NOAA Tide Gauges : Sea Level Rise – Less Than 2 Inches Per Century

I averaged the sea level change rates for all NOAA global tide gauges with data in the current century, and the average rate is +0.47 mm/year – which is 1.85 inches per century. Far below the IPCC forecasts.

Spreadsheet is here.

About Tony Heller

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31 Responses to NOAA Tide Gauges : Sea Level Rise – Less Than 2 Inches Per Century

  1. Mike Davis says:

    You Apparently did it wrong. You were supposed to only pick those that showed sea level rise of the “Correct” amount. There is a “Known” Problem with some gauges that makes them unreliable. Only a well trained Climatologist sea level “Expert” chosen by the Establishment can tell the difference.
    It is like Palmistry or Phrenology, You need the Magic Touch to FEEL to the “Truth”!
    😉 😉 😉

    • Mike Bromley says:

      And, exactly WHAT constitutes the original datum? What was sea level BEFORE? Did it magically stop rising for a while after shooting up a hundred meters after the Wisconsinan minimum? Long enough for the paleo clamato-phreneticists to peg “normal” sea level? “Oh, but it’s the RATE of change”. In relation to what? your wet pantlegs from the 1600’s? Bother.

  2. Galvanize says:

    Oh no, we are all going to drown at a painfully slow rate.

  3. Climate Dissident says:

    You clearly didn’t include the IPCC graph with the tipping point. Nearly flat, pretty much what the tide gauges now show. Until we reach the tipping point, the sea level will rise one foot per year from that point on. Repent!

  4. Jimbo says:

    One thing is clear, the rate of sea level rise needs to get going soon if the IPCC’s predictions are to come into fruition. Where did all the water from the melting ice caps and glaciers go?

  5. Andy Weiss says:

    This pretty NOAA chart has been published and peer reviewed by the best climate experts money can buy. Who are you to believe that you can look at actual data from the real world and try to interpret it?

    As Mike says, only an Expert chosen by the Establishment can make an accurate interpretation. Only they know the correct peer reviewed methods as to how to adjust or throw out data.

  6. P.J. says:

    You should have used Michael Mann’s al-gore-rhythm, which would have assigned a negative weighting to the negative values, thereby making them positive, and making the overall sea level rise look unprecedented.

    • Mike Davis says:

      Using the Mannian Al-Gore-Rhythm my place would now be under water at 1K ft above MSL! Only those that live on the side of the tall mountain ranges would be above the water level! The Earth would now be 85% covered by ocean rather than 70%

  7. Philip Finck says:

    OK, here it goes, and remember, polite criticism with respect to my post.

    It is incorrect to use raw tide gauge records (data) to draw any conclusions with respect to either eustatic or isostatic rates of sea-level change. This may only be done in the situation where there is no vertical movement of the crust (+ve or -ve), at each discrete location. If there is vertical movement, then the tide gauges are measuring the `apparent rate’ of sea level change (which is the observed rate of sea level change at the individual location).

    Let us assume that at `Station A’, the eustatic change is +10 cm/century (volume and thermal expansion/contraction changes plus salinity changes) . At the same time crustal movement or isostatic change is – 10 cm/century. The apparent or observed rate of sea level rise will be +20 cm/century.

    If we use the same scenario but the isostatic movement is +10 cm/century, then the observed rate of sea level rise will be 0 cm/century. Thus observed or relative sea level rise will vary depending on the possible combinations of eustatic and isostatic change.

    But what does this tell us about, or how does it correlate to the global average rate of sea level rise or fall measured using tide gauges or satellite observations? Well, actually nothing. Global average sea level rise or fall is a meaningless number that would only apply to uniques situations where the combination of eastatic and isostatic changes just happened (by random chance) to equal the global average number. This is easily sean if one looks at a world map of rates of sea level change measured by satellite. Remember the satellite does not measure the isostatic part of sea level change.

    I will use the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada tide gauge data as an example and also as it is probably one of the more confusing possible examples that lends itself to incorrect interpretations. It also has a very long record (not continuos but almost ) from the mid-1890’s. In Halifax the isostatic rate of crustal subsidence 15.7 cm/century. The eustatic rate of sea level rise is calculated by subtracting this measurement from the apparent rate of sea-level rise of 32 cm/century measured by the tide gauge. This gives a eustatic rate of sea level rise of +16.3 cm/century.

    Hold it! Isn’t the global satellite measured rate of sea level rise around 31 – 32 cm/century. How can this be since the satellite doesn’t measure isostatic changes and the Halifax rate is about 32 cm/century? Or if one just looked at the tide gauge records, without including the isostatic component, one would conclude that sea level rise in Halifax would always equal the satellite global average rate of rise. We are bach to where I started above.

    his is incorrect since, as I indicated, the global number is meaningless in regional contexts. Apparent sea level rise in Halifax equaly global satellite measured rate of sea level by Pure Chance. This is because the satelite measured rate of sea level rise along the south coast of Nova Scotia is around 16 +/- cm/century. Combine this with the isostatic value and it gives 32 cm/century that coincidentally equals the satellite global rate.

    Sooooooooo………. as an avowed skeptic I am afraid I have to point out, as I did at the beginning of the post, that you cannot use muti-tide gauge station data to compare to global satellite data. I really hate to say this, but the DATA MUST BE CORRECTED…..ahhhhhhh…….. I’m sorry, I know I am baaaaaaaaaad.

    • Monte Carlo calculations are based on the idea that local biases distribute themselves randomly.

    • Mike Davis says:

      The satellite records are not long enough to give meaningful results because of long term variations due to regional weather patterns that affect appearant sea level. Sea Level is a dynamic reality as it changes which is why they refer to Mean Sea Level. Hover Mean Sea Level is also a changing thing because what the MSL was for the last 30 years will be different from the preceding 30 years of the next 30 years. It is also meaningless at more than regional scale.
      It is like a trivia thing and something humanity learned to adapt to!

  8. Alcheson says:

    I have a little problem with this
    “It is incorrect to use raw tide gauge records (data) to draw any conclusions with respect to either eustatic or isostatic rates of sea-level change. This may only be done in the situation where there is no vertical movement of the crust (+ve or -ve), at each discrete location. If there is vertical movement, then the tide gauges are measuring the `apparent rate’ of sea level change (which is the observed rate of sea level change at the individual location).”
    My problem is this, if the land height increases by 5 meters and the water level increases by 5 meters…its the difference in rise between the two that is important… not the absolute rise of sea level. Therefore you SHOULD use the uncorrected values for land rise if you are worried about flooding due to sea level rise.

  9. Something seems very wrong here: the graph’s vertical axis is in meters; 0.47m is 47 cms or 470mms over a century, which means a yearly rise of 4.7, not 0.47mms. Or, to put it in your crazy “system” which may have mixed you up, not 1.85 but 18.5 inches/century.
    Please do tell me where I skidded.

  10. Steve Oxler says:

    The earth is still in the process of condensing into a shpere. This is why our day is suddenly shorter after the little plate shift off the coast of Japan ten days ago. It would seem that variations in sea level as a result of melting ice and thermal expansion are just noise (loud noise, to be sure) on top of the real cause–Mr. Gravity’s constant pressure to flatten the land masses until they are all covered by water.
    Do we have any sort of handle on the net “crustal movement” that people are refering too?

  11. Thanks. So the graph has no relation to the real world.

  12. Walt Ughes says:

    Good job. I nominate you for the John Daly award “The Tazy”, using common sense to debunk rediculous claims about sea level rise. I wonder if we can get the global sea level alarmists to move to “The Isle of the Dead”? We’ll call back in a couple of hundred years, if they are still above water.

  13. Kevin says:

    Two inches is not very much. At least, that’s what my wife says.

  14. Gary Hall says:

    Every time I pick up my Los Angeles Times and read another fabricated piece on how the Pacific is expected to rise by 55 inches by the end of this century (89 years, mind you) – well.. A few contacts with the journalists involved has only brought their insistence on the “fact” that the 55 inches is a conservative one – according to their sources (Pacific Research Institute – I believe).

    Last year, after several of these stories, I picked up the phone and called this division at NOAA. Amazingly, I got immediately transferred to a scientist who volunteered that the tide gauge data was his baby – he was the guy (Wow, I apologize for not remembering his name – but Steve, you can follow up on that, right?)

    Anyway I asked him a few questions, and although it did seem that he was concerned about CO2 and future sea level rise, he answered my question in no uncertain terms. I paraphrase – but I’m dead on with the context and accuracy of what he said:

    ‘Looking at the records of the several oceans which are contiguous with the United States (Alaska included) we see absolutely no measurable evidence that there has been in increase in the rate of sea level rise – across the board.’

    Certainly a statement that not a soul in our national mainstream media would be interested in repeating.

  15. Steve Case says:

    What you really need to do is go to the Permanent Service for Mean Seal Level site

    http://www.psmsl.org/

    and down load all the data, all 1200 or so stations with annual data going back year by year. You can get monthly too if you want to really get into it.

    Here’s the link to Station #1, the annual data for Brest France

    http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.annual.data/1.rlrdata

    which goes back to 1807. I’m not saying your spreadsheet is wrong or off the mark, it’s merely incomplete.

  16. Rann Xerox says:

    First, forgive my lack of links or scientific terminology. I read an article that spoke about how because of the fluid nature of water, that it is actually affected by the gravitational pull of glaciers, land masses, and the centrifugal force of the rotation of the earth (bulging the water at the equator). It seems that if the ice caps are melting that there would be less water pulled to them and more would bulge at the equator. I am sure there are a lot more dynamics that would affect fluid distributions but I would think if the oceans are rising, they would be rising faster at the equator then elsewhere.

  17. Gary Hall says:

    “NOT” for pub.. OK.

    Steven.. would love to send you a quick e mail.. follows a tele conversation with a journalist over her NY sea level rise/warming story. OK?

    Here: http://www.app.com/article/20110319/NJNEWS/103190327/Global-warming-rising-seas-threaten-New-Jersey-expert-says?odyssey=tab

    w/ the usual:

    “In the scientific community, there is no debate about climate change,” she said.

    The gal sent me an e-mail – reference links – from her source – Melanie Reding, education coordinator for the Jacques Cousteau Coastal Education Center in Little Egg Harbor.

    Thought you’d appreciate..

    cheers

  18. Vincent Gray says:

    The rate of increase is falling because of the use of GPS devices to stop false rises due to storms lowering the equipment. The rest of the rise is caused by fall in neighbouring land caused by local removal of groundwater and minerals and the weight of new buildings

  19. Thomas says:

    I wonder why nobody noticed the obvious error in the OP’s calculation. He has been averaging a lot of numbers where many of them are large negative numbers from locations in northern Europe where the land rise from the latest ice age is still a hard fact. E.g. in Furuogrund, Sweden the land rise is 9.16 mm/year and instead of using -8.15 mm/year he should have used + 1.01 mm/year when doing the averaging of the sea level rise.

    • That is how Monte Carlo analysis is done. There are also many tide gauges affected by subsidence and they all average out in the wash. By using the entire data set you eliminate confirmation bias.

      • Thomas says:

        You cannot be sure that land rise and subsidence average out if you do not calculate that effect separately. A few subsidence numbers that were easily found:
        Cuxhaven: 1.4 mm/year
        Halifax: 1.5 mm/year

        The Halifax number was obtained from http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/climate-change/landscape-ecosystem/human-settlements/3986 where it clearly states:
        “To obtain realistic estimates of future sea-level rise under climate change, it is necessary to know the magnitude of the subsidence. The rate of subsidence needs to be added to projections of sea-level rise from climate models in order to estimate the total relative sea-level rise to be expected at any locality.”

        In http://www.psmsl.org/train_and_info/training/gloss/gb/gb6/denys.html there are discussions about the situation in New Zealand but also at other sites like the Mediterranean region and Chesapeake Bay.For these regions the subsidence effects seems to be less than 1 mm/year which definitely do not average out the 5-10 mm/year land rise effects in the many samples from Sweden and Finland.

        Thus, not separately taking into account the land rise and subsidence effects is utterly wrong.

  20. Environmental Voice says:

    Fellow Mankind; when we hear the thump at our front doors ; open the doors and find the waters flushing in knee deep; or worse; we can then stop theorizing and debating; we will finally have a conclusive answer to the questions at hand; Has mankind impacted planet Earth’s machinery , or is this an all natural cyclical event; and; exactly how fast will the waters rise ? Ooops ! When Mother Nature finally has had enough; as in former reigns of man; and passes the tipping point of no return; the circuit breaker reset switch will flip. First comes the swamp; then comes the freeze. The transition interphase will not be subtle; we will not find a space the size of a postage stamp which will not be effected and affected; wherein we will find shelter; whether underground; on the surface; or even orbiting eight miles up; planet Earth will be restarted and correct our damages; however; most; if not all of us; will not survive the restart.

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