Real Clear Science and Real Clear Energy are great aggregators of science and energy articles. But, invariably, there is always at least one article that merits lampooning, if not outright ridicule… And today was no exception.
“Alarmist CO2 Headlines Create Confusion”… Yes they do. Earth has been setting CO2 records since 1809, but it never became headline news before we crossed 387 ppm.
Why you should take hyperventilating headlines about CO2 with a grain of salt — but still be quite concerned
By Tom Yulsman | May 15, 2017
This graph shows carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The last four complete years of the record plus the current year are shown. The dashed red line red line shows monthly mean values, and reveals a natural, up-and-down season cycle. The black line shows the trend after correcting for the average seasonal cycle. (Source: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory)
Back in late April, there was a spate of hyperventilating headlines and news reports about the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
This one in particular, from Think Progress, should have made its author so light-headed that she passed out:
The Earth just reached a CO2 level not seen in 3 million years
Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide hit record concentrations.
That story and others were prompted by measurements at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory showing that the concentration of heat-trapping CO2 in the atmosphere had exceeded 410 parts per million.
Some of you might be thinking this: Since rising levels of greenhouse gases are causing global warming, and myriad climate changes like melting ice sheets and glaciers, then this really was big news story.
And the highest CO2 level in 3 million years? WOW! That certainly justifies the hyperventilating hed, right?
I don’t think so. That’s because the headline is inaccurate, and the story hypes the crossing of a purely artificial CO2 threshold.
While Mr. Yulsman is spot-on in his characterization of alarmist CO2 headlines (“hed” is journalistic shorthand), he then veers right off into alarmist prattle about sea level:
My point is not that we shouldn’t be concerned about continuing to use the atmosphere as a dumping ground for the byproducts of fossil fuel burning. Quite the opposite. We should be moving more aggressively to do something about it. If you have any doubts, check out the trend in sea level since 1880:
Cumulative changes in sea level for the world’s oceans since 1880, based on a combination of long-term tide gauge measurements and recent satellite measurements. (Source: EPA.)
Moreover, sea level rise isn’t something that only future generations will have to deal with. It’s already causing significant challenges. If you doubt that, check out what’s happening in Miami right now.
So yes, we absolutely should be concerned about the rising tide of CO2 in the atmosphere, and doing something over the long run to transition away from fossil fuels.
[…]
But slapping an inaccurate, hyperventilating headline on a non-story to rile up readers is no way to do it.
I love irony. If “slapping an inaccurate, hyperventilating headline on a non-story to rile up readers is no way to do it,” what’s the point in “slapping an inaccurate, hyperventilating” comment about sea level rise? Mr. Yulsman linked to this article about “what’s happening in Miami right now”…
Miami Beach spends millions to hold back the sea
The city is installing powerful storm water pumps and raising some public streets by an average of two feet.
Sea levels in South Florida could rise up to two feet over the next four decades. That puts Miami Beach – an island three miles off the Florida coast – at risk.
The city is already experiencing sunny day flooding – days when there’s no rain, but high tides push water up through storm drains and flood city streets.
“Sea levels in South Florida could rise up to two feet over the next four decades”… No they can’t and this is not happening right now.
For sea level to rise “two feet over the next four decades,” it would have to accelerate to the pace of the Holocene Transgression:
Projected sea level rise through 2100 AD. Two feet of sea level rise over the next four decades would require a pace even faster than that required for 1 meter (~3 feet) of sea level rise by the end of this century. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/21/oh-say-can-you-see-modern-sea-level-rise-from-a-geological-perspective/
It would take an average rate of sea level rise nearly twice that of the Holocene Transgression for sea level to rise more than 1.5 meters (~5 feet) over the remainder of this century.
Sea level isn’t behaving any differently than it has throughout the Holocene.
Sea level rise in the Miami area is not accelerating and it is rising at a rate of about 1 foot per century.
The mean sea level trend is 2.39 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.43 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1931 to 1981 which is equivalent to a change of 0.78 feet in 100 years. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8723170The mean sea level trend is 2.40 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.15 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1913 to 2016 which is equivalent to a change of 0.79 feet in 100 years. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580The mean sea level trend is 3.63 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.48 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1971 to 2016 which is equivalent to a change of 1.19 feet in 100 years. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8723970
The satellite data indicate virtually no statistically significant sea level rise in the Miami area:
CU Sea Level Research Group University of Colorado http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/interactive-sea-level-time-series-wizard?dlat=26&dlon=280&fit=n&smooth=n&days=60
I intentionally retained the “seasonal terms and mean” and did not smooth the data because the seasonal variability is real and at least 10 times the magnitude of any secular trends in sea level.
To the extent that there is a trend (R² = 0.0945), the rate of sea level rise in the Miami area is about 3 mm/yr. This would lead to about 5.5 inches of sea level rise over the next four decades.
Miami FL Area Sea Surface Height (cm). Data from CU Sea Level Research Group University of Colorado. http://sealevel.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/table.cgi?q=content%2Finteractive-sea-level-time-series-wizard&dlat=26&dlon=280&fit=n&smooth=n&days=60
A review of USGS topographic maps reveals very little in the way of inundation by rising seas:
Miami Beach, Florida topographic maps from 1950 and 1994.(USGS).Miami Beach topographic maps for 1950 and 1994. Note that the 5′ elevation contour has not shifted (USGS).Miami Beach, Florida topographic maps for 1994 and 2012. The 2012 map has no 5′ contour because it has a 10′ contour interval. However, it is abundantly obvious that Florida is not being inundated.Topographic profile A-A’. The NOAA sea level trend has been plotted at.the same vertical scale.
Conclusion
Kudos to Mr. Yulsman for raising the alarm about alarmist CO2 headlines and ironically including alarmist prattle about sea level rise in his article. I’ve been looking for a reason to break out the Miami Beach topo maps and profile and use them in a WUWT post.
References
Bard, E., B. Hamelin, M. Arnold, L. Montaggioni, G. Cabioch, G. Faure & F. Rougerie. Deglacial sea-level record from Tahiti corals and the timing of global meltwater discharge.Nature 382, 241 – 244 (18 July 1996); doi:10.1038/382241a0
Blum, M.D., A.E. Carter,T. Zayac, and R. Goble. Middle Holocene Sea-Level and Evolution of The Gulf of Mexico Coast (USA). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue 36, 2002.
Jevrejeva, S., J. C. Moore, A. Grinsted, and P. L. Woodworth (2008). Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago? Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08715, doi:10.1029/2008GL033611.:
Nerem, R.S., D.P. Chambers, C. Choe & G.T. Mitchum. Estimating Mean Sea Level Change from the TOPEX and Jason Altimeter Missions. Marine Geodesy. Volume 33, Issue S1, 2010, pages 435- 446 Available online: 09 Aug 2010 DOI: 10.1080/01490419.2010.491031.
Anyone have an idea of the sea level rise off the Netherlands in the last 30 years. Seems impossible to get but I need it for a blog. Thanks if anyone can help.
Virginia Key is the barrier island south of Miami Beach where a tide gauge was installed at the University of Miami marine School. The old one was removed when Miami Beach increased the width of its beach in 1980.
The new gauge on Virginia Key shows very high rates of SLR (5.3 mm/yr) as does Vaca Key (3.6 mm /yr ) while Key West is a more normal 2.4 mm/yr. The rapid rise is attributed to a combination of winds and currents “piling up” the water. The data can be found here http://andrew.rsmas.miami.edu/bmcnoldy/papers/MDPL_17Feb2016.pdf
It is a little bit odd that NOAA no longer shows Virginia Key at its tides-and-currents web site. There does not seem to be any subsidence as in coastal Virginia.
Any ideas??
Combined the adjusted data records from Miami
Beach, Haulover Pier, and Virginia Key to create 82-year time series of annual mean sea level… linear trend is 0.092 ± 0.005 “/yr
Thanks for the units conversion, but the rate for the last 20 years is 5.3mm/yr, which IS high when you consider Key West is not that far away. Is there is anything tricky in the way corrections are done or is this a cyclic fluctuation, and why did NOAA stop providing SLR trend data for Virginia Key?
I think the author of that slide show would say that 5.3mm/yr vs 2.3mm/yr proves acceleration and that satellites always read lower than tide gauges. How would you answer that?
Linear trends of noisy time series have to be used with
caution!!!
ESPECIALLY with relatively short periods
20-year trend (0.22”/yr): probably pretty reliable, but more
years would be better
5-year trend (0.92”/yr): likely not accurate
(if sea level rose 4” in past 20 years, it didn’t rise 5” in past 5 years!)
Longer time series allows for higher confidence in linear trend line, but cannot account for accelerating rates
His “acceleration” is based on short cherry-picked segments. If sea level rise was accelerating, it would clearly show up in the longer time series. The time series would clearly be curving upwards, rather than linear.
Even if sea level rise was accelerating at Virginia Key, it’s not accelerating in any of the longer time series. Nor is it accelerating globally.
Elsewhere, I have argued that there is no acceleration signal in the 20 year Virginia Key data; however, 20 years should be long enough to determine a slope unless there is a long term variation in the gulf stream and we are seeing the upward slope of a cycle.
That said, I don’t know anything about satellites, but it is strange that a few of them could disagree so much with hundreds of tide gauges. But then what does global SLR actually mean?
The global average of the tide gauges don’t show any recent acceleration either.
You could probably find several 20-yr segments in the Key West time series over which the slope would be greater than the long-term trend.?w=720
Our results (Fig. 4) clearly demonstrate that accelerations are not expected to exceed 0.1 mm per year until the second half of the 21st century for sea level rise pathways towards targets of 0.5–1 m (P1, P2), and will only exceed this threshold around 2030–2050 for pathways towards targets of 1.5–2 m (P3, P4).
Like the bear in the woods, the acceleration is always just out of sight, generally well-beyond the retirement dates of the authors of papers like this.
I think the author of that slide show would say that 5.3mm/yr vs 2.3mm/yr proves acceleration and that satellites always read lower than tide gauges. How would you answer that?
steve in miami
May 17, 2017 9:47 am
I think the author of that slide show would say that 5.3mm/yr vs 2.3mm/yr proves acceleration and that satellites always read lower than tide gauges. How would you answer that?
One would think that, for all the caterwauling about sea rise doom in Miami, they’d have a work gauge.
Or not, considering that it is harder for people to scaremonger when people do not have actual data to debunk.
There are two obvious things wrong with that CSIRO-based EPA sea-level graph, which appears to come from this EPA page.
I used WebPlotDigitzer (bookmark it!) to digitize a couple of points on the graph, twenty years apart, to see what rate they are claiming. It is absolutely preposterous: http://sealevel.info/sea-level-download1-2016_digitized_cropped.png
The two obvious things wrong are:
1. That graph wildly exaggerates the rate of sea-level rise from tide gauge measurements. In fact, it shows sea-level from tide gauge measurements as even more rapid than satellites! That’s nonsense. The sea-level from tide gauges actually averages about 1½ mm/year. Sea-level from satellite altimetry averages about twice that (and isn’t trustworthy).
2. That graph clearly shows average sea-level from tide gauge measurements accelerating over the last thirty years. Yet none of the best-quality, long-term, sea-level measurement records show such an acceleration. Some of them spike with El Niños, so there’s been a very slight uptick over the last couple of years, but there’s certainly been no upward curve resembling that EPA graph. Here’s a typical sea-level measurement record:
Sealevel.info: http://www.sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=Honolulu
NOAA: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=1612340 http://www.sealevel.info/1612340_Honolulu_vs_CO2.png
(Note: Peltier estimates that Honolulu experiences 0.1 mm/yr uplift, which makes the global rate about 1½ mm/year.) All of the best-quality, long-term, sea-level measurement records show that there has been no significant, sustained acceleration in rate of sea-level rise since the 1920s or before. Mathematically, if an average of several measurement records shows acceleration, it must be the case that at least some of the individual measurement records show acceleration, but the CSIRO bunch seem to somehow have found a way around that problem. I assume that it is an artifact of using a changing mix of tide gauges in their “average” over the period of time represented in the graph.
Or maybe it’s something even stranger. That group definitely does some strange stuff. That group’s Church & White (2006) was the first paper to claim to have detected a small “20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise.” About five years ago I reanalyzed the averaged sea-level data used in that paper (the output of a mysterious algorithm involving empirical orthogonal functions), and discovered that all their detected acceleration predated 1925. Their data actually showed a slight (statistically insignificant) deceleration after 1925. In other words, when CO2 levels rose above about 307 ppmv, sea-level rise acceleration ceased.
But there was more weirdness in that paper than that. This is a quote from the paper:
“An additional spatially uniform field is included in the reconstruction to represent changes in GMSL. Omitting this field results in a much smaller rate of GMSL rise…”
That sounds to me like a fudge factor, to increase the reported rate of sea-level rise! But I stared at it a while and wondered: why did they say “spatially?”
Surely, I thought, since they were reporting measured acceleration trends, the “additional field” must at least have been temporally uniform. So why did they use the word “spatially?” What other sort of non-uniformity could there be, besides spatial and temporal?
I emailed Drs. Church & White and asked them why they used the adjective “spatially.” Was the “additional field” temporally uniform, I asked? I’ve yet to figure out what that “field” was, but to my amazement Dr. Church replied that it was not temporally uniform.
In 2009 they posted on their web site a new set of averaged sea-level data, from a different set of tide gauges. But they published no paper about it, and I wondered why not. So I duplicated their 2006 paper’s analysis on their new data, and not only did it, too, show slight deceleration after 1925, all the 20th century acceleration had gone away, too. Even for the full 20th century their data showed a slight deceleration.
My guess is that the reason they wrote no paper about it was that the title would have had to have been something like, “Neeeeever mind: no 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise, after all.”
Finally, in 2011, they posted another new dataset, and this one finally showed a acceleration for sea-level even after 1930, though it was very slight, and statistically insignificant.
davidrussell22
May 18, 2017 6:45 am
South Florida, specifically parts of Miami are SUBSIDING up to 3mm per year: http://www.ces.fau.edu/arctic-florida/pdfs/fiaschi-wdowinski.pdf
The South Beach tidal gauge reports sea-rise or 2.39mm per year.
Consequently, there is no sea rise in Miami….. only subsidence.
The tide gauge has not been on South Beach since 1980, but on another island with much less high-rise development. My theory of the 5.3 mm/yr is that they converted units incorrectly and it is really 0.8mm/yr.
The tide gauge has not been on South Beach since 1980, but on another island with much less high-rise development. My theory of the 5.3 mm/yr is that they converted units incorrectly and it is really 0.8mm/yr.
Sea level was 1-2 meters higher than it currently is during the Holocene Highstand. All of the sea level rise since 1700 is insignificant relative to the natural variability of Holocene sea levels.
“Just remember, kids – if the sea level rise doesn’t get you, the dreaded ocean acidification will.”
‘“Sea levels in South Florida could rise up to two feet over the next four decades”… No they can’t
I’m sure they could if they really tried.
An interesting read on “adjustments” to sea level “once-was-data”.
http://mycoordinates.org/our-influence-on-sea-level-is-negligible/
Anyone have an idea of the sea level rise off the Netherlands in the last 30 years. Seems impossible to get but I need it for a blog. Thanks if anyone can help.
The satellite-derived sea level data can be accessed here: http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/interactive-sea-level-time-series-wizard
Pick a point on the map or enter Lat/Lon.
Tide gauge data from PSMSL can be accessed here: http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/
Scroll down to the NLD (Netherlands) stations,
Virginia Key is the barrier island south of Miami Beach where a tide gauge was installed at the University of Miami marine School. The old one was removed when Miami Beach increased the width of its beach in 1980.
The new gauge on Virginia Key shows very high rates of SLR (5.3 mm/yr) as does Vaca Key (3.6 mm /yr ) while Key West is a more normal 2.4 mm/yr. The rapid rise is attributed to a combination of winds and currents “piling up” the water. The data can be found here http://andrew.rsmas.miami.edu/bmcnoldy/papers/MDPL_17Feb2016.pdf
It is a little bit odd that NOAA no longer shows Virginia Key at its tides-and-currents web site. There does not seem to be any subsidence as in coastal Virginia.
Any ideas??
3.6 mm/yr is not a high rate of SLR.
0.092 in/yr = 2.3 mm/yr
Thanks for the units conversion, but the rate for the last 20 years is 5.3mm/yr, which IS high when you consider Key West is not that far away. Is there is anything tricky in the way corrections are done or is this a cyclic fluctuation, and why did NOAA stop providing SLR trend data for Virginia Key?
I think it’s a function of it being a short time series.
I just picked a point in the Straits of Florida from the satellite data: http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/interactive-sea-level-time-series-wizard?dlat=24&dlon=278&fit=n&smooth=n&days=60
I get a slope of 1.1 mm/yr for 1993-2016.
I think the author of that slide show would say that 5.3mm/yr vs 2.3mm/yr proves acceleration and that satellites always read lower than tide gauges. How would you answer that?
I would answer him with his own slides.
His “acceleration” is based on short cherry-picked segments. If sea level rise was accelerating, it would clearly show up in the longer time series. The time series would clearly be curving upwards, rather than linear.
Even if sea level rise was accelerating at Virginia Key, it’s not accelerating in any of the longer time series. Nor is it accelerating globally.
Elsewhere, I have argued that there is no acceleration signal in the 20 year Virginia Key data; however, 20 years should be long enough to determine a slope unless there is a long term variation in the gulf stream and we are seeing the upward slope of a cycle.
That said, I don’t know anything about satellites, but it is strange that a few of them could disagree so much with hundreds of tide gauges. But then what does global SLR actually mean?
The global average of the tide gauges don’t show any recent acceleration either.
?w=720
You could probably find several 20-yr segments in the Key West time series over which the slope would be greater than the long-term trend.
From Judith Curry and of interest to the fans of SLR.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4635
I skimmed it once will look again mañana.
The bear is in the woods…
Like the bear in the woods, the acceleration is always just out of sight, generally well-beyond the retirement dates of the authors of papers like this.
From Judith Curry and of interest to the fans of SLR.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4635
I skimmed it once will look again mañana.
From Judith Curry and of interest to the fans of SLR.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4635
I skimmed it once will look again mañana.
I think the author of that slide show would say that 5.3mm/yr vs 2.3mm/yr proves acceleration and that satellites always read lower than tide gauges. How would you answer that?
I think the author of that slide show would say that 5.3mm/yr vs 2.3mm/yr proves acceleration and that satellites always read lower than tide gauges. How would you answer that?
The same way I just did.
One would think that, for all the caterwauling about sea rise doom in Miami, they’d have a work gauge.
Or not, considering that it is harder for people to scaremonger when people do not have actual data to debunk.
Property prices in Venice are still holding up nicely despite the fact that it’s supposed to be disappearing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/international/3360120/Property-in-Venice-A-little-place-by-the-canal.html
There are two obvious things wrong with that CSIRO-based EPA sea-level graph, which appears to come from this EPA page.
I used WebPlotDigitzer (bookmark it!) to digitize a couple of points on the graph, twenty years apart, to see what rate they are claiming. It is absolutely preposterous:
http://sealevel.info/sea-level-download1-2016_digitized_cropped.png
The two obvious things wrong are:
1. That graph wildly exaggerates the rate of sea-level rise from tide gauge measurements. In fact, it shows sea-level from tide gauge measurements as even more rapid than satellites! That’s nonsense. The sea-level from tide gauges actually averages about 1½ mm/year. Sea-level from satellite altimetry averages about twice that (and isn’t trustworthy).
2. That graph clearly shows average sea-level from tide gauge measurements accelerating over the last thirty years. Yet none of the best-quality, long-term, sea-level measurement records show such an acceleration. Some of them spike with El Niños, so there’s been a very slight uptick over the last couple of years, but there’s certainly been no upward curve resembling that EPA graph. Here’s a typical sea-level measurement record:
Sealevel.info: http://www.sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=Honolulu
NOAA: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=1612340
http://www.sealevel.info/1612340_Honolulu_vs_CO2.png
(Note: Peltier estimates that Honolulu experiences 0.1 mm/yr uplift, which makes the global rate about 1½ mm/year.)
All of the best-quality, long-term, sea-level measurement records show that there has been no significant, sustained acceleration in rate of sea-level rise since the 1920s or before. Mathematically, if an average of several measurement records shows acceleration, it must be the case that at least some of the individual measurement records show acceleration, but the CSIRO bunch seem to somehow have found a way around that problem. I assume that it is an artifact of using a changing mix of tide gauges in their “average” over the period of time represented in the graph.
Or maybe it’s something even stranger. That group definitely does some strange stuff. That group’s Church & White (2006) was the first paper to claim to have detected a small “20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise.” About five years ago I reanalyzed the averaged sea-level data used in that paper (the output of a mysterious algorithm involving empirical orthogonal functions), and discovered that all their detected acceleration predated 1925. Their data actually showed a slight (statistically insignificant) deceleration after 1925. In other words, when CO2 levels rose above about 307 ppmv, sea-level rise acceleration ceased.
But there was more weirdness in that paper than that. This is a quote from the paper:
That sounds to me like a fudge factor, to increase the reported rate of sea-level rise! But I stared at it a while and wondered: why did they say “spatially?”
Surely, I thought, since they were reporting measured acceleration trends, the “additional field” must at least have been temporally uniform. So why did they use the word “spatially?” What other sort of non-uniformity could there be, besides spatial and temporal?
I emailed Drs. Church & White and asked them why they used the adjective “spatially.” Was the “additional field” temporally uniform, I asked? I’ve yet to figure out what that “field” was, but to my amazement Dr. Church replied that it was not temporally uniform.
In 2009 they posted on their web site a new set of averaged sea-level data, from a different set of tide gauges. But they published no paper about it, and I wondered why not. So I duplicated their 2006 paper’s analysis on their new data, and not only did it, too, show slight deceleration after 1925, all the 20th century acceleration had gone away, too. Even for the full 20th century their data showed a slight deceleration.
My guess is that the reason they wrote no paper about it was that the title would have had to have been something like, “Neeeeever mind: no 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise, after all.”
Finally, in 2011, they posted another new dataset, and this one finally showed a acceleration for sea-level even after 1930, though it was very slight, and statistically insignificant.
South Florida, specifically parts of Miami are SUBSIDING up to 3mm per year:
http://www.ces.fau.edu/arctic-florida/pdfs/fiaschi-wdowinski.pdf
The South Beach tidal gauge reports sea-rise or 2.39mm per year.
Consequently, there is no sea rise in Miami….. only subsidence.
The tide gauge has not been on South Beach since 1980, but on another island with much less high-rise development. My theory of the 5.3 mm/yr is that they converted units incorrectly and it is really 0.8mm/yr.
The tide gauge has not been on South Beach since 1980, but on another island with much less high-rise development. My theory of the 5.3 mm/yr is that they converted units incorrectly and it is really 0.8mm/yr.