Settled Science: Global warming causes sea levels to rise — oops — fall, er slowdown? Whatever!
2016 Claim: Wait! What?! Study: There is so much global warming that it is slowing the rise of sea levels – ‘Is there anything global warming can’t do? Now it seems that there is so much global warming that it is slowing the rise of sea levels.’
Climate Astrology: ‘Global Warming’ commands sea level rise Increases…& sea level rise slowdown: NASA discovers that ‘global warming’ is slowing and not increasing sea level rise – NASA study claim: ‘Because the Earth has become more parched, partly because humans are pumping out more ground water, the rising oceans are being absorbed by lakes, rivers, and underground acquirers, much like a sponge absorbs water. An extra 3.2 trillion tons of water has thus been soaked up and stored and is not pouring into the streets of coastal cities.’
NASA Study Concludes ‘Global Warming’ Is Actually Slowing Sea Level Rise – A new NASA study concludes global warming increases the amount of water stored underground which, in turn, slows the rate of sea level rise. At a time when scientists are worried about accelerating sea level rise, NASA scientist John Reager and his colleagues found an extra 3,200 gigatons of water was being stored by parched landscapes from 2002 to 2014, slowing sea level rise by 15 percent.
2016 Study: Parched Earth soaks up water, slowing sea level rise
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Flashback 1987: FSU Professor: Global Warming Causes Sea Level To Fall
The Palm Beach Post – July 6, 1987: By Mary McLachlin – Palm Beach Post Staff Writer – Via Real Climate Science website
Excerpt: Florida State University Geology Professor William Tanner: “Tanner plotted 4000 years of sea-level data on 5,000 years of climatological data published in last year’s Encyclopedia of Climatology and found some interesting correlations. Every time the climate warmed a couple of degrees, the sea level went down. Every time the climate cooled a couple of degrees, the sea level went up. This happened four times, each cycle taking about 100 years, and spaced about 900 years apart.”
“He says sea level rise has been about six inches over the past century, and he now expects that to slow down and even reverse itself if humans continue warming the Earth.”
“We’ve made the assumption — and it’s logical — that if things get warm, the glaciers get warm, the glaciers are going to melt,” Tanner said. “But that’s not what these two curves show, no matter how logical it may be. Everybody’s been depending on logic without much data.”
More on Geologist Dr. William F. Tanner here. – William F. Tanner (1917-2000) Geologist – Of Tallahassee, Florida died on April 9, 2000. Tanner was an ASA fellow and a member of ASA’s Affil. of Christian Geologists. A prof. of geology at Florida State U. with emphasis on sedimentology, he was born in Milledgeville, Georgia in 1917. He holds a B.A. from Baylor University, an M.A. from Texas Technological College, and a Ph.D. from Oklahoma University, all in Geology. He has served as an Instructor at Oklahoma University, a visiting Professor of Geology at Florida State University, and Associate Professor and Professor of Geology at Florida State University. Since 1974 he has been Regents Professor. He has had geological experience in much of the U.S., mostly in the Southeast, Southwest, and Rocky Mountain areas,- maritime eastern Canada and Canadian Rockies,- Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, various parts of Brazil, and Venezuela. His specialties within geology include sedimentology, sediment transport (including beach and river erosion), paleogeography and paleoclimatology, history of the atmosphere and petroleum geology. Dr. Tanner is Editor of “Coastal Research, ” Science Editor for the New Atlas of Florida, and Editor of six volumes on coastal sedimentology. He is the author of 275 technical papers.
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Real Climate Science website note:
This picture of Boca Raton was in that issue of the paper.
And this is what that beach looks like today. Nothing has changed.
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Background on sea level rise:
1977: ROSS ICE SHELF, Antarctica-A huge portion of the Antarctic ice mass appears to be collapsing into the sea, a catastrophe that could raise the levels of the oceans by almost 20 feet. “We’re seeing the West ice sheet on its way out,” said Richard Cameron of the National Science Foundation. “It seems to be doing something completely different than the east ice sheet. It has nothing to do with a warmer climate, just the dynamics of unstable ice.”…”We’re doing about the most we can do right now to study the possible collapse of the west ice sheet,” said Dr. Richard Cameron, NSF program manager for glaciology. “It has become an area of concern because we could be on the brink of a rise in sea levels.” SUCH A RAPID rise is not unprecedented. It may have caused the Great Deluge described in the Old Testament.
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294 Responses
Sea level rise is in fact accelerating.
https://climatediscovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Church-and-white-A-20th-century-acceleration-in-global-sea-level-rise-Geophys.-Res.-Lett.-2006.png
Yeah sure, and the sun is burning out in a couple years.
A couple billion, yes. What’s your point?
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/infographic-sea-level-rise-global-warming.html
Why would you trust a liar when he makes it so obvious that’s what he’s paid to do?
Are you a fossil prostitute as well?
http://www.desmogblog.com/marc-morano
Now Fracking, you know that what you post is merely self serving jibberish.
Read about Marc here: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7078/marc-morano-0410/
Mr. Morano is a well-known liar and well-known for being paid for it… which is a bit perplexing.
I’m not sure why anyone would pay someone who has no credibility left.
Anything he says is more likely to be false than true!
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/PolarIce/polar_ice2.php
They want to be lied to. That is not as weird as it sounds. You see it all the time in couples. People choose partners who tell them what they want to here. Same thing happens in politics. How else do you explain Donald Trump?
I think eagerness to accept a pretty falsehood certainly does explain the rise of Mr. Donald Trump as well as Climate Denialism… but I think their calculus is a bit off with this one.
Lying about minorities and Women may not affect a person.
Lying about threats to the entire planet certainly might.
There is no way Mr. Morano could be paid enough for his lies to make up for the damage they are likely to do.
I believe that is what makes Climate Denialism a suicidal mental disorder, all the way up to the Kochs themselves. It’s a death cult.
They are actually trying to kill everyone on Earth.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-148
Read the first paragraphs of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. They shed some light on the psycho-social pathology that may be at play today.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/600/600-h/600-h.htm
There have always been people who would sell out their own grandmother, or even their own future well being for a quick fix today. The “fix” need not be a drug addiction, it could just be an ego boost. Or, look at gambling addiction.
Marc Morano is a mensch. It is you who are lying, about Marc, CB.
Oh my, you are naive.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7078/marc-morano-0410/
Esquire, now there is hard hitting nothing but the facts/sarcasm liberal hit rag. You folks are so funny. More life in fantasyland for you guys. BTW, I include tranny’s in that description.
Mike435 wrote, “Read about Marc [in Esquire]”
Are you kidding? Could you possibly find a more biased, inaccurate source?
E.g., they say, “a conservative PR expert named Steve Milloy… [part of] a small but noisy group of amateurs, ideologues, and cranks.” — Gimme a break! Milloy is a masters-level biostatistician, and that “small group” includes the 31,487 other American scientists (including engineers in relevant specialties) who have signed the Global Warming Petition, signifying our agreement with this statement:
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
Here’s an article from an old issue of Scientific American, showing the effect of “carbon pollution” from a blast furnace on crops:
http://www.sealevel.info/ScientificAmerican_1920-11-27_CO2_fertilization.html
Marc Morano is a mensch.
Crackpots.
“Steven J. Milloy is a columnist for Fox News and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. From the 1990s until the end of 2005, he was an adjunct scholar at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.”
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Steven_J._Milloy
The Oregon Petition.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition
Mike, the fact that someone doesn’t agree with you doesn’t make him a crackpot. But the fact that you believe 31,487 scientists who think physical evidence trumps ideologically-driven superstition and hype must all be crackpots strongly suggests that someone is a crackpot!
Both of your sources are fringe, left-wing, ideologically self-defined sites, and characteristically unscientific. In fact, remarkably, both sites betray that their authors don’t even know what a scientist is!
Your first source is “SourceWatch” site of the hard-left Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). The CMD openly admires notorious Stalinist I.F. “Izzy” Stone, and boasts of receiving an award named after him. They wrote, “Milloy holds a B.A. in Natural Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University [and] a Master of Health Sciences in Biostatistics… “ but later wrote, “Milloy (who is not a scientist himself)…”
CMD’s authors apparently don’t even realize that biostatistics is science!
Your second source, RationalWiki, is just as bad. They even wrote, with breathtaking ignorance, and in defiance of the dictionary, that “engineers… are not scientists.”
If you rely on sources which don’t even know what science is, for information about science and scientists, it’s no wonder you’re confused.
Do you know what science is?
Note you are note addressing the information presented, just the perceived ideology of the source. Since assessing right wing political activists is a political question, I need to use politic sources. I do not use political sources for science.
And, most engineers are not scientists. There is some overlap, but most engineers use science, they do not create it. Likewise, medical doctors use biology, but they are not biologists – save for some overlap. Milloy took some science courses, but he does not work as a scientist. He, like Morano, works as a political activist for right wing causes. Do you think Bill Nye is a scientist?
All engineers are scientists, by definition (except for railroad engineers, the guys who drive trains).
Scientists use science, they do not “create” it. Science is a tool, process for discovering knowledge about the physical world.
Milloy is a Masters-level biostatistician, which is certainly a scientist. He’s also a lawyer. The fact that he’s not working in labs and courtrooms doesn’t mean he’s not a scientist and lawyer.
Some scientists don’t really “do science,” or even use their scientific education at all, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t scientists.
The fact that Mann, Hansen & Nye are left-wing political activists doesn’t mean they aren’t scientists, either. They aren’t very good scientists, but they are scientists, nevertheless. They don’t cease being scientists just because they’re activists, nor because Hansen is retired, Mann is a fraudster, and Nye makes his living as an entertainer.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6274/699.short———get yourself updated…..solar slut
The article merely claims that sea levels would be rising even faster than the are if not for this secondary effect. It does not refute the documented fact that sea levels are rising and that the rate is accelerating.
Sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age.
Look up the word acceleration.
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Kemp_sealevel_20111.png
Sorry, but thats not “acceleration”. Look up the word hysteria.
Go learn something.
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-analyze-position-velocity-and-acceleration-.html
3.5 cm a year rise for the last 100 years. Thats hysteria. And your hysterical with your gloom and doom. There is not any city in the world doing anything about the “impending” sea level rise. So please, settle down, relax and quit trying to tell us the sky is falling, the seas are going to rise 2 feet, etc, because its not.
Thanks for admitting you do not know what acceleration means. Cities around the world are making plans to deal with rising sea levels.
Miami
http://www.miamidade.gov/planning/boards-sea-level-rise.asp
LA
https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/291/docs/pdfs/3rdMonthForum/LARC_LCP_Announcement_FINAL.pdf
Hong Cong
http://www.csr-asia.com/report/report_cc_challenges_hk.pdf
Rio de Janeiro
http://resilient-cities.iclei.org/fileadmin/sites/resilient-cities/files/Resilient_Cities_2011/Presentations/C/C4_Herzog_Barcat.pdf
So why isn’t Jacksonville Beach, Daytona Beach, Vero Beach, Fort Lauderdale Beach, Key West worried about sea levels?
Could it be that Miami Beach has a poor drainage system that can’t handle heavy rain?
Why don’t you read up on an issue before offering an opinion.
http://www.npr.org/2013/11/12/241350517/key-west-awash-with-plans-for-rising-sea-level
Why don’t you keep up with the latest “global warming news”?
NASA discovers that climate change is slowing and not hastening sea level rise
http://www.examiner.com/article/nasa-discovers-that-climate-change-is-slowing-and-not-hastening-sea-level-rise
I have already addressed that false argument in this very discussion.
“Sea levels are rising more than twice as quickly as they did for most of the 20th century. Scientists put this increase down to greater melting of glaciers and ice sheets and the oceans continuing to expand as they warm. A new study, published in Science, says that this acceleration would have been even greater had it not been for an increase in the amount of water being stored on land.”
http://www.carbonbrief.org/water-stored-on-land-stopped-recent-sea-level-rise-being-up-to-22-higher
And since you did not refute the article about Key West planning for future sea level rise, I take that as a tacit admission on your part that your original claim just as false as your current claim.
Maybe someday it will occur to you that ideology is not a suitable framework for understand scientific research.
They can juggle lobsters in Key West but that doesn’t mean sea rise will happen any time soon, if ever. I’ve lived in Florida for 50 years and there isn’t one iota of signs that the sea is rising. I don’t worry about it, nor should anyone else with half a brain.
You are lying.
http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/blog/2014/10/03/sea-level-rise-in-miami/
Ralph did not lie. If you are foolish enough to trust a source which draws scary conclusions from sea-level trends at a single location, and from less than a decade of data, it’s no wonder you’re confused, Mike. E.g., a prominent table on that page:
http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/recent_trends1.png
Don’t let Mike435 get under your skin, Ralph1001. He calls people liars all the time. It’s just his way of saying how much he loves you.
The web page he linked to uses laughably tiny data samples to generate a preposterous estimate of sea-level rise at Miami. The scholarly literature indicates that you need at least 50-60 years of data to calculate a robust long-term sea-level trend from a tide gauge.
Here’s NOAA’s graph of sea-level at Key West, which has a continuous 102-year record of sea-level measurements:
http://www.sealevel.info/8724580_key_west_2016-02.png
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580
http://www.sealevel.info/8724580_key_west_2016-02.png
As you can see there’s been no statistically significant increase in the rate of sea-level rise since about 1930. Sea level is rising there at only about 2-1/3 mm/year, a rate which is substantially unchanged over the last 85 years. (Also, some of the rise is actually due to subsidence of the Earth, rather than rising ocean.)
Miami doesn’t have as much sea-level data, but from what they do have you can see that it’s about the same as Key West:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8723170
By 2100, Miami and Key West will see a total of only about 8 inches of sea-level rise.
There are about sixty good-quality, 100+ year records of sea-level around the world, and they all show the same thing: there has been no statistically significant acceleration (increase) in the rate of sea-level rise in the last 85 years or more. That means anthropogenic CO2 emissions do not measurably affect sea-level rise, and predictions of wildly accelerated sea-level rise are based on superstition, not science.
Refs: http://www.sealevel.info/
Dave Burton wrote:
“As you can see there’s been no statistically significant increase in the rate of sea-level rise since about 1930.”
I”m curious — where did you learn to calculate statistical signifiance? And is it too late to get your money back?
In fact, the trend of the tidesandcurrents data for Key West is statistically significant, at the 95% confidence level, starting since Nov 2011!
“Starting since Nov. 2011” — that’s 4-1/3 years. is that a joke, David?
The literature indicates that at least 50-60 years of measurement data is needed to determine a robust trend from a tide gauge.
If you can’t look at the graph of sea-level trend at Key West and see that it’s about as perfectly linear as anything to be found in nature, you need new glasses.
I just did a quadratic regression analysis of the Key West sea-level data, 1925 to present, and found a positive acceleration… of 0.007658 mm/yr^2. That’s so close to zero that it looks like a straight line. Projected for 100 years it comes to a whopping 39 mm = 1.5 inches.
Terrifying, eh?
But that’s nothing compared to the sharp acceleration seen at Kwajalein Atoll, as of about three years ago. But look what has happened there, since then!
The oceans slosh, with a variety of quasi-periodic cycles, of up to sixty years in length. So, by cherry-picking regions and/or time periods, it’s easy to “prove” either acceleration or deceleration. When someone says that sea-level rise in some particular location or region has accelerated (or decelerated) over the last five, or 10, or 20, or 30 years at some location, it just means they don’t know what they’re talking about — or if they do, then they’re being deliberately deceptive.
For those Key West data, a quadratic fit is better than a linear fit, with an acceleration of 0.005 mm/yr2. Difference by 2100 is about 9 cm; more in the centuries that follow.
DavidAppell wrote, “…an acceleration of 0.005 mm/yr2. Difference by 2100 is about 9 cm…”
You appear to have made an arithmetic mistake, David.
2100 is 84 years away.
If a = 0.005 mm/yr² then:
d = a × t ² / 2 = 0.005 × 84² / 2 = 17.64 mm, not 90 mm.
Sorry, no. Simply take the Key West data, fit it to a linear model and a quadratic one, and project these fits. By 2100 they differ by 9 cm. Nearly a foot by 2200.
So you used the full data record, 1913-present?
What you’re describing should be equivalent to starting the acceleration at the midpoint of the (linear) data record, rather than at the present (minus the very slight difference in SL between the linear and quadratic fits at the midpoint).
The Key West measurement record starts in 1913. The midpoint would be 1964. From 1964 to 2100 is 146 years.
d = a × t ² / 2 = 0.005 × 146² / 2 = 53.29 mm (2 inches), still not 90 mm (3.5 inches).
You’d almost get there if you started with the linear trend, but in 1913 instead of 1964:
d = a × t ² / 2 = 0.005 × 187² / 2 = 87.42 mm = 3.44 inches.
However, that would be a mistake. The problem with that is that the quadratic fit starts out with a lower rate of SLR than the linear fit, so if you use the linear fit as the starting rate of SLR, and start the acceleration back in 1913, you end up overstating the SLR due to acceleration.
(Obviously, though, arguing over 2″ vs. 3.5″ of SLR is nit-picking — neither would significantly affect coastal communities,)
Yes, I used the full record.
And I stand by my numbers, which came straight from a linear fit and a quadratic fit via Excel.
“The Key West measurement record starts in 1913. The midpoint would be 1964. From 1964 to 2100 is 146 years.”
Your calculation isn’t valid unless you use the fitted data.
I found your mistake, David.
You misunderstood the result which Excel calculated for you. If you did a quadratic fit for January 1913 through December 2015 you not find an acceleration of 0.005 mm/yr². You found a t² coefficient of 0.005 (actually 0.004958), which is half the acceleration, which is therefore 0.009916 mm/yr².
Acceleration is the derivative of velocity, and when you take the derivative of a quadratic you’ve got to multiply by the exponent (2).
Starting at the midpoint (1964), which is where the slope of the quadratic fit is the same as the slope of the linear fit, 146 years of acceleration would come to:
d = a × t ² / 2 = 0.009916 × 146² / 2 = 105.68 mm (4.16 inches) of SLR, which is similar to your result.
However, we were not talking about acceleration since 1913. We were talking about acceleration since the late 1920s. I acknowledge that there was a small amount of acceleration in global SLR prior to the late 1920s, when CO2 was under 310 ppmv. What’s interesting is that adding nearly 100 ppmv of CO2 to the atmosphere since then has caused no SLR acceleration.
The trend is actually almost perfectly linear. Depending on the exact endpoints chosen, you can find either slight positive or slight negative acceleration, neither of them significant. E.g., a quadratic fit for Jan. 1925 through Dec. 2013 results in a decelerating trend of 0.000658 mm/yr², but a quadratic fit for Jan. 1925 through Dec. 2014 results in an accelerating trend of 0.002726 mm/yr².
A deceleration of 0.000658 mm/yr² for 146 years = 0.3″ decline in sea-level
A positive acceleration 0.002726 mm/yr² for 146 years = 1.1″ increase in sea-level
Both are obviously completely insignificant.
I trust that your silence means you have no disagreement with my calculations. Am I right, DavidAppell?
Very well done. This long thread from here on is mental tap dancing on the part of Mr..Appell.
There is an undeniable beauty in Keeling Curve which is more than visually pleasing.
Ralph said: “there isn’t one iota of signs that the sea is rising” in Key West. Your chart shows Ralph is wrong. I’m pretty sure he knows sea levels are rising since this is well covered in the Florida press. Thus, I think he was lying.
In the past you have denied that global sea level rise is accelerating. But, that was not the issue here. Again, Ralph said local sea levels were not rising. Your chart shows they are. Thanks!
Okay, I’ll give you that one, Mike. However, in Ralph’s defense, what he actually said was, “I’ve lived in Florida for 50 years and there isn’t one iota of signs that the sea is rising.”
2.33 mm/yr × 50 years / 25.4 mm/in = 4.59 inches.
I think he should be forgiven for not noticing 4.59 inches of sea-level rise over 50 years. You called him a liar for that. I think that was unreasonable. I think he’s an honest man, who just calls ’em as he sees ’em.
Dave, i kinda started to fall in love with you….but why don’t you just tell them about Volcanic activity and third world waist, that we have no control over….the Ozone scare in the 70s and 80s and now the global warning scare in the 00 and now in the 20teens….the world is going to warm and cool, we have no control over it…..we wobbel on our axis and get closer an further from our life source the sun. things happen…cite the rise of sea levels and now the fall of sea levels…..both as a result of global warming…..if we had enough data to definately determine that man was cousing any such thing as global warning, rest assured the people with the most to loose would put an end to it…..but, its just not true, its just a ploy by people to generate money for thier cause…..Im all for saving the envirenment….love solar and hydro power…and nuclear….but the world will do as the world does…give me a sample size that i can rely on……but i doubt humans will last that long
Here’s some info about volcanic activity:
http://www.sealevel.info/resources.html#volcanoes
“Miami’s Already Drowning Due to Sea Level Rise,” Gizmodo, 12/15/15
http://gizmodo.com/miamis-already-drowning-due-to-sea-level-rise-1748089307
Isn’t that odd that no other east coast Florida city is drowning.
No.
“A coalition of 21 Florida mayors wrote to the networks broadcasting the two Miami debates this week – the Democratic debate was on Wednesday – to demand that questions were put over sea level rise and climate change.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/11/marco-rubio-miami-beach-mayor-climate-change-denial
Miami’s Newest Sea-Level Rise Signpost: The Vizcaya Museum
OCTOBER 29, 2015
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miamis-newest-sea-level-rise-signpost-the-vizcaya-museum-8013241
“Miami Beach’s battle to stem rising tides,” 10/23/15
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article41141856.html
“Rising Seas Pull Fort Lauderdale, Florida’s Building Boomtown, Toward a Bust,” 3/3/16
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/01032016/ft-lauderdale-climate-change-global-warming-rising-sea-level
Rural Coastal Counties Fear Economics of Battle Against Rising Seas, 3/15/16
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/03/15/401782.htm
You’re wrong: here are the data on sea level:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Also see:
“A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise,” John A. Church and Neil J. White, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826, 2006GRL (2006).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL024826
“Global and regional sea level change during the 20th century,” Manfred Wenzel and Jens Schröter, JGR-Oceans, (7 Nov 2014) doi:10.1002/2014JC009900.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JC009900/abstract?campaign=woletoc
“Sea-Level Rise from the Late 19th to the Early 21st Century,” John A. Church and Neil J. White, Surveys in Geophysics, September 2011, Volume 32, Issue 4-5, pp 585-602, doi: 10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10712-011-9119-1
Living in Florida I’ve yet to see anything that remotely looks like sea level rise, and considering Florida is the third most populous state in the nation no one else seems to have either. No one is worried.
Clearly you are poorly informed.
I’m quite well informed.
Worldwide tide gauge comparisons show no acceleration in sea level rise
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/19/worldwide-tide-gauge-comparisons-show-no-acceleration-in-sea-level-rise/
Do you have any science you can cite?
Denier blogs don’t count as science.
What makes the link a “denier” blog? Does any fact that goes against the alarmist agenda make it not true?
“Sea-Level Acceleration Based on U.S. Tide Gauges and Extensions of Previous Global-Gauge Analyses,” J. R. Houston and R. G. Dean (2011) Journal of Coastal Research: Volume 27, Issue 3: pp. 409 – 417.
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/abs/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00157.1?prevSearch=%5BAllField%3A+houston+dean%5D&searchHistoryKey=&
DavidAppell wrote, “Sea-Level Acceleration Based on U.S. Tide Gauges and Extensions of Previous Global-Gauge Analyses,” J. R. Houston and R. G. Dean (2011) Journal of Coastal Research: Volume 27, Issue 3: pp. 409 – 417. http://www.jcronline.org/doi/abs/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00157.1 and “Do you have any science you can cite?”
Ralph1001 is right, David, and if you had bothered to read even the abstract of the paper you cited you’d have realized that it confirmed what Ralph wrote. Houston & Dean found that sea-level rise has decelerated slightly, both in the U.S. record, and globally.
(Bob Dean told me that the deceleration was small enough that it was reasonable to characterize sea-level rise as approximately linear.)
We have precise, high-quality, long term records of sea-level measurements going back at least 100 years from about sixty different locations in the world. The longest of them extends for over 200 years. They all show the same thing: there’s been no acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise in at least 85 years.
(Due to vertical land motion, local rates of sea-level change very considerably from one location to another, but most causes of vertical land motion are roughly linear on century-length time scales, so vertical land motion doesn’t usually affect measured acceleration or deceleration of sea-level rise significantly.)
Here’s one of the best quality Pacific sea-level records. Note the complete lack of acceleration:
http://sealevel.info/680-140_Sydney_2015-10.png (Pacific)
Here’s one of the best quality Atlantic sea-level records. Note the complete lack of acceleration:
http://sealevel.info/120-022_Wismar_2015-5.png (Atlantic)
Here are two more excellent Pacific gauges. Both have over a century of measurements, unaffected by PGR. Both show long-term trends right at the global average from high-quality, long-term measurements. Both show no sign of acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=1612340
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.shtml?stnid=680-471
Baltimore, MD is experiencing subsidence, but no acceleration:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8574680
Here’s a nice Adriatic sea-level record. Same thing: no acceleration:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.shtml?stnid=270-061
With atmospheric CO2 at 0.040% by volume, globally averaged sea-level rise is just under +1.5 mm/year.
When atmospheric CO2 was at 0.031% by volume, globally averaged sea-level rise was just under +1.5 mm/year.
The difference is that climate activists think the current +1.5 mm/year is catastrophic and caused by human release of CO2, and the +1.5 mm/year 85 years ago was natural and inconsequential.
However, the similarity between the two numbers — the catastrophic 1.5 mm/yr and the inconsequential 1.5 mm/yr — has confused even some liberals into backing away from the One True Climate Faith. Even President Obama’s former Undersecretary for Science, Steven Koonin, has written that:
“Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today.”
Here’s a list of some good papers on the topic:
http://www.sealevel.info/papers.html#acceleration
Dave selects papers that older or that only use a subset of the data that give the results he likes.
Mike just makes up nonsense, because facts have a conservative bias.
All the high-quality, long term (100+ year) sea-level measurement records show the same thing: there’s been no statistically significant acceleration in rate of sea-level rise in at least 85 years.
Mike could cherry-pick an outlier counterexample, except that there aren’t any.
The documented fact is that sea levels are rising more places than they are falling, but the average rate is so minuscule that in many places it is dwarfed by the rate of vertical land motion (which is why many places are experiencing falling sea-level). The other documented fact is that there’s been no sustained acceleration in the globally averaged rate of sea-level rise since the 1920s.
Read the most recent research.
Look at the data. It is unambiguous. There’s been no sustained acceleration in rate of sea-level rise since the 1920s.
Good! You found a reliable source of information!
Does it say the sea-level is rising or falling?
science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6274/699.short
Even if your 3.2 mm line which looks mighty cherry picked is true , are you seriously going to tell us to be afraid , really afraid , of a 32cm rise over a century ?
Visit Holland . See the meters they took from the North Sea centuries ago .
You cannot use a linear projection to estimate an accelerating trend. Sea level rise by 2100 is projected to be between 1 and 4 feet. If emissions of ghg’s and the warming continues unabated we are looking at several meters over the next few centuries. If major ice sheets collapse the rise may not be smooth but could have big jumps. Further, sea level rise is only one of the many consequences of global warming. Thus, it makes sense to cut income taxes, to cut corporate taxes, to cut sales and property taxes, and tax ghg emissions instead.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/10cb1a60-9277-11e4-a1fd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3zzTi5BVK
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/699c1f18-8d79-11e2-a0fd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2O5PsXcf1
There is damned little curvature in that graph at least since 1920 .
“Global warming” has been so near noise level since the steam engine that there is no room for a nonlinear component : http://cosy.com/Science/CO2vTkelvin.jpg .
Most fundamentally , GHG “theory” that the bases of planetary atmospheres are warmer than their tops is physical nonscience . If you dispute me , show us the equations or the demonstration of an optical filter which can “trap” energy .
The people doing that graph are using a standard dishonest trick. They just select a scale the makes 0.8 C look small. The issue is what is the impact on the climate and oceans. There is a lot of evidence that past 2.0 C things get pretty rough, and if we hit 4.0 C, which is a real possibility by 2100, and likely by 2150 under BAU assumptions, it would be catastrophic.
To understand how the dishonest people you are relying on work, see
http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
I do not understand your second “point”. Anyone who has been on an airplane knows the upper atmosphere is much colder than the surface.
.8 C is small.
That reminds me of this song …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzvlivbptXk
You’re showin’ your age, Mike.
Are people who listen to Bach dead?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQVehnkc68M
He’s OK. I prefer the real Bach, even though …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsc_v_bj2Pg
It’s my graph . And it is an honest 0 based graph . That’s why all temperature physics is stated in 0 based Kelvin . Thus we can say that at most dT%dCO2 is less than 0.01 .
You have “How to Lie with Statistics” exactly backwards . It warns against the truncating of graphs to exaggerate effects .
But here’s another one which puts the variation in temperature over the last few lifetimes in perspective : http://cosy.com/Science/WUWT1307ChicVsTotGW.jpg .
The effects claimed for this barely noticeable by any human change are just plain stupid .
It is the impact that matters. 0.8C is just the start. If we go to 4C, you are looking several meters of sea level rise, widespread desertification, and the extinction of many life forms. Plus ocean acidification will cause massive loss of sea life. You simply reject science that does not comport with your preconceived notions.
Duh ! .
But how do you extrapolate a 0.3% rise in well over a century to a 1.3% rise in the next 85 or so years . There is absolutely no evidence for any such extreme jump in dT%dCO2 : http://cosy.com/Science/ThermometerRecordBkUp.gif .
I am sorry that you do not understand the concept of acceleration. I do not have the time to explain such things to you. Take a calculus class.
That comment I class as willfully stupid .
Bet you believe your sex is what ever you want it to be rather than what you find between your legs , too .
And on top of it all, you are a bigot. Good to know.
No . I just strongly believe in REALITY .
I’ve had “trans” friends , at least one , Bobbi , who had their meat cut off unlike that drag queen wuss , Jenner .
I’m a bleeding heart libertarian ; I believe in each person’s right and responsibility to make their own decisions .
That does not imply a need to deny reality .
You “progressives” despise and deny reality and believe your hierarchical social reality can trump it .
It cannot .
Your biases have caused you to reject medical science. BTW, the penis is not cut off, they invert it. And, Jenner has not had srs. You have no idea what you are talking about.
So your “medical science” has attained the nonscience status of climate science !
I said Jenner was a wuss compared to Bobbi .
And about bathrooms , see my comment in http://cosy.com/views/APL94.txt .
The ONLY issue is that it is NOT the central government’s place to force any rules about bathrooms on used to be free citizens .
You have totally confirmed my comments about your disdain for reality .
Bye . That’s all the time I have to waste .
So, we can conclude that you reject science when it conflicts with your personal biases or ideological orientation.
So, we can conclude that you reject science when it conflicts with your personal biases or ideological orientation.
You have rejected mainstream climate science and the recommended medical treatment of gender dysphoria. What mainstream scientific position have I rejected?
Damn right I’ve rejected that pile of state funded mediocrity and outright anti-science willful stupidity .
I just implement the fundamental , experimentally testable equations for radiant heat transfer and show the quantitative absurdity climate scare millionaire James Hansen’s claim that Venus’s surface temperature is 400 Kelvin hotter than can be explained by the energy it absorbs from the sun .
So I don’t give a shit what any global statist self deluded eKoMafia says , only equations and experiment have standing with me .
Got it. But we already knew that you reject the conclusions of mainstream climate science. I asked you what mainstream scientific position have I rejected? You can read my comment history if you like. Let me know if you find any examples.
You are a thoughtless dupe or an intentional liar . You’ve made that clear .
Coming from the likes of you that is a complement. Have a great day Bob.
I’ve looked into Bob Armstrong’s “calculations” about a colored ball more than any other person on the planet. They are a joke — and not just because the planet isn’t a colored ball. Armstrong misunderstands Kirchhoff’s law, writes down equations whose units don’t even balance, and applies blackbody equations to objects he explicitly says are not blackbodies.
His “science” is a joke. He’s afraid to even address questions about it.
If only equations and experiments mean something to you, when are you going to provide them?
So far your equations are a joke, like when they divide two quantities with different units and somehow get a pure, unitless number.
I’ve looked into Bob Armstrong’s “science” more closely than anyone else on the planet, even deciphering his ancient and unknown method of writing equations and his horrible punctuation.
It is complete junk. (And I say that having a PhD in theoretical physics.) He can’t even get the units right in his equations. He misunderstands basic physical laws like Kirchoff’s Law, and he applies blackbody equations to objects that he defines as not blackbodies.
As just one bizarre example, on page 23 of his PowerPoint slides for the oh-so-credible Heartland Institute talk, he divides A by E and get a unitless number.
Unfortunately for him, higher up on that page it clearly shows that A and E have different units.
And, no, his derived numbers aren’t right either, such as for albedos and outgoing longwave spectrums.
Armstrong is afraid to even try to address any of these problems, or answer a single question. He’s very, very afraid he might be wrong.
PPT slides:
http://climateconferences.heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/Powerpoints/ICCC9/RobertArmstrong-Panel18.ppt
via
http://climateconferences.heartland
Pot, kettle, black.
Ever hear of positive feedbacks?
Obviously not.
dT/dCO2 has units. Notice Armstrong did not include them.
More likely, he doesn’t understand them.
To respond to your second point . Yes , the top of atmospheres are colder than their bottom necessarily matching the gray body temperature in their orbits ( 278.6 +- 2.3 from peri- to ap- helion in our orbit ) at their tops .
But that is exactly what cannot be explained by any optical phenomenon . Only asymmetric centripetal gravity can and does quantitatively explain that difference .
You do not know what you talking about.
Please be specific . Give us your computations . Mine are at http://CoSy.com
You sound like Fracking saves.
Mike: Don’t expect Armstrong to answer your questions. He is afraid of questions.
Gravity doesn’t interact with EM radiation. Thus, it cannot explain the Earth’s temperature, and it especially cannot explain its outgoing EM spectrum:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/schmidt_05/curve_s.gif
Armstrong wrote: “If you dispute me , show us the equations or the demonstration of an optical filter which can “trap” energy .”
He’s been shown them many times now. He’s afraid to even acknowledge that.
Bob Armstrong is afraid of a lot of things. But mostly, science.
Bob Armstrong wrote, “GHG “theory” that the bases of planetary atmospheres are warmer than their tops is physical nonscience…”
Huh? Do you not know that the atmosphere gets colder at higher altitudes? Have you never seen a snow-capped mountain?
https://photos.travelblog.org/Photos/24820/331072/f/2932699-Snow-capped-mountains-and-icebergs-2.jpg
I’ve been through that with him. He is even wackier than you! 😉
Here is the view I’m looking at right now :
http://cosy.com/images/y15/contrails1204.jpg .
In my Heartland Talk , http://cosy.com/Science/HeartlandBasicBasics.html , and other material on http://CoSy.com I work thru the computations of the temperature of a radiantly heated colored ball and show that that cannot explain the difference between top of atmosphere temperatures and the surface .
It was only seeing the quantitative work by “HockeySchtick” at , eg , http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-gravity-continuously-does-work-on.html mentioned in a discussion on “Watts Up With That” that it got thru to me that gravity is the only possible cause of the difference and explains it quite accurately .
The GHG theory is fundamentally false in explaining surface temperatures which is why you never have seen nor will see either quantitative equations or experiments demonstrating it .
Nice view!
I teethed on APL, and retain an affection for the language.
The Lapse Rate is a complex topic. Obviously, gravity is responsible for the pressure profile of the atmosphere, but I don’t see how you can think that gravity, alone, explains the atmosphere’s entire temperature vs. altitude profile:
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=atmospheric+lapse+rate+temperature+altitude
Additionally, you wrote, “GHG ‘theory’ that the bases of planetary atmospheres are warmer than their tops is physical nonscience…” What did you mean by that if you did not mean that the bases of mountains are no warmer than their peaks?
“Greenhouse gas theory” is pretty simple, in its fundamentals. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) are colorants. They tint the atmosphere (albeit in the infrared, rather than the visible, part of the spectrum).
The Precious Air Fertilizer (a/k/a carbon dioxide) acts as a dye in the atmosphere, which “colors” the atmosphere in the infrared, esp. around 15 µm.
Since nearly all of the energy emissions from the Earth are in the infrared, but over half of the incoming energy (from the Sun) is at shorter wavelengths, tinting the atmosphere in the infrared has a differential effect. Since there’s more outgoing than incoming infrared, GHGs absorb mostly outgoing radiation, preventing it from escaping into space. That causes warming. (It’s not how actual greenhouses work, but it’s still a real effect.)
The warming of the air, in turn, warms the ground, by several mechanisms, including increased infrared back-radiation from the air.
It doesn’t take much of a trace gas to have a substantial effect on the absorption and emission spectra of the atmosphere. If you add dye to a clear gas or liquid, and then shine through it a light which contains wavelengths that are absorbed by the dye, the gas or liquid will warm due to absorption of the light (compared to its temperature without the dye). Even a few ppm of dye is sufficient to have a substantial effect.
Compare it to the effect of food coloring on water: one drop of food coloring added to 10x10x10 cm (one liter) cubic jar of water (or 57 drops in a 15 gallon fish tank) will noticeably tint the whole liter, but one drop is only about 0.05 ml, so one drop in one liter is 0.05 / 1000 = 0.00005 = just 50 ppm.
But consider: although the atmosphere is less dense than liquid water, it is miles thick. The full thickness of the atmosphere is about the same mass as a 30 foot deep layer of water. Your cubic jar of colored water is only about four inches thick. So to get an equivalent thickness to the Earth’s atmosphere, you’ll have to stack up 90 of those jars of colored water in a 30-foot-long row.
Now, if you were to look through (or shine a light through) the row of 90 jars of colored water, imagine how deep the color would be, from just 50 ppm food coloring.
That’s why just a few ppm of a trace gas can significantly affect the spectrum of the light which passes through the Earth’s atmosphere, and have a potentially significant so-called “greenhouse” effect.
Except at the fringes of carbon dioxide’s absorption bands, there’s so much carbon dioxide in the air that the atmosphere is already very nearly opaque to the IR wavelengths which carbon dioxide mainly blocks. So adding additional carbon dioxide has only a small effect. (MODTRAN Tropical Atmosphere calculates that just 20 ppmv of carbon dioxide would have fully half the warming effect of the current 400 ppmv.) But additional carbon dioxide still does have an effect, primarily on those wavelengths corresponding to the far fringes of carbon dioxide’s absorption bands, where carbon dioxide is nearly-but-not-quite transparent.
Really, none of that is controversial. The meat of the climate debate is feedbacks.
If you want to understand the physics of how CO2 works as a GHG, here’s a resource that should help:
http://www.sealevel.info/Happer_UNC_2014-09-08/
There are also some links to additional resources here:
http://www.sealevel.info/resources.html#ghg
Sorry I don’t even have time to read your whole post right now . However , if you’ve got an APL head , you should definitely see if my evolute of a life spent APL in open to the c86 Forth fits in your head . I’ve been working on a new front door : http://cosy.com/y16/CoSy201601.html .
I’ve got a draft page started on Computational Earth Physics on CoSy which will restricted to that topic and generally require algorithms in some freely available language to back up any assertions . Maybe I should do a KickStarter or whatever to get it going .
One of the first items I’d like to see is a thorough analysis of HockeySchtick’s analysis . I think the basic relationship can be reduced to an equation as simple as the ratio of dot products I assert for spectral coupling .
Sorry I don’t have more time .
Two things.
“If you want to understand the physics of how CO2 works as a GHG”. Well it depends on whether you give that particular explanation for a GHE theory credence:
The eminent physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1872) demonstrated that the atmospheric temperature gradient and Earth’s gravitational field, not radiative forcing, can create the so called “greenhouse effect” (which is itself an untestable theorem btw). http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/maxwell-established-that-gravity.html
Later backed by Norman Sissenwine and other scientists in 1958 when creating the US Standard Atmosphere physical model without recognising any radiative forcing. They discarded Co2 and methane since it’s effect on atmospheric temperature was so negligible as it lacked any mass contribution and heat capacity to the atmosphere. Only after the model was completed did they add only one parameter of water vapor based on an annual and global basis, and the US Standard Atmosphere physical model still stands today.
And on the WV feedbacks, it WAS standard and perfectly well accepted physics that upwards of 2x Co2 =1.1C(max) +30% WV feedback [when assumed Positive]. “It is found that even an increase by a factor of 8 in the amount of CO2, which is highly unlikely in the next several THOUSAND years, will produce an increase in the surface temperature of less than 2°K.” (and that figure is only reached by INCLUDING Pos. WV feedbacks)- Rasool, Schneider of NASA (1971), ‘Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate’: https://www.atmos.washington.edu/2008Q2/591A/Articles/Rasool_Schneider_Science.pdf
Today following some Venusian imaginings, assumed Positive WV feedback is 10x that, as just more fatuous theory. So we have undergone a Venus inspired alteration in the physical universe since 1971 apparently.
Bob Armstrong’s calculations are complete crap.
I’ve looked into Bob Armstrong’s “science” more closely than anyone else on the planet, even deciphering his ancient and unknown method of writing equations and his horrible punctuation.
It is complete junk — and I say that having a PhD in theoretical physics. He can’t even get the units right in his equations. He misunderstands and misapplies basic physical principles like Kirchoff’s Law, and he applies blackbody equations to objects that he defines as not being blackbodies.
As just one bizarre example, on page 23 of his PowerPoint slides for the oh-so-credible Heartland Institute talk, he divides A by E and gets a unitless number.
Unfortunately, higher up on that page he clearly shows that A and E have different units.
And, no, his derived numbers aren’t right either, such as for albedos and outgoing longwave spectrums.
Armstrong is afraid to even try to address any of these problems, or answer a single question. He’s very, very afraid he might be wrong.
PPT slides:
http://climateconferences.heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/Powerpoints/ICCC9/RobertArmstrong-Panel18.ppt
via
http://climateconferences.heartland
Armstrong wrote:
“The GHG theory is fundamentally false in explaining surface temperatures which is why you never have seen nor will see either quantitative equations or experiments demonstrating it .”
Here are just some of the observations you keep pretending don’t exist:
“Radiative forcing – measured at Earth’s surface – corroborate the increasing greenhouse effect,” R. Philipona et al, Geo Res Letters, v31 L03202 (2004)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL018765/abstract
“Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010,” D. R. Feldman et al, Nature 519, 339–343 (19 March 2015)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14240.html
Their press release: “First Direct Observation of Carbon Dioxide’s Increasing Greenhouse Effect at the Earth’s Surface,” Berkeley Lab, 2/25/15
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/25/co2-greenhouse-effect-increase/
You can project anything you want, but without data to back it up you have just projections, which mean nothing.
You have no idea what you are saying, but have good day anyway. (The original chart is a data chart.)
Armstrong: Ever traveled to Florida? What will 32 cm more SLR do there? Huh?
Miami and Key West won’t see 32 cm (12.6 inches) of SLR for about 133 years, David. Are you planning to be around then?
Here’s NOAA’s graph of sea-level at Key West, which has a continuous 102-year record of sea-level measurements:
http://www.sealevel.info/8724580_key_west_2016-02.png
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580
As you can see, it’s linear. There’s been no statistically significant increase in the rate of sea-level rise since about 1930. Anthropogenic CO2 isn’t causing any acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise.
Sea-level is rising there at only about 2-1/3 mm/year, a rate which is substantially unchanged over the last 85 years. (Also, some of the rise is actually due to subsidence of the Earth, rather than rising ocean.)
Miami doesn’t have as much sea-level data, but from what they do have you can see that it’s about the same as Key West:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8723170
A linear extrapolation isn’t justified, because of the physics. (This is Climate Science 101.) Acceleration in sea level rise will dominate.
And what physics is that, David? What physics do you expect to suddenly kick in and start causing accelerated coastal sea-level rise, despite not having done so since the 1920s?
We’ve driven average atmospheric CO2 up from 0.031% to 0.040% of the dry atmosphere (by volume) since the 1940s. We’ve driven average atmospheric CH4 up from approximately 0.0012% to 0.0018% over the same period. And yet the rate of sea-level rise at the coasts is no higher now than it was before we added all those GHGs to the atmosphere.
We’ve done the experiment, and we know the result. You might have heard of this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIxvQMhttq4
The physics of the positive feedbacks that affect climate change once it gets started — especially the water vapor feedback and the ice-albedo feedback.
Ever hear of either of these?
Feynman would be the very *first* person to understand them. Were he alive today, Feynman would be one of the loudest voices warning against anthropogenic climate change.
David, my undergraduate degree is in Systems Science, which is the field that studies feedback systems. You misunderstand how they work. Unless they are very unusual and very highly nonlinear (which the two you named are not), they don’t wait and then kick in after a century or so. They simply amplify an effect.
If the last 85 years of large CO2 & CH4 increases and modestly warming temperatures haven’t caused any increase in the rate of sea-level rise, there’s no reason to imagine that the next 85 years will do so, either.
There is, however an important feedback mechanism which appears to be highly nonlinear: it is the negative feedback effect (or effects) of tropical sea surfaces through clouds, which regulate (limit) temperature increases in the tropics. Ever hear of that?
If you want to learn more, my web site has a page devoted to the topic of climate feedback mechanisms, including the two you named, and over a dozen others:
http://www.sealevel.info/feedbacks.html
“They simply amplify an effect.”
There is a term for this: “positive feedback.” They matter over many decades, and certainly over a century, and certainly at the point to which climate change has not progressed.
Unless you include them, you get wrong projections. A linear progression of long-term sea level is simply bad science.
But good politics. Burton’s group, NC-20, played a key role in getting the North Carolina legislature to override scientific assessments of future sea level rise.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/north-carolina-bans-latest-science-rising-sea-level/story?id=16913782
http://www.nc-20.com/board.htm
That’s not at all what the NC legislature did. If you want to know what really happened, you can read all about it here:
http://www.sealevel.info/resources.html#nc2012fight
There’s a link there where you can read the bill which was enacted (with strong bipartisan support, and the acquiescence of our very liberal Democrat governor). As you’ll see, it did just the oppose of what Mike contends.
“Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue had until Thursday to act on the bill known as House Bill 819, but she decided to let it become law by doing nothing.”
She caved in to the far right.
No, she went along with the strong bipartisan consensus in the legislature in favor of basing public policy on sound science.
I have to go bed. Got a meeting in the morning. But, I will hand it to you Dave that not many people can say they got an entire state to ignore reality for four years. Congrats. But, the tide is in and the chickens have come home to roost (whatever that expression means). You will not be able to continue this much longer. People can see the water rising. Let them plan for it!
We’re not the ones who are ignoring reality, Mike.
http://www.sealevel.info/120-012_Warnemunde_2016-02_67pct.png
People can read what happened.
” [The NC] House voted 68 to 46 to revise HB 819. The changes take out the requirement that planners use only linear estimates of future sea level rise, but also bar state agencies from considering accelerated sea level rise in decision-making until 1 July 2016.”
“”This version is better than the original Senate version,” says climate researcher Robert Jackson of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “It’s still bad policy though because it requires the state to bury its head in the sand for 4 more years.””
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/07/update-revised-north-carolina-sea-level-rise-bill-goes-governor
See also:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article10298660.html
The published evidence for acceleration is not much stronger. It will be interesting to see if the extreme anti-science right is finally beaten back,
Mike wrote, “The published evidence for acceleration is not much stronger. “
It’s not any stronger. There’s still no evidence of accelerated coastal sea-level rise. Here’s NC’s best sea-level record (our only GLOSS-LTT gauge):
http://www.sealevel.info/8658120_Wilmington_2016-02_67pct.png
Meant to say “now much stronger”.
If you do a linear fit you get a line. Big surprise!
If you do a quadratic fit and get a line, it mean’s there’s no acceleration.
Or that you don’t have enough data to detect it, or that you have not corrected for confounding factors. Some regions show deceleration over short intervals. But the global trend will override small regional factors.
And the chart you posted uses a linear fit.
When eighty years of data isn’t “enough data to detect” acceleration, we can say with certainty that there’s no significant acceleration to detect.
That’s NOAA’s graph, BTW. They do linear regression because the data is very linear.
And what does NOAA say about sea level rise?
“What is the basis of the range of scenarios for global mean sea level rise?
We have very high confidence (greater than 9 in 10 chances) that global
mean sea level (based on mean sea level in 1992) will rise at least 8 inches (0.2 meters) and no more than 6.6 feet (2 meters) by 2100. The
biggest source of uncertainty within this range is the contribution of water from melting ice sheets and glaciers in Greenland and West Antarctica.
The lowest sea level change scenario (8 inch rise) is based on historic rates of observed sea level change. This scenario should be considered where there is a high tolerance for risk (e.g. projects with a short lifespan or flexibility to adapt within the near-term)
* The intermediate-low scenario (1.6 feet) is based on projected ocean warming
* The intermediate-high scenario (3.9 feet) is based on projected ocean warming and recent ice sheet loss
* The highest sea level change scenario (6.6 foot rise) reflects ocean warming and the maximum plausible contribution of ice sheet loss
and glacial melting. This highest scenario should be considered in situations where there is little tolerance for risk.”
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
http://cpo.noaa.gov/AboutCPO/AllNews/TabId/315/ArtMID/668/ArticleID/80/Global-Sea-Level-Rise-Scenarios-for-the-United-States-National-Climate-Assessment.aspx
How is that good politics?
DavidAppell wrote, “‘They simply amplify an effect’ – There is a term for this: ‘positive feedback.'”
No, David, that is not correct. Amplification is not the same thing as positive feedback.
Positive feedback causes amplification in a system, but it is not, in general, the only cause.
DavidAppell wrote, “They matter over many decades, and certainly over a century, and certainly at the point to which climate change has not progressed.”
That’s dead wrong, David.
Of course feedbacks matter, both positive & negative. But if you think they only matter “over many decades,” you’re very mistaken. The effects of water vapor feedback are immediate, and the effects of ice-albedo feedback are almost immediate.
There are certainly long delays associated with some feedback mechanisms (like CO2-water temperature feedback), but not with the two feedbacks that you mentioned, which are probably the most important positive climate feedback mechanisms.
DavidAppell wrote, “Unless you include [positive feedbacks, especially the water vapor feedback and the ice-albedo feedback], you get wrong projections. A linear progression of long-term sea level is simply bad science.”
You are confused about how feedbacks work, David. Feedbacks which are approximately linear over the range of data values of interest will not, in general, cause significant nonlinearity in the response of a system (though long delays with high amplifications can cause overshoot or oscillation).
Most of the interesting climate feedbacks are not far from linear, for practical purposes, over the ranges of interest (possibly excepting clouds). Even Planck negative feedback, which is proportional to the 4th power(!) of temperature, is nearly linear of the range of interest.
“Positive feedback causes amplification in a system, but it is not, in general, the only cause.”
Of course not — that’s obvious.
“Of course feedbacks matter, both positive & negative. But if you think they only matter “over many decades,” you’re very mistaken. The effects of water vapor feedback are immediate, and the effects of ice-albedo feedback are almost immediate.”
The effects are immediate, but the feedbacks aren’t noticeable until temperature has changed enough to make them noticeable.
We’re still, mostly, in the linear part of climate change, but beginning to transition to the nonlinear part.
DavidAppell wrote, “The effects are immediate, but the feedbacks aren’t noticeable until temperature has changed enough to make them noticeable.”
Are you saying that the temperature change over the last seventy years is not “noticeable?”
DavidAppell wrote, “We’re still, mostly, in the linear part of climate change, but beginning to transition to the nonlinear part.”
Wrong. There’s no “linear part” vs. “nonlinear part.” The great majority of feedbacks are never nonlinear to a significant extent.
The exceptions all seem to be negative (stabilizing) feedbacks, which sharply increase in effectiveness with an increase in input (temperature or CO2):
* Eschenbach Tropical Cloud Feedback
* CO2 / Coccolithophore feedback
“Are you saying that the temperature change over the last seventy years is not “noticeable?””
My god, now you back to arguing the opposite again.
And continuing to misrepresent me.
I don’t consider a blog post by Willis Eschenback (a scientific numbskull) credible in any way whatsoever. Citing him is laughable. Citing a WUWT blog post is more laughable.
Willis is brilliant. Nobody is always right, and I’ve had my share of arguments with him, but he is the exact opposite of a “scientific numbskull.”
You posted that ridiculous reply six minutes after I gave you the link. If you want to understand what he discovered, you’ll have to spend more time than that. It is nontrivial, and very interesting.
Willis is an idiot, always (always) wrong in my experience. And the entire WUWT site is idiotic.
“There’s no “linear part” vs. “nonlinear part.” The great majority of feedbacks are never nonlinear to a significant extent.”
You can’t even keep track of the argument.
THE MAJOR FEEDBACKS are nonlinear. I’m not classifying ever single one of the hundreds of feedbacks as linear or nonlinear. I’m saying this of THE MAJOR ONES.
Clear now?
DavidAppell wrote, “THE MAJOR FEEDBACKS are nonlinear.”
No, they are not. Not significantly so, anyhow.
You’ve only named two feedbacks: water vapor, which very, very close to linear in its effect, and Ice-albedo, which is less obviously so, but which you just described with a linear relation about an hour ago (“the ice-albedo effect, which for the Arctic from 1979-2011 contributed an effective forcing of 25% of CO2’s over that time,” you wrote).
Water vapor is easier to analyze, and more important, so let’s look at it.
Here’s a graph:
http://www.sealevel.info/vapdenshi.png
At first glance, that doesn’t look very linear, does it? But that’s because you’re looking at the wrong range of values. Look what happens when you zoom in on a smaller temperature range:
http://www.sealevel.info/vapdenshi_cropped.png
See? Even over a 25 degree temperature range it’s already very close to linear.
Of course, nobody things global warming will increase temperatures by 25 C. Over an even smaller temperature range, the relation is even more nearly linear.
So, the effect of temperature on water vapor levels is essentially linear, over the range of interest.
But what about the effect of water vapor on temperature? (By definition, feedback works both ways!)
As with all greenhouse gases, additional H2O vapor has a diminishing warming effect as the temperature goes up. But for very small increases, it’s nearly linear, too.
So, the bottom line is that, for all practical purposes, the amplification expected from water vapor feedback is almost perfectly linear.
DavidAppell wrote, “I’m not classifying ever single one of the hundreds of feedbacks as linear or nonlinear.”
“Hundreds?” Really??
My site lists all of the identified significant climate feedback mechanisms, real and hypothetical, of which I’m aware. Depending on how you count, there are 17 or 19. I guess you could split a couple of them, but it’s certainly less than two dozen. Please tell me about the ones you think I missed!
http://www.sealevel.info/feedbacks.html
DavidAppell wrote, “I’m not classifying ever single one of the hundreds of feedbacks as linear or nonlinear.”
David, please tell me about the feedback mechanisms which you think I overlooked.
I’m serious. The lists on my site are intended to be comprehensive. I listed all of the identified significant climate feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative, and both real and hypothetical, of which I’m aware.
Depending on how you count them, there are 17 or 19 feedbacks listed, not “hundreds.” Please tell me about the ones you think I missed!
http://www.sealevel.info/feedbacks.html
These two major feedbacks create a nonlinear rise in the amount of heat being added to the Earth system. This is clear from the acceleration in the rise of ocean heat content, which is where the vast majority (~93%) of the trapped heat goes:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/11/more-big-gains-in-ocean-heat-content.html
“So, the bottom line is that, for all practical purposes, the amplification expected from water vapor feedback is almost perfectly linear.”
Completely wrong. Ever hear of the Clausius-Claperyon equation?
“Water vapor is easier to analyze, and more important, so let’s look at it.
Here’s a graph:”
Your graph is pointless. The vapor density at boiling is completely irrelevant for climate change — what matters is the increase in water vapor saturation pressure with increasing temperatures.
Go learn about the Clausius-Claperyon equation, which shows that the atmosphere holds 7% more water vapor per 1 deg C of warming.
Do you realize that you just made my point, DavidAppell? I wrote, ” Even over a 25 degree temperature range it’s already very close to linear…. Over an even smaller temperature range, the relation is even more nearly linear…. So, the effect of temperature on water vapor levels is essentially linear, over the range of interest.” And you replied, “…the atmosphere holds 7% more water vapor per 1 deg C of warming,” confirming my point.
Now, what about those feedback mechanisms? You said there are “hundreds of feedbacks.” I know of fewer than two dozen. What other feedbacks do you think there are?
Here’s my list. What do you think is missing from it?
http://www.sealevel.info/feedbacks.html
” Even over a 25 degree temperature range it’s already very close to linear.”
What do you claim is very close to linear?
“So, the effect of temperature on water vapor levels is essentially linear, over the range of interest.”
No. This statement disagrees with fundamental thermodynamics, encapsulated by the Clausius-Claperyon equation.
That equation shows that the saturation vapor pressure of water vapor rises exponentially with temperature — about 7% for ever 1 C of atmospheric warming.
It’s a beautiful equation. Worth your time to look up.
DavidAppell, I’ve updated the “feedbacks” page on my web site, adding a couple of additional obscure or theoretical climate feedback mechanisms. But I’ve still identified only 19 (or 21, if you count the three hypothesized tropical sea surface temperatures / cloud feedback mechanisms separately). Yet you claimed there are “hundreds of feedbacks.”
Do you still think that, David? If so, please tell me about the others.
If you have a point, you can bring it up here.
What are the other climate feedback mechanisms? You claimed there are “hundreds of feedbacks.” What are they?
I’ve managed to identify less than two dozen, and some of those are hypothetical. Do you know of any climate feedback mechanisms which I did not list?
I’m not going to list them here. Go look them up.
“Are you saying that the temperature change over the last seventy years is not “noticeable?””
Why do you write this kind of tripe?
“Feedbacks which are approximately linear over the range of data values of interest will not, in general, cause significant nonlinearity in the response of a system (though long delays with high amplifications can cause overshoot or oscillation).”
And now you’re saying feedbacks are linear!
We’re talking about climate change, which is linear changes + feedbacks. The nonlinearity occurs over time — how much time depends on where climate change is at. It’s now getting to the point where feedbacks are starting to be noticeable — the acceleration in sea level rise is an indication of that.
So is the ice-albedo effect, which for the Arctic from 1979-2011 contributed an effective forcing of 25% of CO2’s over that time. (Pistone et al, PNAS 2014). Global sea ice just set a record low six days ago.
Denying is looking ever more ridiculous.
DavidAppell wrote, “And now you’re saying feedbacks are linear!”
No, that’s not what I said. Some feedbacks are highly nonlinear. But most are reasonably approximated by linearity, over small ranges of values.
DavidAppell wrote, “We’re talking about climate change, which is linear changes + feedbacks.”
That’s gibberish, David. You don’t even understand the terminology.
A “linear” feedback is simply one which is proportional to the output which drives it. An “approximately linear” feedback is one which, though perhaps not linear over the full range of theoretical values, is nearly linear over the range of values of interest.
So, for instance, although Planck heat loss is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, the increase in radiative heat loss going from 300K to 301K is just 1% greater than the increase in radiative heat loss going from 299K to 300K. For practical purposes, that’s linear, even though the 4th power of T is obviously not a linear function.
Most climate feedbacks are like that: they are approximately linear, over the range of interest.
Consequently, most feedbacks do not introduce substantial nonlinearity into a system.
DavidAppell wrote, “It’s now getting to the point where feedbacks are starting to be noticeable.”
That’s nonsense, David. Where on Earth did you get the idea that climate feedbacks wait for many decades before taking effect?
Mankind has been driving up CO2 levels dramatically for about seventy years. The feedback mechanisms which amplify and attenuate the effects of that increase are no more efficacious now than they were seventy years ago, and they are no less efficacious now than they will be seventy years from now.
“But most are reasonably approximated by linearity, over small ranges of values.”
That’s true of ALL functions in physics — it’s called a Taylor expansion.
The point is that looking out to 2100 is NOT a “small value” compared to today, so the nonlinearity of the feedbacks matters over that time frame. Extrapolating Key West sea level rise linearly to 2100, or even 2050, is not reasonable.
Really, if you can’t see this, this discussion is pointless.
DavidAppell wrote, “looking out to 2100 is NOT a “small value” compared to today, so the nonlinearity of the feedbacks matters over that time frame. Extrapolating Key West sea level rise linearly to 2100, or even 2050, is not reasonable.”
Are you kidding? Even the wildest high-end estimates for 2050 are for less than 2 °C of warming. A more likely number is somewhere between 0 and 0.5 °C.
Those are very small numbers: compared to daily temperature swings, compared to seasonal temperature swings, and — to get to the point — compared to the temperature scales at which things like water vapor feedback show even the slightest sign of nonlinearity.
We’re talking about the hypothesized effect of CO2 on sea-level, via the intermediate mechanism of anthropogenic warming. People you trust say that we’ve already seen about 0.8 °C of warming since the 1920s. Yet that 0.8°C has caused no detectable increase at all in the rate of coastal sea-level rise.
I know that seems strange to you, but it’s true. Remember: warming doesn’t necessary raise coastal sea-level. If you melt more glaciers, without simultaneously increasing snow deposition, you’ll get higher sea-level. But increasing the temperature in Antarctica from -57 °C to -56 °C will not raise coastal sea-level. Neither will increasing the sea surface temperature in the mid-Pacific from 17 °C to 18 °C. Neither will increasing the temperature of the Gobi Desert, or the temperature of Hotlanta.
If you want to know what happens to sea-level as a result of the tiny warming effect of CO2, you need to look at history, and what history tells us is that anthropogenic CO2 doesn’t significantly affect sea-level.
We’ve driven up CO2 by over 90 ppmv over the last 70 years, and we’re unlikely to drive it up by more than about 80 or 85 ppmv over the next 34 years. What’s more, we know that CO2 has a logarithmically diminishing effect on temperature. What’s more, we know that the last 95 ppmv of CO2, added over a period of about seventy years, caused no detectable increase in the rate of coastal sea-level rise, even though temperatures did go up.
So, given those facts, why on earth would you expect drastically more effect on sea-level from a smaller increase in CO2, with a reduced effect-per-ppmv on temperature, over a shorter time?
Feynman would call that Cargo Cult Science.
“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll back of the industrial age.”
-Dr. Richard Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT)
“Even the wildest high-end estimates for 2050 are for less than 2 °C of warming.”
Yes. We’ve already has 0.9 C of warming. There are many projections that we’ll reach 2 C by 2050.
No one believes Lindzen anymore. People like you quote him only because you are desperate to find a denier with even an iota of credibility.
It’s the same with your Feynman quotes. There’s no reason to believe, at all, that Feynman would deny AGW. None. People like you are just trying to grab onto his coattails — you think quoting him gives you credence. That’s laughable.
“…why on earth would you expect drastically more effect on sea-level from a smaller increase in CO2, with a reduced effect-per-ppmv on temperature, over a shorter time?”
Positive feedbacks.
(This is Climate Science 101.)
“What’s more, we know that the last 95 ppmv of CO2, added over a period of about seventy years, caused no detectable increase in the rate of coastal sea-level rise, even though temperatures did go up.”
A lie. Sea level rise is accelerating just since the satellite era started in 1979.
“Where on Earth did you get the idea that climate feedbacks wait for many decades before taking effect?”
Unless you stop misrepresenting me, this discussion is finished.
I never said what you are attributing to me. Learn to read.
DavidAppell wrote, “They [feedbacks] matter over many decades, and certainly over a century, and certainly at the point to which climate change has not progressed.” and “It’s now getting to the point where feedbacks are starting to be noticeable.”
I wrote, “Where on Earth did you get the idea that climate feedbacks wait for many decades before taking effect?”
DavidAppell replied, “Unless you stop misrepresenting me, this discussion is finished. I never said what you are attributing to me. Learn to read.”
If what you wrote doesn’t mean that you thought that most of the last seventy years of large GHG increases predated “noticeable” effects from feedbacks, then what on earth did you mean, David?
The fact is that there’s no scientific reason to expect significantly greater-than-linear amplification of the effects of other forcings from either water vapor or ice-albedo feedback. The amplification and attenuation effects of most significant positive and negative climate feedbacks are about the same now as they were seventy years ago, and as they will be seventy years from now.
There is ever reason to expect faster-than-linear amplification — they’re called “positive feedbacks,” especially the water vapor feedback and the ice-albedo feedback.
There feedbacks are already producing nonlinearity — see the acceleration in sea level rise, and especially the acceleration in ocean heat content.
“Mankind has been driving up CO2 levels dramatically for about seventy years. The feedback mechanisms which amplify and attenuate the effects of that increase are no more efficacious now than they were seventy years ago, and they are no less efficacious now than they will be seventy years from now.”
Flat-out wrong.
The ice-albedo feedback is *obviously* stronger now than it was 30 years ago, due to the long-term decline of global sea ice.
So is the water vapor feedback, *since the water vapor concentration in the atmosphere* is increasing.
“Attribution of observed surface humidity changes to human influence,”
Katharine M. Willett et al, Nature Vol 449| 11 October 2007| doi:10.1038/nature06207.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/abs/nature06207.html
“Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric moisture content,” B. D. Santer et al, PNAS 2013.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/39/15248.abstract
I wrote, “The feedback mechanisms which amplify and attenuate the effects of that increase are no more efficacious now than they were seventy years ago, and they are no less efficacious now than they will be seventy years from now.”
DavidAppell replied, “Flat-out wrong. The ice-albedo feedback is *obviously* stronger now than it was 30 years ago, due to the long-term decline of global sea ice.”
David, you do not understand what linearity is. The planet is a bit warmer now than it was 30 years ago, and so global sea-ice extent is expected to be down a bit compared to 30 years ago. That is not evidence of nonlinearity.
DavidAppell also wrote, “So is the water vapor feedback, *since the water vapor concentration in the atmosphere* is increasing.”
David, you do not understand what linearity is. When temperatures go up, water vapor concentration in the atmosphere is expected to go up. That is not evidence of nonlinearity.
If water vapor concentration did not rise with temperature, that would not be evidence of linear feedback, it would be evidence of no feedback.
As it happens, there’s conflicting data about whether water vapor content in the atmosphere is actually rising as expected, but that’s getting off-topic. First you need to learn the basics of how feedbacks work, before getting into the minutia of peculiarities of particular feedbacks.
The best evidence, by far, for nonlinearity is the nonlinear increase in ocean heat content:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/11/more-big-gains-in-ocean-heat-content.html
“As it happens, there’s conflicting data about whether water vapor content in the atmosphere is actually rising as expected.”
No, there isn’t — it’s well-established, accepted science:
IPCC 5AR WG1 Ch2 Figs 2.30 & 2.31 document positive trends in water vapor in multiple datasets.
“Attribution of observed surface humidity changes to human influence,”
Katharine M. Willett et al, Nature Vol 449| 11 October 2007| doi:10.1038/nature06207.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/abs/nature06207.html
“Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric moisture content,” B. D. Santer et al, PNAS 2013.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/39/15248.abstract
“How much more rain will global warming bring?” F.J. Wentz, Science (2007), 317, 233–235.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5835/233
“Analysis of global water vapour trends from satellite measurements in the visible spectral range,” S. Mieruch et al, Atmos Chem Phys (2008), 8, 491–504.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/8/491/2008/acp-8-491-2008.html
Your many claims are very inconsistent.
You just wrote:
“Some feedbacks are highly nonlinear.”
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/climatedepot/flashback_1987_8216global_warming8217_causes_sea_levels_to_fall_8212_2016_8216global_warming8217_cau/#comment-2532151333
Then you wrote:
“DavidAppell wrote, “THE MAJOR FEEDBACKS are nonlinear.”
No, they are not. Not significantly so, anyhow.”
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/climatedepot/flashback_1987_8216global_warming8217_causes_sea_levels_to_fall_8212_2016_8216global_warming8217_cau/#comment-2532199290
DavidAppell wrote: “Your many claims are very inconsistent. / You just wrote: ‘Some feedbacks are highly nonlinear.’ / Then you wrote: ‘No, they [the major feedbacks] are not [nonlinear]. Not significantly so, anyhow.’“
By excerpting a snippet of what I wrote, out of context, David, you changed my meaning, and created the appearance of inconsistency. That’s the sort of thing I expect from politicians, not scientists.
What you quoted was: “Some feedbacks are highly nonlinear.”
What I actually wrote was: “Some feedbacks are highly nonlinear. But most are reasonably approximated by linearity, over small ranges of values.”
The anticipated temperature changes attributable to anthropogenic carbon are tiny: a degree or two, or in the most wildly alarmist scenarios, perhaps three. W/r/t a climatic change of just 1 or 2 degrees, the three main positive feedbacks are all well-approximated by linearity. I.e., they are not significantly nonlinear.
The only positive feedback mechanism I know of which might be significantly nonlinear, over temperature ranges of interest, is permafrost-methane feedback, which is mostly theoretical, at this point.
“Even Planck negative feedback, which is proportional to the 4th power(!) of temperature, is nearly linear over the range of interest.”
Oh boy.
The Earth is warming up because more energy in coming into it than leaving it. So the Planck factor is clearly not now causing net overall cooling.
DavidAppell wrote, “Oh boy. The Earth is warming up because more energy in coming into it than leaving it. So the Planck factor is clearly not now causing net overall cooling.”
David, you have no idea what you’re talking about. The most fundamental feedback effect is simply that when the Earth’s surface gets warmer, it loses heat faster, thereby reducing the increase in temperature. The simplest and easiest to quantify component of that effect is the radiative component, called “Planck feedback.” It is calculated that a uniform global temperature increase of 1°C would increase radiant heat loss from the surface by 3.6 W/m².
That is negative feedback: the warmer a body gets, the faster it loses heat, which reduces its temperature.
Yes, it’s obviously a negative feedback, and it ultimately limits planetary surface temperatures (see the “Kombayashi–Ingersoll limit.”) BUT THE EARTH IS STILL GETTING WARMER, and it can get a great deal warmer if the atmosphere continues to thicken. It can’t quite enter a runaway warming state now — we’re about 5% too far from the Sun — but as solar luminosity continues to increase the Earth will eventually enter a runaway state, with no oceans, in several hundred million years.
DavidAppell wrote, “THE EARTH IS STILL GETTING WARMER, and it can get a great deal warmer if the atmosphere continues to thicken.”
Huh? Are you still talking about anthropogenic climate change?
Are you contending that mankind’s GHG emissions are making the atmosphere “thicker?” Or what?
Of course anthropogenic GHG emissions are making the atmosphere thicker, as scientists use the term. That’s what it’s all about.
DavidAppell wrote, “Of course anthropogenic GHG emissions are making the atmosphere thicker, as scientists use the term.”
Wrong. GHG emissions don’t make the atmosphere thicker, as anyone with a dictionary uses the term, except you.
Well, almost anyone except you. Out of curiosity I did a google search, and found that there’s a guy in Canada who also claims that human emissions of GHGs are thickening the atmosphere. But he also claims that ozone depletion is causing sea-level rise, and that, “realistically speaking,” sea level rise may cause chaos due to one-third of humanity having to move away from the coasts. I’m pretty sure he’s not a scientist.
Yes, they certainly make the atmosphere thicker, optically, which is what climate scientists mean by the word “thicker,” as in “optically thicker.”
GHGs thicken the atmosphere, in the sense that less infrared radiation escapes to space.
“Venus has a very thick atmosphere rich in greenhouse gases, which would heat up the surface to the required temperature.”
– Raymond Pierrehumbert, Principles of Planetary Climate, p 15
http://cips.berkeley.edu/events/rocky-planets-class09/ClimateVol1.pdf
Also chock full of other mentions of the optical thickness of planetary atmospheres. (Just search.)
“If the last 85 years of large CO2 & CH4 increases and modestly warming temperatures haven’t caused any increase in the rate of sea-level rise.”
You supposition is wrong.
“A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise,” John A. Church and Neil J. White, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826, 2006GRL (2006).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL024826
“Global and regional sea level change during the 20th century,” Manfred Wenzel and Jens Schröter, JGR-Oceans, (7 Nov 2014) doi:10.1002/2014JC009900.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JC009900/abstract?campaign=woletoc
“Sea-Level Rise from the Late 19th to the Early 21st Century,” John A. Church and Neil J. White, Surveys in Geophysics, September 2011, Volume 32, Issue 4-5, pp 585-602, doi: 10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10712-011-9119-1
David, w/r/t Wenzel & Schröter, they reported that they found no statistically significant global sea-level acceleration.
W/r/t the two Church & White papers, I reanalyzed their data, using their own methods, and discovered that their “20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise” occurred entirely before 1925. After 1925 their data actually showed a slight deceleration in rate of sea-level rise.
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/jnathaz1/CW06_1925-latest.png
In other words, Church & White’s data showed that 3/4 century of intense GHG emissions had caused no acceleration in sea-level rise — and that 2006 paper was the first paper every published which claimed to have identified any acceleration in 20th century sea-level rise.
Church & White subsequently analyzed another set of tide gauges, and put the data on their web site in 2009. But they wrote no paper about it.
I wondered why not. So I duplicated their 2006 analysis on their 2009 data and found that their data showed deceleration, rather than acceleration — not just post-1925, but this time even for the entire 20th century.
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/jnathaz1/CW09_1925-latest.png
No wonder they didn’t write a paper! If they’d written a paper about it, the title would have had to have been something like, “Neeeeever mind: No 20th Century Acceleration in Global Sea-Level Rise, After All.”
In 2011 Church & White finally found a set of tide gauges which showed a slight post-1925 acceleration, and they published that 2011 paper. But even in that data set, the post-1925 acceleration is very tiny, in fact smaller in magnitude than the deceleration seen in their other data sets. The post-1925 acceleration in their 2011 data set, if it continued to 2080, would add just 0.8 inches of sea level rise, compared to a linear projection.
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/jnathaz1/CW11_1925-latest.png
BTW, all the code and data for these analyses is on my web site. You are more than welcome to examine it, duplicate the results, apply it to other datasets, etc. If you need any help or have any questions, just ask.
Sure, you’re right and Church and White are wrong. Did you write a letter to the journal where they were published???
As I wrote above, sea level is now accelerating just over the 22.9 years of the satellite era.
I shared my analyses of their 2006 & 2009 datasets with Drs. Church & White, and on June 18, 2010, Dr. Church replied, confirming my results: “For the 1901 to 2007 period, again we agree with your result and get a non-significant and small deceleration.”
Their 2011 paper uses data through 2009, not 2007.
And sea level has increased a lot just since 2007 — increasing by about 4.1 mm/yr on average since Jan 2008. (= acceleration)
DavidAppell wrote, “Their 2011 paper uses data through 2009, not 2007.”
Their 2009 dataset (for the paper which they could have entitled, “Neeeeever mind: No 20th Century Acceleration in Global Sea-Level Rise, After All”) had data through 2007.
Their 2011 paper uses data through 2009, not 2007.
Satelllite-era sea level data show signficant acceleration:
AVISO sea level data: ftp://ftp.aviso.oceanobs.com/pub/oceano/AVISO/indicators/msl/MSL_Serie_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.txt
CU sea level data:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu
“David, w/r/t Wenzel & Schröter, they reported that they found no statistically significant global sea-level acceleration.”
It depends on what you mean by “statistically significant.” The peak of the Bell curve of their result is clearly in positive territory. The range (2-sigma I guess) extends from -0.005 mm/yr2 to +0.013 mm/yr2, viz, mostly in positive territory.
In the Abstract Wenzel & Schröter wrote, ” the acceleration found for the global mean, +0.0042 ± 0.0092mm/yr^2, is not significant“
An acceleration of +0.0042 mm/yr^2 is negligibly tiny. It corresponds to an x-squared coefficient of 0.0021 in a quadratic equation, which is almost identical to the Church & White (2011) post-1925 acceleration. Over the period for which the data is graphed, it is indistinguishable to the naked eye from a perfectly straight line. If that amount of acceleration continued for 100 years it would add about 1 inch to total global sea-level rise.
Terrifying, eh?
It’s significant at the 82% confidence level. Are we supposed to be unconcerned because this isn’t the 95% CL? (Hardly — there is nothing magical about 95%.)
As I wrote, just in the satellite era, since 1979, sea level acceleration is now 0.024 mm/yr2. And rising. We have reached the nonlinear era.
“If medical breakthroughs somehow enable you to live another hundred years, I think you’ll still be able to outrun one inch of extra sea-level rise, even in your wheelchair.”
The people who owned all the inundated property will not be able to outrun it. Taxpayers will be making them whole, for centuries.
“If that amount of acceleration continued for 100 years it would add about 1 inch to total global sea-level rise.”
Linear and 2nd-order fits to satellite-era sea level now differ by 12 cm in their projections to 2100. And sea level rise certainly doesn’t stop there — by 2300 the difference is one meter.
In fact, the Wenzel & Schröter numbers for acceleration are statistically significant at the 82% confidence level.
Not 95%, but worrisome enough.
“BTW, all the code and data for these analyses is on my web site.”
URL?
Did you do the same quality control Church and White did for their 2004 and 2011 papers?
I wrote, “BTW, all the code and data for these analyses is on my web site.”
DavidAppell replied, “URL?”
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/jnathaz1/codeanddata.zip
DavidAppell asked, “Did you do the same quality control Church and White did for their 2004 and 2011 papers?”
I think you mean 2006, not 2004, right?
I used their data.
The science is looking more and more like the net cloud feedback is positive:
Dessler, A.E., A determination of the cloud feedback from climate variations over the past decade, Science, 330, DOI: 10.1126/science.1192546, 1523-1527, 2010.
Dessler, A.E., Observations of climate feedbacks over 2000-2010 and comparisons to climate models, J. Climate, 26, 333-342, doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00640.1, 2013.
“Observational and Model Evidence for Positive Low-Level Cloud Feedback,”
Amy C. Clement et al, Science 24 July 2009: Vol. 325 no. 5939 pp. 460-464
DOI: 10.1126/science.1171255.
Zhou, C., M.D. Zelinka, A.E. Dessler, P. Yang, An analysis of the short-term cloud feedback using MODIS data, J. Climate, 26, 4803-4815, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00547.1, 2013.
Dessler, A.E., Cloud variations and the Earth’s energy budget, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L19701, doi: 10.1029/2011GL049236, 2011.
I looked at your Web pages — I don’t see anything convincing at all. (The quote from Christy is amusing — he puts out more unpeer-reviewed, wrong graphs than anyone.)
And you are misrepresenting Feynman. He formalized radiation transfer — he’d be the first to understand how it warms the planet.
“And yet the rate of sea-level rise at the coasts is no higher now than it was before we added all those GHGs to the atmosphere.”
False. Wrong. Incorrect:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8e8fe8069d009d7509acb8504d0e990b36fcaae6504c50521045baadd571418c.png
David, take a closer look at that graph.
1. The first “acceleration” shown is around 1920. Which is decades before mankind’s CO2 emissions took off. So it certainly isn’t evidence of an anthropogenic effect on sea-level.
(The rates shown are wrong, too. Averaged, measured, post 1920s SLR (sea-level rise) derived from the best tide gauge records is around 1.5 mm/yr, not 2.0 mm/yr. Even AR5 says 1901-2010 SLR +0.3 mm/yr Peltier GIA averaged only about 1.7 mm/yr, which means SLR alone was 1.4 mm/yr. For this graphic they obviously added model-derived GIA, and they probably neglected subsidence, to inflate the rates. Here’s a better version. But that’s all beside the point.)
2. Do you see how they managed to get that supposed 0.1 mm/yr acceleration around 1976? Look at the gap between the line segment endpoints: They started the “2.1” line segment on a negative noise spike! If they’d started the “2.1” 1976-2001 line segment at the end of the “2.0” 1920-1976 line segment, it’d have had less slope rather than greater, compared to the 1920-1976 line segment.
3. I wrote “at the coasts,” and you even quoted it. But the red “3.2” line segment in your graph is not sea-level at the coasts. It is from satellite altimetry, not tide gauges. Satellites are unable to measure coastal sea-level.
The creators of that graph conflated satellite altimetry measurements of sea-level with tide-gauge measurements, which is a very basic blunder.
As you surely know, the rate of sea-level change varies considerably from one location to another. In addition to being much less trustworthy and than tide-gauge measurements, satellites can only measure sea-level in the open ocean, away from the shorelines. If you draw a graph which begins with measurements from one place, and ends with measurements from somewhere else, you can create the illusion of either acceleration or deceleration, depending on the locations you chose.
Neither tide gauges (over the last 85 years) nor satellites (as long as they’ve been operating) have measured any long-term acceleration in rate of sea-level rise (though the satellite altimetry data is untrustworthy). But most of the satellites have measured higher rates of sea-level rise than most tide-gauges. So if you conflate satellite altimetry data with tide gauge data, you’ll create the illusion of acceleration in rate of sea-level rise, where none actually exists.
Don’t feel too bad: the IPCC made the same mistake. Tony Heller memorably called it the “IPCC Sea Level Nature Trick.”
Why, if you think sea-level rise has already accelerated, do you suppose that acceleration hasn’t affected any of the measurements taken by the best tide gauges?
It’s because the supposed acceleration is an illusion. The rate of sea-level rise at the coasts is no higher now than it was before we added all those GHGs to the atmosphere.
They calculated rates of rise for various times.
Sea level is even beginning to accelerate over the satellite era:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/09/satellite-era-sea-level-rise-starting.html
Since I wrote that post, the acceleration is up to 0.024 mm/yr2, and the acceleration itself is increasing.
Translation: Jason-2 is reporting higher rates of SLR than other satellites, which is exaggerating an unremarkable “bump” in averaged reported satellite-measured sea-level for 2015 — a bump which is absent in the coastal sea-level measurements.
http://www.sealevel.info/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust_2016-02m.png
How many times have you written breathless articles about the the sharp deceleration in sea-level rise when one of these bumps came to an end? Hum?
Let’s ask Google:
Acceleration:
https://www.google.com/search?q=acceleration+site%3Adavidappell.blogspot.com
Deceleration:
https://www.google.com/search?q=deceleration+site%3Adavidappell.blogspot.com
Yep.
No, my statement is based on the adjusted data from AVISO:
ftp://ftp.aviso.oceanobs.com/pub/oceano/AVISO/indicators/msl/MSL_Serie_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.txt
I would never ask Google a scientific question, of all places. That you did, and that you keep quoting Feynman, tells me you are trying to make claims by fiat and ride on Feynman’s coattails. (Instead, you might try thinking.)
DavidAppell wrote, “I would never ask Google a scientific question, of all places. That you did…”
David, comparing how many times you’ve talked about “acceleration” on your blog to how many times you’ve talked about deceleration on your blog is not “a scientific question.” It’s bias exposure.
Every time there’s a little bump in the satellite record, there’s “acceleration.” It’s completely insignificant, of course, but it is mathematically calculable — and it’s an excuse for DavidAppell to write breathless articles about the threat of sea-level rise.
Every time one of those little bumps in the satellite record ends, there’s “deceleration.” That’s just as insignificant, of course, but there’s one very noticeable difference: DavidAppell never blogs about it.
There’s a term for that.
http://www.sealevel.info/cherry-picking-1_with_note.png
“Every time there’s a little bump in the satellite record, there’s “acceleration.””
Completely false. The acceleration is determined by considering the ENTIRE satellite era record, which is now 22.9 years.
So you’re very wrong. These kind of boners tell me that a “systems” degree is a poor substitute for physics degree.
The acceleration is not an illusion.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Sea-Level-1.gif
Of course projections are not based on merely extrapolating the quadratic trend or the linear trend. They are based on modeling the physics of thermal expansion and glacier melting. The latter is especially difficult. But paleoclimate studies now confirm that warming of 1-3 C can have cause a few meters of sea level rise.
Reasonable people conclude that while uncertainty remains, there is a very real risk that our ghg emissions are causing sea level rise that could reach a few meters over the next 100-200 years. Thus, preparing for this possibility is only prudent.
Mike wrote, “The acceleration is not an illusion.”
Did you even look at that SkS graph you posted? It confirms what I’ve been saying. Can’t you see that the acceleration was all prior to 1930?
If you cover up the left-hand third of the graph (1870 through 1925 or 1930), what’s left shows “jiggles” up and down, but obviously no sustained acceleration.
In 1925-1930, average atmospheric CO2 levels were under 0.031%. Now they’re over 0.040% — and the rate of sea-level rise is essentially unchanged.
No, it is not all prior to 1930.
http://www.realclimate.org/images/GlobalSLR_cm.jpg
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/02/millennia-of-sea-level-change/
Mike wrote, “No, it is not all prior to 1930.”
You don’t understand what you’re looking at, Mike. The “it” we were talking about is acceleration. That bar chart does not graph acceleration.
The fact that all the acceleration in sea-level rise occurred prior to about 1925 or 1930 is perfectly consistent with that bar chart.
If you’re not clear about the concepts, Google can find some videos which explain it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+does+acceleration+look+like+on+a+graph&tbm=vid
(Also, as an aside, the bars for the centuries prior to the 19th century are of imaginary data, “reconstructed” from inexact proxies.)
Sorry, but the far-left predictions/projections/tea-leaves follows the political funding. Science is not involved, it is a bystander.
Rock on dude!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRpAANsoG8I
Yawn….wake me when you finally have the right answer. Different day—different study—different conclusions. Obviously you haven’t kept up with the latest……see the Journal Science—-http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6274/699.short In other words, the rate of SLR is slowed by 15%—–which is a significant change given you guys are always babbling in fractions of a mm over decades and centuries.
By land or by sea
How much of an effect does terrestrial groundwater storage have on sea-level rise? Reager et al. used gravity measurements made between 2002 and 2014 by NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to quantify variations in groundwater storage. Combining those data with estimates of mass loss by glaciers revealed groundwater’s impact on sea-level change. Net groundwater storage has been increasing, and the greatest regional changes, both positive and negative, are associated with climate-driven variability in precipitation. Thus, groundwater storage has slowed the rate of recent sea-level rise by roughly 15%.
Sea level rise is accelerating as I have shown. This study shows that the observed rate increase would have been even higher but for the effect of land absorption of some of the water.
It is true that if this study is correct it means the rate of sea-level rise would have been higher but for the retention of additional water in aquifers, soil, etc.
However, it is not true that sea-level measurements show that sea-level rise is accelerating. That’s a myth.
It is not myth. It is what scientists are reporting. You think they are wrong. But that does make it a myth.
The measurements show it to be a myth.
http://www.sealevel.info/680-471_Fremantle_2016-02_67pct.png
It might be true that sea-level rise would have accelerated slightly were it not for extra water retained on land, but it is not true that sea-level rise has accelerated.
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The only thing rising is the BS factor of those claiming AGW. They want to blame humanity for all of the world’s ills and are getting quite desperate for validation.
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Mike435 is wrong. Sea-level rise is not accelerating, and has not accelerated since the 1920s. Here are two very high quality sea-level measurement records, one from the Pacific and one from the Atlantic:
http://sealevel.info/680-140_Sydney_2015-10.png
http://sealevel.info/120-022_Wismar_2015-5.png
There’s been no acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise in at least 85 years. Mike’s graph creates the misleading appearance of acceleration by conflating two different types of data: coastal sea-level measurements from tide gauges (which are very reliable), and mid-ocean sea-level measurements with satellite altimetry (which are unreliable). The two different methods produce two different rates, and by splicing them together that graph creates the illusion of acceleration, even though neither the tide gauges nor the satellites have actually detected any acceleration.
Tony Heller memorably called it the “IPCC Sea Level Nature Trick.”
(In addition, Mike’s graph inflates both the tide gauge data and the satellite rates by the addition of model-derived adjustments.)
Refs: http://www.sealevel.info/
If you ignore data you do not like, you can get the “science” you want. I go with the mainstream research that assesses all the available data. At the present time the preponderance of the evidence is that sea level rise is accelerating.
That’s simply not true, Mike435. All the high quality, long term (100+ year) sea-level records show the same thing: there’s been no acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise in at least 85 years. Most (including these two) show no acceleration for even longer than that.
There are about sixty good-quality, 100+ year records of sea-level around the world, and they all show the same thing: no statistically significant acceleration, in at least 85 years (in most cases, even longer). There are no exceptions, not even one.
The great bulk of the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels has come since the 1940s. That means anthropogenic CO2 emissions have not measurably affected sea-level rise.
Here are some relevant papers:
http://www.sealevel.info/papers.html#acceleration
You are not keeping up with the research. Of course, there are lots of older papers in which the authors were not able to detect 20th century sea level rise acceleration. Sea level data is very noisy. But, now researchers have been able to do this using more recent data and a better understanding of past data.
Lets just flip a coin a be done with it already
It’s important to remember that there is little or no precedent in the geological record for the rate at which we are changing the Earth’s climate.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-current-pace-environmental-unprecedented-earth.html
The rate of sea level rise has already quadrupled in just a century. In 2014 we learned that ice mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica had more than doubled in the previous 5 years. Prior to that, Greenland’s ice mass loss had already doubled from 2000 to 2006. If the mass loss keeps doubling every 5 or 6 years, then we’ll see 1 metre of global sea level rise by about mid-century.
“A 10-year doubling time would lead to 1 meter sea level rise by 2067 and 5 meters by 2090. The dates are 2045 and 2057 for 5-year doubling time and 2055 and 2071 for a 7-year doubling time.” – Dr. James Hansen
The mean rate of sea level rise during the last deglaciation was 10mm per year, which is 2 doublings from the current contribution of ice melt to sea level rise of around 2.5mm per year. Another two doublings would take us to the peak rate of sea level rise during the last deglaciation, 40mm per year. That’s only 24 years from now, at 6 years per doubling.
The last deglaciation was accompanied by global warming of only about 0.005°C per decade compared to today’s warming of 0.15 – 0.2°C per decade. We’re extracting carbon and returning it to the climate system 20,000 times faster than the natural rate of exchange with the solid Earth, and causing a huge planetary energy imbalance which is driving rapid global warming. This is undoubtedly why we’re seeing such a rapid acceleration in sea level rise. During the last deglaciation it took 2,000 years for the rate of sea level rise to increase from 3 to 30mm per year. On current trends, we can expect to exceed that in just 3 decades.
It’s also worth noting that equilibrium sea level rise is 20 ± 10 metres per °C of global warming. Anyone owning property close to sea level would be justified in being very nervous about the near future.
The bottom line is that the extremely rapid change to the Earth’s atmosphere and climate caused by human activity means that natural systems are hugely out of equilibrium even with today’s global temperature, let alone the temperatures that we will inevitably see in coming decades and centuries. We can expect to see more and more dramatic changes to the natural world, and they will have increasingly negative consequences for human and natural systems.
Good grief, what an impressive load of nonsense.
Icarus62 wrote, “there is little or no precedent in the geological record for the rate at which we are changing the Earth’s climate”
FACT: There’s nothing remarkable about the current Climate Optimum, except for the current high CO2 levels. Temperatures are similar to previous warm periods, like the MWP and the RWP.
Icarus62 wrote, “The rate of sea level rise has already quadrupled in just a century.”
FACT: The rate of sea-level rise hasn’t increased since the 1920s.
Icarus62 wrote, “The last deglaciation was accompanied by global warming of only about 0.005°C per decade compared to today’s warming of 0.15 – 0.2°C per decade.”
FACT: The last hundred years has seen less than 0.1°C of warming per decade. When the effects of ENSO and volcanic aerosols are removed, there’s been no significant warming since 1993.
Icarus62 wrote, “equilibrium sea level rise is 20 ± 10 metres per °C of global warming.”
Earth to Icarus62: The Laurentide ice sheet is gone. In order to melt ice you’ve got to have some ice to melt. The only great ice sheets left are Greenland and Antarctica, and neither of them would be endangered by a 1 °C temperature increase. What’s more, the bulk of the anthropogenic CO2 pulse is likely to last only a few hundred years, far short of the thousands required for equilibrium ice sheet response.
As you can see, despite an estimated 0.7-0.8°C of global warming, sea-level is rising no faster now than it was >85 years ago:
http://www.sealevel.info/8518750_TheBattery_2016-02_67pct.png
“Temperatures are similar to previous warm periods, like the MWP and the RWP.”
Icarus wrote about rate of change, not temperatures. You purposely ignored that.
I wrote, “Temperatures are similar to previous warm periods, like the MWP and the RWP.”
DavidAppell replied, “Icarus wrote about rate of change, not temperatures. You purposely ignored that.”
Wrong. That’s not what he wrote. He wrote, “…the rate at which we are changing the Earth’s climate…”
That’s true — and inconsequential.
The fact is that there’s nothing remarkable about either the temperatures of the current Climate Optimum, or the rates of temperature change, in spite of the very remarkable surge in GHG levels.
Not remarkable? Our current rate of warming is about 30 times faster than when the last ice age was ending.
From Shakun et al Nature 2012 Figure 2a:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/nature10915.html
global temperature anomaly in year -18,000 is -3.4 C
global temperature anomaly in year -11,000 is +0.0 C
so the average temperature change is 3.4 C in 7000 years, or ~ +0.005 C/decade, compared to GISTEMP’s current 30-year trend of +0.16 C/decade
So that’s a factor of 32 now compared to then.
DavidAppell wrote, “…so the average temperature change [between 16,000 BC and 9,000 BC] is 3.4 C in 7000 years, or ~ +0.005 C/decade, compared to GISTEMP’s current 30-year trend of +0.16 C/decade. / So that’s a factor of 32 now compared to then.”
Comparing Appells to Orrangs again, I see.
David, if you start with a perfectly flat time series + purely random noise, and do linear regression on a 30-year subset of the data, you will, on average, get a trend with a much steeper slope than if you do linear regression on a 7000-year subset of the data. It doesn’t mean that there is anything remarkable about the 30 year period. It doesn’t mean that anything is different between the two time periods, other than their lengths. It just means that comparing a 7000 year fit to a 30 year fit is a blunder.
That’s very fundamental. Less obviously, 30 years is a particularly poor choice for linear regression on climatic data. Here’s a relevant quote from Physicist Nicola Scafetta. He was discussing sea-level, rather than temperature, but his words are nevertheless instructive:
“…an interval of just 30 years is the worst that can be chosen because it is half 60-year cycle, and it happened that for SLR the period 1975-2005 had this 60-year cycle during its warming phase (the temperature warming phase was about 1970-2000). So, if you fit the last 30-40 years you get an overestimation of the real trend.” [private communication, 2012]
Do you notice anything about this graph, David? What do you see?
http://www.sealevel.info/Amo_timeseries_1856-present.svg
Wrong. The trend of a flat time series + random noise is a small trend whose uncertainty range includes zero.
That is the mathematically correct way to calculate and describe the trend, as well as its statistical significance.
You really don’t understand it, David?
Over a short period, like 30 years, the high frequency “noise” dominates your linear regressions. Depending on which endpoints you choose, you’ll find dramatically different trends.
Over a longer period, like 7000 years, the effect of the high frequency noise largely disappears. (Of course, 7000yo temperature “measurements” are really proxy-derived guesstimates, but that’s a different problem.)
If this isn’t obvious to you, maybe you should talk to a statistician about it, preferably someone who works in time series analysis.
30 years is generally enough time to reduce trend uncertainities due to noise to levels that make trends statistically signficiant.
But if you want to go to, say, 50 years, I’m all up for it.
Give me your trends, including autocorrelation, and we’ll compare. OK?
“Over a longer period, like 7000 years, the effect of the high frequency noise largely disappears.”
That’s just a stupid choice, since relevant cliamatic factors are changing on time scales of decades, not 7 millennia.
(Chuckle)
“FACT: The rate of sea-level rise hasn’t increased since the 1920s.”
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8e8fe8069d009d7509acb8504d0e990b36fcaae6504c50521045baadd571418c.png
FACT: if you splice together sea-level measurements at different places, and/or by different methodologies, you can create the deceptive appearance of either sea-level rise acceleration or deceleration, depending on what locations you choose. That’s what your graph does. If you don’t understand what’s wrong with that, then google for “IPCC Sea Level Nature Trick.”
FACT: There’s been no sustained, detectable acceleration in the rate of coastal sea-level rise in over 85 years.
When I write about acceleration, I am writing about global sea level, as measured by Aviso or the University of Colorado.
DavidAppell wrote, “When I write about acceleration, I am writing about global sea level, as measured by Aviso or the University of Colorado.”
That’s not accurate. Aviso / U.Co. work with satellite altimetry data. But the graph you posted starts in 1870.
Satellite altimetry measurements of sea-level started in late 1992, with the Topex-Poseidon mission. 85% of that graph you posted is adjusted tide-gauge measurements of coastal sea-level. Only the red bit at the right-end is Aviso / U.Co. satellite data.
Satellite altimetry is highly unreliable, and dramatically affected by the details of how it is processed. E.g., after a full decade of measurements, Aviso revised all the reported ENVISAT sea-level measurement data, with new corrections, which tripled the reported rate of sea-level rise, as you can seem in these juxtaposed graphs:
http://www.sealevel.info/2061wtl.jpg
Different satellites often measure dramatically different rates of sea-level rise. The changes in rates of sea-level rise reported by satellite altimetry are more closely associated with changes of satellite mission than with changes in actual sea-level trend.
What’s more, satellite altimetry measures the wrong thing. It doesn’t measure coastal sea-level. It can’t. It can only measure sea-level in the open ocean — where sea-level rise is inconsequential.
If you want to know whether sea-level rise is really accelerating, you must not conflate coastal tide-gauge measurements with open-ocean satellite altimetry. That’s comparing apples to oranges. It’s the infamous “IPCC Sea-Level Nature Trick,” and it is a fundamental blunder.
If you examine any of the best-quality, long-term coastal sea-level measurement records you’ll see that sea-level rise has exhibited no sustained acceleration in more than 85 years. (In fact, at most gauges there’s been no detectable acceleration in more than a century.) E.g.:
http://sealevel.info/120-012_Warnemunde_2016-02.png
http://sealevel.info/680-140_Sydney_2016-04.png
http://sealevel.info/1612340_Honolulu_2016-04.png
In fact, despite all the problems with the satellite data, even satellite altimetry is currently showing little or no sustained, significant acceleration in sea-level rise. Here’s Aviso’s graph:
http://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/fileadmin/images/data/Products/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.png
Even President Obama’s former Undersecretary for Science, Steven Koonin, wrote that, “Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today.”
Satellite measurements of sea level are the best data we have for that.
They show a current sea level rise of 3.38 mm/yr, with an acceleration of 0.033 mm/yr2.
DavidAppell wrote, “Satellite measurements of sea level are the best data we have for that…”
That is obviously nonsense.
Satellite measurements are, by far, the lowest quality data we have for evaluating sea-level rise acceleration. The only advantages of satellites over tide gauges is that satellites provide near-global coverage, and there’s no need to try to account for local vertical land motion (because there’s no land anywhere near), but neither of those matters much w/r/t determinations of sea-level rise acceleration or deceleration.
Tide gauge measurements are overwhelmingly superior for determination of sea-level trend acceleration/deceleration, because:
1. The tide gauge data is trustworthy, and the satellite data is not.
The satellite data is subject to massive, opaque adjustments and corrections, which dramatically affect the reported trends.
Tide gauge measurement records require no adjustment or corrections, except for occasional simple, reliable referencing to geological benchmarks when there’s a station move, and, rarely, accounting for earthquakes.
2. The longest consistent measurement record from a single satellite instrument is only about a dozen years, and the total record is only about 23 years. To get to that 23 year total requires splicing together records from different missions, with different instruments and different orbits, and often different processing methodologies, which makes “acceleration” determinations highly problematic.
Some tide-gauge measurement record exceed 200 years, at a single location.
3. Sea-level rise only matters at the coasts, which is where tide gauges measure it. Satellites are incapable of measuring coastal sea-level, at all.
4. At any given time, there are usually only two or three satellites making measurements. There are hundreds of high-quality tide gauges independently measuring sea-level, and well over 100 tide gauges which have recorded more than 70 years of data.
Tide gauges must be corrected for local land movement. They fail and must be replaces, requiring some method to join the two records.
Not so for satellites.
Satellites now measure sea levels more accurately than do tide gauges or any other method.
I wrote, “The only advantages of satellites over tide gauges is that satellites provide near-global coverage, and there’s no need to try to account for local vertical land motion (because there’s no land anywhere near)”
DavidAppell replied, “Tide gauges must be corrected for local land movement.”
That’s what I just said.
However, if what you’re interested in measuring is acceleration, then there’s no need to adjust for local land movement, in most cases. That’s because, in most cases, the vertical land motion is very nearly linear over the time periods of interest. Thus, vertical land motion does not usually affect acceleration calculations.
DavidAppell continued, “They [Tide gauges[ fail and must be replaces, requiring some method to join the two records.”
“Some method?”
Oh, my. I didn’t realize that you are unfamiliar with how it is done.
It is a solved problem.
Go to NOAA’s web site information for any tide gauge; e.g., Seattle:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9447130
Near the upper-left, click on “Station Info” / “Station Home Page.”
There’s you’ll find things like:
Present Installation: Sep 13, 1988
As you can see, the present Seattle tide gauge was installed 27-2/3 years ago, which is pretty typical for U.S. gauges, and is longer than the entire combined satellite altimetry record.
Now, scroll down, to near the bottom of the page. There you’ll find a link to:
Bench Mark Sheets
In the case of the Seattle gauge, it is referenced to nine (9) nearby NGS & USGS bench marks.
If the tide gauge should be moved or destroyed and replaced, the replacement would be very precisely referenced to the same bench marks, using surveying techniques, so there’s no loss of accuracy.
Satellites have much, much worse problems.
1. Satellites don’t last nearly as long as tide gauges.
2. There are no NGS & USGS bench marks in space.
3. Satellite altimetry measurements are far less accurate than tide gauge measurements.
4. Satellite altimetry “measurements” are actually a product of complex, error-prone, opaque calculations done from the raw data. In the case of Topex-Poseidon, subsequent revisions to the first ten years of measurements increased the reported rate of sea-level rise by 23%.
http://www.sealevel.info/U_CO_SLR_rel2_vs_rel1p2_SteveCase.png
In the case of ENVISAT, subsequent revisions to its ten years of measurements tripled the reported rate of sea-level rise. (Things like that don’t happen with tide-gauges, of course.)
Note that NASA has proposed a mission called GRASP, to create something akin to a bench mark in space, but the mission has not been funded.
You have completely missed the point.
Satellites measure average global sea level, and they do that quite well. Local sea level change will rarely match that, because of local geography.
In some places, like the western Pacific ocean, it will be larger. In some places lower.
But all places have a component due to global sea level rise. It is already showing up in places like Miama and Norfolk, VA.
No coastal cities are going to escape global sea level rise, which will be about 3 feet by 2100.
DavidAppell wrote, “No coastal cities are going to escape global sea level rise, which will be about 3 feet by 2100.”
Utter nonsense. The average will be closer to 5 inches. There’s no sign of accelerating sea-level rise at any coastal city. In fact, in 2100 sea-level will still be falling at many coastal cities, like these:
http://www.sealevel.info/970-141_Churchill_2016-05.png
http://www.sealevel.info/050-201_Furuogrund_2016-05.png
http://www.sealevel.info/060-051_Vaasa_2016-05.png
http://www.sealevel.info/9443090_Neah_Bay_2016-05.png
Those coastal cities are not threatened by sea-level rise.
There’s only one place on the planet with a long-term tide gauge measurement record which is likely to see anywhere near to 3 feet of sea-level rise by 2100. The sealevel at Kushiro, Japan is likely to rise about 2.5 feet by 2100, but 85% of the sea-level rise at Kushiro is due to subsidence:
http://www.sealevel.info/641-021_Kushiro_2016-05.png
“The average will be closer to 5 inches.”
False.
Global sea level rise in the 20th century was 7 inches.
It is now 3.4 mm/yr, with an acceleration of at least (satellite data since 1993) 0.03 mm/yr2.
Maybe you can do the math. But probably not.
DavidAppell wrote, “Global sea level rise in the 20th century was 7 inches”
That’s close. By my calculations from tide-gauges, over the 20th century, coastal sea-level rise averaged about 6 inches (= 1½ mm/yr).
Hansen et al (2016) use 1.2 ± 0.2 mm/yr for 1901-1990, and their Fig. 29 shows 1.4 mm/yr for 1930-1992, both of which I think are slightly low. They wrote:
“Hay et al. (2015) reanalyzed tide-gauge data for 1901–1990 including isostatic adjustment at each station, finding global sea level rise to be 1.2 ± 0.2 mm year−1. Prior tide-gauge analyses of 1.6–1.9 mm year−1 were inconsistent with estimates for each process, which did not add up to such a large value (Church et al., 2013).”
DavidAppell wrote, “It is now 3.4 mm/yr…”
No, it’s not. It’s not even half that.
In fact, even the averaged satellites aren’t giving a number that large. Here’s Aviso saying 2.88 mm/yr:
http://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/fileadmin/images/data/Products/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.png
But that’s a nit. Your main blunder is conflating different sorts of measurements, which are not directly comparable. if you splice together sea-level measurements at different places, and/or by different methodologies, you can create the illusion of either sea-level rise acceleration or deceleration, depending on what locations you choose. That’s what you’ve done. If you don’t understand what’s wrong with that, then google for “IPCC Sea Level Nature Trick.”
Remember: you said “coastal.” That means tide-gauges. Satellites do not and cannot measure coastal sea-level.
Despite a 30% increase in CO2, and a 75% increase in CH4, there’s been no detectable acceleration in the rate of coastal sea-level rise since the 1920s.
We’ve done the experiment, and we know the result: anthropogenic GHG emissions do not detectably increase the rate of sea-level rise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIxvQMhttq4
I wrote it’s now 3.9 mm/yr.
And it is. Here’s the data. Calculate, if you know how.
ftp://ftp.aviso.oceanobs.com/pub/oceano/AVISO/indicators/msl/MSL_Serie_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.txt
A linear fit gives 3.9 mm/yr of sea level rise now, and a quadratic fit gives 0.03 mm/yr2 of acceleration.
(The acceleration matters if your projecting. Still large error bars.)
Shove the Richard Feynman crap up you ass.
No one doing science needs to quote Richard Feynman. Only those who can’t do science quote him in order to make an excuse for themselves.
If Feynman were alive today, he would be the most vocal scientist warning of rapid anthropogenic warming.
The Aviso data give a total trend of 3.4 mm/yr, when you include *all* the data (through 3/2/16).
ftp://ftp.aviso.oceanobs.com/pub/oceano/AVISO/indicators/msl/MSL_Serie_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.txt
This is a trivial calculation — no excuse for getting it wrong.
“Remember: you said “coastal.””
Another fail. I said global. Satellites measure global sea level.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/29274e80b067ffee8923f9e0477e2ca582035fe6090b2e91a620e8b632fc104f.png
Over the last 6-8 thousand years, sea level had risen about 1 meter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise#/media/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
That’s an aveage of 0.15 mm/yr.
Sea level rise is now 3.4 mm/yr — 24 times faster. And accelerating.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/eee5e1c4d3ef82a837974baaeb8f49436442dba3a787d8d397399818a0e00f26.png
“FACT: The last hundred years has seen less than 0.1°C of warming per decade.”
Over the last 30 years, the trend in global mean surface temperature is 0.15-0.20 C/decade.
“The only great ice sheets left are Greenland and Antarctica, and neither of them would be endangered by a 1 °C temperature increase.”
Ha ha. Greenland ice loss is accelerating. Scientific papers here:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-picture-of-accelerating-greenland-ice.html
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2014/09/another-paper-confirms-greenlands.html
The North American continent was covered by glaciers as far south as the Great Lakes, and they melted thousands of years ago. What caused that melting, buffalo farts? Fossil records show CO2 at 4-8,000 ppm in eons far past. Life on Earth thrived, in fact the fossil fuels were formed on the surface as plant life before they were covered and turned into fuels by the heat and pressure.
They whole idea that what we do over a few hundred years is ABSURD. Watch Dr. Ian Clark destroy the idea in short order.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDKSkBrI-TM
IT is a HOAX to take your money and freedom.
The pause is over. Many of his statements about past temp changes are just wrong. His statements about solar output and surface temps are incorrect. The 800 year lag is not an issue because the issue that temp and CO2 have feedback loop and a change in either can start the cycle. There are documented instances where the cycle was started by increases in CO2. Further, it is now know that the lag was quite shorter. So, try to stay up todate.
“The Pause” is not over. You’re confusing weather with climate. We’re at the peak of a major El Niño. It should end by sometime this summer. If history is any guide, it will be followed by a couple of years of La Niña (cool) conditions, at which time The Pause will be back.
If you subtract out the effects of ENSO (El Niño / La Niña) and the biggest volcanoes, you find that “The Pause” is now well over two decades long.
A 2014 paper by MIT’s Ben Santor (with many co-authors, including NASA’s Gavin Schmidt) did that interesting exercise. They tried to “subtract out” the effects of ENSO (El Niño / La Niña) and the Pinatubo (1991) and El Chichón (1982) volcanic aerosols, from measured (satellite) temperature data, to find the underlying temperature trends. Here’s their paper:
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/89054
This graph is from that paper:
http://www.sealevel.info/Santor_2014-02_fig2_graphC.png
Two things stand out:
1. The models run hot. The CMIP5 models (the black line) show a lot more warming than the satellites. The models show about 0.65°C warming over the 35-year period, and the satellites show about half that. And,
2. The “pause” began around 1993. The measured warming is all in the first 14 years (1979-1993). Their graph (with corrections to compensate for both ENSO and volcanic forcings) shows no noticeable warming since then.
Note, too, that although the Santor graph still shows an average of almost 0.1°C/decade of warming, that’s partially because it starts in 1979. The late 1970s were the frigid end of an extended cooling period in the northern hemisphere. Here’s a graph of U.S. temperatures, from a 1999 Hansen/NASA paper:
http://www.sealevel.info/fig1x_1999_highres_fig6_from_paper4_27pct_1979circled.png
The fact that when volcanic aerosols & ENSO are accounted for the models run hot by about a factor of two is more evidence that the IPCC’s estimates of climate sensitivity are high by about a factor of two, suggesting that about half the warming since the mid-1800s was natural, rather than anthropogenic.
Notice they use the term “slow-down” not pause. This slow-down is real, may be ending, but we won’t know for a few years. The pause, as used in this video, is over, for now. There will of course be unexpected ups, downs and pauses in global temperature in the future. The paper does not pretend to cover all sources of aerosol emissions or internal variability or all possible data problems. It is an interesting research question. It is not a justification for ignoring the enormous risks of unmitigated anthropomorphic climate change.
The last graph: you were duped by Heller.
Best,
D
I wrote, “Here’s a graph of U.S. temperatures, from a 1999 Hansen/NASA paper”
Dano2 replied, “The last graph: you were duped by Heller.”
How do you get “Heller” from “Hansen/NASA?” Do you wear the same glasses that you wear when getting “acceleration” from a straight line? Then this link might be helpful to you:
http://www.zennioptical.com/
The graph is Fig. 6 in this paper:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_etal_1.pdf#page=37
Goddard-Heller uses that chart to make a gif to dupe his faithful. That chart is not in the paper, thanks! That chart was from a disinfo site.
Best,
D
No, Dano2, that graph is not from Tony Heller. I copied it from Hansen’s paper, and I added the red circle and annotation. It’s not disinfo, and Tony had nothing to do with it.
But don’t take my word for it. I gave you the link to Hansen’s paper. If you click the link, it should take you directly to the page which contains Figure 6, in the paper. (If it doesn’t, then go to p.37, as Adobe Reader numbers the pages.)
Ah, so you altered the graph. You did not get it from Hansen directly.
Nonetheless, Heller/Goddard uses this graph to mislead his dullard readers, thanks!
Best,
D
For the third time: the graph, in black & white, is from Hansen’s 1999 paper. I got it directly from his paper. I added the red circle around the 1979 data point.
I think you know there’s nothing misleading about it, Dano2.
Tony’s a good man. Why are you so hostile?
Tony’s a good man. Why are you so hostile?
Cuz he’s a disinformation peddler.
Best,
D
No, he isn’t. He just has a low tolerance for flim-flam.
Uh-huh. Whatever gives you the good feels. Goddard/Heller is indefensible in civil society.
Best,
D
So it’s his manners that you object to? Really??
Dano2, you’re living in a glass house, you really ought to be more careful with those stones.
Weak flail. It is Heller/Goddard’s blatant disinformation peddling that I object to.
You are a weak bluffer. You should play poker with us.
Best,
D
Tony does not “peddle disinformation.” He’s not infallible, of course, but he’s smart, and he’s honest.
Have you ever heard of “projection” (the psychological term, not what they do at the movie theater)?
Steve peddles disinformation, thanks!
Best,
D
So sea levels are not really rising at all. Tuvalu is still there. and at an average of 3.2mm a year for the last 100 years, its nothing. Is NYC spending billions to build sea walls? No its a crack pipe dream of lefties to get the middle class to fork over huge sums of money for “their own good”.
Since your argument was shown to be false earlier, you restate it anew. How bold of you. Your statement that 3.2 mm = 0 mm is false. 3.2 mm/year = about a foot/century. And of course the main concern is that the rate is increasing, that is sea level rise is accelerating. It will not stay at 3.2 mm/yr. We looking at 1 to 4 feet by 2100. And if ghg emissions continue as they are, there will likely be several meters of sea level rise over the next century.
Coastal cities in every part of the world have begun planning for potential sea level rise.
The rate of sea-level rise is not increasing, unless you’re living in the 1920s or earlier. The rate of sea-level rise hasn’t accelerated since the 1920s.
When atmospheric CO2 was under 0.031%, globally averaged sea-level rise at the coasts was just under +1.5 mm/year.
With CO2 at 0.040%, SLR is still just under +1.5 mm/year.
Even President Obama’s former Undersecretary for Science, Steven Koonin, wrote that, “Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today.”</b?
Here're some relevant papers:
http://sealevel.info/papers.html#acceleration
“Thus, adaptation measures such as raising the height of sea walls or shifting to drought-resistant crops become very important.” – Steven Koonin, NYT, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/opinion/the-tough-realities-of-the-paris-climate-talks.html
His point in the WSJ essay was not that sea level rise from human caused warming is of no concern, but that there are natural factors at play that are still not understood. Koonin makes many good points in both his WSJ and NYT pieces. I tend to disagree with his slant, but I do respect him.
As for evidence of acceleration, I have already shown you that the most recent studies are finding that now there is enough data to detect acceleration. This was not the case a few years ago.
Mike435, there’s been no acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise in at least 85 years. Your graph created the misleading appearance of acceleration by conflating two different types of data: coastal sea-level measurements from tide gauges (which are very reliable), and mid-ocean sea-level measurements with satellite altimetry (which are unreliable). The two different methods produce two different rates, and by splicing them together your graph created the illusion of acceleration.
Don’t feel too bad. The IPCC made the same mistake. AR5 says:
“The rate of mean global sea level change—averaging 1.7 ± 0.2 mm/year– for the entire 20th century and between 2.8 and 3.6 mm/year– since 1993 —is unusual in the context of centennial-scale variations of the last two millennia…” [chapter 5] and “Between 1993 and 2010, the rate was very likely higher at 3.2 [2.8 to 3.6] mm yr–1…” [chapter 13]
I was an Expert Reviewer of that Report, and I tried in both the FOD and SOD reviews to get that misleading claim corrected..
What do you think is special about 1993? Can you guess why they picked that date?
It’s when the satellite altimetry record began.
What the IPCC calls “the rate of mean global sea level change.. since 1993” is derived from radically different sorts of measurements, taken entirely in different places, by completely different means, than the pre-1993 sea-level numbers. The satellite measurements are not comparable to the sea-level records from tide gauges (and the satellite measurements are of dubious quality). But that didn’t stop the IPCC from conflating the two, despite my protests.
The IPCC mostly ignored my comments, but here they are, FYI:
The “expert review” process was pretty much a sham. There was no dialogue between the IPCC Lead Authors and the Expert Reviewers. The Expert Reviewers wrote comments, and the Lead Authors read them. That’s all.
The Lead Authors wrote responses to all the Expert Reviewer comments on both the “first order draft” (FOD) and “second order draft” (SOD), but didn’t give those responses to the reviewers!
Expert Reviewers weren’t allowed to see the first order draft comments even when working on their reviews of the second order draft. They weren’t even allowed to know who the other Reviewers were. In fact, even the responses to their own first order draft comments were kept from them.
None of the Expert Reviewer comments, to either draft, were released until after the final report was released. Here they are:
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/
In my case, they rejected almost all of my comments, sometimes even with contradictory reasons.
For instance, in comments about several different parts of the Report I complained about the inclusion of Peltier’s 0.3 mm/yr GIA adjustment to arrive at that inflated 1.7 mm/yr rate of 20th century sea-level rise. In every case they rejected my complaints. But their reasons varied.
Sometimes their response claimed that they did not include the 0.3 mm/yr adjustment (“the 1.7 mm/year rate does not have a 0.3 mm/year correction applied,” they said). Other times they claimed that it was proper to include the 0.3 mm/yr adjustment (it was “done to extract the 1.7 mm/yr SLR supposed to reflect climate processes only,” they said).
I’m sure that inconsistency happened because they had multiple people writing the responses, but it is telling that those people didn’t agree except about the result: “Rejected.”
Of course, since I didn’t get to see any of their responses until after the final report had been released, there was no way to point out their confusions to them.
That Willie Soon said satellites are not accurate in a video is not evidence of anything. (I’m referring to the video link in your link.)
It is normal to use data derived from different methods. There are statistical methods used to combine data sets. Whether this is done properly in an given paper may be up for debate, but that is a debate to have in the peer reviewed literature.
“Of course, since I didn’t get to see any of their responses until after the final report had been released, there was no way to point out their confusions to them.”
Your recourse is to publish you views. But, you cannot just say the acceleration claim is “trivially refuted by examination of the recorded sea level … tide gauge[s]”. You have to dig into the statistics. Since you are not a statistician, I suggest you contact Steve McInyre and see if you can get him interested in working on this with you. In the meantime, I will go with the published peer reviewed literature as having a higher probability of being correct than your internet posts.
Dr. Soon did not just “say” the satellites are not accurate, he explained why. Listen to his talk, and learn. It will be worth your while.
NASA is aware of the problems with satellite altimetry. To address some of the problems, in 2011 NASA proposed (and re-proposed in 2014 / 2015) a new mission called the Geodetic Reference Antenna in SPace (GRASP). The proposal is discussed here, and its implications for measuring sea-level are discussed here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gmW9GEUYvA#t=0s&rel=0
Soon just says “I don’t believe it”. So? His opinion carries no weight. Hint: averaging data points reduces the error. And then you cite Watts? Really? I am supposed to believe that of a power point presentation Watts found on a proposal to refine satellite measurements, implies all the published literature is bunk. Sorry.
Contact McInyre. Maybe you two will come up with something publishable. Who knows.
Mike435, I gave you six links about the proposed Geodetic Reference Antenna in SPace, and that’s the best you can do? What do you think is its purpose?
And, what do you think of the corrections made to the Envisat record of sea-level measurements? Does that inspire your confidence?
http://www.sealevel.info/2061wtl.jpg
(The little box showing 0.76 mm/yr SLR is the “before” version, the big box showing 2.33 mm/yr SLR is the “after” version.)
You obviously didn’t listen to much of Dr. Soon’s lecture, either. Too bad. You could have learned a lot.
It is a standard denier tactic to cite a proposal to improve a model and or a data set as proof that all past work is invalid. Most of us know better than to fall for that. It would be great if we can get even better measurements of sea levels. But, the preponderance of the evidence in recent papers is that an acceleration in sea level rise can be detected. Could new evidence from a future satellite mission change that? Sure. If such new evidence comes in and is assessed by the scientists who work in the area we will see what they have to say.
Soon does not work in this area. All I heard him say was that individual measurements could not be accurate to 1 mm. But if you average many measurements the error range deceases.
Global sea levels have risen six meters or more with just slight global warming
July 9, 2015
Oregon State University
Summary:
A new review analyzing three decades of research on the historic effects of melting polar ice sheets found that global sea levels have risen at least six meters, or about 20 feet, above present levels on multiple occasions over the past three million years. What is most concerning is that amount of melting was caused by an increase of only 1-2 degrees (Celsius) in global mean temperatures.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150709145159.htm
If we can avoid the next glaciation, at the current rate of globally averaged sea-level rise, we could get to six meters in about 4000 years.
However, carbon emissions ain’t gonna keep us warm enough for that. The anthropogenic CO2 pulse is likely to last only a few hundred years (depending on what threshold you use). Already, at least half of all the CO2 that mankind puts into the atmosphere is being removed by the biosphere (“greening”) and the oceans. So when CO2 emissions fall to half their current rate, CO2 levels will begin falling, too.
(If mankind hasn’t transitioned to other energy sources within the next couple of hundred years, the human race will have much, much bigger problems than sea-level rise.)
“We present the first, to our knowledge, estimate of global sea-level (GSL) change over the last ∼3,000 years that is based upon statistical synthesis of a global database of regional sea-level reconstructions. GSL varied by ∼±8 cm over the pre-Industrial Common Era, with a notable decline over 1000–1400 CE coinciding with ∼0.2 °C of global cooling. The 20th century rise was extremely likely faster than during any of the 27 previous centuries. Semiempirical modeling indicates that, without global warming, GSL in the 20th century very likely would have risen by between −3 cm and +7 cm, rather than the ∼14 cm observed. Semiempirical 21st century projections largely reconcile differences between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections and semiempirical models.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/02/17/1517056113
Butbutbut that LoWatts said oshin ain’t risin!
Best,
D