![Monster_from_the_Ocean_Floor_FilmPoster[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/monster_from_the_ocean_floor_filmposter1.jpeg?w=300&resize=300%2C234)
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Willie Soon sends me a fascinating paper by Beenstock et al. on sea-level rise. Beenstock, famous for taking a down-to-earth approach to climate issues, asked the question how much warming the tide gauges show if one does not tamper with them.
The official sea level data are fiddled by an artifice known as the “global isostatic adjustment”. The inconvenient truth that sea level is not changing much must be concealed, so an enormous, bogus addition to the actual trend is made.
The excuse for this overblown addition, which accounts for a very large fraction of the difference between the satellite and tide-gauge records, is that the land is still rising and the sea sinking because of the transfer of miles-thick ice from the land to the oceans that ended 9000 years ago. Therefore, the story goes, sea level would be falling were it not for global warming.
Hey presto! Sea level rise is instantly made to accelerate.
Niklas Mörner calls these tamperings “personal calibrations” – a polite form for what is in essence fiction. After all, in the century to 1950, we could not have had any significant influence on climate or on sea level. Yet sea level rose.
In the past decade or two sea level has not really been rising much, as the Envisat and then the Grace satellites confirmed, suggesting that all of the major global temperature records are correct in showing that global temperature has not been rising recently.
So there is no particular anthropogenic reason for ocean heat content to rise appreciably. Those who say, with the relentlessly wrong-about-everything Kevin Trenberth, that “the ocean ate my global warming” are simply wrong.
Meanwhile, the Pause continues. The RSS satellite data for April 2014 are now available. The updated graph shows no global warming for 17 years 9 months.
Enjoy The Pause while it lasts. A Kelvin wave is galloping across the Pacific, and the usual suspects would be praying for a super El Niño if they had the sense to credit the Old Religion rather than the New Superstition. Already the well-paid extremists are predicting a new record annual mean surface temperature either in 2014 or in 2015.
Their prediction for 2014 will probably not come true. Four months without any warming make it difficult to imagine that this will be a record year for global temperature, though it is barely possible.
The notion of a new record temperature next year is less implausible, particularly if there is a strong or prolonged el Niño followed by a weak la Niña. As Roy Spencer points out on his hard-headed and ever-sensible blog, all things being equal one would expect temperature records to be broken from time to time, for CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere and some warming – eventually – is to be expected.
However, as the also hard-headed Dick Lindzen points out, the new record, when it happens, will be hundredths of a degree above the old, and it will be well within the natural variability of the climate. When warming eventually resumes, probably towards the end of this year, for El Niño is a seasonal event, it will probably not be much to write home about. And the following La Niña may cancel much of it. But that will not prevent the usual suspects from screeching that It’s Worse Than We Ever Thought.
Beenstock knocks that one on the head. Here is his conclusion about the rate of sea level rise: “Consensus estimates of recent GMSL rise are about 2mm/year. Our estimate is 1mm/year. We suggest that the difference between the two estimates is induced by the widespread use of data reconstructions which inform the consensus estimates.”
In short, They made stuff up. Again. And neither the politicians nor the journalists asked any of the right questions.
When Niklas Mörner was invited a couple of years ago to give a presentation on sea-level rise at an international climate conference in Cambridge, he arranged for a copy of a paper by him for the layman to be circulated. The organizers agreed, but the moment they saw the title, Sea Level Is Not Rising, they not only refused to allow the paper to be circulated – without actually reading it – but went round collecting the few samizdat copies that had already reached the delegates.
This offensive and now routine intolerance of what is now daily being confirmed as the objective truth should not be tolerated for a moment longer.
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OK. So they include a factor to account for land rising in their estimates of sea level rise. They can now include the same factor in their estimates of how much we need to worry about sea level rise.
Hey presto, like the 6’s in the division 16/64 they both cancel out and nothing changes.
Except that they have just pocketed another splodge of our wonga and kept their scam alive for another day…
Concur. As Steve Goddard has pointed out here: http://bit.ly/1nfdNxI, 85% of all tide gauges read below the claimed 3.2mm per year. Taking the average of the listed gauges, it is 1.14mm/yr (this includes wildly sinking and rising gauges and is not an area weighted average)
Do you have a link that shows that GRACE disagrees?
we could have had any significant influence on climate or on sea level”
Missing a “not”
[ fixed thx -mod]
Thanks, Lord Monckton. Good article.
See The Great Sealevel Humbug: There Is No Alarming Sea Level Rise! (by Nils-Axel Mörner, 21st Century Science & Technology, Winter 2010/2011, Science and Public Policy Institute Reprint, 27 May 2011), at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/the_great_sealevel_humbug.html
See Maldives Will Avoid Extinction (Nils-Axel Mörner, Video 06:20 ClimateClips.com), at http://climateclips.com/archives/117
Chinatown, Broome was built 100 years ago at the high tide mark to service the pearling fleet. If the seas were rising even 2mm a year, this business centre of the town would be underwater at every high spring tide. That just does not happen. http://pindanpost.com/2012/12/07/actually-no-rise-in-100-years/
I spent a long time working in a fish factory here at high tide, with feet getting wet during high king tides, still not higher than a hundred years ago, except for the odd passing cyclone.
Six Grave Scientific Errors and the history of an absurd idea David Kear.
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/david-kear-former-director-general-nz-dsir-says-a-non-existent-threat/
Regarding sea level changes:
One only has to look around the Mediterranean basin to see towns that once were once ports and are now inland due to sea levels falling; similarly, there is no shortage of archaeological sites in which the towns and other structures are submerged well under the sea.
There are numerous documentaries which show scantily clad divers swimming amongst submerged Roman statues and structures.
Interestingly enough, there is a conspicuous silence regarding these historical events, and their reflection on natural variations in sea levels; none of which were caused by global warming. Or maybe they were caused by the new physics of heat sneaking into the cold deep ocean?
“The inconvenient truth that sea level is not changing much must be concealed, so an enormous, bogus addition to the actual trend is made.”>
Why no actual numbers quoted anywhere?
It’s about 0.3 mm/year. Maybe 10-15% of the quoted rise.
And it isn’t bogus.
We spent a year sailing the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific. The charts were drawn by none other than William Bligh, when he sailed with Cook on the Resolution 1776-1780. They are a masterpiece of precision, from a time before chronometers were available to calculate longitude.
There is a reef on the charts, in the Vava’u island group. The reef is important because if provides a short cut between two major sailing areas, cutting a day off travel time. The chart shows 1 fathom depth on the reef (at low tide). Our boat also draws 6 feet (1 fathom). At low tide we used to bump across the reef in the slightest waves, as we made our way across the shortcut.
More than 200 years after the charts were drawn, not enough sea level rise to notice.
http://www.vavau.to/index.html
The official sea level data are fiddled by an artifice known as the “global isostatic adjustment”. The inconvenient truth that sea level is not changing much must be concealed, so an enormous, bogus addition to the actual trend is made.
It’s fiddled with more than just that. The Internet Archives WayBack Machine allows us to see what their data said ten years ago:
Here’s Colorado University’s 2004 Release 1.2 which when analysed for the rate of sea level rise comes to 2.6 mm/yr for the period of 1994 to 2004
Here’s CU’s data as it appears today 2014 Release 3 and today the analysis of that same period from 1994 to 2004 yields a rate of 3.5 mm/yr.
That’s nearly a full mm/yr of fiddling.
William yes you are right, although Willis challenged this but around the Med there is evidence of sunken villas, the ones Julius Caesar used to visit. Very volcanic undersea around there including Mt.Vesuvius. And the Firey fields. Still advertised as a tourist attraction as it was in the Roman era. Where if birds flew over they would drop dead from the fumes. No way would I visit Naples or Pompeii, because one day Mt Vesuvius will blow again, like in 79 AD.
“Why no actual numbers quoted anywhere?”
I have to agree with Nick. Christopher’s article is full of assertions, but strangely free of actual science.
Thank you again Lord Monckton – and Andres Valencia (above post: May 3, 2014 at 8:24 pm) for recommending Nils-Axel’s excellent report on “sea-level-gate” – as he often refers to it! A must- read for all WUWT regulars. I’ve absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge from this, particularly the section on the 10mm exaggerated difference between raw data and GIA ‘corrected’ data and the IPCC ‘boy-scouts’ who conveniently removed the tree. Very good.
It is patently and painfully obvious, objectivity has no place in the temple of CAGW.
Gawd, Christopher has actually found a place where people with call him “Lord” with a straight face?
“It’s about 0.3 mm/year. Maybe 10-15% of the quoted rise.
And it isn’t bogus …”
==========================================
Quite so, the models say so:
“Averaged over the global ocean surface, the mean rate of sea level change due to GIA [glacial isostatic adjustment] is independently estimated from models at -0.3 mm/yr …”.
May 3, 2014 at 9:29 pm | Nick Stokes says:
Come now, Nick … here’s Kear’s numbers:
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/david-kear-former-director-general-nz-dsir-says-a-non-existent-threat/
Mr. Monckton, I hope that the new study will be useful:
“We report on the existence and nature of Holocene solar and climatic variations on centennial to millennial timescales. We introduce a new solar activity proxy, based on nitrate (NO3−) concentration from the Talos Dome ice core, East Antarctica. We also use a new algorithm for computing multiple-cross wavelet spectra in time–frequency space that is generalized for multiple time series (beyond two). Our results provide a new interpretive framework for relating Holocene solar activity variations on centennial to millennial timescales to co-varying climate proxies drawn from a widespread area around the globe. Climatic proxies used represent variation in the North Atlantic Ocean, Western Pacific Warm Pool, Southern Ocean and the East Asian monsoon regions. Our wavelet analysis identifies fundamental solar modes at 2300-yr (Hallstattzeit), 1000-yr (Eddy), and 500-yr (unnamed) periodicities, leaves open the possibility that the 1500–1800-yr cycle may either be fundamental or derived, and identifies intermediary derived cycles at 700-yr and 300-yr that may mark rectified responses of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation to external solar modulation and pacing. Dating uncertainties suggest that the 1500-yr and 1800-yr cycles described in the literature may represent either the same or two separate cycles, but in either case, and irrespective too of whether it is a fundamental or derived mode in the sense of Dima and Lohmann (2009), the 1500–1800-yr periodicity is widely represented in a large number of paleoclimate proxy records. It is obviously premature to reject possible links between changing solar activity at these multiple scales and the variations that are commonly observed in paleoclimatic records.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825214000518
May 3, 2014 at 10:02 pm | drumphil says:
Is he not entitled to be addressed according to his title? It may be an English thing but so what. Funny though, I read your name as “dumbphil” … blame it on the ADD.
“relentlessly wrong-about-everything Kevin Trenberth”- you forgot to add Nobel-lareate (shared) which is still blatantly on his CV.
Streetcred says: May 3, 2014 at 10:36 pm
“Come now, Nick … here’s Kear’s numbers”
Well, I see he quotes his 1957 paper, but I can’t see any numbers for Glacial Isostatic Rebound.
Christopher Hanley says: May 3, 2014 at 10:13 pm
“Quite so, the models say so…”
Geo models. But it isn’t a subtle calculation. We measure the land rebound. It’s like unloading a ship in a confined dock. The ship rises, the water drops. How much? Archimedes could have told you.
I want to see that film.
In the meantime, in between time, Lord Monckton, do you have a news report or similar reference for the Niklas Mörner story? I am happy to take you at your word, but I would like to pass this story on to some people who will be less trusting.
The adjustment is not bogus, and it’s not large, amounting to one meter every 3300 years. It is, however, a small overstating of the rise as felt by an observer standing (for a long time) on the seashore and one wonders whether the scientists who compute all this would have made the adjustment if it were running the opposite direction.
Sunday Stupidity . . . .
Alarmist Neighbour to Skeptic GeeJam:
“You know nothing about the world at all GeeJam, despite what you say – sea levels are rising to dangerous levels – especially in the Maldives.”
Skeptic GeeJam to Alarmist Neighbour (after slight pause):
“Does that apply to all the islands in the Pacific Ocean then?”
Alarmist Neighbour to Skeptic GeeJam:
“Yes, all of them are threatened”
Skeptic GeeJam to Alarmist Neighbour:
“I find it fascinating that, on one hand, your neurotic need to ignore my skeptical views are based on what you are led to believe is the truth, and on the other hand, you don’t have an atlas.”
“The excuse for this overblown addition, which accounts for a very large fraction of the difference between the satellite and tide-gauge records, is the land is still rising and the sea sinking because of the transfer of miles-thick ice from the land to the oceans that ended 9000 years ago”
Isn’t there a major flaw here, in that the rate of sea level rise against land rebound from the last ice age shouldn’t have to be recalibrated, since given that the land has been rising since 9000 years ago, any change in sea level rate rise due to global warming should STILL show up as an anomaly against the long term background isostatic rebound from glacial ice.
In other words, the fact that the land has been rising for 9000 years shouldn’t make any difference- the sea level rate of rise should still show up against this background, if present AGW was dominant in causing the sea level rise. The fact that the rate of sea level rise is not increasing shows that AGW is not a dominant factor in sea level rise.