![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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Ferdberple,
encompass its excursion?
j ferguson says:
May 4, 2014 at 7:26 am
But ferdbrple, the center of mass of the earth is not stationary with relation to the surface. Or do you think it is?
==========
the surface of the earth moves, which is why it is not a good reference to establish anything. WGS84 does not move relative to the earth. It rotates with the earth, such that it proves a fixed reference from which to measure the latitude, longitude and height of any point on earth. And it is an international recognized standard widely used in existing measurement of the ocean depths and ocean/land boundary.
If the dimensions of a sphere were estimated to encompass the center of mass of the earth, what would be the radius of that sphere?
============
the center of mass is a point. a point has no radius.
Having been on board an aircraft carrier off the coast of Norway in a force11 storm with waves breaking over the flight deck (80ft above nominal water level) , I find a few millimetres here or there are, frankly, irrelevant.
David Chappell says:
May 4, 2014 at 7:52 am
off the coast of Norway in a force11 storm
=============
The true origin of the Fear of God. Being on the ocean in a storm. In a small boat you pray you have sea room, lash everything down, wedge yourself into the smallest bunk you can find and go to sleep. if you wake up, you have survived the storm.
ferd,
But you need to know where the point of center of mass is, especially when you use gps or other satellite based measurement systems (techniques) to resolve the elevation of a position on earth to say a tenth of a MM.
ferdberple says:
May 4, 2014 at 7:50 am
If the dimensions of a sphere were estimated to encompass the center of mass of the earth, what would be the radius of that sphere?
============
the center of mass is a point. a point has no radius.
_________________________
Encompassing excursions…
The powers that mis-inform realize the rising ocean meme is dead(or almost dead) so on to “Acidification of the oceans will kill EVERYTHING” meme
Bill Illis:
The problem with GPS is accuracy. Or lack of it.. Altitude measurements have a standard deviation of about 10 meters. Hard to measure a few mm/yr with that. (This based on actual experience.) A matter of geometry, satellites 12,000 miles up, and positions not known quite that well. Same with horizontal location. Some folks claim centimeter precision (a paper stated this back in the 70’s), experience shows a few meters at best, even with WAAS or DGPS. Raw, 3-5 meter standard deviation. Good for finding a favorite fishing spot, not so good for millimeter changes.
Of course, with proper “adjustment”, they can prove anything.
No amount of mental masturbation will make it “not bogus”.
No real time to weigh in on all the points brought up, so let me just say that I agree with Nick Stokes pretty much across the board in his comments. Well, except one. His metaphor for the adjustment isn’t so much like unloading a boat (a problem I’m fond of assigning my students, BTW:-) and more like me heating up my beer wort in a pot that expands. If the base area of the pot increases at the same rate that volume of the beer thermally expands, I would observe no rise in beer level even though the beer is, in fact, measurably increasing in volume and decreasing in density (as my hydrometer would, and in fact does, tell me).
However, the main point is that as he pointed out very clearly the isostatic correction is 0.3 mm/year. That is, nobody cares. They really don’t care if the same correction is uniformly applied across the entire tide gauge data, because it has no effect whatsoever on acceleration. It is the equivalent of a frame change in physics — adding a constant velocity to all velocities does not affect any accelerations, which is the whole point of the requirement of an inertial reference frame for Newton’s Second Law (predicting the acceleration) to work.
Note that this has nothing to do with whether or not the tide gauge data or satellite data accurately reflects either the rate that water level will rise “on average” everywhere, or whether it will rise or fall at all on any given coast. It is simply one part — and not the only part — of dealing with “sea level” on a non-spherical, rotating, tipped, tidally stressed, planet with a rather inhomogeneous mass distribution in its surface layer. As I pointed out in another thread, because warming water floats, the question of whether or not coastal water levels will rise due to thermal expansion depends strictly on the location-specific coastal water temperature (plus some dynamic effects and relaxation times) and not on what the water is doing somewhere else.
And that is due to Archimedes Principle and Nick’s example. If you take a boat loaded with balsa wood and throw the wood overboard, you don’t change the water level in a finite reservoir at all. When an ice cube melts in a glass of water, it doesn’t change the water level at all. If you put 100 grams of styrofoam and 100 grams of ice into a fixed volume glass, the change in the displacement of the water at the boundaries will be the same. Similarly, if the mass of ENSO warming water in the mid-Pacific is floating before it warms and after it warms, it doesn’t cause the sea level on the NC coast to change at all unless it incidentally raises the actual temperature of the water off of the NC coast. It might change the overall average sea level by any amount you like and not cause tide gauge data to change anywhere — except due to associated local sea surface warming.
Only melting land ice can substantively and globally increase the volume of the oceans. Without melting land ice the predictions of 21st century SLR — especially Hansen’s 5 meter TED talks crack — are complete bullshit. Tide gauge data will continue to reflect a nontrivial mix of local uplift or subsidence and local sea surface temperature (withOUT the 0.3mm isostatic correction) with a tiny, tiny bit due to e.g. net Greenland or Antarctica land ice melt or other sources of variation in land vs ocean total water mass.
In the meantime, no matter how you slice it, SLR is proceeding at a literally negligible rate everywhere except the few specific sites where, due to the local conditions (subsidence/uplift, water temperature, changes in tidal pattern) it isn’t negligible — either way. Nobody cares about 2-3mm/year, or even 3-4 mm/year. The places that need to worry are the specific places where it is proceeding much faster than that, for reasons that have nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming.
rgb
So as I read the back and forth about sea level / volume / height / rebound / whatever in all of the above, and “corrections to those.
What they (y’alls) are saying, is :
Here’s what would be happening, if what is not happening , was happening.
So if we turn on the mitigating switch to compensate for what is not happening, will we then have to make a correction for what happens, when what is not happening, stops not happening because of our mitigation ??
“””””…..from rgb…And that is due to Archimedes Principle and Nick’s example. If you take a boat loaded with balsa wood and throw the wood overboard, you don’t change the water level in a finite reservoir at all. …….”””””
Well the balsa wood on the boat is dry; so when you throw it overboard, it will soak up some of the water in the reservoir, instead of displacing it.
So why dontcha switch from balsa wood to Mylar balloons full of SF6 Professor, so your students have a chance to get an A ??
In support of:
richard says:
May 4, 2014 at 6:29 am
What warming,
a list of headlines for April1st – May 3rd.
A) Warming
William: Impressive list of 60 recent news worthy items/observations that appear to support the assertion the planet is cooling. Record cold weather events precede cooling climate change. The cause of the majority of the warming in the last 70 years was solar magnetic cycle changes which is reversible. The interesting questions is why the delay in cooling? The solar magnetic cycle has been in decline for 6 years. How much cooling will occur? Roughly 0.5C to 0.7C, the solar magnetic cycle is changing to Maunder minimum. If there was no CO2 forcing the drop in temperature would be 0.7C to 1C.
B) Ocean levels, mid-Ocean levels are falling:
William: Old comment concerning mid-ocean level anomaly.
There are multiple unexplained sea level anomalies (the data and analysis is not consistent) if one starts to look for mass and volume changes to explain the sea level rise and constraints the analysis with rotational changes. Significant unexplained anomalies often indicate that there is either a fundamental error in the analysis/theory or there is missing parameter/mechanism. I believe in this case there is a missing parameter/mechanism that affects both ocean level and satellite altitude (this missing mechanism/parameter explains the GRACE anomalies). If that belief is correct ocean level will fall more than predicted if and when the planet cools.
The satellite give sea level rise of 3.2 mm/yr is not correct and is due to adjustments. I believe the tidal gauge analysis gives 1.5 to 2.0 mm/yr (no change in rate of increase).
Mass and volume changes based on temperature changes and ice sheet melting give 0.5 mm so there is an unexplained the 1.0 mm/yr to 2.0 mm/yr.
ftp://www.grdl.noaa.gov/pub/laury/nature.pdf
Mass and volume contributions to twentieth-century global sea level rise
The rate of twentieth-century global sea level rise and its causes are the subjects of intense controversy1–7. Most direct estimates from tide gauges give 1.5–2.0mmyr21, whereas indirect estimates based on the two processes responsible for global sea level rise, namely mass and volume change, fall far below this range.
Estimates of the volume increase due to ocean warming give a rate of about 0.5 mm yr (ref. 8) and the rate due to mass increase, primarily from the melting of continental ice, is thought to be even smaller. Therefore, either the tide gauge estimates are too high, as has been suggested recently, or one (or both) of the mass and volume estimates is too low.
Here we present an analysis of sea level measurements at tide gauges combined with observations of temperature and salinity in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans close to the gauges. We find that gauge-determined rates of sea level rise, which encompass both mass and volume changes, are two to three times higher than the rates due to volume change derived from temperature and salinity data. Our analysis supports earlier studies that put the twentieth-century rate in the 1.5–2.0 mm yr range, but more importantly it suggests that mass increase plays a larger role than ocean warming in twentieth-century global sea level rise. (William: The authors of this paper have not solved the ocean level paradox, support for that assertion is mid-ocean level is suddenly and unexplained falled.)
William: New comment:
Ocean levels are falling.
Europe’s Envisat satellite measured a drop in sea level of almost 20 mm since the beginning of 2010, and is now lower than at the start of their record eight years ago.
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.gif
The warmists try to hand wave the fact that mid-ocean level is falling by appealing to La Niña, however, the drop in the mid-ocean level is multiple times greater than past La Niña events .
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/rainfall/sea-level-rise-cazenave-s3.gif
RGB,
==============
sea level and sea volume are two different things. It is that simple.
“Beenstock et al.”
Jack Beenstock?
Sorry. Couldn’t resist. As far as GIA goes, it seems odd that both the sea level and the land are rising. (and underneath, it’s turtles all the way down). As has been pointed out, GIA makes the sea level numbers about something other than sea level, say 90% sea level and 10% sea volume, except volume isn’t measured in millimeters unless you have a straight walled container. Sea levolume, maybe. Not useful in any case.
The point of sea level rise is the catastrophe about to befall us. Bangladesh, the Maldives, Venice,
polar bears, Algore’s Malibu beach house. So a little perspective might help.Algore’s place is probably up on pilings, so he’s cool. Venice has been sinking ever since they moved out to the lagoon to avoid the Lombards. Mörner showed us that the Maldives are higher than they used to be, and they could use some of that billion dollars they’re investing in new seaside resorts to move if they were really worried.
Bangladesh is all mudflats where it meets the sea. If the sea rises, the river dumps the mud earlier and eventually pushes the mudflats out again. The floods they sustain are from the river and rains, not the sea. Typhoon storm surges depend on the strength of the typhoon, not the couple inches of sea level rise.
And what does a couple inches of sea rise over the decades do? I buy a property on Galveston Bay. Twenty years later, I sell it, having lost about ten feet of front yard. The buyer buys a property with ten less feet. He sells it after fifteen years with another few feet gone. Nobody is taking a big hit, because the market adjusts much more rapidly than the sea level rises. And if anybody thinks that NYC is going under a hundred years from now, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell.
William: New comment:
Ocean levels are falling.
Europe’s Envisat satellite measured a drop in sea level of almost 20 mm since the beginning of 2010, and is now lower than at the start of their record eight years ago.
====
William, Envisat showed sea levels falling from day one…..they adjusted up…tuned to Jason…and it still showed sea levels falling…They kept believing sea levels were rising, so didn’t question it, just kept adjusting up…
They did every thing in their power to make it show sea levels rising……….
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/documents/calval/validation_report/EN/annual_report_en_2009.pdf
We know the land is constantly washing into the sea…..so are they adjusting for that mud and silt too?
..that displaces water and makes it rise also
“Thou foolishe Elfe (said then the Gyant wroth)
Seest not, how badly all things present bee,
And each estate quite out of order go’th?
The sea it selfe doest thou not plainely see
Encroch vppon the land there vnder thee;
And th’earth it selfe how daily its increast,
By all that dying to it turned be?
Were it not good that wrong were then surceast,
And from the most, that some were giuen to the least?”
Hey, thank you Nick Stokes and rgt for your additions to the discussion.
Going on a different tack . . . . . .
Which of the following (if any) apply to exaggerated SLR research that is solely informed by the incorrect theory of significant AGW from fossil fuel?
John
John Whitman says:
May 4, 2014 at 11:19 am
——————————————
r) fr@udulent science
s) bogus science
t) sh!t science
u) incompetence
v) conclusion-based conclusion-drawing science
When I put trash in a compactor and start the compaction cycle, the trash compacts. If I open the compactor after the cycle finishes, I sometimes see a raise in the level as the trash expands. Most of the raise occurs in the first 20 seconds or so and after that I can not see any perciptable rise in the trash so I throw mure in the compactor.
So how is the raise in land measured? If it is not measured by satellite how is the raise in different geological features calculated?
Lord Monckton’s most important point here is the intolerance of any but the “consensus’ view of climate change, by the alarmist cabal. That is the real inconvenient truth that skeptics have to deal with, that honest science is having to contend with a firm commitment to witchcraft on the part of academics, the media and policymakers. This problem is made the more difficult because these people cannot be made to listen to reason without violating the first tenet of their religious belief, namely that thou shalt not recognize the existence of, let alone listen to, let alone accept, evidence that conflicts with your dogma. They can be expected to cling to their fantasies and superstitions no matter how long or how strong the present cooling tend continues, and no matter how much physical evidence refuting their assumptions about carbon dioxide comes to light. They will still be claiming the globe is warming as the ice sheets of the next glaciation are grinding over them.
The monster in that old movie poster looks a helluva lot like Kang, half the alien pair Kang and Kodos on “the Simpsons”.
Kang’s best line comes when Homer tries to grab him:
“Keep your slimeless hands off me!”
Are they also adjusting for water abstraction which is “contributing a considerable amount of 0.8 (±0.1) mm a−1 to current sea-level rise”?