Observed sea level rise still is (just) within the 'natural range'

Sad news for sea level “pushers”, but my back yard is about 900 ft above sea level, and I can find sea shell fossils….
http://northtexasfossils.com/walnut.htm

For those looking at individual tide gauges, don’t forget the local subsidence/rebound rates, which are starting to get really nailed down now since many GPS stations have been around long enough now to have a solid number.
A map below of the subsidence/rebound rates which have been confirmed ranging from +12.0 mms/year to -8.0 mms/year.
http://www.sonel.org/IMG/png/ulr5_vvf-2.png
Table of 326 locations: V_GPS is the vertical motion up and down.
http://www.sonel.org/IMG/txt/ulr5_vertical_velocities.txt
Might have to search around the site a little to match up the locations and the 4 letter symbol. Close-by tide gauge data also available. But it takes some sleuthing and going back and forth to match up the locations.
http://www.sonel.org/?lang=en

Strange how climate scientists never refer to the single most accurate record of sea levels around the globe. The British Admiralty Nautical Charts.
To a precision of 1 foot these charts show the sea levels around the globe, as they were 2-3 hundred years ago. You will recognize the names on these charts. Cook, Vancouver, Bligh, Flinders.
Now for something no one tells you. Almost every chart in modern use was drawn from the BA charts. Almost nowhere on earth has been resurveyed. Yet these charts, 2-3 hundred years old, still are accurate today and in widespread use.
And something else no one tells you. These charts do have small errors in longitude, because they were draw before chronometers were available. These charts were drawn back in the age when an hourglass was the most precise timing instrument available, and to calculate longitude you need accurate timing.
And yet, these charts were drawn to a level of accuracy hard to duplicate even with modern chronometers and high precision sextants. Only the invention of GPS has resulted in greater precision.
And what do we see on the BA charts? There is a chart datum, showing us the correction for GPS. Typically given as WGS84. But nowhere is there a correction for global sea level rise.
These very charts on which so many lives and businesses depend every day. These charts that are corrected for inaccuracy in fine detail, nowhere do they show a correction for global sea level rise.
And yet climate scientists continue to claim there is significant seal level rise happening. Apparently they never learned to read a nautical chart.

They are wrong. A century’s worth of sea level rise will be 24.6 centimeters, just under ten inches. That is because for the last 80 years sea level rise has been linear at 2.46 millimeters per year. This is corrected for water held in storage by all dams built since 1900. Something that has been linear this long is not about to change anytime soon. Read Chao, Yu, and Li in Science.

ferd berple
‘Strange how climate scientists never refer to the single most accurate record of sea levels around the globe. The British Admiralty Nautical Charts.
To a precision of 1 foot these charts show the sea levels around the globe, as they were 2-3 hundred years ago. You will recognize the names on these charts. Cook, Vancouver, Bligh, Flinders.
Now for something no one tells you. Almost every chart in modern use was drawn from the BA charts. Almost nowhere on earth has been resurveyed. Yet these charts, 2-3 hundred years old, still are accurate today and in widespread use.
And something else no one tells you. These charts do have small errors in longitude, because they were draw before chronometers were available. These charts were drawn back in the age when an hourglass was the most precise timing instrument available, and to calculate longitude you need accurate timing.’
[snip. Read the site Policy re: forbidden labels. ~mod]

These very charts on which so many lives and businesses depend every day. These charts that are corrected for inaccuracy in fine detail, nowhere do they show a correction for global sea level rise.
That’s because the total rise over the last 143 years has been less than 9 inches, even according to climate scientists (neglecting the uncertainty, which is around an inch either way, mostly from the beginning part of the record). And before that, the rate of SLR was very likely negligible or even negative; if one goes back to the eighteenth century or earlier, one really IS in the LIA and ocean levels actually diminished in the LIA.
The problem is that ocean levels are not even approximately constant, especially not over geological time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
For once, a figure with error bars (hooray!). Or, over only the Holocene, this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Sea_Level.png
One can ignore the black curve in this — it is nearly meaningless — the data speaks for itself (and note as well that the data speaking contains substantial errors and putative corrections for isostatic rebound and other things that we find difficult to measure today with sensitive instruments). In other words, one should take the curve and data alike with a grain of salt. One can see this because otherwise we have numerous absurdities in the data given the error bars. Indeed, nearly the entire figure is an absurdity given the error bars. It seems a bit unlikely that sea level was between 1 and 2 meters higher and lower but only at certain points even after correction for land rise, yet there are data points that state this with enormous confidence (and the figure alleges that they already left out any real “outliers” — I wonder what a number had to be to be considered an outlier!).
The immediate difficulty is that sea level has probably fluctuated on a scale of order meters over the Holocene, and plateaued roughly 2000 years ago (where I would argue that we cannot tell from the data presented if it has been higher or lower in the 2000 year past than it is today, because the answer very likely depends on where you look and things we cannot possibly measure accurately 2000 years after the fact, making answers highly uncertain).
Columbus sailed the ocean blue — 1/3 of the way — only 511 years ago. We have absolutely no human records of any value for more than a tiny fraction of the globe from earlier than this. Trying to determine the absolute radius of surface points on the Earth 1000 years ago (needed in order to correct such biological or physical traces as survive) is an exercise in imagination, not science. All we are left with is that is most unlikely that sea level is static, or would have been static if it weren’t for human activity, plus the reliable observations of tide gauge sea level for well over 100 years revealing a rate of growth over that interval of around 1/6 of a meter/century.
To get an idea of how uncertain things are, here is a nearly pristine graph of tide gauge data from only 23 sites picked for geological stability:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png
This data is even flatter than the previous figure I linked covering the same general time scale. It shows even less SL rise — around 20 cm — from 1880 to the present (ignoring the apples-to-oranges satellite record at the very end as not yet being particularly comparable, to say the least). Interestingly, this figure does not continue the tide gauge data to the present (or any of the curves past 2003), although surely it is available, perhaps because it appears to flatten (pause) as of around 1997. Hmm. But 20 cm over the 120 years plus observed over tectonically stable sites is, hmm, less than 8 whole inches, and this curve doesn’t show the slightest hint of any acceleration after around 1910.
And look at the spread! We have tectonically stable actual tide gauges showing multiyear peaks and troughs of 10-15 cm — apparent SLR fluctuations of as much as 6 inches over a few years seem to be the rule rather than the exception. I frankly find this difficult to believe or understand — multiyear persistent high/low pressure centers? Space alien gravitational death rays? Systematic error in the gauges themselves? Dark matter induced gravitational fluctuations caused by the Earth passing through invisible bands of the stuff as the Sun proceeds through Galactic space? A fifth force? This isn’t inferred stuff from coral reefs or algae accretions, this is readings from a physical instrument on a solid object directly attached to geologically stable ground. One has to conclude that the ocean itself has substantial multiinch multiyear fluctuations in SLR, making even very recent observational data highly uncertain and making data from the distant past even more so.
At this point I think it is safe enough to conclude that the sea’s level is rising, very slowly, at a reasonably averaged rate of less than 8 inches per century. There is absolutely no reason looking at the data itself to think that there is any anthropogenic influence on this rate whatsoever. If you showed it to a disinterested observer from outer space (the aliens using the gravitational rays, perhaps) and said “Look at this tide gauge data! Should we be worried about SLR of a meter over the next century?” they’d look at you as if you didn’t have six heads.
COULD it happen? Sure! Could it not happen? Sure! That’s the funny thing about the future — we don’t really know what will happen until it does. All we can say at this point is that there is very little good reason based on the actual data to fear anything like 80 cm of SLR by 2100. To come up with a number like 80 cm, you need predictive models. To have predictive models, you need models that actually have predictive skill.
And that is currently what we lack.
rgb

Max Hugoson,
“3mm per year… And the satellite accuracy is????”
Let’s see, they are measuring the surface of a fluid in motion that can vary greatly in the vertical axis over short horizontal distances. Personally, I have a hard time believing it can be measured more accurately than +/- 1m.

When I hear that Nils-Axel Mörner is panicking over sea level rise, I’ll worry. Until then, not.