People send me stuff. You may recall this story from last week that raised a number of eyebrows due to the claims made within it by author William Hay. Dave Burton decided to take him to task. So far no response.
From: David Burton
To: William W. Hay
Cc: Ted Carmichael; Anthony Watts
Sent: Sun, November 4, 2012 6:25:15 AM
Subject: Re: Could Estimates of the Rate of Future Sea-Level Rise Be Too Low?
Hello, Dr. Hay,
I hope you’re enjoying the “Old North State!” Did you receive my previous email (below, w/ one typographical correction)?
Warmest regards,
Dave Burton
On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 5:55 AM, David Burton wrote:
Dear Dr. Hay,The abstract of your Sunday, 11/4/2012 presentation, “Could Estimates of the Rate of Future Sea-Level Rise Be Too Low?” has attracted considerable attention at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/01/why-seas-are-rising-ahead-of-predictions
Perhaps you’d like to weigh in there.
The 2nd sentence of your abstract is the most startling for its inconsistency with the measurements with which I’m familiar:
“Current sea-level rise measurements track or exceed the maximum rate of rise proposed by the IPCC and suggest a rise of 1 meter or more by the end of the century.”
One meter of sea-level rise over the next 87.2 years would be an average rate of of 11.5 mm/year. But actual sea-level measurements show that it is rising at a tiny fraction of that rate, and measurements at most locations show no sign of acceleration in the last 80+ years.
This is one of the longest and most complete records of sea-level in the world, and it fortuitously happens to be at a location where there is little or no PGR:
The lack of acceleration in rate of sea-level rise is obvious. So why do you say that these current measurements suggest an average rate of eight times that for the next 87 years??
A few other things in your abstract also puzzled me:
“…changes in the volume of the ocean basins… can be neglected for projections of sea-level change over the next few centuries.”
The main contributor to changes in the volume of the ocean basins is thought to be GIA: the presumed sinking of the ocean floor due to the addition of meltwater from ice sheets circa 10K years ago. But GIA accounts for over 1/3 of the often-claimed 1.8 mm/year average rate of coastal sea-level rise (from tide gauges) over the last 100 years. That hardly seems negligible. Also, a 0.3 mm/yr GIA “fudge factor” to account for presumed post-glacial sinking of the ocean floor is usually added to satellite-measured rates of sea-level rise when they are reported. If “sea level” means the level of the surface of the sea, then adding that adjustment to measured numbers yields a quantity which can no longer be truthfully called “sea level,” but the addition inflates reported satellite-measured sea-level rise by more than 10%, so I don’t think that’s negligible.
Perhaps you meant, “changes in the volume of the ocean basins due to factors other than GIA?”
“…the location of atmospheric high and low pressure systems… [can not] be neglected for projections of sea-level change over the next few centuries.”
Is that a typographical error? Weather systems do move water around, but only over relatively short time time spans. For century-scale time-spans, that factor can be neglected.
“The Greenland ice sheet is melting, and the Antarctic beginning to melt, both at increasing rates.”
This seems to be based on outdated information. The latest ICEsat measurements indicate that Antarctica is gaining ice mass.
“The rise of ocean temperature has a major effect roughly equal to the input of glacial meltwaters”
Do you realize that sea-surface temperature changes do not affect coastal sea-level at all? (That’s one of the ways in which coastal tide gauge measurements differ from satellite altimeter measurements, and one of the reasons that it is always a mistake to conflate the two.) Gravity balances mass, not volume, so when ocean surface waters warm or cool, the resulting density changes have only local effects, rising or sinking in place, like icebergs. Only if there are density changes in the ocean depths can it affect coastal sea-levels, and no such changes are thus far in evidence.
Warmest regards,
Dave Burton
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daveburton says:
November 7, 2012 at 1:20 pm
OK, it’s indirect – high air pressure – stable atmosphere – no clouds – warm sea – 1mb>1013mb =1cm sea level depression.
Like your website BTW.
It’s not the weight of the extra water. here’s what the U. og Colo. says:
I think it also important to note that the ocean floor is very thin compared to the width of it and that it is under tremendous pressures from expansion mid ocean and subduction / compression at the edges. This means it tends to buckle.
During the quake in Indonesia ( 9 ish) that cause a massive tsunami, that part of the crust moved up about 9 feet (IIRC). Similarly, the tsunami that hit Japan was from a big jump in crustal height during that quake.
On longer time scales, whole masses of land are shoved up, or fall back below the surface. Pretty much all of New Zealand, for example. Look in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and you find sharks teeth and sea shells. Or how about the Grand Canyon?
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/where-did-the-grand-canyon-go/
It went into a large trench about 9 MILES deep in the ocean, filling it.
There are very huge changes in the contour of the ocean bottoms happening all the time. Some very slow, some very fast. It is an error to assume that they all just average out somehow.
In Florida on the Keys I was on the ‘beach’ of a park. Then it hit me. The coral that made the key was a couple of FEET above the water line. In the not too distant past, it MUST have been below water level. Coral does not form above water.
Similarly, we have a Roman Port that is now a long ways from the Sea:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/ostia-antica-and-sea-level/
and similar places from the U.K. to Turkey (where an ancient port was recently found under a city…)
The simple fact is that the surface of the earth is dynamic and unless you have complete shape and depth data on the entire ocean bottom AND accurate data for all the land, it isn’t possible to say why the ocean rises or falls. A 10 mile thick sheet that’s 2000 miles long can easily flex in the middle when being squashed from the ends. And it does.
Peter Miller wrote, “this guy Hay… has also been involved in some kind of controversy over divine intervention in the oceans, as supposedly recorded in the Koran,” and piquied my curiosity.
I wondered what Peter was talking about. (I wish WUWT supported some sort of “private reply” or email feature!) So I googled for it.
It turns out that in 1983 & 1984, the GSA (them again!) hooked up Dr. Hay with some Saudis and Pakistanis, who interviewed him under false pretenses, recorded him on video camera, and tricked him into saying things which, when edited to remove the context, appeared to be a non-Muslim scientist confirming that scientific wisdom in the Koran must have been divinely inspired. Here’s a 2011 video of Dr. Hay (by now pushing 80yo) being interviewed about the episode:
sophocles wrote, “There’s the paper by Wenzel & Schroter “Reconstruction of regional mean sea level anomalies from tide gauges using neural networks”, Journal of Geophysical Research, VOL. 115, C08013, 15 PP., 2010, which states:
“The global mean sea level for the period January 1900 to December 2006 is estimated to rise at a rate of 1.56 ± 0.25 mm/yr which is reasonably consistent with earlier estimates, but we do not find significant acceleration …”
I have links to that (44 page!) paper and many others on my sealevel.info web site. Click on “papers.” That paper is in the “Sea-level rise acceleration?” section.