Every few weeks, one publicity hound or another at Scripps (La Jolla) makes a press release warning of sea level rise threatening the California coast. Here is the automatically generated graph from the new CU sea levels site – for 34N 120W
Sea level is not rising in La Jolla.
You won’t get grants or win peer approval if you say there is no problem. As a scientist, that is completely self-destructive.
And La Jolla sits several hundred feet above the ocean on a bluff.
Most of La Jolla is actually down near the beach.
Significant sea-level rise (relative to human timescales) is a thoroughly BOGUS issue.
The surface-area of the oceans is vast and the amount of landlocked ice is small (relative to the extremes at glacial maximum). There’s simply not enough potential melt source to raise sea levels.
And let’s recall, the average tidal range (low tide to high tide) worldwide is 2 to 6 ft, or roughly 600 to 1800 mm. The annual rate of change is about 2 mm/year, so at that rate over the next 90 years to 2100, possibly 180 mm of rise MIGHT occur (that’s about 6 inches).
So the rise in the next 90 years MIGHT equal 1/3rd to 1/10th of the coastline that already GETS WET TWICE A DAY.
Jeez, why are we even talking about this?!!?
Thanks for the cool site, I never knew the CU site had this option.
I have made an utterly mind-blowing discovery this week: a six hour viewing of dozens of the very oldest tide gauge plots at http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/ turned up almost NONE that show any recent trend change at all. Some indeed are falling instead of rising though. This seems to me to be quite important since the public keeps hearing about accelerating sea level rise. I made a quickie graphic, but a video might be a better format since there are so very many ultra linear plots as to be bewildering. It would take me a week or two to make it though since I’d have to re-learn Perl in order to automate the graph collection and labeling effort, or I could try it manually. Ugh.
It’s nearly futile to try to find long records that support the Church and White claim that the global average sea level is curving upwards. Skeptics are so caught up in debate about statistics that they too tend to miss dirt simple arguments such as: if global sea level is surging, then it should be reflected in individual century old tide gauge records, and because it is not reflected in individual tide gauge records, global sea level is not surging after all and such global average results must logically be artifacts of the averaging calculations.
http://oi56.tinypic.com/11jsp5i.jpg
Unlike old thermometer records which require multiple centuries to establish the natural trend (due to how noisy they are in decadal scales), tide data are not noisy at all in a rough trend-obscuring way, so I discover. That means a single century is all that’s needed, resulting in dozens of examples that directly contradict alarmist claims.
For readers who haven’t seen them, old thermometer records are here:
http://oi51.tinypic.com/357pvme.jpg
Here is that site’s version of the La Jolla record:
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/stations/256.php