Is there anything global warming can’t do? Now it seems that there is so much global warming that it is slowing the rise of sea levels.
As glaciers melt due to climate change, the increasingly hot and parched Earth is absorbing some of that water inland, slowing sea level rise, NASA experts said Thursday.
Satellite measurements over the past decade show for the first time that the Earth’s continents have soaked up and stored an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, the experts said in a study in the journal Science.
This has temporarily slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20 percent, it said.
“We always assumed that people’s increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting in a net transfer of water from the land to the ocean,” said lead author J.T. Reager of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “What we didn’t realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge — at least temporarily.”
The global water cycle involves the flow of moisture, from the evaporation over the oceans to the fall of precipitation, to runoff and rivers that lead back into the ocean. Just how much effect on sea level rise this kind of land storage would have has remained unknown until now because there are no land-based instruments that can measure such changes planet-wide.
The latest data came from a pair of NASA satellites launched in 2002 — known as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). more here
Here is the Press release from the AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
Land reservoirs helped offset sea level rise, study says
Recent increases in the storage of excess groundwater may be helping to offset sea level rise by as much as 15%, a new study finds. While the capacity of land to store water is known to be an important factor affecting sea level rise, the magnitude of its storage contributions are not fully understood. Land masses store water in numerous ways, though some human-induced changes — including to groundwater extraction, irrigation, impoundment in reservoirs, wetland drainage, and deforestation – are affecting this process, as are climate-driven changes in rainfall, evaporation, and runoff.
To gain more insights into how the land storage capacity may have changed over recent years, John Reager and colleagues analyzed satellite data from 2002 to 2014 that measure changes in gravity, and thus underlying changes in water storage. They combined this satellite data with estimates of mass loss of glaciers to determine what impact land water storage might have had on sea level change.
Their analysis suggests that during this timeframe, climate variability resulted in an increase of approximately 3,200 gigatons of water being stored in land. This gain partially offset water losses from ice sheets, glaciers, and groundwater pumping, slowing the rate of sea level rise by 0.71 ± 0.20 millimeters per year, the authors say. While a small portion of the increase in land water storage can be directly attributed to human activities – primarily, the filling of reservoirs – the authors note that climate is the key driver. The greatest changes in land water storage were associated with regional climate-driven variations in precipitation.
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Another explanation for lower sea level rise is the possible growth of the Antarctic ice sheet recently discussed.
“Another explanation for lower sea level rise is…”
My own theory is that global warming is a scientific fraud, made up from beginning to end.
If you’re talking about the growth of the ice sheet around Antarctica, it’s floating on the ocean and does not affect sea level.
No, the “Antarctic Ice sheet” is on land, and several of it’s glaciers extend into the water. There are also ice “shelves” which are still attached to the continental ice but aren’t yet fully floating in the water. The rest of the ice that surrounds the Antarctic is sea ice, and yes, it floats.
There was an article here recently discussing growth of the ice sheet based on a study by Jay Zwally. Increased precipitation was thought to be the cause. The ice is on land, not floating.
Surely this is a corollary of the increased “greening” – plant growth – caused by increasing CO2??
My theory goes along with the question Rep. Hank Johnson posed during a Congressional hearing about whether or not Guam might “tip over”. I believe the continents float on the oceans so as the sea level rises, so do the continents. If the rise is fast enough, it just takes a little longer for the continents to catch up so we get an apparent rise. And vice versa. The key word in my theory is “apparent”.
This ice melting thing is just a scam.
The false propaganda put out by people who know better is astounding.
Here is a series of images from National Geographic used to scare their readers by showing what would happen if all frozen water on earth melted.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map
So, you’d better eat your vegetables, or else!
What is the time frame for this?
It looks like I’ll have some wonderful ocean front property.
I’m just wondering how long it will last???
Larry – hence I dropped my subscription to NatGeo years ago because they became a propaganda arm for socialist agendas.
So we don’t get Waterworld? Dang.
That Nat Geo map has hope for me Washington DC is out of the picture!
Glenn999 – I believe that it would take millions of years for something like this to occur, but it’s not occurring, and they never speak of time scales.
Wallensworth – I too recognized NatGeo’s outrageous political correct junk science many years ago and wouldn’t dream of subscribing again.
And what a shame that is. They used to be brilliant.
I’m not sure the planet gets enough solar energy in the polar regions to melt enough ice to cause a sea level rise like the alarmists moan about; even if the Arctic temps increase 5 degrees from -34 to -29 it’s not going to change the ice volumes much! People just can’t get their heads around really big numbers, logarithms and how many calories it takes to melt some ice and how few calories air can hold compared to water, ice and steam.
Still seeking global warmist who needs to dump their waterfront residence FAST! Will pay cash!
You forgot the /sarc tag right?
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=geology
Actually I am pretty sure that a re-analysis will show that the GRACE data is a long slow gravity wave from super massive black holes waltzing around galactic center.
What’s really irritating is that they are just now figuring out the fundamentals of the water table, but for decades they’ve been forecasting doom with an air of certainty reserved for Baptist ministers.
RH:
“[…]they’ve been forecasting doom with an air of certainty reserved for Baptist ministers.”
Nice turn of phrase, there.
It’s really an irrigating turn of events.
Good lord, the abuse of incoming data is criminal.
The ONLY times the oceans receded in the past is due to more ICE, not rain. This goes under ‘duh’ since rain flows back into the oceans and if there is more rain there are more floods of water flowing back!
You know the rain mostly comes from the oceans. The amount of water in the ocean will therefore reach an equilibrium when the amount leaving equals the amount arriving back from rivers. If this is displaced, it might take a while for the equilibrium to re-establish. Say we kept evaporation and rainfall the same, but we make a huge number of reservoirs. This will reduce the amount of water returning to the ocean, so the level will drop. The authors are suggesting that removing the ice is like building a lot of reservoirs – the water can be stored in the exposed soil. This causes the sea level to be lower than it would have been.
If the ice has melted and returned to the ocean we would expect this to cause the sea level to rise. If some of this water can be stored in the soil, we would expect the sea level to rise less than expected form the melting glaciers alone.
I see no abuse of data here.
a) The Sahara seems to suggest that warming the soil does always not cause it to hold more water
b) However humans have been removing water from giant aquifers for some time, so if there is some way that a warming climate helps the water get back into the aquifers, then that is interesting. Seems unlikely that the total size of the missing aquifer water would be noticeable when spread over the Pacific Ocean.
> The authors are suggesting that removing the ice is like building a lot of reservoirs – the water can be stored in the exposed soil.
The vision here seems to be that of glacial ice shields sitting over dry sponge-like soils yearning to soak up the warm rains that will come when the ice melts. I’m no expert on Northern soils, but I have a pretty good idea what the rocks in Northwest Vermont and adjacent NY probably looked like when the glaciers retreated. A lot of impermeable bed rock. And a lot of permeable soils interbedded with poorly permeable glacial clays. And my guess is that the permeable beds were loaded with frozen water. I’d like to hear from a real geologist (which I am not) on this. But until I do, put me down in the Really Skeptical column.
DonK. Yes- reading the article again it is not the removal of ice that results in more water storage. They do not say in the abstract what does cause it, and the article only says the changes “are associated with climate-driven variability in precipitation.” One can only assume it means something like “more rain, wetter soil, less rain dryer soil”. As Michael D says, with no rain we get very dry “soils”. We must hope that the wetter soils are in places where we can make use of them. Nonetheless, I do not see any data abuse.
I’m wondering how the water from those melting glaciers managed to not soak into the soils uncovered as the glaciers retreated.
seaice1: One can only assume it means something like “more rain, wetter soil, less rain dryer soil”.
Maybe. I do seem to vaguely recall a glitch in sea level a few years ago attributed by some to exceptionally heavy rains over much of Australia.
“Removing the ice is like building a lot of reservoirs”??? If the water was locked up in land based ice prior, then the ice IS/WAS a reservoir! If it melts and soaks into the soil, then there would be NO increase in sea levels. (the water remains on land) Glaciers, ice sheets, underground aquifers, lakes, ponds etc simply store water that USED TO BE in the oceans, that evaporated, fell as rain, snow, etc on land, and remained there.
“The amount of water in the ocean will therefore reach an equilibrium when the amount leaving equals the amount arriving back from rivers.”
That will never happen, the water cycle simply takes too long, and has too many variables to ever balance out. As the world warms between glacial cycles, the surface temp of the oceans warms, and ocean evaporation increases. More evaporation= moister air which increases rainfall…both where it can “runoff” into a river, but also where it will soak into the ground and increase the water table and stay, or grow more plants, or be consumed by more humans/animals. Wetter air = more snow in colder areas where ice can build up. Eventually we hit ice age cycle again, and more and more water remains on land frozen and sea levels drop.
“We always assumed that people’s increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting in a net transfer of water from the land to the ocean,” said lead author J.T. Reager of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “What we didn’t realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge — at least temporarily.”
Well DUH…rocket scientists should talk to geologists once in a while.
Reager’s first three words, “We always assumed…” tells you everything you need to know about these guys.
So they replace an assumption with another…umm…. assumption. There’s nothing more stupid than that.
It’s not the assumptions that are the problem, or even replacing initial assumptions with more refined assumptions, it the amount of surprise they show at finding their assumptions are in fact assumptions! Assumptions are made all of the time, many hypothesis are almost entirely assumptions, but an astute researcher recognises his assumptions and works diligently at replacing assumptions with empirical evidence.
Let me see if I have this straight. It you dry out the soil, it gets wetter? I’m certainly glad they’ve clarified that.
No Don K. When you remove water from the ground (not just the top soil) more water can then soak into the ground to replace it. It gets WETTER over land when the ocean evaporates more-increasing the amount of water in the air-which can then fall as rain and soak back into the ground.
Huh?
Be specific here Don K.
Usually what happens is the soil gets desiccated, it’s stressed and the surface tension goes through the roof, so when it does rain, the water all runs-off causing a flash-flood.
The children just aren’t going to know what SLR is.
Wouldn’t the water that used to be in the now parched earth have gone into the oceans in the first place.
Presumably whatever conditions caused that ground to become “parched” in the first place are still around, so how is it that the parched ground is now getting wetter?
MarkW-
Not “parched earth” or dry soil….UNDERGROUND water storage in aquifers that are many, many feet underground and in places where the bedrock has caverns or openings in it where water does not evaporate because there’s no sun or significant heat or exposure to surface air there to cause it. This article is specific to underground water pumping (bringing that water to the surface for drinking or crop watering) and then increased rain in those areas replenishing the water storage. It’s not talking about places in which there is NO underground water reserves-such as in deserts or “parched” places where the underground geography is not conducive to natural water accumulation and where there isn’t a crazy increase in rain on the surface.
@ur momisugly Aphan I was under the impression that there are large aquifers under deserts just not many people around to drill for them?
Large? Who knows? It depends on what kind of geology is underground. If not a lot of rain falls, and it’s hot on the surface, and the soil doesn’t absorb well, then it’s going to go up (evaporate) rather than down (soak in). There’s almost always “wet” soil if you dig far enough, but enough to call a “well” or pump out of the ground for any length of time depends on a lot of things.
Keeping crops or people or animals alive in the desert isn’t just a matter of drilling for water. Winds, temperatures, soil conditions etc all factor in and trying to domesticate a harsh environment isn’t always feasible even if you have access to water. If one sandstorm can kill or bury everything….
“This article is specific to underground water pumping (bringing that water to the surface for drinking or crop watering) and then increased rain in those areas replenishing the water storage”
Aphan, have you read the full paper? The abstract does not say the extra water is in the same place that the water is extracted from the aquifers. From the information given here we cannot say that the water is replacing that lost from the same aquifers.
http://www.groundwater.org/get-informed/basics/groundwater.html
“Groundwater is the water found underground in the cracks and spaces in soil, sand and rock. It is stored in and moves slowly through geologic formations of soil, sand and rocks called aquifers.”
The article is about groundwater, not surface water, was my point. It does not say rain is falling in the exact same places its pumped from, but I cant imagine that areas which never stored water before, are now suddenly storing it for some odd reason.
It doest really matter. Clearly these authors were uninformed about the water cycle and are in denial that the southern ice sheet is most likely the reason sea level rise is slowing…IF in fact it was even accelerating prior to now.
It is my understanding that “parched earth” is dry. So if it is soaking up water, it will no longer be parched. Since AGW is causing sea level rise by melting the Arctic and Greenland ice, and AGW causes droughts therefore parching the earth, how can the AGW hoaxsters now say the sea level is not rising because the parched earth is absorbing the water from the melted ice? This whole premise is illogical. Unless Don K is right, dryer soil gets wetter!
So all that pumping of water from aquifers doesn’t lead to ground subsistence? How did the water get there in the first place? Stick a pipe in the ground and water will come gushing out? No need to drill deeper. The water gets there by magic since it’s dry and hot, doesn’t rain.
> So all that pumping of water from aquifers doesn’t lead to ground subsistence?
It most certainly DOES lead to subsidence. That’s the primary reason why Norfolk-Newport News is slowly sinking into the sea. Pumping lots of oil will do the same thing. Visit Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor and note the high berms bulldozed up along the shipping channel.
Did I forget to add the sarc tag? I was trying to point out that with all the ground water pumping, not only in California, but elsewhere, that’s a bogus argument that the earth is storing water.
What do terms along the shipping channel have to do with subsidence?
Without seeing the entire paper I’m not so sure the authors are saying what it appears they are saying. Using the logic for temperatures that some AGW proponents use, wherein they say forcing by CO2 is really greater than what shows up because of negative forcings etc, etc, blah blah, the full paper might say that GMSL would really be 3.9mm/yr if not for this dynamic. 3.2 + .7mm.
I can’t tell without the entire paper. It may or may not be significant.
While not exactly lining up with the thrust of Wada et al 2012, it would be interesting to lay them side by side for comparison of assumptions and findings.
If sea level rise was INCREASING instead of slowing do you think these people would be saying “sea level rise should be DECREASING on account of global warming and the ‘parched earth effect’? Of course, they wouldn’t.
A warmer planet with more CO2 AND more moisture??? We’re all dead!
I think they assumed less moisture but then learned it is not so much less, less less, if you will, but in future they project more less, i.e. more or less parched earth. I’m sure they can’t be wrong.
So not more less but just a little less less. Got it. More or less.
“…causing the land to act like a sponge — at least temporarily.”
…but then after the sea level pauses for a while, and the deniers have their day in the sun, rising sea level will come back with a vengeance – it’ll be worse than we thought!
(do I need to insert a /SARC tag here?)
It sounds like terrestrial water retention might be just another negative feedback in the self-correcting system that is the hydrosphere, which IPeCaC overlooked, or chose to ignore when creating their ‘sky is falling’ models.
Help. I can’t tell if it’s worse than we thought, better than we thought, or both.
“We always assumed…”
The author’s “we” isn’t sure either.
Yes, it BETTER be worse! Or so they ardently wish so they can get more money making up stuff.
Hey, I know when I’m hot and parched, I drink more. Makes sense.
An interesting document from the government of Nova Scotia quotes three sources of evidence the Atlantic has been rising for a long time:
Measurements for the past 100 years show steady unaccelerated rise of 30 cm / century
Structures build in 1740 reveal that the water has risen at about 40 cm / century since then
Huge sea level rise since the last ice age.
They attribute part of the rise as being caused by land subsidence, but because they want their grant money, they project, based on IPCC models, that global warming will make sea level rise worse; much worse.
sea level was rising faster at beginning of 20th c. certainly no AGW signal there:
http://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/jevrejeva_2014_fig8.png
figure 8 excerpt from Jevrejeva 2014
“Trends and acceleration in global and regional sea levels since 1807”
i think the problem was that the GRACE data were going against the sea level rise alarmism and so they had to come up with a way to explain it away. land water was the perfect answer.
Good Lord!
So, the worse things get the more they’ll stay the same?
If this keeps up matters will be so extreme that we won’t notice anything at all at all….Therefore the pause shows just how bad things really are.
You, sir, have a delightful way with irony and satire.
Yes, the status quo is evil by definition. And I believe these guys seriously want another Ice Age.
Caused by AGW, no doubt.
So not only are humans delivering more CO2 to plants but also more water! Global rates of photosynthesis must be climbing dramatically…oh how alarming! More life is on its way…what have we done…won’t somebody think of the children!
It’s called convenient inconvenient truth. ……………………………Or it’s an enigma soaking up settled science.
Challenging to dogma is not allowed. So “scientists” must work really hard to find a complicated narrative that NEVER challenges the “settled” science.
Facts:
A- catastrophic warming because CO2
B- A is TOTALLY caused by man and NOTHING else!
Therefore “science” now must find alternative explanations for the obvious.
Such as, Warming is causing massive melting of all the worlds glaciers. Therefore sea levels are rising catastrophically. If that doesn’t happen… the melt water must be going somewhere else because massive melting CANNOT be challenged. It’s happening dammit!
The athmosphere is warming catastrophically!… however it isn’t, therefore the heat MUST be going somewhere else! Quick… find the missing heat because it MUST be there, that cannot be challenged.. it’s a FACT!
Weather is more unstable and more violent… stastistics show that it actually isn’t… points to latest weather event LALALALALALALALALALALALA!!! Because we said so dammit!
Climate “science” is immune to Occam’s razor.
We’ll just add another epi-cycle so the Earth is still the center of the universe, no problem
seaice1: Surely you see that this ‘great’ discovery is a trivial matter that has been known by geologists for more than a century. Instead of spending millions on such a study, consult a hydrologist (preferably a retired one so you don’t get a system gamer advising you). Aquifers get recharged. I’ve been suffering through years of the nonsense that use of groundwater was raising sea level. I’m worried that, if this is a ‘new’ discovery by NASA, that the lefty education with no-knowledge-content has even effected today’s hydrologists. This makes this topic one that wouldn’t even have risen in a more enlightened past, let alone coming from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Drop this carp and propulse something instead!!
“What we didn’t realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge — at least temporarily.”
So surface temperatures are on pause , TLS is on pause , Arctic sea ice is on pause, global water cycle is on pause.
Are all our sensor systems and satellites wrong ?! It’s a travesty.
Nothing causes more temperature variation than menopause. Just ask my wife who opened windows yesterday with the outside temps at -17C
Maybe the FUNDING should pause ?????
@ur momisugly Gaza, +many, ( and if they don’t have a place to those funds?….)
From a wingnuttery connoisseur’s view that is a beautiful thing and one to be treasured. Not quite as sublimely fatuous as the ‘global warming causes more snow’ and a few other Meisterwerke but nevertheless it’s a significant piece in its own right and well deserving of a monumental statue in the ‘sea level rise’ garden niche.