Bishop Hill De Lange and Carter on sea level
May 7, 2014 Climate: WG2 Willem de Lange and Bob Carter have written a report on sea level rise for the GWPF. This is really good stuff and I thoroughly recommend it to readers. Here is the press release:
A new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation stresses the importance of revising the current expensive policies that seek to mitigate an assumed global sea-level rise by cutting human carbon dioxide emissions.
The report, co-authored by Dr Willem de Lange (Waikato University) and Dr Bob Carter (formerly Otago and James Cook Universities), provides a succinct summary of the primary scientific issues relevant to devising cost-effective policies regarding sea-level change, and identifies that adaptation is more cost-effective than mitigation, a similar conclusion to that reached by the IPCC in their recent 5th Assessment Report."Though sea-level change is presented to the public as a singular issue of damaging global rise, such simplicity only exists in the virtual reality imagined by computer models," said Dr Carter, continuing that "the reality is that at different locations around the world sea-level is either rising or falling at individual rates of up to several mm/year, depending upon the local circumstances."
The report argues that such local and regional variability must be recognized in any sensible national sea-level policy plan, which must deal with the reality of measured sea-level change on nearby coasts rather than with a notional and speculative global average sea-level.
Dr de Lange stresses that some excellent coastal management plans of this type already exist, for example the UK¹s Thames Estuary 2100 project. "This plan assesses the vulnerability of the City of London to storm surge and flood impacts associated with relative sea-level rise, and it is one of first major flood risk assessments in the world that places adaptation to climate change at its core," said Dr de Lange.
The new report presents three major sea-level policy conclusions, which are:
- Abandonment of costly and ineffectual policies aimed at stopping 'global' sea-level rise.
- Recognition of the local or regional nature of sea-level hazard and the requirement for location specific policy that needs to cover particular cases of both rising and falling sea-level.
- Use of planning controls that are flexible and adaptive in nature, including the deployment of environmentally suitable engineering solutions to particular coastal problems.
Reader Comments (20)
Based on the press report, the reasoning seems to be:
1. Create a straw man: There is a variability in local sea level rise. This certainly is not news to anyone.
2. Jump to the conclusion that it is not sensible to mitigate something that affects sea level rise globally, i.e. climate change. This is a complete non sequitur. Just because there is local variation doesn't mean that there cannot be climatic conditions that go beyond the local context.
Once again, I have to raise the question: do you really believe that sea-level changes can be measured in millimetres?
Okay, it may be argued that it is just an average of a rise over several decades, but can you be sure that the original measurement was as accurate as the today’s measurement? It seems that there is general agreement that temperatures of a few decades ago were not too accurate, and many records have been adjusted (usually to fit in with whatever theory is being espoused); will the same ideas be applied for sea-level measurements?
Australia's Bureau of Meteorology must be fully moved into their swanky new HQ by now:
https://www.leightoncontractors.com.au/projects/medibank-house-700-collins-street/
They allowed some other sucker to lease the lower levels. The whole shebang in 2 meters above sea level. I guess the taxpayer didn't need to know or be consulted on this. Or maybe the gov dept that shelled out didn't get the memos.
Looks as if they slapped another 4 floors on it recently - maybe that is their strategy to escape rapidly rising sea level.
In other words, the solution to the non-global largely non-problem remains the same as it has ever been: Just build sea walls and coastal defences where and when they are needed, or build somewhere else. Like they already had for London before global warming became fashionable.
It's another Homer Simpson moment. Doh!!!
@michael hart: exactly.
For instance, the sea-level change poster boys of the Maldives, an island chain that may or may not be descending into the briny, are decamping to Bougainville Island, a short hop away that - erm - is showing no sign whatsoever of succumbing to the same fate. The fact that the two are located either side of a subduction zone is the salient point here but it's the sheer intellectual dishonesty that is being used to hammer home the climate-change-sea-level-rise-we're-all-doomed message that galls.
The correct response is of course the decampment, you can't mitigate against a purely natural phenomenon but for christ's sake don't lie to us about it.
Whoops. Not the Maldives, the Carterets. But the point remains.
Mickey C:
I think you refer to the Caterets. The Maldives are thousands of miles away in the Indian Ocean.
Aynsley: spotted and corrected.
The report leaves out one of the most alarm-busting plots of all, yet cites in detail the study it originates from:
“Church and White (2006, 2011) suggested that the long-term sea-level rise acceler-
ated during the late 20th century. Because their work is based on merged satellite and
tide-gauge datasets, these studies are problematic and have to be used with caution.
Break point and other statistical analyses indicate a significant change in the under-
lying characteristics of the data around 1992 (Chambers et al. 2012), i.e. at the com-
mencement of satellite measurements. This implies either that a fundamental change
in sea-level processes occurred in 1992, or that the satellite data behave differently to
the tide-gauge data – the latter view being supported by Wunsch et al. (2007) and
Domingues et al. (2008). But in any case, linear trends calculated over periods as short
as 20–30 years (as the satellite data are) cannot be viewed as reliable indicators of the
long-term rate of sea-level change.”
Unlike the 2006 paper, the 2011 update included a simple plot of the average of world tide gauges, in yellow, atop other plots that obscured its pencil straight linearity in utter defiance of nearly every climate alarmist headline ever written, here extracted in black with an added trend line:
http://oi51.tinypic.com/28tkoix.jpg
If the extra heat is suddenly hiding in the oceans, unlike before when it showed up in the global average temperature, then this would immediately show up as a surge in sea level rise, but it doesn’t. So “adjustments” are made that instead of correcting errors create a virtual sea level out of hand waving arguments, an indeed the attempt to ignore the systematic mismatch between satellites and tide gauges. NASA’s web site even cuts tide gauge data off to hide its clear falsification of claims of acceleration.
One of the references is to Hansen 2007*. In this letter, Hansen claims that research funding has been affected by political biases:
Significantly, Hansen does not perceive that the situation may have reversed, and research focusing on up-playing (?) climate effects may now be preferentially funded.
Apologies for this somewhat tangential comment.
*If the GWPF authors are reading this, please note that the citation is incorrect, reading "Scientific Research Letters" where it should read "Environmental Research Letters".
At risk of boring you all with my continuous repetition, I have to ask why the “ocean heat content” is expressed in such terms (joules); after all, how is this heat measured? Why, by a thermometer, of course! So why not call it temperature? Easy answer: because 0.02°C does not look quite as impressive as 2 times 10 to the power 16 (2 x 10^16) ubermegajoules. While the figures are entirely made up (as are the latter units), they display the desire of so many in the “climate change” farce to twist facts for their own gain by over-inflation of data in such a manner.
Radical Rodent -
Dr Pielke Snr disagrees with your view in several of his posts, e.g. this one. Joules is the natural unit to use when considering energy flow. While a (presumably volume-weighted) temperature average can be constructed, it is not the best metric in this situation.
I wouldn't be distressed by the fact that the OHC rate of change is on the order of a few ZJ/year. [1 ZJ=10^21 J] As you say, the key is presenting numbers in context, and the heat capacity of the entire ocean means that 1 ZJ, as enormous a figure as it is, implies a very small temperature change. Alternatively, one can convert ZJ/year into an equivalent energy flux, averaged over the globe, at a conversion factor of 16.1 ZJ/year to 1 W/m2.
one of the million imbecillic trolls in the (rich, secure, indefinte entitlements provided, tax efficient) pay of the public or in the pay of so called "charities" will now come and tell us it is baaaaad that gwpf , 20people, get paid by big oaoaoaoaoaowl
A recent study of some Pacific atolls has shown that they have been through sea level rises and falls previously and that the atolls grew in line with changes in the level of the sea. It seems that absolutely nothing needs to be done to mitigate level rises for these places at least – be they from any cause.
http://theconversation.com/dynamic-atolls-give-hope-that-pacific-islands-can-defy-sea-rise-25436
and
http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/9963480/Pacific-atolls-resilient-to-rising-seas-study
An stretch of the North Island of New Zealand that I am familiar with has an area of ancient low-lying grassed-over sand dunes, swamps and small lakes that are about the same distance from the sea as they were before Humans of any type discovered the place. The Dunes, that Geologists have estimated to be around three million years old, the swamps and the lakes are about the same distance from the sea as they were when the first East Polynesian hunter-gatherers, somewhere around a thousand years ago, began a seasonal cycle of using established hunting sites now marked with ancient middens.
I guess that, in another thousand years or so, the coastline there will not have changed much.
Sea level rise, it seems, is not much of a factor there.
Re: Radical Rodent
> I have to ask why the “ocean heat content” is expressed in such terms (joules); after all, how is this heat measured? Why, by a thermometer, of course!
Not quite. OHC is a calculated value that uses both salinity and temperature measurements. Temperature measurements on their own can not be used.
Thank you for pointing out the scientific discrepancy of me equating heat content with temperature. However, while this might be valid in a laboratory, how can this difference be reliably measured out in the real world?
My argument still stands: the reason that AGWistas use heat content rather than temperature is that the numbers used can look considerably more scary – “The oceans are heating at a rate of 1 Zigga-zig-hah Joules per year!” does sound a lot more scary than, “The oceans are 0.001°C warmer than they were when we first started measurements in isolated areas, five years ago… (yawn).”
It is elementary physics that the study of thermal expansion of a liquid body has to include all of the body.
The deeper 50% of ocean volume is very sparsely sampled. It is not currently valid to assume that no mechanim exists to cause variation in surface level measurements by any method.
It is simply junk science to attribute mm per year changes to a mechanism like global warming.
It is possible that future study will show that present assumptions are a correct guess. But hard science is about the replacement of gueses with good data. The good data do not exist yet. We do know of some understudied mechanisms, like energy as heat being added to the deep oceans by hydrothermal vents, for example. We simp.y cannot ignore them as seems to be trendy. Then, there remain the 'unknown unknowns' that preclude the conclusions so confidently made in many sea level rise papers. It is unhealthy, poor science.
Can anyone find fault with this line of thinking?
Not me – but, then, I have shown that my own logic can be deeply flawed, so should my opinion count as representative of others’?
Geoff Sherrington: "The deeper 50% of ocean volume is very sparsely sampled." Lyman and Johnson consider the top 1800 m as being adequately (>50%) covered since 2004, but they do not discuss beyond that depth.
While one can't eliminate other sources of heat (e.g. hydrothermal vents) as causes, that doesn't seem consistent with the profile of decreasing warming rates with depth, as observed.