Guest “catching them lying through their teeth” by David Middleton
Unprecedented and Worrying Rise in Sea Levels Poses Serious Threat to Coastal Cities
TOPICS:Climate Change, Environment, Oceanography, Simon Fraser University
By SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY JANUARY 1, 2020A new study led by Simon Fraser University’s Dean of Science, Prof. Paul Kench, has discovered new evidence of sea-level variability in the central Indian Ocean.
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Underscoring the serious threat posed to coastal cities and communities in the region, the ongoing study, which began in 2017, further suggests that if such acceleration continues over the next century, sea levels in the Indian Ocean will have risen to their highest level ever in recorded history.
The research paper authored by Kench and others, and entitled, “Climate-forced sea-level lowstands in the Indian Ocean during the last two millennia” was published December 16, 2019, in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.
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An alarmist headline regarding a paper by Paul Kench just didn’t pass the “smell test”. This is the abstract of Kench’s paper:
Sea-level reconstructions over the past two millennia provide a pre-industrial context to assess whether the magnitude and rate of modern sea-level change is unprecedented. Sea-level records from the Indian Ocean over the past 2,000 years are sparse, while records from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans show variations less than 0.25 m and no significant negative excursions. Here, we present evidence of two low sea-level phases in the Maldives, Indian Ocean, based on fossil coral microatolls. Microatoll growth is constrained by low water levels and, consequently, they are robust recorders of past sea level. U–Th dating of the Maldivian corals identified lowstands at ad 234–605 and ad 1481–1807 when sea level fell to maximum depths of −0.88 m and −0.89 m respectively. These lowstands are synchronous with reductions in radiative forcing and sea surface temperature associated with the Late Antiquity Little Ice Age and the Little Ice Age. Our results provide high-fidelity observations of lower sea levels during these cool periods and show rates of change of up to 4.24 mm yr−1. Our data also confirm the acceleration of relative sea-level rise over the past two centuries and suggest that the current magnitude and rate of sea-level rise is not unprecedented. Two intervals of distinctly lower Indian Ocean sea level during the last two millennia occurred during times of relatively low incoming solar radiation, according to an analysis of U–Th dated coral microatolls in the Maldives.
In case you missed it:
Our data also confirm the acceleration of relative sea-level rise over the past two centuries and suggest that the current magnitude and rate of sea-level rise is not unprecedented.
The acceleration of sea level rise over the past 200 years is due to the fact that it was falling and then static during the Little Ice Age lowstand before it started rising. It’s not a recent feature. It began in the early 1800’s.
Furthermore, neither the rate nor the magnitude of recent sea level rise is unprecedented. The SciTech Daily headline is a baldfaced lie.
The basis of this bit of alarmism:
Underscoring the serious threat posed to coastal cities and communities in the region, the ongoing study, which began in 2017, further suggests that if such acceleration continues over the next century, sea levels in the Indian Ocean will have risen to their highest level ever in recorded history.
Is the last sentence in the paper:
Collectively, our coral evidence suggests that rates of recent sea-level change are not unprecedented over the past two millennia. However, these rates of rise set a sea-level trajectory that will exceed the elevation of the late Holocene high-stand in the Indo-Pacific in the next century.
(1) Climate-forced sea-level lowstands in the Indian Ocean during the last two millennia | Request PDF. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337953634_Climate-forced_sea-level_lowstands_in_the_Indian_Ocean_during_the_last_two_millennia [accessed Jan 02 2020].
The full text of the paper is available to Researchgate members. Their data indicate that sea level was 0.5 m higher than it is today during the late Holocene high-stand. The “serious threat” alleged by SciTech Daily is that Indo-Pacific sea levels will rise by a bit more than 20 inches over the next 200 years.
Reference
Kench, Paul, Roger McLean, Susan Owen, Emma Ryan, Kyle Morgan, Lin Ke, Xianfeng Wang & Keven Roy. (2019). “Climate-forced sea-level lowstands in the Indian Ocean during the last two millennia”. Nature Geoscience. 1-4. 10.1038/s41561-019-0503-7.
Measuring sea level rise in a place like the Maldives; how brilliant. Did anyone doing this check the geology of the Maldives?–
“The geology of the Maldives formed beginning 68 million years ago as a hotspot which produced the Deccan Traps in India. As India moved northward, the hotspot generated an island chain in the Indian Ocean, which includes Mauritius and Réunion. The Réunion hotspot trail was offset by the Central Indian Ridge 35 million years ago. The hotspot theory is supported by the fact that the basement basalts underlying the atolls of the Maldives are younger in the south, toward Réunion.” (From Wiki)
Let me give a hint–can you measure sea level rise on Surtsey, which was below sea level when I was in high-school grade 10? How about at the SE end of Hawaii, at the Kapoho tide pools, which were below sea level at this time last year? Krakatoa?
I invite everyone to try a simple exercise–try to draw a sphere representing this planet on an 8-1/2 X 11 sheet of paper, drawing the solidified crust to scale. Unless you kept your 00 and 000 Rapidograph drafting pens from before the computer era, you will find that you don’t have anything that can draw a line thin enough for it to be to scale.
And some PhD wants to measure (and project) seal level trends on a pimple sitting on oceanic crust that is sliding off a mantle hot-spot?? If you would like to short-circuit all the endless babble about what will happen ‘if this trend continues’–check the sea mounts northwest of the Hawaiian Volcanic Chain.
The simple question is–‘sea level’…with respect to what?
Good paper, good data. It most strongly suggests that sea level changes in the last two thousand years are mainly due to changes in overall ocean temperatures. No signal yet from the catastrophically collapsing ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica. Perhaps they are not catastrophically collapsing!
The disconnect between the content of the paper and the news article is clear evidence that the media are only interested in scare stories and can’t be bothered to actually read scientific literature.
Settled science is so amazing.
From No Tricks Zone: ocean heat content
“According to a new paper, the Earth’s ocean heat content time derivative (OHCTD) has been decreasing (-0.26 W/m²/decade) since 2000, coinciding with a similar deficit in the Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI). The authors acknowledge such trends are “surprising” considering greenhouse gas emissions have risen. “
CAGW’s dire SLR prediction failed miserably, as have all its other dire predictions: global temps, ocean pH, methane concentrations, drought, rainfall, hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones, tornadoes, snowfall, polar bears, air pollution, mass extinctions, crop yields, flooding, Arctic ice, etc., etc., etc.,…
CAGW has become a joke..
Free markets have just made the last decade the most prosperous in human history with more people rising out of poverty and the fastest growth in living standards and technological and medical advancements evaaaa.
Yet Leftists try to convince their useful-idiot followers it was the worst decade in human history and there are only 12 more years before the world becomes uninhabitable because of…..CAGW….
Yeah, right…got it…
A general rule of thumb: Immediately question any statement that uses a comparative (bigger, smaller, hotter, etc.) and no precise figures. ” Sea levels are increasing” is a comparative. “The rate of sea level increase is increasing” is a double comparative ( sea levels are getting higher and getting higher faster). These statements are (I assume) true. Now go out on the ‘net and start reading articles that speak of increasing sea levels, and you quickly notice that very few of them have a figure for the annual increase in global sea levels. In 2018 it was something like an eighth of an inch. No reasonable person is going to say, an eighth of an inch increase in a year is an existential threat, which of course is why the earnest articles citing the threat of increasing sea levels scrupulously avoid mentioning that particular datum.
This is why I have so much scorn for climate change Chicken Littles: They haven’t got even enough integrity to lie honestly. They say things that are technically true (the rate of sea level increase is increasing) which are meant to make people believe that London will be under water, and pretty damn soon. So they weren’t really lying, and if you happened to be deceived into being alarmed that sea level increase was a serious problem, that’s on you.
Climate change alarmism depends on getting people smart enough to write newspaper copy but dumb enough not to understand common sophistry to be alarmed, and then set out to alarm similarly handicapped people. And they call us doubters the dummies, who don’t understand the Science. (Which is simple, by the way. Only dummies like us could fail to understand it.) This offends my vanity.
The Maldives have just built 11? new airports. I suppose it’s to help with the evacuation!
In the cartoon, that hockeystick is attached to wrong body part.
Didn’t Nils Axel Morner show that Maldive sea levels fell 30 cm in the 1970s and have stayed there ever since? The Maldives need Paris Agreement money to build another airport for tourists.
From memory, Prof. Morner referenced a lone tree on the coral flat that had been there for many years … rumour has it that a couple of Australian academic research $warmunista$ promptly went there are removed the tree !
Anything for a headline
I reckon that they search the Web for documents containing the words “sea-level”, “rise” and “unprecedented” and then assume, without reading, that the research is predicting oncoming disaster by water
Let’s suppose sea level rise will become threathening for coastal areas ,
wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in dikes and other protective works then waste all those billions for a hypothetical lowering temperature a few hundreds of a degree caused by hypothetical
manmade climate change.
But i’m using logic here , that doesn’t work for a religious cult driven by an agenda.
The entire premise of “sea-level rise” being of any danger is itself a bald-faced lie, other than a tsunami.
I have oft times wondered what would happen to sea levels if everything west of the San Andreas fault broke off and slid into the ocean.
It would make a big splash… But San Andreas is a strike-slip fault system. As entertaining as the scene was, everything west of the fault system is moving north, not west.
My my what an echo-chamber. If reassurance is what you’re after you would be better off acknowledging that climate change is a real thing and working to combat it rather than just patting yourselves on the back for a flimsy string of pop-science claims. I would say the same thing to alarmists as well, don’t worry.
If you think that human pollution will have no negative impact on the Earth’s ecosystems, then please do go try inhaling exhaust fumes for a while and see where it gets you. I warn you though, it’s not good for your health – does this count as alarmism too?