Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Sea Rise 60% Faster?





Not so fast again. Do read the second item also. Whatever they are all claiming, it is clear that the sea level did rise slowly in response to the global increase in temperature that peaked in 1998. As could be reasonably expected that impact is now slowly dropping as the driver is flat to now declining.

We can presume that this possibly reflects additional fresh water been released from Greenland and other Glaciers. It may also reflect warmer waters. How much of either is likely open.

The more interesting question is just how much of this rise is a result of a rebound from the Little Ice Age? I have no doubt that a period of cold will again expand all glaciers and take it all back.

What makes this all so problematic anyway is that the global sea surface area is 361 million square kilometers. That means that a rise of one meter requires 361 000 cubic kilometers of ice. That is an awful lot of ice to melt. The glaciers reacting with the sea just do not cut it. In fact we are talking about one cubic kilometer of ice per square kilometer of area in Greenland and we have had nothing of the kind anytime during the past centuries.

So the only reasonable explanation for the modest rise we have seen is the modest general global temperature increase driven by the rebound from the Little Ice Age causing an expansion of the surface water.

Seas rising 60 percent faster than UN forecast: study

by Staff Writers

Paris (AFP) Nov 28, 2012



Sea levels are rising 60-percent faster than the UN's climate panel forecast in its most recent assessment, scientists reported on Wednesday.

At present, sea levels are increasing at an average 3.2 millimetres (0.125 inches) per year, a trio of specialists reported in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

This compares with a "best estimate" by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007, which projected that by today, the rise would be 2 mm (0.078 inches) per year.

The new figure converges with a widely-shared opinion that the world is heading for sea-level rise of around a metre (3.25 feet) by century's end, co-author Grant Foster of US firm Tempo Analytics told AFP.

"I would say that a metre of sea level rise by the end of the century is probably close to what you would find if you polled the people who know best," Foster said.

"In low-lying areas where you have massive numbers of people living within a metre of sea level, like Bangladesh, it means that the land that sustains their lives disappears, and you have hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and that can lead to resource wars and all kinds of conflicts," he added.

"For major coastal cities like New York, probably the principal effect would be what we saw in Hurricane Sandy.

"Every time you get a major storm, you get a storm surge, and that causes a major risk of flooding. For New York and New Jersey, three more feet of water would be even more devastating, as you can imagine."

The investigation, led by Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), gauged the accuracy of computer simulations that the IPCC used in its landmark Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

That report jolted governments into nailing climate change to the top of their agenda, culminating in the ill-fated Copenhagen Summit of 2009, and helped earn the Nobel Prize for the IPCC.

The new study gave high marks for the document's forecast on global temperature, saying there was a "very good agreement" with what was being observed today, an overall warming trend of 0.16 degrees Celsius (0.28 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade.

But it said the IPCC's projection for sea levels was much lower than what has turned out.

The panel's prediction for the future -- of a rise of up to 59 cms by 2100 -- "may also be biased low," it warned, a caution shared by other studies published in recent years.

Foster said the bigger-than-projected rise could be attributed to meltwater runoff from land ice, something that was a big unknown when the IPCC reported in 2007 and remains unclear today.

Other factors were technical uncertainty, he said.

The IPCC's projection had been based on information from 1993 to 2003, and there has been more data since then, helping to prove the accuracy of satellite radars that measure ocean levels by bouncing radar waves off the sea surface.

The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report will be published in three volumes, in September 2013, March 2014 and April 2014.



Stefan Rahmstorf’s Sea Level Amnesia – Using His Own Numbers, Sea Level Rise Actually Slowed Down 3%!

By P Gosselin on 29. November 2012



Ulli Kulke, veteran journalist at the German flagship daily DIE WELT, posts a comment at his blog on über-alarmist Stefan Rahmstorf’s claim that “sea levels are rising 60% faster” than previously thought in 2007.

Sea levels have decelerated over the last years. Chart source:http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

Being a devout alarmist, Rahmstorf is obsessed with finding ways to produce spectacular headlines. In Germany scary climate headlines have become a tradition every November, just before every major climate conference. Doha this year is no different.

In his latest claim, Rahmstorf claims that just a few years ago, sea levels were thought to be rising 2 mm/year. Suddenly the sea level, the satellites say, is actually now rising at 3.2 mm/ year – that’s 60% faster then they thought!

But as Kulke points out in his piece titled False climate alarm surrounds an old hat,Rahmstorf is suffering from (selective) amnesia, and forgot what he said in the UN-IPCC report of (2007): Rahmstorf back then:

Satellite measurements show a rise of 3.1 mm/year for the period 1993-2003 – and if you consider the measurements through 2006, it’s even 3.3 mm/year.”

Kulke writes, with a bit of sarcasm:

It was, after all, quite some time ago, and there was so much data in that thick report. Also with sea levels – some numbers were lower and some were higher. But Rahmstorf, the ocean scientist, had been lead author in every climate report. For this reason the data shouldn’t be anything new for him. Back then the report projected an increase of 18 – 59 cm for the coming century.

Alarm, Alarm. Let’s increase the growth of data. Or, to speak like Honecker (leader of former communist regime East Germany): Always higher, never lower! And if it’s not possible to increase the current data, then let’s just reduce the data of the past. Just like some climate scientists also want to reduce the temperature of the hottest year since instrumental measurements began, namely 1998, just so that this decade can once again appear to be on the rise. Or just like Michael Mann tried with his infamous hockey stick – but failed.”

If we take Rahmstorf’s 1993 – 2006 period value of 3.3 mm/year, then we see that sea level rise has actually slowed down by 3%, and not risen 60%. The tricks being used by alarmist climate scientists are becoming ever more obvious and desperate.

You don’t need to be an investigative journalist to uncover that.

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