Ian Wishart writes in Investigate Daily:
Century old map throws new doubt on climate change sea level claims
A new book on the history of New Zealand has inadvertently stirred the climate change debate by revealing a near zero sea level increase over the past century.
The book, The Great Divide, includes a 100 year old map of Cloudy Bay lagoons in New Zealand, drafted back in 1912 to show the location of 20 kilometres of canals dug with wooden spades by ancient Maori.
However, when the 1912 map is shown alongside a satellite image of the same location from Google Earth, it reveals not only the startling accuracy of the original map (drafted at a time when aerial photography did not exist) but also a stunning lack of Pacific Ocean encroachment on the narrow shoal linking the lagoons to the sea.
The shoal is comprised of rock and pebbles, making it an ideal weathervane for sea level increase as it’s less prone to erosion than shifting sands.
Even the narrowest and lowest part of the bar, marked with a black squiggle on the 1912 map, remains the same in 2012.
The Great Divide goes on sale this week, and among its revelations is confirmation that a massive comet-strike into the ocean off New Zealand’s southern coast caused a 220 metre high tsunami that may have been responsible for erasing evidence of human habitation in early New Zealand.
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This might be a good time to review my story about how easy it is to get freaked out about sea level rise.
Good points about the land lifting in this area…..thats why WUWT is so diff from RC etc…not afraid to be skeptical of stuff that seems to support ones own position at first glance.
But Australia’s ABC just showed a house in England next to an eroded coast line which was claimed to be evidence of sea level rise. It must just be rising in some parts and not others.
Whether this shows no significant sea-level change, or moderate land change coincident with sea level change, there is one thing that this certainly does NOT show. That is any sign whatsoever that sea level is rising fast enough to wipe London, New York or Florida from the map any time soon!
Such alarmism is clearly baseless and there is a higher chance of a meteorite causing such devastation, than human emissions of CO2 creating such a massive increase in sea-level. Yet I do not see world governments holding meteorite defence summits and pledging trillions of dollars to save the earth from meteorites.
All that is required to explain this lack of sea level rise is to “think like a climate alarmist”.
1. This is only a small sample of the whole ocean and it is merely cherry picking to point it out.
2. The lithosphere was depressed by the comet impact and now Isostatic rebound is causing the coastline to rise at the same rate as the increase in sea level.
3. The 1912 map was drawn by people funded by wealthy corporations and is biased to increasing company profits
See how easy that is.
The value of this matchup is that it could be used to discredit NZ sea level rises alleged by alarmists. That would finesse the problem of NZ being tectonically active.
Perhaps you’re thinking of the photo on the home page of the late John Daly’s site:
http://www.john-daly.com/index.htm
/Mr Lynn
markstoval says:
April 26, 2012 at 4:02 am
“…I seem to recall a web site where a guy posted a very old picture of the mean sea level mark on a cliff in Australia or some place and compared it to today and there was no difference.”
I think you’re referring to the late John Daly’s website:
http://www.john-daly.com/
Incidentally, there’s a notorious “climategate” e-mail cheering his death:
“From: Timo H‰meranta
To:
Subject: John L. Daly dead
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:04:28 +0200
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510
Importance: Normal
Mike,
In an odd way this is cheering news ! One other thing about the CC paper – just found
another email – is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals
to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.
Cheers
Phil”
You can find it on the November 19, 2009 “Watts Up With That” post.
I keep saying on the blogs (Andrew Bolt & Tim Blair) that if anyone had eyes connected to their brain and lived in Sydney they would see these rising sea levels in action (NOT). I quote from the heritage council website () about an ocean baths where I learned to swim in the 1950’s.
“Wylie’s Baths is located on the rocks at the southern end of Coogee Beach with an entrance off Neptune Street via Grant Reserve. The pool is a rock and concrete pool 50 metres by 30 metres located on a natural rock shelf below the high tide mark with concrete walls around four sides. It measures 50m long and 30m wide (to provide a 50-yard Olympic swimming length) and the depth of the pool varies from about 0.5m in the south-west corner to about 1.6m in the north-east corner. It is flushed twice daily by tidal action. The baths were constructed in 1907 by Henry Wylie, a champion swimmer, whose daughter Mina was also an outstanding swimmer (she represented Australia in the Stockholm Olympics in 1912.
My point is that there exists many tidal ocean swimming pools in Sydney that were built in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Many of these baths are still in use for well over 100 years and they have not been inundated by the catastrophic rising sea levels that the warmist propaganda would have us believe.
Near 100 year old photos of Sydney Harbour foreshores when compared to recent photos also show there is no appreciable sea level rise. That’s why warmists hate old people, we know the truth and will never be convinced by their lies.
John Daly did a lot of the early work on sea level fraud around Aus/NZ – fighting that anti-alarmist cause when it was intensely unfashionable to do so, and when there was no one to help him.
I think he was the first well-known ‘denier’, prompting a famous gloat in the ClimateGate emails when he died. His web site is still kept going here: http://www.john-daly.com/ and it is good to see that his assertions that seal level was not changing in the Antipodes is justified…
Roger says:
April 26, 2012 at 4:38 am
These are the round 2 results. Look here for the ’round 1′ results (and they appear accurate):
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/changeyourmind/about/rd1_challenge.htm
Go for the second round…..
Can anyone provide any any evidence of any area where the sea level has definitely and markedly risen in the last 100 years?
This is not a rhetorical or frivolous question. I would very much like to know.
Consider: The land is lifting at Yosemite National Park. It doesn’t all rise at the same rate. There are trees there that have died from a lake that migrated One side of the lake rose, the water went to the low end and drowned them. In these photos here,The small ponds and channels keep the same spatial relationship. If the land is rising, it’s coming up perfectly square, perfectly perpendicular to gravity.
Not bloody likely!
The IDIOTS that are talking about rising sea levels are just that, IDIOTS ! The Pacific Ocean covers one third of the worlds surface, its max. depth is 11 km or 35,700 feet. It is 165.2 million square kilometers or 64 million square miles, midnight in the north is midday in the south, a storm hundreds of miles across with waves meters high in the south has no, I repeat no effect on the sea level in the north, having sail the Pacific many times and had weeks without seeing land IDIOTS have just no perception of how big it is ! And they are talking about fractions of an inch ?
[Moderator’s Query: Uhhh, George, are you sure you meant North and South? -REP]
The British Admiralty has all the charts going way back past Captain Bligh. He was not the only quality cartographer that they Had. Indeed many of those charts were still in use unti l very recently.
The needs of sailing ships, no depth sounder, little room to maneuver, meant that coastline charts were of the highest quality. Most being superseded by metrication, deep sea soundings improvements and port development.
A very rich resource for sea level researchers.
Re Jerome
Professor Nils Mörner have been saying that according to landmarks the sea hasn’t risen anything measurable the last hundred years. He has published several papers and lectures on this, google it. I don’t know if its credible except that the visuals he provide clearly demonstrate that at that particular point(s) the sea haven’t risen.
“Warmists hate old people” I love that. Thanks Ozzy John. Indeed, we remember. We all read “1984” and “Animal Farm” . We remember people being killed trying to go over the Berlin Wall. We’ve seen the change in environmentalism. it used to be a noble thing.
The following link opens up a photo, a beautiful one, of a palace built some 300 years ago by the Knights of Malta alongside the Mediterrenean sea’s Malta harbour known as the Grand Harbour of Malta. One can easily see the steps leading from the edge of the water to the palace. The first step is about 12 inches above sea level which is the perfect height to get on or off a tender boat. Tide here has an oscillation of maximum 9 inches. Considering all this I do not see any reason why any scientist can say that this place, and therefore the whole planet, has seen any sea level variations these last 300 years.
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=malta+grand+harbour&hl=mt&sa=X&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=g68iT762YLV-4M:&imgrefurl=http://www.malitashipping.com/aboutmalta.htm&docid=USpD9gf3u-avzM&imgurl=http://www.malitashipping.com/images/melitapic22.jpg&w=2064&h=1448&ei=GEuZT_6FBq7a4QTDz4HFBg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=181&vpy=346&dur=1724&hovh=188&hovw=268&tx=26&ty=210&sig=117223596319254972936&page=3&tbnh=151&tbnw=190&start=45&ndsp=25&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:45,i:176&biw=1280&bih=859
This link includes a multitude of photos of the Grand harbour, which has been the main harbour of the island for 2000 years at least.
http://www.google.com/search?q=malta+grand+harbour&hl=mt&site=webhp&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=pUqZT6OKFMnsOf7AscwG&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CBMQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=859
The problem with the coastal houses in England is one of tidal erosion from North Sea Storms and not sea level rise. Those cliffs have been eroding for centuries/miilenia. If people are foolish enough to build houses on eroding landscape that is their problem. In many cases these houses were built to replace houses that fell into the sea in earlier times and the cliffs have just caught up with them. Conflating natural beach erosion with sea level rise is easy when people are facing the catastrophe of losing their homes, much easier to blame it on people than natural forces donchaknow.
I have a large number of UK Ordnance Survey maps from the 1950s and also a number from the most recent survey in the 2000s. Coastal areas show no sea rise although they do show changes in shoreline due to longshore drift and erosion etc. In Wigtown bay in Scotland the sea level seems to have dropped. If I had access to a web site I could upload them for comparison.
What I love about WUWT is the willingness to consider hypotheticals. Here, I’m impressed by the speed with which some folks offer the explanation for “unchanged sea level” as being a perfectly-matched isostatic rebound/tectonic plate rise. That’s elegant; but more importantly, it’s falsifiable. What evidence is there that the region is behaving that way? And what are the odds that there would be a perfect match? These mechanisms (sea level rise, isostatic rebound, tectonic plate action) are not –so far as I know– correlated. So what are the odds of perfect correlation here?
Just asking.
@RobRoy, I believe that you are talking about Yellowstone NP (Yellowstone Lake, specifically), not Yosemite. Considering that Yellowstone Lake is about 500 miles inland and resides directly over the top of an active supervolcano, I seriously doubt that the changes in that particular shoreline has anything to do with changing sea-levels.
As to spatial relationships of the lake contours, take a look at pictures of Mt St Helens (another volcano) on May 17th, 1980. There was this huge bulge that erased Goat Rocks on the North Slope of the volcano — but the rest of the mountain was relatively unaffected. Kinda like the area surrounding Lake Yellowstone.
Apples-to-giraffes correlation there.
Grey Lensman: Good comment on the Admiralty charts, and particularly the reason why the near-shore measurements would have been so scrupulously accurate (and precise). When you are commanding HM vessel in splendid isolation half a world away from any help, let alone a proper shipyard, you had better have good soundings. …To what extent have these charts not been used to develop the historical baseline data for sea level trend studies?
PS: Good moniker, I vaguely remember those books!
scotchman1 says:
April 26, 2012 at 6:41 am
” If I had access to a web site I could upload them for comparison.”
How about
http://photobucket.com/ ?
A previous WUWT article reviewing the Maldives, and other sea level rise info, is at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/19/despite-popular-opinion-and-calls-to-action-the-maldives-is-not-being-overrun-by-sea-level-rise/
Am also a bit surprised about the survey results magically changing. Went and took the survey myself, and was put into the ‘dismissive’ category. Actually has 16 questions, give it a shot yourselves….
There is one major change though. The size of “Upper Lagoon” has increased and the northern end of the larger land mass, depicted on the 1912 Map, between Uppper Lagoon and Big Lagoon has vanished. This could be due to erosion or the wave action along the shoreline might act to offset sea level rise by depositing fresh material to reinforce the shoal area