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Sea Level scare industry urges plans to panic and evacuate over 1mm rise

Please, sell us your low lying land

Let’s play sea level bingo with the latest advertising from the Merchants of Sea-level Scares.

Hitting the media outlets tonight — the latest “Prepare to Die” news stories claim we must plan now for evacuees, refugees, inundation and homeless koalas. All the usual features of marketing are there — firstly all the images they use are from mocked up futuristic sea level rise. Secondly, it’s not a continuation of current trends, it a sudden acceleration — in this case from 1mm to year to 9mm a year, effectively starting tomorrow.

1 tiny millimeter

Atolls, Pacific, Sea level Rise, measured by satellites. Photo.

From 1969 – 2013 the seas have not changed the beaches around these Tuamotu atolls — or almost any other atoll you can name.

By every method known to man, seas are rising around 1mm a year:

  1. 1,000 tide gauges,
  2. hundreds of studies of beaches,
  3. satellites measuring sea levels, and
  4. satellites measuring beaches.

All anyone needs to know about sea levels is that for the last 50 years sea levels have been rising at 1mm a year as shown by a thousand tide gauges all over the world. There was no acceleration. (Beenstock et al). Some of those gauges were rising, some falling, but when averaged out, it’s almost a wash at 1mm. Nils-Axel Morner took the opposite approach and studied 50 beaches around Scandinavia intensely, figured out which beach was at the centre of the turning crust and calculated that the seas were only rising at 0.9mm a year and for the last 125 years. (Morner, 2014).

Believe it or not, that fits with what the satellites used to say too (Morner 2004). From 1992 – 2000 the satellites recorded a rise of less than 1mm a year, but by 2003 that trend was retrospectively “adjusted” up to 2.3mm/year. As far as Morner can figure out, the satellites were calibrated to one sinking tide gauge in Hong Kong.

It also fits with the 560 odd papers that Nils has written.

Satellites are now tracking every 20m rolling sandspit above the seas — and if seas were rising the beaches would surely be shrinking. Instead of 709 islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans 89% either stayed the same or got bigger. (Duvat, 2018). Not one island large enough to have human inhabitants was getting smaller. Not one.

Most of man made warming is made by adjustments

We don’t need sea walls to stop the rise, just an independent science audit.

Before adjustments:

A lot of the rise here is just the El Nino effect of 1998 in any case.

Figure 5. Annual mean sea-level changes observed by TOPEX/POSEIDON in 2000, after technical “corrections” were applied (from Menard, 2000). A slow, long-term rising trend of 1.0 mm/year was identified, but this linear trend may have been largely an artefact of the naturally-occurring El Niño Southern Oscillation event in cycles 175-200.

After adjustments:

Figure 7. Sea-level changes after “calibration” in 2003. The satellite altimetry record from the TOPEX/POSEIDON satellites, followed by the JASON satellites. As presented by Aviso (2003), the record suddenly has a new trend representing an inferred sea-level rise of 2.3 ±0.1 mm/year. This means that the original records presented in Figs. 5-6, which showed little or no sea-level rise, must have been tilted to show a rise of as much as 2.3 mm/year. We must now ask: what is the justification for this tilting of the record?

 

Sea levels have been rising for 2 centuries – the rate hasn’t changed

As far as the eye can see, it has nothing to do with CO2. Fully 85% or more of all our human emissions of CO2 have been produced since World War II and nothing changed.

Sea levels, Global, Little Ice Age, 1800, 1900, 2000. Carbon dioxide emissions.

[Graphed by Jo Nova based on data from Jevrejura et al located at this site PMSML]


There are large natural forces in here that are not well understood — look at the way the rate of change of sea level has rolled in cycles in the last 200 years.

Global Sea Level Rise Jevrejeva, 2008

Source: Jevrejeva 2008

Scream and run soon say the ABC

As usual, Nik Kilvert of the ABC doesn’t do any research or ask any hard questions. He’s just a distant part of the Science propaganda unit. The gloom and doom is based on highly adjusted data being fed into junk models and extrapolated beyond the error bars, but don’t expect Nik to report that. Truly terrible science needs truly terrible journalism to live on long enough to get the next grant.

Climate change evacuation planning needs to start now, scientists urge

Nik Kilvert, ABC

From Bangladesh to the Philippines and the low-lying islands of the South Pacific, the impacts of climate change for many people around the world are going to get much worse, very soon.

Some people will become stateless, and will need to find homes in new countries, while others will need to relocate within their own borders.

Researchers writing in Science today argue that it’s time to begin preparing the retreat of people living in regions that will become uninhabitable due to climate change.

Average global sea level will rise by up to 77 centimetres by the end of the century if warming is kept to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to IPCC predictions.

Extreme weather events, saltwater incursion and bushfires are also expected to displace people in the near future.

etc, etc, etc

Trust the ABC to throw a bushfire scare into a sea level story.

Ruairi

Small changes in sea-level rise,
Should not come as any surprise,
But a reading adjusted,
Can’t really be trusted,
As it’s not what the reading implies.

Sea levels are always changing and past changes were often larger.

Other posts on Sea Levels

REFERENCE

Duvat, V. K. E. (2018). A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, e557. doi:10.1002/wcc.557

Michael Beenstock, Daniel Felsenstein,*Eyal Frank & Yaniv Reingewertz, (2014)  Tide gauge location and the measurement of global sea level rise,  Environmental and Ecological Statistics, May 2014 [Abstract]

Morner. N.A. (2004)  Estimating future sea level changes from past records, Global and Planetary Change 40 49–54  doi:10.1016/S0921-8181(03)00097-3 [PDF]

Nils‐Axel Mörner (2014) Deriving the Eustatic Sea Level Component in the Kattaegatt Sea,  Global Perspectives on Geography (GPG). American Society of Science and Engineering, Volume 2, 2014, www.as‐se.org/gpg

Jevrejeva, S., A. Grinsted, J. C. Moore, and S. Holgate (2006), Nonlinear trends and multiyear cycles in sea level records, J. Geophys. Res., 111,

Jevrejeva, S., J. C. Moore, A. Grinsted, and P. L. Woodworth (2008), Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08715, doi:10.1029/2008GL033611. [PDF]

 

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