From his June 4, 2008 speech on winning the Democratic primaries:
“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.”
Here’s the proof: Ten year running mean sea level rise from satellite altimetry.
Figure 1. Decadal (overlapping) rates for sea level rise as determined from the satellite sea level rise observations, 1993-2011 (data available from http://sealevel.colorado.edu/).
h/t to Dr. Pat Michaels
UPDATE: for the whiners about “cherry picking” here’s a graph with data through 2012, not much difference in the rate.
I replicated the plot from the data. There is indeed a *slight* uptick at the end when you add in the most recent years. Indicating, of course, that it was indeed at the beginning of the Bush presidency that the rate began to slow and, contrary to claim, the up tick showed up just during the period when president Obama was giving his speech.
LOL!!! These sea rise numbers put a serious hole in CAGW theoretical assertion that the “lost heat” (lol) ended up buried deep in the oceans.
Most sea rise is attributed to thermal expansion. If the “lost heat” (lol) was mysteriously skipping atmospheric warming and going directly into the oceans, then there should be a corresponding acceleration in rising sea levels, which isn’t the case.
If, on the other hand, the sea rise level is decelerating in tandem with no global warming trend into the 17th year (despite 40% of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 being emitted over the last 16 years), a very strong case could be made that CAGW is officially kaputz.
Luuuuucy… You ‘ave some e’splaaaaaaining to doooo….
Am I the only one who remembers Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign pledge to “de-salt the oceans”? He won the election, but the Viet Nam war took away his attention to removing this major pollutant from ocean water; like many campaign pledges, this one remains unfulfilled. It’s a travesty!
Well Pat, joke or not now you have 12+ comments from people who clearly think that either sea levels are falling or that sea level rise is rapidly falling. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Or is it only you guys who get to read a conspiracy behind every graph?
Rate of draining quantity of water is reduced because source is drying. Heal? Does that mean level is lowering and water is going back to the places where it came from as underground water, moisture contents of soil, snow on mountains and poles?
The thing I do see rising is the chance of tropical activity in the BOC or Western Caribbean in the near term. Heads up folks,,,,,, Tis the season.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/global-mean-sea-level-time-series-seasonal-signals-removed
is still showing 2013_rel_3 (Edited: 2013-05-15), while http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/2013rel4-global-mean-sea-level-time-series-seasonal-signals-removed has 2013_rel_4 (Edited: 2013-05-19), of course. Both show 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/year.
And to think the University of Colorado can achieve this with a satellite with no terrestrial references! (Priceless)
Real ‘Cherry-Picking’ would be to use just the 2011-2013 data. That trend would be around 20 mm per year. 😉 Arrrrggggghhhhh! We Doooomed! !
If single site tide gauge records, any of them, formed a hockey stick, the covers of IPCC policy maker reports would get new covers, but alas, none of them, at all, do, shown in a single glance with reference, here:
http://oi53.tinypic.com/2i6os4y.jpg
Jason Miller says:
May 28, 2013 at 5:43 pm
It is obvious why the bar graph stops at 2011. The data on the CU website shows a sharp increase afterwards. This is absolutely Cherry Picking.
Of the most shameful kind…
Well that’a one thing that began in the previous administration that Obama probably wont be blaming Pres. Bush for.
Tell me WHY?
And I will share my understanding of this “global change” facet.
Michael Kerjman
So let me understand, the rate of fall in sea level rise is accelerating, and better than they thought, but worse for coral reef growth, but better for downtown Manhatten, but worse for the models?
Fun with correlations, with these decadal periods of sea level rise used elsewhere, courtesy of WoodForTrees:
PMOD composite TSI monthly average, rate of rise (slope of trend line), watch the Sun’s 1996 to 2005 (to 2006 by WFT notation) period bottom out exactly where the sea level rise turns around here. Good match between the charts by eyeball.
The AMO Index rate of rise is lagging the sea level rate of rise by about 5 to 6 years. Why is that?
Surprisingly, by HADSST3 the global sea surface temperatures rate of rise didn’t level off until five years later in 2001 to 2010. So SST rate of rise is also lagged, about the same as the AMO. Why? With sea level rise from thermal expansion, would you expect SST to better match sea level?
And the CO₂ measured at Mauna Loa still doesn’t care.
So the Sun matches, the AMO and SST lags, the CO₂ doesn’t care. Oh, and I checked the PDO Index, it’s a mess.
What do these correlations tell us?
It is worse than we thought – if we extrapolate the slowing of the sea level, eventually rise will reverse, and the seas will run out of water. Children will not know what trip to the seaside is…
/sarc off
SAMURAI says:
May 28, 2013 at 7:53 pm
LOL!!! These sea rise numbers put a serious hole in CAGW theoretical assertion that the “lost heat” (lol) ended up buried deep in the oceans.
Most sea rise is attributed to thermal expansion. If the “lost heat” (lol) was mysteriously skipping atmospheric warming and going directly into the oceans, then there should be a corresponding acceleration in rising sea levels, which isn’t the case.
***************************************************************************************************
Climate scientists are not as creative as astro physicists. When they lost their missing energy they came up with Dark Energy, missing matter becomes Dark Matter. SO do we make missing heat Dark Heat which disappears into the Dark Depths?
Ryan says:
May 28, 2013 at 8:19 pm
“Well Pat, joke or not now you have 12+ comments from people who clearly think that either sea levels are falling or that sea level rise is rapidly falling. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Or is it only you guys who get to read a conspiracy behind every graph?”
It would be “mission accomplished” of the warmist kind only if now every newspaper on the planet would print it – like they did with Jon Cook’s shonky 97%.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of stranglehold on the media.
As Jason Miller pointed out May 28, 2013 at 5:43 pm:
“It is obvious why the bar graph stops at 2011. The data on the CU website shows a sharp increase afterwards. This is absolutely Cherry Picking.
Here’s the current graph from CU Sea Level Research Group –
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2013_rel4/sl_ns_global.png”
it does look like the most egregious cherry picking. Is there some explanation because I thought that we climate sceptics took a higher ground.
Well, some fun at our grandiose leader. Oh, I have a grin, I like political stuff… slowing sea level rise blamed on Bush? or credited to Obama. Lol
The ever forward looking markets are affirmed now in record bull territory. Correction is progressing rationally, such an enormous turn around from the hole that the Republicans dug, deeper than any time since the great depression. Jobs are being added, not subtracted in the last 38 straight months. 6.8 million to be precise, 800,000 in the last 4 months. US Deficit is falling at a faster rate than expected.
Now if someone can steer this great nation in the years ahead through the pressures of an ageing population, rising health care costs, an expansion of federal subsidies for health insurance, and growing interest payments on federal debt when the interest rates eventually go up (return to normal) then Obama and say… hmm maybe Hillary could be chiseled at Mount Rushmore.
Republicans could try recruiting Chelsea.
Kxl will get the go ahead this summer and he is going to rake in a lot more cabbage than the Republicans, the 600,000 jobs spouting conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute did.
If he can walk on water maybe he’s stamped it all down to produce the graph seen above?
It’s about as rational as much else I see spouted off as ‘common sense’ nowadays…..
Could Anthony please explain why he leaves the last years out? Its a bad look, mmmkay.
Jarrett Jones said:
“If I am reading that graph right the “rise of the oceans began to slow” in 2000.”
Which is when I noticed the jets start to become more meridional again and shift equatorward.
Longer lines of air mass mixing, more global cloudiness, higher global albedo and less solar energy getting into the oceans.
Looks more like Bush’s fault to me.
Obama must be prescient. Ocean level appears about to significantly drop.
Obama should also take credit for cooling the planet.
The climate gods appear to be increasing sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere, all months.
Arctic sea ice is starting to ‘recover’ if one’s idea of recovery is a massive amount of sea ice and a cooling planet.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
I would expect the recent uptick to be linked to our being close to the solar max of cycle 24 mitigating the effect of the quieter sun for a little while and the recent La Ninas (or lack of strong El Ninos) that allow some recharging of ocean heat content as explained by Bob Tisdale
I still think the true net position on a decadal basis is a decline in ocean heat content since around 2000 and that CU has not yet got a grip on all the variables and so is showing too high a level after removing the seasonal signal.
The oceanic response to solar effects on global cloudiness takes some time to show up on ocean heat content estimates and sea levels.
Not only do we have to consider seasonal variations but also the progress of individual solar cycles and the variations in intensity of successive El Ninos and La Ninas.
Taking a view of trends over successive decades as per Figure 1 is far more likely to draw out longer term trends in the size of any anomaly than the CU graph.
The last couple of years doesn’t affect the decadal trend much so of the two styles of presentation I am more critical of the CU style in terms of cherry picking.