People send me stuff. Here we have another case of value added adjustments that increase the slope, much like temperature.
This email forwarded from Steve Case reads as follows:
The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group just published the 2013 Release #1 of their Global Mean Sea Level Time Series.
![sl_ns_global[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/sl_ns_global1.png?quality=75)
I discovered that these periodic releases are on the net all the way back to 2011 Release #1. So I downloaded all nine of them.
2012 release #1 has 628 entries up to January of 2011 so I had Excel’s slope function calculate the rate of sea level rise for that time series of 628 entries across all nine releases.
What I found is that the rate of sea level rise has been bumped up twice since then, once in 2011 and the the latest in the current release. Here’s a link to a graph to illustrate the point:
![2vmenpv[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/2vmenpv1.gif)
http://oi45.tinypic.com/2vmenpv.jpg
Coupled with the GIA increase of 0.3 mm/yr that was made prior to these nine releases the rate of sea level rise has been bumped up 0.43 mm/yr in the last few years.
This sort of thing has been going on more or less regularly and it seems to go only one. way.
Here are the links to the data:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2011_rel1/sl_ns_global.txt
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2011_rel2/sl_ns_global.txt
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2011_rel3/sl_ns_global.txt
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2011_rel4/sl_ns_global.txt
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2012_rel1/sl_ns_global.txt
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2012_rel2/sl_ns_global.txt
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2012_rel3/sl_ns_global.txt
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2012_rel4/sl_ns_global.txt
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2013_rel1/sl_ns_global.txt
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
martin_cregg-guinan says:
January 25, 2013 at 11:10 am
The University of COLORADO has a sea level study group?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes, it is a hot bed of Climate Scientists. Colorado used to have a really good geology school, the Colorado School of Mines.
Nerem reports the UC rate as 3.2 +/- .4 mm/yr in the first plot in the post. The bar chart in the second plot shows all the incremental rates well with the statistical error of that calculated rate, particularly if they are rounded to the same precision Nerem uses. While it is ALWAYS good to question adjustments made to data, they don’t seem to have made a statistically significant difference in this case.
@martin_cregg-guinan
January 25, 2013 at 11:10 am
>The University of COLORADO has a sea level study group?
It is right ‘up there’ with Austria! (a reference to Dr Nils-Axel Morner’s video above).
Why aren’t these scammers being arrested? WTF does it take? In any other field, the cops would be all over this by now. Who has the authority to complain to the police or to the FBI or the CIA? Where are they? Is any one of them even sniffing around? Does the MSM have to push for it or something? Do they have to get public approval first? A consensus maybe? Sheesh!
Yes, Martin, the University of Colorado is uniquely positioned to study rising sea level because of all the United States, Colorado has the highest lowest point. Every other state will be partially inundated, and 18 states totally submerged before a rising sea pushes the first drops of brackish water up the Arikaree River from Kansas into Colorado, at a minimum elevation of about 3,315 feet. Perhaps that is why they seem so comfortable speaking about sea level as something other than the level of the sea at the shore. For a Coloradan, it is a purely theoretical consideration.
{ Gail Combs says:
Yes, it is a hot bed of Climate Scientists. Colorado used to have a really good geology school, the Colorado School of Mines. }
The School of mines is still a very highly rated institution of education. My nephew graduated with a degree in engineering. As others on this site can tell you, it’s difficult to trick a Geologist or Engineer with alarmist hand-waving, but easy to trick a CU tree-hugger. I know from experience, as I attended CSU.
The University of Colorado CU Sea Level Research Group says:
“In essence, we would like our Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) time series to be a proxy for ocean water volume changes.”
Then call it “Global Mean Sea Volume” instead of “Global Mean Sea Level”, and provide empirical data demonstrating just how much the volume of the ocean basins is increasing due to glacial isostatic adjustment.
The CU Sea Level Research Group is talking out of both sides of their mouths to intentionally mislead the public. They say they want to call it ‘volume change’ but what they really want the public to see, hear, and feel is ‘dramatic sea level rise’ due to AGW.
A Joint EPA NOAA report for Barnegat Bay (State of the Bay Report 2011) claimed NJ was experiencing “one of the of the highest rates of sea-level rise in the continental United States. The tide gauge at Atlantic City shows a sea level rise rate of increase of approximately 4 mm per year.” The report never mentioned the fact that they were well aware of that a large portion of this relative rise was over pumping of groundwater and the resulting subsidence and compaction of soils.
It seems fairly clear that they are not measuring sea level but rather sea volume. Their graph is mislabeled and the way they are quantifying it is awkward (mm/yr).
As I understand it, KR, your position is that the scientists have spoken – and our job is to listen. Excuse us, but we don’t buy that position.
How about you explain why every adjustment is upwards? Even without any knowledge of a subject, that is an overwhelming sign that the answer is being “corrected”. (If you saw a series of corrections in an undergraduate experiment of that nature, it would be pretty much an automatic fail.)
If you mewasure something with a ruler that is inaccurate, it doesn’t matter how many measurements you make, there will still be an error equal to the error of the ruler. No averaging will correct it.
I’ve been on this planet for over half a century and I’ve always lived near the sea. To the observers eye the level hasn’t changed much at all. These people need to get out more and take a walk by the sea occasionally. Is UC a coastal university?
This shocking exaggeration adds up to: [..wait for it.. ] 0.017 extra inches per year.
If we allowed this travesty to go on for 100 years — that would be a whole 1.7 inches!
Unless dedicated scientific fraud can be proven, this is not worth worry about. Of course, neither is the whole sum of 3.2 (or 3.3) mm a year — which is a whole 0.13 inches.
Beats the heck out of me how anyone can claim to be measuring “The Sea Level” to an accuracy of 0.13 inches under any circumstances.
Since 1992 the GMSL is shown to have risen by 70mm, or 7.0cm. 7.0 cm should be noticeable on all tidal guages. And, as an average, some would have 10 cm. You can’t miss that.
Remember the 21 “high-quality” tidal guages that were used a few years ago to estimate a much slower rate of rise? I wonder that those 21 show …
In the meantime, all of their “adjustments” keep resulting in values that are increasingly further away from the only important ones that matter…. the tide gauges! You don’t see stories about tide gauges because they DON”T show anything alarming. Soon UoC will be claiming Manhatten is underwater and Hansen has been vindicated. Wonder what the people living in Manhatten will think when they find out they are supposedly living under water.
Tim Clark says:
January 25, 2013 at 12:58 pm
The School of mines is still a very highly rated institution of education…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You may have had a couple friends of mine as profs. (Graduates of Purdue University who taught at CSM back in the 1970’s) Haven’t seen them in years though.
Tower: “Cesna 456, you are cleared to land on runway 2L”
Cesna 456: “Ah, Tower? There appears to be a communication beacon in our landing flight path”
Tower: “Pay no attention to that. You see, the land around here heaved up 100 feet recently. We’ve made the correct adjustments, so the top of that beacon is actually 100 feet lower than it appears and the runway is also 100 feet lower than it appears. Trust us! Ignore your instruments, we will guide you in.”
___________________________________________________
I wonder if CU consulted with The National Geodetic Survey? Professional surveyors have to be scratching their heads. CU has rendered the term “elevation”, which is a fixed vertical point, into a meaningless quantity.
” In essence, we would like our GMSL time series to be a proxy for ocean water volume changes.”
riiiiiight…
volume is always measured in millimeters
martin_cregg-guinan……………….exactly
Re, Gail Combs says:
january 25, 2013 at 5:28 am
———————————————————————
Ditto all of your comment, plus, as others said, the tide cycles, some 18 years, some far longer, plus confirmation bias, a nice way of saying corrupted by peer pressure, ( recall how the U of Col SL was virtually flat from 2006 to 2010, then went off line for some time with no explanation, then came back on line with the “new” adjustments.)
If anyone wants to know how accurate the meaurements of the SL are, just google the “Palm Dale Bulge” Years of debate about how much a particular area of a Calif desert have risen due to the San Andreas fault. We are talking about 100s of mm of debate concerning a desert floor, not a rolling liquid surface changing by seveal feet due to atmospheric pressure alone.
Not only is the slope of the 2013 rel 1 data steeper than the 2011 rel 1 data, it is also about 9.5mm higher on average. So they have ‘raised’ global mean sea level 9.5mm in two years of processing – actualy most of it (9.2mm) occurred between 2011 rel 1 and rel 2.
MieScatter says:
January 25, 2013 at 3:26 am
You are assuming that what they measure is the “same” . But it varies with time and place. So the noise reduction is less than you estimate. When this was a hot topic a while back the accuracy was estimated in the cm range. IMO – mm range accuracy is doubtful.
Light travels at 1 ft/ns – round trip gives 2ns/ft. So the question is – can the timing be held to better than .2ns? i.e ~1″ ~ 2.5cm? Maybe. But it is difficult.
Tide gauges are only showing about 1.0 mm / year of sea level rise.
On average, the tide gauges are uplifting at about 0.3 mms/year according to GPS.
So, sea level rise is only around the 1.3 mms/year rate.
The satellites numbers are adjusted up to what the global warming scientists think should be there from their estimated glacial ice loss and from their estimated steric ocean warming sea level expansion rate.
So, they have just adjusted the satellite rise up to meet the global warming theory assumptions. I’m sure, the satellites are really measuring something in the 1.0 mm/year range (and the ocean is subsiding / deepening at something like 0.3 mms/year so again we are back to the 1.3 mms / year).
Glacial ice loss have grossly overstated due to the inappropriate glacial isostatic adjustment models which have been applied to the Grace gravity satellites. In addition, steric ocean warming expansion is much, much lower than estimated because the oceans are warming much slower than was assumed in the days before the Argo bouys. The global warming scientists are still trying to use the old ocean heat content trendlines which are too high.
It will take some time before the satellite adjusters have to come clean. But in the meantime, you will know what is really happening.
I’ve gained a great deal from Colorado’s web site.
With that positive bias and optimism said, the only ethical rationale ,
[inconsiderate but ethical] for the revisions may be:
As agreement is reached by the Colorado researchers that the model has been improved,
they update the total time series to present a total perspective. Of course, that should
be boldly indicated in the university’s web site.
I’m sure this posting is causing a buzz at Colorado.
Regards,
I have processed all the data linked in the article. There are no significant differences between them, all the differences are perfectly negligible. The biggest difference is that the last data series is a bit longer than the second to last, and that it shows certain rise in sea levels after several years of stagnation where the second to last series ended.
These data do not show any signs of tampering.
The only problem I can see is lack of scientific approach and a bit too wild imagination of certain people here.