at 2.5% they would generate $77,500 per year AND help the local economy.
Re having to contact a data manager for tide gauge information, instead of just putting it on the net, climate data has become a state secret in Australia.
“crosspatch says:
December 1, 2011 at 9:36 pm
You have a “Climate Change Commissioner”?”
Yup! Tim Flannery holds this, part-time position, and is paid AU$180k p/a. Not a bad earner if you can get on the AGW gravy train. He also has a waterfront property, recenty purchased too. He also has stated that we’re all going to die from AGW, and this decade is THE decade of action against climate change.
On Channel 7 news tonight, rare snow in Nevada, US. Yes, the world is warming.
There is snow in Nevada, the global tropical storm energy is near record lows, it has been over 2000 days since a Category 3 storm has struck the US, it’s just crazy. There really is no observational evidence of any of their dire predictions coming true. But that doesn’t seem to matter, one must “believe”.
What these politicians are doing is actually extremely dangerous for several reasons. First, they are spending a very large amount of money in times of economic uncertainty. This money is going toward things that will make absolutely no difference whatsoever on a global scale. The economy could better use that money for other things. This is what amounts to economic sabotage of the Western world. Second, when this is fully exposed for the scam that it is, people are going to be much less likely to believe warnings of an actual impending emergency pointed out by scientists. They are going to respond with “oh, yes, just like ‘Global Warming’ was such a dire emergency” and not respond as they should. Third, there is evidence that exactly the opposite of global warming is happening over the longer term and we may well be entering into a time of significantly cooler temperature if some recently published papers are to be believed. We have evidence that temperature overall has been in decline for about the last 2000 years. Yes, we have warm periods but it seems that each one “tops out” a little cooler than the one before it. We have a paper published that seems to show a correlation between decreased UV radiation from the sun and how the AO/NAO respond. We have a second paper published yesterday that shows certain indications from the sun that we may be headed for a deeper minimum than the Dalton and could be headed for something more like the Maunder minimum. If this is true, then we are possibly going to face some serious hardships from global cooling.
It is frustrating enough that these people go on like they do about this AGW nonsense in the face of observational data to the contrary, it is even worse that it may be blinding them to what actually might be headed our way. Countries such as Canada and Russia are going to face serious hardships if climate cools even a little. Places already right on the edge of being able to bring in a crop are possibly going to find they are unable to feed themselves.
Yes, we just had a warm period. It seems to have flattened out after 1998 with temperatures since then actually trending down a little (MSU satellite data). Sea level rise has flattened, Solar activity has declined. Tropical storm activity has declined. All the observational indications are pointing more toward cooling than warming. NONE of the programs put forth by the “climate change industry” positions us for that reality. Adaptation to a degree of cooling is MUCH HARDER than adaptation to a degree of warming.
These people are doing our populations a huge disservice. They need to be stopped.
Hey crosspatch… Australia has an entire department of Climate Change with several hundred employees. Annual cost $90 million. That is entirely separate from the Climate Commissioner. It’s big business in Australia….
The BoM has an array of 14 SEAFRAME stations around Australia monitoring sea levels since 1991 but they also record other data such as sea surface air temperatures supposedly not affected by UHI. If anybody’s interested, I’ve charted all the sea surface air temperatures at http://www.waclimate.net/sea/sea-air-temperatures.html, including Google sat pics of the recording areas.
The combined trends might suggest a .2C increase in sea surface air temps since 1991. However, it’s worth looking closer at the station data:
• The general trend was for northern warm latitudes in Australia to have cooling sea air temperatures, in line with records from the land stations, with southern stations increasing in temperature. All three Western Australia stations are stable or slightly cooler since 1991.
• The overall increase was mostly because of Australia’s south east quarter, the exception being the Cocos Islands. For example, Portland Victoria sea air temperatures would seem to have gone up by about 1C since 1995, albeit only a figure pulled from a trendline.
• The intensity and proximity of nearby industrial, port and urban development may have an influence, although it’s difficult to tell without figuring out the prevailing winds.
The inherent problems in measuring sea levels overwhelm any rational discussion of the matter. Even if accuracy is somehow obtained, so what? What causes it will still be a mystery, surrounded by an intrigue, and explicable in only the vaguest of terms. Governmental action will certainly have no effect whatsoever on the sea level change. But any such governmental action will affect people in other immeasurable ways with consequences that should be avoided.
last year the govt had an online survey about coastal dwelling/sea rises/insurance/
it was a total farce ALL questions geared to the “you accept it going to rise” baseline.
since then they have been Removing people from coastal areas, refusing building permits any damn thing they can to get PRIME seafront land back in ownership of the govt.
so when it all falls over(well it HAS) but when a lot more wake up to the fact its getting COOLER, and its all a bloody lie. then watch the extremely well off folks grab all that land.
like grabbing land for eco saviours then banning almost all public access BUT making massively high priced eco tourism deals with select ecogroups…
in the meantime the Insurance companies are Loving it!! massive hike in any coastal insurances.
a gullible friend said sea rise Must be true…because the insurers were accounting for it.
with thinking like that and the Liar in power till we can get her out!!!! its looking grim in my land.
re Bom and accessing files, yeah they also removed the really HOT weather of the 30s OFF the accesible pages and hid it in obscure formats around Copenhagen time.
Once again, it all comes down to money. State governments in Australia will do just about anything to get money from the Feds. In this case, there were bucketloads on offer provided the State governments went along with the climate alarmism meme. So they did. Just like the Greeks lying about the accounts to get into the EU (with resultant bucketloads of money), the New South Wales government had no qualms about lying about sea levels.
Everywhere you look, the AGW gravy train has spawned corruption. Yet believers imagine that they are purer than the rest of us. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ is barely adequate to describe what is going on here.
How do they measure sea level when it’s slopping around all the time? Especially to the precision of 1mm? Do they measure it at the same place on the planet every time? Do they do it at high tide, low tide, or somewhere in between? On a hot day or a cold day (expansion/contraction)? In exactly the same wind conditions (wind-driven)? Do they check the tectonic plates haven’t given it a bit of a boost?! Seems to me an impossible thing to measure with any accuracy.
Chris Gillham says:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/01/hiding-the-decline-down-under-inconvenient-papers-censored/#comment-815953
Henry@chris
Nice work. I’ve done analyses of two stations there, namely Christchurch and Brisbane.
I found cooling since 1975, namely -0.005 degrees C/annum in Christchurch and -0.001 degrees C/annum in Brisbane.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
(you have to study the tables)
So no warming on the east coast there.
I am willing to bet that when I take a look on the west coast, things might be different.
I am expecting to see some warming there,
because it seems there is a correlation of the warming/cooling with the increase or decrease in the leaf area index (LAI)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/
To finalize this matter, in terms of establishing an actual correlation coefficient, I need to get the actual values of the LAI. Does somebody here know where I can get this, or how to contact the writers (Liu et al)?
David Archibald’s “trend” of 0.5 mm/year is rubbish. Even a reasonably knowledgeable high school student could tell you, just by looking at the Archibald’s “fitted” line that it IS NOT a best fit. It looks as if he has just taken a rough line between the end points. A linear least-squares fit to the 1915-2009 data has a trend of 0.89 mm/year, which is way above his quoted 0.5 mm/year.
Bryant, of course, did it correctly using linear least-squares fitting. If you extend the data out to 2010, the linear least-squares fit (1886-2010) is 0.62 mm/year (i.e. LARGER than his value which was over the shorter period, 1886-1988).
If you really want to look for an acceleration (but lets face it – anyone who knows anything about sea level knows that we have already experienced a substantial acceleration from an almost stable sea level over the 2000 years prior to the 19th century) let’s just split the 1886-2010 record into two: (1886-1948) and (1948-2010). These are the two trends:
1886-1948: -0.32 mm/year (i.e. a sea-level FALL)
1948-2010: 0.67 mm/year (a sea-level rise)
which represents an ACCELERATION of about 1 mm/year over a period of about 60 years.
But of course, as you see in this posting, you can cherry-pick your period to get pretty well any “trends” or “acceleration” you want. However, the fact remains that, if you take the longest available record for Fort Denison, divide it in half and compare the two trends, YOU GET A SUBSTANTIAL ACCELERATION.
So, dear Anthony Watts, here is an apparent case of manipulation of data by either you or David Archibald. You show a plot and quote a quite erroneous “trend”. You both profess to have some knowledge in this field and yet you failed to notice or correct this glaring error. Will you do it now?
John Hunter probably gets his sea level misinformation from the Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science blog. Sea levels have not been accelerating. Quite the opposite. The whole CAGW canard has been falsified so many times I don’t know why they still try to convince us that down is up, ignorance is strength, and global cooling is runaway global warming. Get a clue.
Smokey – the data I used is simply the data used by Watts and Archibald and obtained from the same public sources. Go and insult them too if you want. If you think yourself capable of responding to my post then you should also be capable of checking my numbers. Please do it and tell us what you find.
And also Smokey: you may not have noticed what I said in my original response in order to try and forestall time-wasting cherry-picking:
> But of course, as you see in this posting, you can cherry-pick your period to get pretty well
> any “trends” or “acceleration” you want.
So what do you do in a discussion about century-long tide-gauge observations? That’s right, you become Exhibit A and produce (1) something which suggests a “deceleration” in sea level over the last 5 years (and then only if you cherry-pick one satellite out of three – the other two satellites suggest a deceleration over the past year only), and (2) a temperature (no – not sea level) record over a period of little over a year.
So – the relevance of your response to the present discussion – NONE WHATSOEVER – which indicates why climate scientists such as myself generally avoid “discussions” on sites such as this.
John Hunter says:
So what do you do in a discussion about century-long tide-gauge observations?
Henry@John
Well John, I think what you could do, is work it out,
and then compare it with the known past.
For example, if this is your data,
1886-1948: -0.32 mm/year (i.e. a sea-level FALL)
1948-2010: 0.67 mm/year (a sea-level rise)
then we can conclude the average over the past 124 years was a rise of 0.175 mm per annum.
Do you agree?
Now to compare this result with the known past, I am using the example of the South African coast line, where it has been determined that sea water levels were ca. 130 meters lower during the last glacial 20000 years ago than they are today. Shall we work that out? 130000mm/20000 = 6.5 mm /annum. So, on average, in the past 20000 years sea levels have risen by about 6.5 mm per annum.
Mind you, it must perhaps be mentioned that there was a time during that past 20000 years that it warmed so much that levels were 30 meters higher than they are today, so the 6.5 mm rise per annum is just an average.
(we are still talking about the SA coast line – my source is the book: Shoreline: Discovering South Africa’s coast)
so your result of 0.175 mm up to 0.67 mm rise per year is nothing really special in terms “man made” climate change. It is completely within the realm of natural variability. Indeed, I determined that temperatures have been increasing in the past 4 decades due to natural factors. The extra greening of the planet is adding some extra warmth (the extra vegetation traps heat)
I suggest you carefully study my tables here
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go to the Sceptical Science site? I have baptised them Gullible Science.
I’m not a scientist, merely Joe Citizen, so this question may be wrongly stated, but here goes:
I read such discussions and I keep wondering how it’s even possible to measure “sea level” down to less than one millimeter??
My rough layman’s mind would think that the error of measurement is much more than one millimeter but what do I know?
On a different note, I have not seen anything that makes me concerned that sea level is likely to rise more than a very small to modest amount in the next century, so I strongly suspect that the more “catastrophic” projections are being offered for political effect only. But that’s only one layman’s opinion which is wide open to new information credibly stated.
Henry@Skiphil
You are right of course, we cannot measure that accurate.
I am also not an expert in this field but I suspect what they probably do is measure it over a decade or longer and then you average it out over years.
I always say: climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.
And sometimes the weather can be a bit rough, but I believe that is God’s way of keeping the planet habitable.
However, there are now some people who call this rough weather: climate change
so they can make lots of money…..
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
HenryP: OK – you’re Exhibit B for my statement ‘but of course, as you see in this posting, you can cherry-pick your period to get pretty well any “trends” or “acceleration” you want’ – so you now go from a discussion of century-scale sea-level change to time scales of 20,000 years. So Exhibit A (Smokey) covers the last 5 years and you now complete the picture by going for the glacial cycles. You contrarians are so predictable.
If you want to put some of these multiple time scales together look at Fig. 6.8 (and thereabouts) in the IPCC AR4 WG1 report (go to http://www.ipcc.ch).
Henry@John
John,
if you want me to find something useful on the ipcc site you have to give me a more specific link.
I don’t have hours to spend looking for your fig. 6.8
In the 16th century there was a dutch sea farer with the name of Willem Barentz who was convinced from his “history” lessons that there was a way up north to the other side of the world. I am certain that he would not have risked his life unless he was certain about it. As we now know, it probably was open during the MWP, ca.500 or 600 years before he lived.
I don’t think anyone here is denying that the extra warmth the planet is experiencing will cause some ice to melt and the sea water level to rise a bit.
The question is: is the warming natural or is man taking a part in helping it along? If man is helping it along, the next question would be; what is the mechamism by which he is doing this?
In trying to find an answer to that question I looked at all the popular blog sites, trying to find the warming trend in tandem with the increase in maxima and minima. I coould not find it. In the end I decided to do the work myself.
The results were surpising. But I gather you are not interested in discussing my results?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
HenryP: so you obviously haven’t read much of the AR4! Go to:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6s6-4-3-2.html
> But I gather you are not interested in discussing my results?
Correct.
Henry@John
I did study the Ipcc reorts 2005 and 2007 and found out that they looked at the problem from the wrong end. They assumed the extra warming is caused by the increase in GHG’s and calculated a forcing based on the the increase of the GHG since 1750.
They first should have made the formula’s from S Arrhenius correct instead of looking to solve the problem from the wrong end?
In effect, you are making the same mistake by refusing to see what your own results really mean if you put them on a wider time scale.
HenryP: Your discussion is all a diversion from my original point, which was that there is a critical error in Anthony Watts’ original posting, in that the trend quoted for Archibald’s plot is nearly a factor of two too low. This is easily verified, by resorting to elementary statistics, not sophisticated climate science. Will it ever be corrected? I suspect not, as to do so would spoil a good story.
John says:Your discussion is all a diversion from my original point
Henry@John
It was not. I did reply that the data you quoted actually worked out to an average of a little less than 0.2 mm /yr and I did ask you if you agreed. You did not reply to that question? I donot have access to the original data now, but I reckon that Archibald’s 0.5 mm per annum result (for a different, more recent period) is probably very much correct.
You are confusing the whole issue by bringing in periods of fall and increase and then working out “acceleration”. He is not doing that and he is not pretending to be doing that. He is just analysing the data and he probably uses Excel to work out the linear trend – you cannot really make a mistake with that unless you are an idiot.
Obviously you did not get that, and when I diverted to the whole issue of “man made” global warming (which apparently is not global, and which apparently seems to me to be caused by natural factors and a little bit by more vegetation), like an ostriche, you put your head in the soil, claiming this is too difficult for you….
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
I am here to learn from you, if you have something to say that will challenge my way of thinking. Don’t irk us by claiming a few times it is no use discussing things here.