2/22/16 Washington Post:
A group of scientists says it has now reconstructed the history of
the planet’s sea levels arcing back over some 3,000 years — leading it
to conclude that the rate of increase experienced in the 20th century
was “extremely likely” to have been faster than during nearly the entire
period.
“We can say with 95 percent probability that the
20th-century rise was faster than any of the previous 27 centuries,”
said Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who led the
research with nine colleagues from several U.S. and global universities.
Kopp said it’s not that seas rose faster before that – they probably
didn’t – but merely that the ability to say as much with the same level
of confidence declines.
The study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Seas
rose about 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) from 1900 to 2000, the new study
suggests, for a rate of 1.4 millimeters per year. The current rate, according to NASA, is 3.4 millimeters per year, suggesting that sea level rise is still accelerating.
Of course, for the True Believers, this is bad news. But as the Weather Underground site points out:
Well over seventy percent of our planet is covered by water. This was
not always the case. During the last ice age, massive ice sheets covered
portions of the northern and southern hemispheres (Figure 1). When the
massive ice sheets melted, they released the water locked inside them –
enough to make the seas rise by about 120m (390 ft) (Waelbroeck et al., 2002; Schneider von Deimling, et al., 2006; Rahmstorf, 2007).
A very interesting discussion of the different causes of rise. As the
3/28/2009 Daily Telegraph points out:
But if there is one scientist who knows
more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish
geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA
International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising
verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known
scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all
this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he
says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century
it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of
plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence,
he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice)
tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain
that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that
they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings
are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening
in the real world". \
When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he
launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20
years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off
disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to
confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing
his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why
they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be
shown.
Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been
calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if
anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers
can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple
growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice
has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.
One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to
show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own
satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph
tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the
finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm
rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards
by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists
admitted, they "needed to show a trend".
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