According to the new results, the annual world average sea level rise is about 1 millimeter, or about 0.04 of an inch.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-satellites-reveal-differences-sea.html
These new numbers are in line with NOAA tide gauge data.
The low end of IPCC forecasts is about double that at 1.9 mm/year. Hansen has been talking about 30+ mm/year. Once again the experts demonstrate that they have no clue what they are talking about.
This data and tide gauge data also blow away any credibility to claims of ice sheet meltdown. Is there anything left for the scamsters to cling to?
h/t to reader Green Sand
It seems as there is a need of adjustments 😉
Rgds Troels
If the results hold up to scrutiny then that’s a big dink in AGW alarmism.
You’re misinterpreting the study. It’s a gravitational study, looking at the [i]mass[/i] of water/ice present across the globe. It shows that the sea level rise [i]from ice melt[/i] currently amounts to ~1 mm / year. Ice melt is not the only contributor to the sea level rise caused by global warming. By far the dominant factor is thermal expansion of the oceans: this of course does not change their mass and is thus not seen by the GRACE study.
The main important finding of the GRACE study is the ability to separate melt-driven sea level changes from changes due to local hydrological factors (such as redistribution of water within the oceans due to local isostatic factors). They find, as expected, that these local factors average out to zero, and that the remaining changes in mass balance are due to ice melt.
In terms of total sea level rise – not just mass balance – the IPCC prediction for 2100 is for 110-770 mm of sea level rise, of which 110-430mm (more than half) comes from thermal expansion. A current figure of 1 mm/year of melt-driven sea level rise suggests that the total current rise including thermal expansion is around double that, consistent with the low end of the IPCCs predictions.
Given that both ice melt and thermal expansion are accelerating processes due to thermal lag, it’s unsurprising that current figures are at the low end of the predictions – it would be extremely worrying if they were not. If anything, it suggests that the low end of the prediction is too low – the only way for sea level rise to [i]stay[/i] as low as the low-end prediction is if there is no acceleration of melt or thermal expansion. This would contravene the laws of thermodynamics.
Ocean temperatures are plummeting and are below normal. That must mean that the real rate is less than 1.0.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
110-770 ?
Nice call. 700% error bar.
It appears that Peter Ellis is on of those Alarmist apologists that doesn’t understand basic physics! “Given that both ice melt and thermal expansion are accelerating processes due to thermal lag”. What a crock! Looked at ocean heat content figures lately Peter? They’ve flat-lined since 2003! A check of recent satellite sea-level figures is revealing too! Levels are now only a smidgen above minimums in 2003 and given current cooling trends may even drop below them shortly!
You’re right, Goddard completely misinterprets the study. In fact, I doubt he actually read it.
http://clearscience.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/short-rebuttal-of-goddard/
But he is certainly welcome to read the abstract and see for himself that they only consider contributions from the continents. Some of us have heard of thermal expansion… others apparently haven’t. And goddard, for the record, thermal expansion is not only an upper layer warming phenomena. You’ve probably seen the abyssmal warming study have you not?
http://www.cwwa2009.com/climate-change/warming-of-global-abyssal-and-deep-southern-ocean-waters-between-the-1990s-and-2000s-contributions-to-global-heat-and-sea-level-rise-budgets-by-sarah-g-purkey/
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/clearscience-gets-silly/
clearscience, if thermal expansion were only an upper layer warming phenomena then it wouldn’t affect coastal sea levels at all. Consider this thought experiment:
Supposed that a large quantity of surface water in the mid-ocean freezes, causing a resultant ~10% reduction in density (and increase in volume) for the frozen water. (Think icebergs!)
Question: what effect does this have on sea levels at the coasts?
Answer: none, because the displacement (mass) of the frozen water is unaffected by its change of density when it freezes. (That’s why changes in sea ice extent don’t affect coastal sea levels.)
For the same reason, density changes from thermal expansion or contraction at the ocean surface also don’t affect coastal sea levels (which, after all, are the only sea levels that matter).
Changes in temperature & density in the deep ocean are a different matter, but it takes a long, long time for surface warming to much affect temperatures (and densities) further down. Heat transport through water is mainly via movement of the water, and (based on radiocarbon dating) it takes an average of about 1000 years for surface water to make it down to the ocean depths.
Dave
Silly Steve….. according to Ross Gelbspan’s 2004 Boiling Point book, http://books.google.com/books?id=NLzgunts0aAC&pg=PA171 pg 171:
“…… the evacuation of the first 1,000 residents of the Duke of York Islands off Papua New Guinea ‘could be a dress rehearsal for millions of people around the globe affected by rising sea levels.’… The islands are just 12 feet above sea level, and water levels are rising by 11.8 inches per year.”
Surely they have just a few feet remaining before they are all gone……….
So now we know for sure they are lying about unprecedented sea level rise.
Just as they lie about 2010 being the hottest year since 1850.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/11/hottest-year.html
In short, they lie about… everything.
Sorry for posting the Guardian link.
You’re faster than quick silver.
An 1885-1980 careful report (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1991/91JC00064.shtml) gives 1.8mm/yr sea-level average. Hansen/NASA talks of 3.2mm/year. This article says current rise is 1.0mm/yr. Wigley suggests 75mm of rise/1K of increased temperature due to thermal expansion. Disaster, accouding to 2009 Science News, could occur in 2100 with a 0.75-1.6METER rise. For the CAGW disaster to occur, we would need an AVERAGE of 8.3-18mm/year sea level rise from this point on. This is something like 4 to 9 times the worst to-date rate we have seen. Where is the evidence we are headed here? This is not just a sea-level issue: where is the 4 – 9 times freshwater input to our oceans coming from?
The internal discrepancy in the alarmist positions is mind-boggling. Do not journalists own hand calculators? How do they make their cheque books balance?
Please, someone tell me that a new Amazon River is out there. The Mother of All Rivers: the Algore River. In Imagistan.
The Algore river in Imagistan. That sounds like it is fed by the Hansenized glacier fields in the Hallucinogenic Mountain range.
NOAA uses only a few gauging stations.
Using all psmsl stations gives a global average trend since 1850 is just 0.3 mm/ year
There are obvious problems in the older datasets, and there is an additional uncertainty due to isostatic rebound in near polar territories that were heavily glaciated during the LGM. But even if one chooses only lower latitudes (45S to 45N) and only from 1945 to present, the trend is 0.66 mm/year, with some oscillations, that makes a very unimpressive 6.6 cm (or two and a half inches) in a century.
Here are some charts:
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/2189/msl.png
http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/8168/msl1945.png
The original data are available at: http://www.psmsl.org/
There is obviously something drastically wrong!
0.8 mm of sea level rise is due to ground water overdraft AKA fossil water or water table drawdown.
0.2 mm of sea level rise is due to sediment infilling.
Several mm of sea level rise is due to ocean warming. The ARGO buoys (after twice being corrected when they showed cooling) show unpresidented global ocean warming.
Several more mm of sea level rise is due to the unpresidented melting of Mountain Glaciers since their last expantion in the 1970’s
An unknown number of mm of sea level rise is added by post ice age arctic rebound.
So if the sea level is rising by only 1mm per year my question is”Where has all the water gone?”.
I understand that Grace says approx 1mm a year rise in sea level due to ingress of land base melt water?
Colorado have 3.1mm a year total, so we have 2mm rise per annum due to thermal expansion?
NODC say no increase in ocean heat content since 2004, even a downward trend and Hadsst says no discernable increase sea surface temps since 1998, where is the “The thermosteric component” coming from?
There will certainly be a significant lag in the thermal transfer, large ENSO through 70’s then the 90-95 ENSO classed by Trenbeth as a once in 2000 year event and more recent strong El Ninos. Now we have the first strong La Nina, time will tell, but if the 2mm is due to thermal expansion we should see it reducing. There is a hint of that with the 2010 data from Colorado but it is far too early to call a trend.
You can now rule out any claims by Trenberth and the Colorado group they have proved good at MSU (Makin Stuff UP) or are they at CSU (Cooking Stuff Up).
It has now gotten so distorted they may as well start from scratch after getting rid of the current group of fabricators.
It is a TRAVESTY but with a little Magic we can find what went missing!!
[q]”…it appears our former measurements of sea level rise were off by 50% on the high side”[/q]
That’s EXACTLY what I found, by calculating a geographically-weighted average from tide station data. (A simple median gives the same result.)
IPCC-favored researchers correct sea level trends upward in locations where glacial isostatic rebound causes coastal sea levels to fall, but they don’t correct sea level trends downward where land subsidence due to water/oil/gas wells cause sea level to rise (perhaps because it’s harder to model). So their corrections exaggerate the global avg sea level rise by ~50%.
James Hansen et al claim global sea level rose at 1.7 or 1.8 mm/year during the last century, and that the rate is accelerating. But the best tide station data shows coastal sea levels rose an avg of only ~1.1 mm/year during the last century, and the rate has NOT measurably accelerated in response to increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions.
See: http://www.burtonsys.com/GMSL
The effect of thermal expansion on sea levels is trickier to quantify than it appears to be at first glance. Consider this thought experiment:
A large quantity of surface water in the mid-ocean freezes, causing a resultant ~10% reduction in density for the frozen water. (Think iceberg!)
Question: what effect does this have on sealevels at the coasts?
Answer: none at all, because the displacement (mass) of the frozen water is unaffected by its change of density when it freezes.
So, what about changes in density due to warming?
The answer is: it’s complicated.
If surface water in the ocean warms and expands, it will simply bulge up in place, floating like an iceberg does, without affecting water levels at the shoreline.
However, if water at the bottom of the ocean warms, or if all the water in the ocean warms together, it will displace more volume and thereby cause a generalized rise in sea level at the shorelines.
The wrinkle is that the sea is in layers, and it takes a very long time — on the order of hundreds of years — for surface warming and atmospheric warming to much affect the deep ocean.
So, how much change in sea level can really be expected due to thermal expansion? The IPCC thinks it is substantial (0.8 mm/yr or more over the last century, and increasing). Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner thinks it is negligible. The truth might be somewhere in between.
Dave
The bottom line is that the assertion this article was based on is a false assertion: the Riva paper does not support the conclusion that the sea level rise has been measured at 1mm/year.
The measured sea-level rise is in fact 3.2mm/year. Riva estimates 1mm of that to be caused by ice melt from continents.
Very simple, you’d think even the anti-science mob would be able to grasp it. Goddard has a knack for grasping the wrong end of the stick, though – perhaps he isn’t as sceptical as the rest of us are?
OMG we are all underwater.
You don’t seem to have retracted or apologised yet for your misstatement, “the annual world average sea level rise is about 1 millimeter”.
Bit of a habit for you, getting things wrong.
That is what tide gauges show. Only about 15% of tide gauges show 3+mm/year You are a world class wanker and a propagandist.
What are you complaining about, Mr. Thomas? That was an exact quote from the article he cited:
https://archive.today/CikIP#selection-105.30-105.118
Maybe you didn’t understand that it was a quote, because he used italics, rather than quote marks, to indicate the quoted excerpt. But you owe him an apology, even so.
He’s also correct that the number is “in line with” NOAA tide gauge analysis. The worldwide annual sea-level rise (SLR), as measured by the best tide gauges, averages less than 1.5 mm/year, which, to one significant digit, rounds to 1 mm/year.
Calculated from NOAA’s 2010 list of 159 best tide-stations, the average is +0.84 mm/year, and the median is +1.23 mm/year SLR:
http://sealevel.info/MSL_global_trendtable1a.html (scroll to the bottom)
Calculated from NOAA’s expanded 2013 list of 285 best tide-stations, the average is +1.27 mm/yr, and the median is +1.41 mm/year SLR:
http://sealevel.info/MSL_global_trendtable4.html
All of those round to “about 1 millimeter.”
Of the 285 gauges, just 49 (17%) recorded ?3 mm/yr SLR, and 53 (19%) recorded sea-level falling, rather than rising. All of those are outliers. They are sites at which the global sea-level trend is smaller in magnitude than local factors, like subsidence or uplift.