![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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given we are in an interglacial warming period then warming is to be EXPECTED. I would even bet on ‘records’ [ie recent ones] being ‘broken’ given we know the arctic has been 4 deg warmer.
the further you get away from real measured data with adjustments and interpretations the less truth picture there is in them.
i am totally amazed some are basing climate predictions on the last 30 years data. Without contextualising within ice ages frankly all people are looking at is noise from which one can extend 100 year predictions lines and either say we are going to fry or freeze.
Nick Stokes (9:29 and 10:52 pm) doesn’t seem to have read to the end. (I was beginning to wonder myself ‘O ye of little faith?’).
‘ “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.” ‘
“Geo models. But it isn’t a subtle calculation. We measure the land rebound. It’s like unloading a ship in a confined dock …” Nick Stokes 10:52.
===================================
But it’s not ships in docks it’s tectonic plates and ice sheets that disappeared thousands of years ago.
To paraphrase Nigel Lawson re global surface temperature record, to ‘estimate’ (roughly calculate) the assumed ‘glacial isostatic adjustment’ to tenths of a mm per year sounds like a pretty heroic task to me if not palpably absurd.
Rahmstorf is Germany’s big alarmist and typical activist, a sea level guy, who also adds water reservoir volume on land to sea level while hand waving away well water pumping. The site on the blogroll here, http://climatesanity.wordpress.com by Tom Moriarty teases though odd claims that the term “sea level” can still be used on plots of *virtual* sea level where “adjustments” no longer act to remove error but to move the plots *away* from real coastline values.
A sense of perspective is needed here since the rabbit hole is so terribly deep in climatology, namely that this sort of deception isn’t allowed in proper science, at all. Actual tide gauges show utterly no trend change in their worldwide average, here extracted in black with added trendline, from Church & White 2011:
http://i51.tinypic.com/25q4pd5.jpg
Nigel S says: May 4, 2014 at 12:24 am
“Consensus estimates of recent GMSL rise are about 2mm/year.”
That’s GMSL rise, not the GIA adjustment.
Christopher Hanley says: May 4, 2014 at 12:32 am
“But it’s not ships in docks it’s tectonic plates and ice sheets that disappeared thousands of years ago”
Isostatic rebound doesn’t change the volume of the Earth. If land rises, magma moves in (underneath) from elsewhere. The solid surface has to drop somewhere else. Basically, GIA is just figuring out the extra volume of land above sea level, from measured isostatic rise.
But if the land is rebounding in the north/south, wouldn’t the water flow to the equator. Thus making it appear that levels are increasing. So if you add the expected land rise to the water level rise in the north/south, then shouldn’t it be subtracted from the rise around equator. At the least some fraction of it (considering the difference in size).
Whoops, where’d the whole trendline go? Here it is:
…and that plot reveals a constant sea level rise of 1.9 mm/yr.
My Dear Lord Monckton, empirical evidence and theory shows there is next to zero CO2-AGW. The mechanism is strong negative feedback and there is good experimental evidence of its operation.
The World is now cooling, the ‘hiatus’ really being the graph peak. The fact that the Sun’s surface magnetic field is to fall below 1500 Gauss, hence no sunspots, means cloud area will increase, reducing SW input into the oceans, the ONLY ocean warming mechanism.
So, we’ll soon see a real fall in OHC. A contributory factor is the ‘Asian Brown Cloud’, first seen in 1999. This gives SW thermalisation in the atmosphere thus reducing direct ocean warming. So, we actually have the reversal of numbskull Trenberth’s proposition, comparative ocean cooling. This is probably the main cause of the fall of ocean level rise rate.
@William Howard Feynman
The geology of some parts of the Mediterranean is interesting.
Crustal extension leads to fracturing and block formation, and the blocks then rotating.
I’ve been to the Pelopponese, where you can see sunken ancient greek villages only tens of meters from
other remains that were previously at sea level and are now meters above.
No sea level rise or fall necessary, it’s all down to crustal movement, with earthquakes of course.
@ferdberple
Reefs are living things. They grow, and where there is a (relative) sea level rise that’s not too fast, they’ll keep up.
That doesn’t mean that I think there has been/is/going to be a run-to-mummy 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.”
A very good illustration of the difference between “consensus science” (science by committee votes) and skeptic science (science based on the facts & Moncktonian reasoning).
Steve Goddard added a sense of above-the-rabbit-hole perspective:
“Saddened by the fact that sea level is barely rising, climate scientists made up a fake upwards sea level adjustment called the Global Isostatic Adjustment. It is based on a theory that sea level rise would be 10% faster if not for glacial rebound.
Using that adjustment, they will eventually virtually drown New York, even if sea level doesn’t rise at all.
I propose an equally valid adjustment – the Glacial Contribution Adjustment – which compensates for the excess water in the oceans due to glacial melt. Sea level rise rates should be adjusted downwards by 1 mm/year to show what the rate would be if not for glacial melt. The logic behind this adjustment is identical to the GIA, except for one problem – it works against funding instead of in favor of it.”
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/understanding-the-global-isostatic-adjustment/
The thing is though, this isostatic adjustment is indeed small and also *constant* over time as so far applied so various up-curving “sea level” plots must be created by other types of “adjustments” in order to afford the properly alarming curvature up, up and away from reality on the ground.
A lack of warming can be dismissed with the incorrect hand waving heat is hiding in the ocean, explaining global cooling will be a tougher problem for the warmists. The sudden increase in sea ice both poles and the observed cooling of the ocean is an indication of what to expect next.
A super El Niño is warmist wishful thinking. The reduction in solar heliospheric pressure of 40% (See AGU 2013 fall presentation solar magnetic cycle 24 changes) is causing the magnetic field strength of solar wind bursts to be reduced. The solar wind bursts remove ions from the atmosphere at high latitudes and at the equator by creating a space charge differential in the ionosphere (mechanism electroscavenging). At the equator the amount of ions affects the number and size of cloud drops which in turn affects the tropical clouds’ reflective/transmission properties in terms of upward long wave radiation.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2014/anomnight.5.1.2014.gif
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/images/iphone.anomaly.global.png
http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2012/02/09/understanding-the-global-warming-debate/
“The problem for global warming supporters is they actually need for past warming from CO2 to be higher than 0.7C. If the IPCC is correct that based on their high-feedback models we should expect to see 3C of warming per doubling of CO2, looking backwards this means we should already have seen about 1.5C of CO2-driven warming based on past CO2 increases. But no matter how uncertain our measurements, it’s clear we have seen nothing like this kind of temperature rise. Past warming has in fact been more consistent with low or even negative feedback assumptions.”
Analysis of top of the earth radiation changes to short term changes in ocean temperatures supports the assertion that the planet resists (negative feedback) rather than amplifies (positive feedback) forcing changes. Consequence of negative feedback is a doubling of atmospheric CO2 results in less than 1C warming.
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2
The observed latitudinal pattern of warming (high latitudinal warming, no net warming in the tropics) does not match the pattern of warming that is predicted to occur if CO2 was the forcing mechanism.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf
Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth
The global atmospheric temperature anomalies of Earth reached a maximum in 1998 which has not been exceeded during the subsequent 10 years (William: 17 years and counting). The global anomalies are calculated from the average of climate effects occurring in the tropical and the extratropical latitude bands. El Niño/La Niña effects in the tropical band are shown to explain the 1998 maximum while variations in the background of the global anomalies largely come from climate effects in the northern extratropics. These effects do not have the signature associated with CO2 climate forcing. (William: This observation indicates something is fundamental incorrect with the IPCC models, likely negative feedback in the tropics due to increased or decreased planetary cloud cover to resist forcing). However, the data show a small underlying positive trend that is consistent with CO2 climate forcing with no-feedback. (William: This indicates a significant portion of the 20th century warming has due to something rather than CO2 forcing.)
The recent atmospheric global temperature anomalies of the Earth have been shown to consist of independent effects in different latitude bands. The tropical latitude band variations are strongly correlated with ENSO effects. The maximum seen in 1998 is due to the El Niño of that year. The effects in the northern extratropics are not consistent with CO2 forcing alone.
An underlying temperature trend of 0.062±0.010ºK/ decade was estimated from data in the tropical latitude band. Corrections to this trend value from solar and aerosols climate forcings are estimated to be a fraction of this value. The trend expected from CO2climate forcing is 0.070g ºC/decade, where g is the gain due to any feedback. If the underlying trend is due to CO2 then g ~1. Models giving values of greater than 1 would need a negative climate forcing to partially cancel that from CO2. This negative forcing cannot be from aerosols.
These conclusions are contrary to the IPCC [2007] statement: “[M]ost of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Nick Stokes says:
May 3, 2014 at 9:29 pm
“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.
=====================================
It is bogus, because it is not an observed rise, and it is not indicative of SEA LEVEL. Sea level is what it is, regardless of where the ocean bottom is. It inflates the badly failed sea level projections so common in the alarmist camp, and is in fact a large portion of the actual rise as presented by numerous professional scientist who study this,
LewSkannen says:
May 3, 2014 at 7:57 pm
…
Hey presto, like the 6′s in the division 16/64 they both cancel out and nothing changes.
…
I’m pretty sure you mean the “16’s in the division 16/64 … At least, I hope so.
David A says: May 4, 2014 at 1:53 am
“Sea level is what it is, regardless of where the ocean bottom is.”
It depends on what you want to know. A GIA correction is applied if you want to know about the change in water volume. As the Colorado site says:
“We apply a correction for GIA because we want our sea level time series to reflect purely oceanographic phenomena. In essence, we would like our GMSL time series to be a proxy for ocean water volume changes.”
Nick Stokes says:
May 4, 2014 at 2:14 am
David A says: May 4, 2014 at 1:53 am
“…Sea level is what it is, regardless of where the ocean bottom is….”
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
It depends on what you want to know. A GIA correction is applied if you want to know about the change in water volume. As the Colorado site says:
===============================================
Sorry Nick, that just makes them dishonest. They, and YOU know, that SL rise is used to SCARE folk, to lobby for social change which somehow always demands greater power for central goverment. Also they and YOU know that if the threat of SL rise increases, so does grant money.
BTW Nick they should stop callin it Sea Level, and instead start calling it “Sea Volume” chart. Or more like Sea Volume WAG estimate.
Duster says:
May 4, 2014 at 2:03 am
I suppose he means that 16/64 = 1/4, therefore the two sixes can indeed be removed without anything changing.
Nick Stokes says: “It depends on what you want to know. A GIA correction is applied if you want to know about the change in water volume…”
What I’d want to know (1) if I lived near the shore and (2) if my home was 20 feet above sea level was how fast sea level was rising relative to my home. I wouldn’t care about the change in the volume of the oceans.
Regards
Bob Tisdale says: May 4, 2014 at 2:50 am
“What I’d want to know (1) if I lived near the shore and (2) if my home was 20 feet above sea level was how fast sea level was rising relative to my home.”
Then for a start you won’t be thinking about 1 inch per century GIA. Especially as there’s no reason to expect it to change.
You may not be worried much about the current 1 inch/decade GMSL rise either. It’s probably not huge relative to the vertical motion of your land. But it may change – and monitoring ocean volume is the way to track that.
History is an inconvenient thing to the megalomaniac mind-set, which is why they need to “adjust” the past. What many do not understand is that sometimes they themselves wind up erased from the picture, as some who shared power with St*lin discovered, and what the teachers of China discovered after supporting M*o in the “Great Leap Forward,” only to be purged in the “Cultural Revolution.”
Despite all efforts to burn the history books, history is passed on as stories and as lore, and especially as language. People who study language, such as J R R Tolkien, become aware of hints of history, of forgotten events and travels, which cannot be historically verified. (Which is why Tolkien’s trilogy about make-believe “hobbits” seems to “ring true,” [truer than Climate Science], though it is obviously fiction, and there is no such thing as walking trees.) For example, the Finns and Hungarians speak languages that are related to each other, but very different from other European languages, though it is not easy to trace their paths backwards to a common homeland with precision.
I think one reason sea-level-rise has a hold on the psyche of ordinary men is because, back in the dim mists of most people’s collective memory, is the memory of colossal disasters, whether they were raging storms, tsunamis caused by earthquakes, or an Atlantis-drowning rise in sea-levels after the ice age. Even the Navajo and Apache have some odd taboos involving eating fish, which seems odd for people living in a desert, until you trace the roots of their language, and it leads you to other tribes on the Pacific coast and up in Alaska.
However just because there is some echo of past disasters in the subject of sea-level-rise does not make the frettings of worry-wart Climate Scientists any realer than Tolkien’s walking trees. In fact, if I am going to worry, I think it would be more fun to worry about sea-levels rapidly sinking at the onset of a new ice-age. (And a movie about sea-levels sinking would be more interesting and original than the tiresome old theme that forever has the Statue of Liberty poking a torch up through the waves.)
Nick Stokes says:
May 4, 2014 at 3:05 am
Bob Tisdale says: May 4, 2014 at 2:50 am
“What I’d want to know (1) if I lived near the shore and (2) if my home was 20 feet above sea level was how fast sea level was rising relative to my home.”
———————–
Then for a start you won’t be thinking about 1 inch per century GIA. Especially as there’s no reason to expect it to change.
You may not be worried much about the current 1 inch/decade GMSL rise either. It’s probably not huge relative to the vertical motion of your land. But it may change – and monitoring ocean volume is the way to track that.
———————————————————–
Really????, so you are concerned that the rebound from the last Ice Age is going to end real soon??? As I said, instead of calling their graph a Sea Level chart, they should call it an “Ocean Volume WAG”
@Nick Stokes
I was going to reply to your original post but this is just priceless!
“It depends on what you want to know. A GIA correction is applied if you want to know about the change in water volume.”
I call BS on that! Good grief! Talk about global sea level has turned into a discussion on the volume of the oceans? What then is the threat from? More volume with hardly any change in sea level?
This is nonsense. Either the land is threatened by sea levels rising (net) or not. If a change in volume poses no threat to anyone or anything, then it is not a threat. Modest increase, modest concern to be tracked.
The claim, for years now, is that the sea level is rising ‘at an increasing rate’ and going to flood the land and make everyone move out of coastal cities and away from flooded low-lying areas. I don’t think this can be transmuted into a ‘volume problem’ with an alarmist wave-of-convenience.
It is this level of perfidy that drives people out of the alarmist camp. People can put up with a certain amount of noble cause corruption and ‘team playing’ but this is beyond the pale. Humankind is threatened by an increase in the volume of the oceans? Which is not accelerating? Which is not threating land in any significant manner? Which is caused in significant part (40%?) by isostatic rising of the land over huge portions of the dry surface and the deepening of the oceans?
Several contributors have already pointed out that if the sea is not rising relative to the land ‘at an alarming and dangerous rate’ then it is a non-issue. Long may it continue and long may the interglacial last, thank you very much. Long may the oceans deepen. Seal level rise is no threat to Sweden at all, for example, no matter how much they worry about it. Nor Hudson Bay in Canada.
Now, just about the stupidest thing anyone could offer would be to kill the economy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to ‘counter the effects of isostatic rebound’ but no doubt we will hear tell of it. At least the CO2+greenhouse+alarm story has a shred of believability, even if it is not well supported by data.
>“We apply a correction for GIA because we want our sea level time series to reflect purely oceanographic phenomena. In essence, we would like our GMSL time series to be a proxy for ocean water volume changes.”
Well jolly good for them. But science is calling and they want their metric back. They need it to report Sea Level.
I am confused about sea level measurments after watching this video,
How can people be concerned about Millimetres when this video says (at the end)
that average sea level can only be measured to the nearest Metre?