Reporter Confronts Al Gore On Sea Level Rise Claims, Gets Called A ‘Denier’

No, Greg, the graphs are not meaningless. Here’s the meaning you can glean from them:
1. CO2 level has increased about 30% in the last 3/4 century, and 37% since 1900. And,
2. The sea-level rise has been almost perfectly linear for nearly a century. And,
3. CO2 level has no noticeable effect on sea level.
Therefore:
4. Since the rate of sea-level rise has not increased significantly in response to the last 3/4 century of CO2 emissions, there is no reason to expect that it will do so in response to the next 3/4 century of CO2 emissions. The best prediction for sea level in the future is simply a linear projection of the history of sea-level at the same location in the past.
The fact that, as you noted, CO2 has a logarithmically diminishing impact on temperature, and hence on any secondary factor thought to be influenced by temperature, like sea-level, simply reinforces the 4th point.
 
I’m sorry you don’t like the graph scalings. They were chosen as follows:
* The number of horizontal grid lines was chosen to be nine, to match NOAA’s sea-level graphs.
* The number of horizontal grind lines for CO2 was chosen to be the same as the number for sea-level, so the two graphs could share the same grid lines.
* The green CO2 scaling was chosen to fit nicely on a graph with nine 20 ppmv increments, leaving room for growth to 440 ppmv (probably about 15 years from now).
* The black sea-level scale (in meters) was chosen to match NOAA’s graphs. (In fact, if you look closely, you’ll notice that for one location I accidentally used NOAA’s graph instead of mine.)
The scaling NOAA chose allows a consistent vertical scale for most locations. I.e., it is broad enough to “work” for most sites.
The way my code draws the vertical axis, there are always nine labeled points. By default, they are 0.15 meters apart, which is what NOAA generally uses. But when that would result in any of the traces not fitting on the graph, the vertical axis increments are increased: to 0.20, 0.25, 0.30, etc., per increment, as necessary, to make everything fit.
All except two of the graphs which I showed this time used 0.15 meters/increment. One of the two exceptions is Harlingen, where 0.20 meters/increment was needed to accommodate the wide month-to-moth variations; if you enable boxcar smoothing it reverts to 0.15 meters/increment. The other is Poti, on the Black Sea, which experiences atypically large sea-level rise (I don’t know why).
0.15 meters per increment was NOAA’s choice for most of their MSL graphs, but I think it was a reasonable one, which is why I used it, too.
It’s a compromise, of course. If you make the default increment much larger than that, so that fewer graphs would require non-standard scaling, to get better consistency between the graphs for the different sites, then for the most typical graphs everything looks almost like a horizontal line. Not good.
OTOH, if you make the increment as small as you possibly can for each graph, so that the traces are scaled to “use” maximum possible vertical range (like I did for CO2), then when you compare the graphs of different sites most of them would look pretty much the same. The graph thumbnail sheets on my site would become quite misleading, because the graphs for the sites with the highest rates of SLR would look just like the graphs for the sites with lowest positive rates of SLR. Only the sites where MSL is falling would look distinctly different — also not good.

Yes, it looks like Sydney’s sea-level is influenced slightly by the PDO: