ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
A majority of the world population lives on low lying lands near the sea, some of which are predicted to submerge by the end of the 21st century due to rising sea levels.
The most relevant quantity for assessing the impacts of sea-level change on these communities is the relative sea-level rise – the elevation change between the Earth’s surface height and sea surface height. For an observer standing on the coastland, relative sea-level rise is the net change in the sea level, which also includes the rise and fall of the land beneath observer’s feet.
Now, using precise measurements from state-of-the-art satellite-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) that can detect the land surface rise and fall with millimeter accuracy, an Arizona State University research team has, for the first time, tracked the entire California coast’s vertical land motion.
They’ve identified local hotspots of the sinking coast, in the cities of San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Francisco, with a combined population of 4 to 8 million people exposed to rapid land subsidence, who will be at a higher flooding risk during the decades ahead of projected sea-level rise.
“We have ushered in a new era of coastal mapping at greater than 1,000 fold higher detail and resolution than ever before,” said Manoochehr Shirzaei, who is the principal investigator of the NASA-funded project. “The unprecedented detail and submillimeter accuracy resolved in our vertical land motion dataset can transform the understanding of natural and anthropogenic changes in relative sea-level and associated hazards.”
The results were published in this week’s issue of Science Advances (DOI link here).
The research team included graduate student and lead author Em Blackwell, and faculty Manoochehr Shirzaei, Chandrakanta Ojha and Susanna Werth, all from the ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration (Werth has a dual appointment in the School of Geography and Urban Planning).
Em Blackwell had a keen interest in geology, and as Blackwell began graduate school, the applications of InSAR drew them to pursue this project. InSAR uses radar to measure the change in distance between the satellite and ground surface, producing highly accurate deformation maps of the Earth’s surface at 10s m resolution over 100s km spatial extent.
Land subsidence can occur due to natural and anthropogenic processes or a combination of them. The natural processes comprise tectonics, glacial isostatic adjustment, sediment loading, and soil compaction. The anthropogenic causes include groundwater extraction and oil and gas production.
As of 2005, approximately 40 million people were exposed to a 1 in 100-year coastal flooding hazard, and by 2070 this number will grow more than threefold. The value of property exposed to flooding will increase to about 9% of the projected global Gross Domestic Product, with the U.S., Japan, and the Netherlands being the countries with the most exposure. These exposure estimates often rely only on projections of global average sea level rise and do not account for vertical land motion.
The study measured the entire 1350-kilometer long coast of California from 2007-2018, compiling 1000s of satellite images over time, used for making a vertical land motion map with 35-million-pixel at ~80 m resolution, comprising a wide range of coastal uplift and subsidence rates. Coastal communities’ policymakers and the general public can freely download the data (link in supplemental data).
The four metropolitan areas majorly affected in these areas included San Francisco, Monterey Bay, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
“The vast majority of the San Francisco Bay perimeter is undergoing subsidence with rates reaching 5.9 mm/year,” said Blackwell. “Notably, the San Francisco International Airport is subsiding with rates faster than 2.0 mm/year. The Monterey Bay Area, including the city of Santa Cruz, is rapidly sinking without any zones of uplift. Rates of subsidence for this area reach 8.7 mm/year. The Los Angeles area shows subsidence along small coastal zones, but most of the subsidence is occurring inland.”
Areas of land uplift included north of the San Francisco Bay Area (3 to 5 mm/year) and Central California (same rate).
Going forward in the decades ahead, the coastal population is expected to grow to over 1 billion people by 2050, due to coastward migration. The future flood risk that these communities will face is mainly controlled by the rate of relative sea-level rise, namely, the combination of sea-level rise and vertical land motion. It is vital to include land subsidence into regional projections that are used to identify areas of potential flooding for the urbanized coast.
Beyond the study, the ASU research team is hopeful that others in the scientific community can build on their results to measure and identify coastal hazards more broadly in the U.S. and around the world.
###
Let them do a Sacramento on them, jack the buildings up 15 feet and fill the roads in with rubble. 🙂
In San Francisco they had a bunch of sailing ships stranded when the crews ran off to seek their fortune during gold rush. They sank them with fill in them to help make more land. The remains of those buried ships are being found still today during construction projects. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/05/map-ships-buried-san-francisco/
Today, the growing homeless population leaves shi*s all over and they don’t bother to bury them.
Chicago, too.
WHat I dont get is why they didnt just turn the ground floor into t basement and raise the roof, adding another floor. Haas to be much better than jacking up the whole building! (Because a lot of those buildings, brick, didnt take well to being jacked up!
3,000 feet above sea level here in Montana and West Coast Republicans, Independents and Libertarians leaving Commiefornia as well as The Two Peoples Republics of Portland and Seattle. Buying property sight unseen and moving in droves.
Cost to rent 26 foot U-Haul from Sacramento to Boise – $3,068
Cost to rent same truck from Boise to Sacramento – $147
Cost to rent 26 foot U-Haul from Sacramento to Bozeman, MT -$4350
Reverse trip – $726
So Democrats will drown – Schadenfreude, dudes.
The most relevant quantity for assessing the impacts of sea-level change on these communities is the relative sea-level rise…
Now, using precise measurements from state-of-the-art satellite-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR)…
The easiest way to determine the relative rate of sea level rise is by looking at the tide gauge record which is notably missing in the Arizona State University study.
I am reminded of the Niels Bohr yarn about measuring the height of a building using a barometer.
Steve — You’re correct of course. For what it’s worth, here are the URLs for data from the USGS tide gauge at the Presidio at San Francisco. It happens to be the longest continuous tide gauge record in the US.
General site info: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/stationhome.html?id=9414290
Long term trend plot: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/stationhome.html?id=9414290
Data from the gauge (tide info removed) during the 1906 earthquake. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/presidio-tide-gauge-graph-april-18-1906
Take aways: There was an apparent shift of a couple of inches in elevation in the late 1890s — about a decade before the earthquake. No one knows why. The earthquake in 1906 had surprisingly little effect despite the San Andreas fault being only a few kilometers to the West and the city just to the South being devastated. But the San Andreas is a right-lateral slip fault. It’s not supposed to have any significant vertical component. Overall, the sea level trend looks to be a remarkable steady 2mm/year = 20cm (roughly 8 inches) a century. No sign of the alleged recent acceleration in sea level rise beloved of climate alarmists.
If I still lived in California, I’d worry about future water availability, rather than about being swallowed up by the sea. There’s reasonable paleo evidence of decade long droughts in centuries past https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/ No reason I can think of (other than climate change perhaps) that can’t and won’t happen again.
Don K August 2, 2020 at 4:28 am
No sign of the alleged recent acceleration in sea level rise beloved of climate alarmists.
There is some acceleration for San Francisco, it’s about 0.015 mm/yr² extrapolating out to 2100 that would come to about 0.23 meters or 8.9 inches of sea level rise.
If you omit data before the 1906 earthquake, there’s been no acceleration at all in San Francisco’s sea-level measurement record:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=san%20francisco&c_date=1906/6-2024/12
Linear trend: 2.028 ±0.193 mm/yr
Acceleration: -0.000699 ±0.013103 mm/yr²
Quite a few places saw a slight acceleration in rate of sea-level rise in the late 19th century and/or the first quarter of the 20th century. That, and/or the apparent datum shift mentioned by Don K, presumably account for the very slight apparent acceleration at San Francisco when 19th-century data are included in the regression.
But that obviously cannot be blamed on fossil fuels. Sea-level rise acceleration had largely ceased by the time the first Model A rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line.
What is the error in the 15 micrometer per year acceleration you mentioned?
It’s about ±6 µm/yr², Brook. Calculated from the full San Francisco sea-level measurement record (July 1854 through June 2020), quadratic regression yields an acceleration of +14.42 ±5.96 µm/yr². However, there’s been no detectable acceleration there since the 1906 earthquake.
Let’s look north of San Francisco.
NOAA reports sea level at Victoria BC is rising at 7.4 cm per century, but the raw tide gauge data dating back to 1915 shows a slope of about 0.6 cm per century.
Just a bit farther north, NOAA tide gauges report sea level at Juneau is falling at 3.4 cm per century.
But the extreme example in North America is Churchill Manitoba where tide gauges show sea level is falling at 93 cm per century – close to 1m every 100 years. You can see the old coastline far inland from the water. The GoC site explains that this is due to post-ice-age isostatic rebound.
Indeed. Unless you have good evidence that vertical land motion rates do not vary, extrapolating long term projections from very short measurement records is a fool’s errand — especially when long-term data is available — but that’s what they did.
Their paper reports that they analyzed two non-overlapping 5-year datasets of satellite measurements, plus a 22-year dataset of horizontal land movements, and that they included individual stations with measurement records as short as 1 year.
If you want to know about coastal sea-level trends, you should look at coastal sea-level measurements. How is that not obvious?
The best California sea-level measurement record is from San Francisco. We have 114 years of continuous sea-level measurements there since the 1906 earthquake. Here they are, graphed, along with linear and quadratic regression analyses:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=san%20francisco&c_date=1906/6-2024/12
Of course the ocean “sloshes,” but the long term trend is perfectly linear:
Linear trend: 2.028 ±0.193 mm/yr
Acceleration: -0.000699 ±0.013103 mm/yr²
That trend is just 7.2 to 8.8 inches per century.
Across the Bay at Alameda, measurements began in 1939:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=alameda
The second-longest California measurement record is from San Diego, where measurements began in 1906:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=san%20diego
La Jolla has 105 years of measurements:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=la%20jolla
Los Angeles has data since 1923:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=245
Crescent City has data back to 1933:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=crescent%20city
Santa Monica has data back to 1933, but with substantial gaps:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=santa%20monica
San Luis Obispo has data from 1945:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=san%20luis
Those are the eight best long (60+ year) sea-level measurement records from California.
At seven of the eight sites, sea-level is rising. At one site, Crescent City, it is falling. In every case the rates are minuscule.
At seven of the eight sites, the trends are not statistically different from linear. At one site, Los Angeles, there’s been a barely-statistically-significant acceleration. Projected to year 2100 it would amount to a sea-level difference of about six inches, compared to the linear trend.
I hope it is obvious that rising CO2 levels, and resultant climate change, have not substantially affected sea-level trends.
Interpolate at will. Extrapolate at your own peril.
he doesnt understand that extrapolation is modelling
QED!
Only to an arts graduate, its actually an estimation method to people with a maths or science degree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrapolation
Extrapolation is not “modeling,” unless you stretch the definition far enough to pretend that even so-called “semi-empirical modeling” is actually modeling (which it isn’t).
“Model” is a transitive verb. It requires an object. If someone claims to be “modeling” then you are entitled to ask them what are they modeling?
To model something requires some level of understanding of the physical processes involved, so that they can be estimated (“modeled’). Extrapolation does not.
Model at your own peril, Mr. Mosher?
Steven Mosher August 3, 2020 at 2:34 am
Mmm … this is one of those times when it’s clear that the words mean different things to different people … and to defend Mosh, both meanings are valid and valuable.
LdB and Dave are using “model” to refer to the type of iterative model used to attempt to model global climate. And guess what?
They’re right. In the climate context that’s the usual meaning of “model”.
Mosh, on the other hand, is using “model” to mean any kind of abstraction of underlying principles from underlying chaos. For example, and he can correct me if I’m wrong, I’d suspect that he would say that E = M C^2 is a model, and guess what?
He’s right. It is a mathematical model of a physical process.
I’m reminded of the story of the time that the learned Mulla Nasruddin became a judge and presided over his first case. The prosecutor went first, and he argued so passionately that Nasruddin shouted “You’re right!” to the prosecutor, and had to be restrained from issuing judgment until the other side was heard.
Now, the defense attorney was a silver-tongued devil, and he argued so well for his client that Nasruddin jumped up and shouted “You’re right!” to the defense attorney.
Nasruddin’s wife happened to be in court to see his first case, and she jumped up and said “My dear husband, they cannot both be right.”
Nasruddin turned to the gallery shouted at her, “Thank you, my dear … you’re right!”
Me, I’m kinda with Mosh on this and kinda not. I don’t like the blanket disagreement without explanation, that “drive-by” kind of comment isn’t all that helpful. But on another level … he’s right.
The problem for me is, I’ve been writing computer programs for 57 years now, and in that time I’ve written dozens of models of all kinds of processes for a host of different reasons. And what I’ve found out is that there are a bunch of kinds of models, with very different characteristics, accuracies, inherent problems, fundamental logical framework, range limits, scientific grounding, numbers of tunable parameters, and other attributes and issues known and unknown.
So when we say that a global climate computer model (GCM) and “E=MC2” are both “models”, while it is true, it is far too general to be meaningful.
One of the fundamental differences in models is the distinction between iterative and non-iterative models. I probably should write a post about that sometime … in any case, E=MC2 and direct extrapolation are non-iterative models, and GCMs are iterative models. These are totally different universes of models.
So I will say that if E=MC2 is considered to be a model, then extrapolation is a model. And on my planet I do consider both to be models. The assumptions in the extrapolation model are “Everything stays the same”. Bear in mind that that assumption is not fundamentally different from the assumption “Most things stay the same” … and that both are often gross oversimplifications. Not always, obviously, or we wouldn’t have those marvelous mathematical and logical models that we call “Natural Laws” … but as a rule, and particularly in the world of climate, things are generally far from that simple or stable.
My best to all of you, and what can I possibly say to each of you other than …
“You’re right!”
w.
Ah, Willis,
At the risk of quibbling, I disagree that ” E=MC2 is a model. ” That’s a bit like saying that ” 1 inch = 2.54 cm ” is a model. It’s a change of units, based on definitions.
Expressed in English, the implicit model in linear extrapolation is “sea level is modeled as a linear function of time with slope m.” History and pre-history have shown conclusively that this model is patently not true except perhaps over short periods of time.
boffin77 August 3, 2020 at 2:42 pm
Nope. Inches are totally separate from the real world. All they are is a specific length.
E=MC2, on the other hand, is a mathematical description of a real physical process. Investigating and following the trail of E=MC2 in the real world led to atomic power and nuclear bombs … but investigating and following the trail of “1 inch = 2.54 cm” has no meaning in the real world. So no, they’re not the same at all. One is a model of a physical process (the transformation of mass into energy), and one isn’t.
Regards,
w.
The entire west coast of the Americas is an emerging coast, with subduction-related thermal inflation (often expressed as volcanism) and tectonic plate tilting. If humans pump out groundwater, and maybe even petroleum phases, there will be localized subsidence, which may exceed the emergent rate. Since any potentially adverse subsidence is localized the local community should take up the issue with building permits and construction designs. Prohibiting driving SUV’s is dysfunctional virtue signaling and won’t help. If the Journal of Irreproducible Results still existed it would attribute the subsidence to the politically motivated policies that attract huge concentrations of homeless persons, thereby loading up the lowlands and promoting subsidence. Stay sane and safe and staying away from Kalifornia would help with both.
None of the San Francisco GPS measurements (and there are several) show the land to be settling at a rate of 5.9 mm/yr. All are either stable or erratic, likely due to changes in the GPS location.
Why would these “scientists” not consider all sources of relevant data before publishing their findings?
Because most of them are so unaware of reality that they don’t even know things like GPS can be used to measure altitude. My youngest son grew up here in Kansas living a semi-rural background. He is now a scientist living near Boston. Some of the tales he has to tell about his city-grown compatriots are amazing. From cell phones to microwaves to automobiles many of them have no idea how anything actually works. It’s like a piano player that has never once looked under the hood to see how the sound is actually made!
When I was in grad school, I shared a house with a graduate EE. The toilet started acting up one day, so I fixed it. As I explained what I had done, he looked amazed. He said he had always thought there was an electric pump in there. So I told him, “Have you ever plugged one of those in?”
They got my zone wrong. Their vaunted measuring device precise to millimetres is off by meters.
They have me in a red zone which is incorrect.
GPS might get you 2-5cm accuracy and NOT for every 80 meters
but go ahead give me the GPS values for rise and fall at
37.7676, -122.5120
Wank
They must have made huge improvements.
“However, despite the potential to generate large-scale interferograms, the spatiotemporal variability of the troposphere, limits InSAR measurements accuracy (Delacourt et al., 1998, Haghshenas Haghighi and Motagh, 2017). For instance, 20% change in relative humidity leads to 10 cm error in the final deformation map (Zebker et al., 1997). ”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425719306285
Although Geomotion Australia promises 1mm going back 25 years. 😉
“Let Geomotion configure an InSAR Monitoring solution for you – with millimetre accuracy, up to 25 years back in time and 100,000’s measurement points per km², each with a graph of deformation over time”
https://www.geomotion.com.au/insar-monitoring.html
Subsidence, huh? Well, then you see that nothing the Earth wants to do can be controlled by what we want it to do.
Last winter, I saw first hand just how much control the planet has over us and how little control WE have over it when Lake Michigan flooded all the beaches from its northernmost reaches to the southern end, on both sides of the lake. IF Michi Gamu wants to reclaim its former turf, it will and even the Army Corps of Engineers won’t be able to stop it. That’s true of all the Great Lakes, all the smaller lakes and ponds and rivers, all of it, including the coastal areas.
Is it just me, or are the Pacific storms getting to be more hefty and destructive than they used to be?
Its Just you.
“A majority of the world population lives on low lying lands near the sea, some of which are predicted to submerge by the end of the 21st century due to rising sea levels”
The new sea level fearology is the effect of a 10cm local tidal guage SLR (not global eustatic slr) on “high tide flooding events in low lying coastal areas”.
This fearology is already here and now and spreading to more and more low lying coastal zones around the world with every cm. Here are some links.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/11/03/lessweknow/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/12/16/global-warming-melting-greenland/
I have a few more of these 10cm slr fears about high tide flooding in low lying coastal areas if anyone is interested. I can post more links if necessary.
The short of the story is that now we are supposed to fear 10cm slr because of the high tide flooding events in low lying coastal areas. They have some statistics of the horror of these high tide flooding events. Don’t have to wait for the year 2100. The fear is here and now.
Do the climate change alarmist not know ? Subsidence is the land sinking not the sea level rising.
Yes sir of course but i think their argument is that the more you sink the less slr i need to scare the hell out of you.
It’s journalistic malpractice. The lede states “due to rising sea levels”, but the story is about subsidence.
Possibly in the past most of the population have lived on low lying land by the sea. As the sea rose or dropped, they upped their tents and moved inland or vice-et-versa. Now adays we are much more fixed in place. Same with temperatures. In the Roman warm period, the Romans moved further North, hence Hadrian and Antoninos walls. In the cold period around the 6th Century there was mass migration southward.
15000 years ago, just before the beginning of the end of the last major ice age sea levels were 130 metres lower. In places the coastline was many 100’s of miles sea ward from its current position. Populations would continually be moving. Imagine if the Industrial Revolution had occurred in 15000 BC with its associated population growth and large cities by the sea. Sea rises at rates 10 or 20 times the current rate would put current rises in the shade.
Would have made a nice pre-historic hockey stick for Michael Mann’s 500 great granddad to predict!!
Going forward in the decades ahead, the coastal population is expected to grow to over 1 billion people by 2050, due to coastward migration.
Sounded to me like a serious report until I got to this. Or was this just a comment by Freakalert?
OK, I suppose they have here jumped from the California coast to global population shifts. Doesn’t make any sense otherwise, but sheesh!– doesn’t anyone proofread for intelligibility anymore?
“Going forward in the decades ahead, the coastal population is expected to grow to over 1 billion people by 2050, due to coastward migration.”
This is what’s known as the “Lemming Effect”, or the desire to move into a “Danger Zone” (real, or imagined). Even Odumbo isn’t immune, having purchased a coastal estate on Marthas Vineyard, which is itself an island. Why they do it exactly is a mystery, but possible explanations could include herd behavior and martyr complex. Or, deep down, they know that the whole “climate change” thing is a scam, but aren’t willing to admit it.
deep down, they know that the whole “climate change” thing is a scam, but aren’t willing to admit it.
‘Actions Speak Louder Than Words.’
When Alarmists like Al Gore and Barack Hussein Obama buy beach front estates, their actions demonstrate they are willful liars and know full well man made global warming is a socialist fraud they avariciously employ to enrich themselves and gain further control of the masses.
Nor did the “threat” of sea level rise stop Boston from doing the “big dig”.
and in other news…roughly 12 hours later the researchers discovered that sea levels fell in a newly discovered term, water snap!
There is so much missing here: tides, subsidence, geological formations, erosion….etc. SO MUCH MISSING. Amazing how they immediately jumped to the conclusion that the minuscule amount of exhaled gas is causing the sea to rise and the land to fall.
What’s next? The combined minuscule amount of weight at the edge of CA is causing the land to sink? They did tests in a lab using cork and weights and discovered that when you put more weight on one end the cork starts to dip at that end! Run away! Run away! We all need to run inland because if you put weight on one end of a continent it will dip into the ocean! The horror of it all! Man is nothing but a scourge upon Earth’s back, we should all be ashamed that we did not know this before and mitigate our evil ways of life through massive restrictive regulations wherein we will need a permit to say we are breathing properly–renewed every year and on file at the street, neighborhood, city, county, and finally state office (all of whom use a different system, so we can spend 11 months getting the permit up the ranks, only to repeat in another month for the following year)!
The continental U.S. tilts downward toward the Southwest and everything loose rolls into Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico.
AZ has the White Mountains and NM the end of the CO Plateau, which means as they lose steam over TX, they hit that plateau, fall down, then pick up steam to get up and over the White Mountains and roll into S. California for the big splash down at the end. And the crowd goes wild–from the East.
Not to say it’s a straight shot, there are eddies that form along the way, those so called “newly” discovered vacation spots that were there before but now are too expensive for the locals to live there anymore once that eddy was formed.
Having grown up in Santa Cruz, Commiefornia. The erosion is far more of a concern. The sandstone cliffs just disintegrate every year. Animals hollow them out to build homes, which is kinda kewl. There’s a spot near the beach where half the road just fell away on a 50 foot cliff and a desperate nearby homeowner has sprayed cement to try to stabilize it.
What happened to this formerly skeptical site? Who is Charles Rotter? Is there no escape from fake alarmist news now?
You’re new here, aren’t you.
CR posts what idiots say, then he is blamed for having said it. Sounds quite familiar, actually!
Sounds like a returnee.
Brodie, if it is fake news as you assert, then by all means please provide a rational, science-based rebuttal.
Or are you one of many Internet trolls who just happened to visit WUWT?
Charles is the guy behind the curtain who lets people come on here and beclown themselves.
Without fear or favor.
Brodie,
Here’s a helpful tip.
Scroll down to the bottom of the article. If it says “from EurekAlert!”, then you can be sure it’s alarmist rubbish.
I assume that Charles “the Moderator” Rotter posts this stuff to generate counter-arguments from the commenters.
Brodie
This site publishes claptrap in order to give equal airing to all views.
Unlike “settled science” sites you get to see it all here.
I’d call that science
And democracy
And common sense
And “not criminal”
Subsidence, and tidal erosion, two points alarmunistas really hate to see in public.
Nah, they’re as shameless as the mass murderer whose first victims were his parents, claiming that he should receive clemency, being an orphan.
Anything that contributes to generating alarm is useful. First off you can attribute subsidence to evil human development, and obviously any sea level rise is exclusively due to CO2-induced warming. Erosion can be claimed as the consequence of net sea level rise, and thus the whole thing is caused by man. Then after establishing that “fact”, focus 100% on the CO2.
It was in the early 70’s we were told (by no one with any credentials) that California was going to slide off into the ocean and the only safe place to live were the mountains behind Boulder Colorado.
High numbers of hippies and fruit loops headed to Colorado, and many still remain.
Should we be expecting another immigrant wave of Californians to hit Colorado following the release of this study?
“It was in the early 70’s we were told (by no one with any credentials) that California was going to slide off into the ocean”
That will still likely happen, but it will take hundreds of thousands of years.
In a shorter term perspective, in San Francisco for example, the sea level regularly rises and falls over 2000 mm in just a matter of hours. Even the 20 mm or so yearly variances due to natural ocean oscillations are dwarfed by natural tidal variations.
Even without considering additional variation due to storms, generational sea level rise is not significant.
If land sank it would be “seas rising in global catastrophe”. If seas rose it would be “seas rising in global catastrophe”. If there was no change at all it would be “computer models predict global catastrophe”
Oceans are always rising or falling, they’re never static, just like “the climate” is never static.
If oceans were receding, that would most likely mean glaciers would be advancing. That would also be the fault of nasty humans and their fossil fuels, as cities slowly get crushed, the same way they’re going to be slowly inundated sometime in the future, if trends continue.
If we’ve lost our ability to adapt, and instead attempt to control the uncontrollable, then we’re truly doomed.
Satellite measurements of a highly tectonic coastline with sea level model results applied allows another sea level doom claim and prediction?
Defund these armchair alarmists!
“Defund these armchair alarmists!”
More like armPIT alarmists, because their papers smell funny.
From the head post:
Not a whole lot of tidal stations in the area, but here’s the NOAA Sea Level Record for Monterey itself …
Now, IF Monterey were sinking at 8.7 mm per year or so as the authors claim, and the relative sea level is going up by only 1.7 mm per year, that would mean that around Monterey the sea level is DROPPING at a hurricane pace of 7 mm per year … and if you believe that I’ve got a bridge for sale.
Same thing for San Francisco:
Measured sea level rise in San Francisco is about two mm/year, and has been for a century … IF the land is sinking at 5.9 mm/year, that would mean that the sea level is falling in San Francisco at about four mm per year …
Not.
w.
But … but … but … the study passed peer review! Its science! How could its claims be illogical?
Peer review has been redefined. Peers, too.
Funny, the last time I was in Capitola about 12 years ago, the beach looked pretty much the same as when I went there as a kid in the 60s and 70s visiting my grandmother. I know it’s anecdotal, but there was no dramatic change either way.
The above article from ASU would have been more objective had they chose to make a direct comparison of the stated rates of land subsidence in comparison to the measured rate of rise of global sea level. Also, it appears they intentionally chose to obfuscate the real issues by introducing the largely-unscientific term “relative sea-level rise.”
Please allow me:
NOAA has documented that global absolute SLR has been linear at 3.0 +/- 0.4 mm/year since 1993, based on satellite altimetry data from the TOPEX, Jason-1, Jason-2 and Jason-3 satellites.
Ref: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/socd/lsa/SeaLevelRise/LSA_SLR_timeseries.php
In comparison, the above article states: ” ‘The vast majority of the San Francisco Bay perimeter is undergoing subsidence with rates reaching 5.9 mm/year,’ said Blackwell. ‘Notably, the San Francisco International Airport is subsiding with rates faster than 2.0 mm/year. The Monterey Bay Area, including the city of Santa Cruz, is rapidly sinking without any zones of uplift. Rates of subsidence for this area reach 8.7 mm/year. The Los Angeles area shows subsidence along small coastal zones, but most of the subsidence is occurring inland.’ ”
So, the above article’s lead-in sentence is very misleading by inclusion of the phrase “. . . some of which are predicted to submerge by the end of the 21st century due to rising sea levels.” To be scientifically objective, this phrase should have included at its end “and subsiding land.”
Hurricane Isaias will move closely along the US east coast all the way to Canada. Will cause huge material losses.
All due to climate change, no doubt.
And the relevance of your post to the above article is?
San Francisco Airport Subsidence = 2mm = 0.07874 inch X 100 years = 7.8 inches
San Francisco Airport runway height above sea level = 13 ft / 7.8 inches = 19.8 *100 =1,980 years before water reaches the runway.
At the rate California is going there will be no one wanting to visit long before the runway flood.
Sub-millimeter laser measurement from space? As it stands $12,790 survey instruments do 1.5mm at limited distances. The optics of that ‘space based laser’ must be impressive or built by unicorns.
For some reason I thought (or didn’t) they were using Lasers based Interferometric measurements.
InSAR is not laser based.
If you are curious as to whether or not these ideas are really believable, look to see if the promoters are buying land on the higher ground that will soon be new beachfront. I don’t think you will find many buyers. There is easy money to had there for the true believers.
California tumbles into the sea
That’ll be the day I go back to Annandale
Tried to warn you
About Chino and Daddy Gee
But I can’t seem to get to you through the U.S. Mail
Well I hear the whistle but I can’t go, I’m gonna
Take her down to Mexico, she said oh no
Guadalajara won’t do
Well, I did not think the girl
Could be so cruel
And I’m never going back
To my old school
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFnwczuvb74
“My Old School” from Steely Dan’s 1973 album Countdown to Ecstasy.
3,000 feet above sea level here in Montana and West Coast Republicans, Independents and Libertarians leaving Commiefornia as well as The Two Peoples Republics of Portland and Seattle. Buying property sight unseen and moving in droves.
Cost to rent 26 foot U-Haul from Sacramento to Boise – $3,068
Cost to rent same truck from Boise to Sacramento – $147
Cost to rent 26 foot U-Haul from Sacramento to Bozeman, MT -$4350
Reverse trip – $726
So Democrats will drown – Schadenfreude, dudes.
WOW! You mean the surface of the earth is in constant fluid motion, both sinking and rising?
“Netherlands” is the technical term for passages between mainlands and oceans.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Netherlands+technical+term&oq=Netherlands+technical+term+&aqs=chrome.
“Holland” is derived from the technical term “hollow land” – landscapes on the mainland that lack natural draining, emptying, other then evaporation.
We already discussed https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tDP1TdIzk3LMWD04ihLzFPIScxOBQA-jgY1&q=van+lake&oq=van+laje&aqs=chrome.