Guest essay by Albert Parker*
Hopefully everybody remember Sallenger’s “hot spots” of sea level acceleration along the East Coast of the US.
Asbury H. Sallenger Jr, Kara S. Doran & Peter A. Howd, Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America, Nature Climate Change 2, 884–888 (2012), doi:10.1038/nclimate1597
This was one of the many examples of bad science misinterpreting the sea level oscillations by cherry picking the time window.
As 6 more years of data have been collected, let see if the hotspots are now the “hottest on record” or if they have cooled down.
The logic of Sallenger & co. was based on the comparison of the rate of rise of sea levels over the first and second half of time windows of 60, 50 and 40 years, i.e. the comparison of the rate of rise over the first and the last 30, 25 and 20 years respectively of these 60, 50 and 40 years windows.
This did not make any sense to me, as if you do have sinusoidal oscillations of periodicity 60 years, positive and negative phases of 30 years, and you select the end of the time widows at the end of one positive phase, this way you will always have “positive acceleration” even if there is none, and everybody knew about periods and phasing of the natural oscillations.
The logic was clearly flawed, but obviously Nature did not accepted any comment. The science is settled, and can’t be discussed.
So, let see the data, for example for Washington DC and The Battery NY, to check if the hotspots have produced huge sea level rises since December 2009.
The figure below presents the MSL (monthly average mean sea levels) and the SLR computed with 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 years’ time windows for Washington DC and The Battery NY.
Is there any one able to spot any sign or acceleration or simply oscillations? With the data up to December 2009 and with the data up to April 2016, not a chance. There are only oscillations about same longer term trend.
Which is then the novelty of the last 6 years of data? Since December 2009, the sea levels have declined in both Washington DC and The Battery NY, -3.3 mm/year in Washington DC and -10.7 mm/year in The Battery NY.
It seems that immediately after December 2009, the last month of data considered by Sallenger & co. in their June 2012 paper, corrected online June 2013 with the publishing in the supplementary of the actual numbers, a positive phase of the oscillations has been replaced by a negative phase.
*Note: Originally this story was submitted under a pseudonym “Giordano Bruno”. The author, Albert Parker has consented to it being changed to his real name. – Anthony Watts
Trying to extract mm/century changes in sea level change from incoherent cm/year changes in noisy sea level data around the world is like trying to find fly excrement in beach sand. These intellectual exercises should be called what they truly are: mental masturbation.
Besides, who cares. We are in an interglacial warmup period. Ice is supposed to be melting. It is the ice that we see growing in the rear view mirror that I would be worrying about, an indication that we may be at the end of this IWP.
Climate change, fake rapes, ‘borrowed’ prosperity, cultural appropriation, trans gender fantasies…….what will democrats think of next?
SD3 – do you really want to know? Ask Woody Allen or Corey Feldman.
Wait a minute! Obama is running around telling us that because of GLOBAL WARMING and the polar ice melting, the seas are risingand will eventually wipe out mankind unless he’s allowed to tax us more. Now you are telling us the seas are not risging but doing just the opposite. Are you now asking for higher taxes because the seas are falling? Who is telling the truth here? I guess we are all going to have to move to Kansas and pay higher taxes no matter what.
kimdi01, you are so wrong! Taxes are lower in Kansas.
liberals are liars it comes from smoking pot
Farley brain dead logic employed there Crispy. Using some Razor sharp thinking and making the fewest assumptions possible I am going to conclude liberals lie because they believe the Ends justify the Means. A lie is acceptable because the ultimate goal, Socialist Utopia , is worth it.
But what do I know…Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
Bud
Maybe the eath is flat and leaning west ….
Help me out here. How do you have a sea LEVEL on a globe? It’s not possible.
Gravitational logic. Level is relative. Space is curved. Hillary is crooked.
Level does not mean flat, it means equidistant from the center of mass of the Earth at all points of the surface in question, with some self-adjustment due to rotational affects.
SR
Sorry but science is settled. Time to get political .an open letter with 1,000s of signatures from informed sceptics to Donald Trump is what we need. Now ,so he can use it against the lying dems and get puplic informed of the complete lunacy of agw and the folly of spending trillions on making the climate colder.with so called green energy.
Id like to know if the measurements are relative to a surface such as ocean floor or a referance point on land. Author might check plate tectonics as a contributing/explanatory factor. Its widely known the north american plate is subducting into the mantle on the west coast. On the east coast it is rising. In addition, the whole plate moves like all others on this planet. I would expect sea levels to ‘be rising’ in a similacr fashion. GrwgK ‘s reply is similar, but much more thorough. Nice work gregk.
You have it all wrong. Approximately 8 years ago Obama was elected, and the Earth began to heal and the seas stopped rising… sarc off
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The author is obviously ESL. He needs a better editor for more credibility.
There’ll be hell to pay now, Anthony. This article made Drudge. 😀
The only thing that is settled here is that the ignorance and greed in Man is never-ending and there is little to be done about it. Man-made stupidity.
“We have caused such such global warming that…..wait…..we have caused such climate change that we’re melting the polar ice caps! By 2013, Miami will be underwater, we’ll have to depopulate Manhattan, and move the East coast inland by 20 miles……uh….wait………No, we’re draining the oceans! Our wasteful use of seawater has made the oceans disappear by, uh, by…..uh….evaporation or something. Oh what the hell, whatever it is, we’ve done it! And only by giving trillions of dollars to leftist NGOs and collectivist governments will we have a hope of having any oceans in five years!”
Miami is now being portrayed as “Ground Zero” for sea level rise.
Sea level rise at Miami is about 0.09 in. per year and not accelerating.
Miami Beach monthly tide gauge records end in 1981:
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.monthly.plots/363.png
Records at Virginia Beach Key south of Miami run from 1994-2015:
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.monthly.plots/1858.png
Key West records are from 1913-2015:
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.monthly.plots/188.png
Miami is sucking freshwater from the underlying limestone and dumping wastewater into the ocean to the tune of about 360 million gallons per day, which might cause some subsidence. In any case, that is the cause of salt-water intrusion into the aquifer, NOT “climate change.”
How can you make projections based on the measure of sea level since there’s so many variables? All these influence sea level: changing barometric pressure, Sun tides, Moon tides, distant storms, earthquakes, underwater volcanoes, in addition to sea ice, rain runoff, glacial melt, drought, evaporation and probably salinity and sea life. Measure it? Perhaps. Usefulness of the measure? Doubtful.
Ok, so what say Nature? I think that journal would be more aptly named “Nurture”, I you know what I mean.
The New York Time article on the Marshal Islands being covered by water due to global warming left out one critical scientific fact.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/02/world/The-Marshall-Islands-Are-Disappearing.html?_r=0
What did they leave out? The Marshal Island chain is an Atoll. The natural life cycle of an Atoll ends by sinking. The residents of the Marshall Islands are suffering because they built their village on a sinking atoll, not because of Los Angeles automobiles.
I thought it was because of too much toilet paper usage.
But…But….what about the computer “models” showing sealevel rise all around the world?? how will we ever be able to get the U.S. to embrace our definition of “climate change”?? these “scientists” are more concerned with their government paychecks to bother themselves with the real science behind whatever “climate change” is. They curse the rest of us fir not believing their little game of charades and card tricks.
Evaporation is happening faster than polar caps melting because of green house effect, and too many polluting cars on the road.
The sea level in New England and NY is dropping (MLW), because the land is rebounding from the compression (of the 1 mile thick Laurentide Ice Sheet), that melted off about 9000 years ago. Like most of the “Global Warming” nonsense, the science has been subordinated to dogma.
Then I guess we have little to worry about regarding sea levels . . . .
File this with the Michael Mann Hockey stick chart and the University of East Anglia falsified temperature data . . . .
You cannot say the UEA temp data were falsified – they were actually “lost,” not falsified. So, we can all go back to believing in the global warming.
You mean there’s yet ANOTHER inconvenient truth for the Global Warming religion?
I have no idea what the [pruned] these people are talking about. All I want to know is whether sea level is high or [pruned] lower. Can some brainiac answer this?
Global mean sea level is creeping up at about the same rate it has since we started measuring, as far as we can tell. What it’s doing at the coast near you depends mostly on what the land is doing. End of story,
“what the land is doing” YES!!!! the typically forgotten rest of the puzzle. if you only know what the water is doing you’re wasting your time.
That’s pretty much the complete picture and all that anyone needs to know.
Sadly, almost nobody will take note of such a simple presentation.
They prefer to be baffled by garbled nonsense,
just more garbage about the scam that our government is playing on the gullible idiots who buy into the global warming con game they are playing. The left hates the idea that we are still unable to control every citizen in the country and that the UN still can tell us what to do, eat and spend our money on, not matter how hard they have tried to make it so. It is just driving the left nuts that they can totally control every thing you think say and do.
Though science is and foremost the leading edge of technological advancement, it is not a true/false categorical proof of anything in either direction. Today’s truth becomes tomorrows antiquated structure. Ultimately, not enough information has been gathered to prove climatologists predictions or ‘facts’. Therefore, what is the only unmovable truth? The Bible. It says and I quote, “While the earth remains, Seedtime and harvest, And cold and heat, And summer and winter, And day and night Shall not cease.” This is the comment made to Noah by God Almighty. Though it is not scientific it is from the Creator of science. For science is nothing more than the study of creation. Monkey wrench has been thrown.
[Others disagree with you. .mod]
I guess 0dumbo really could make the seas recede? It would be the only “promise” he fulfilled other than transforming Amerikkka into a 3rd world shitehole.
Obama said that with his election the sea would cease to rise. Bravo well done