Rahmstorf continues displaying his ignorance today on RealBadClimateBS
Nature Climate Change publishes two new sea-level papers today. One, by Sallenger et al., is an analysis of US tide gauge data. The main finding is that there is a “hotspot” of acceleration in sea level rise over the past sixty years on the US Atlantic coast, with the largest acceleration found between Cape Hatteras and Boston. The authors argue that this pattern is consistent with a weakening of the Atlantic overturning circulation (and hence their first reference is to our 2005 paper where we show this sea-level pattern in our model). In my opinion an intriguing possibility that warrants further investigation. There could be other causes, like interdecadal changes in the wind field.
Tide gauges show significant sea level rise in that region ….
but satellites don’t ….
Satellites measure the absolute elevation of the sea surface, whereas tide gauges measure the height of the sea relative to the land. If tide gauges show a large increase in sea level, but satellites don’t – the only rational explanation is that the land is sinking.
This is very basic science, and the failure of the experts to realize this is yet another indication that these people are incompetent.
Rahmstorf needs to do more than speculate wildly, then search for *any* piece of data that might back his speculation while ignoring the 99% that doesn’t. But the problem is not Rahmstorf, it’s his peers who continue to endorse his empirically inconsistent and untestable claims.
“Land is sinking”
Or the satellites’ orbit might be increasing.
Steve – Any idea what the margin for error is on a satellite measurments of sea level?
Orbits normally decay, not increase.
Andy, huge parts of the east coast has been sliding into the sea for a few centuries or so. It’s what happens with dirt. In olden times, people used to call it erosion….. today, we call it the catastrophic killer sea level rise from the catastrophic Carbon killing machine! …… people were so weird back then.
Lol!…. yeh but you have to add in the GIA!!!!
The GIA makes as much sense as standing in a hole in order to look taller.
They literally have it upside down; the only thing it is useful for is explaining where all the “rapid ice loss” has gone
Imagine for a moment that a ‘sceptic’ discovered a “coldspot” of deacceleration and then speculated about global cooling by doing some kind of linear extrapolation. The hoots of derision and gibberings from Warmists would be louder than feeding time at the local Zoo’s chimp enclosure. But if instead the speculation is about a “hotspot” in the ocean somewhere, the stupidity in reverse is given much cautious endorsement.
Steve what is this ‘absolute elevation’ that the satellites are measuring?
I’d normally interpret that as the height of an aircraft or similar above the terrain, but I’d say the satellites are measuring the instantaneous distance from the current orbital position to a particular ‘point’ on the sea surface.
I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons that sea level rise is used as an omen of impending doom is that it’s a nice fuzzy concept, and typically no-one really knows what it means.
So all sorts of extravagant claims can be made about it, without much fear of contradiction, until someone asks, ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’, at which point we discover it’s usually climate model output. 🙂
I suspect satellites measure sea level with respect to some gravitational model of the earth plus a model of the geoid. Quite a long way from reality and plenty of opportunity for ‘fudge factors’.
A true scientist will always look at as much data as possible whereas a post-modern activist scientist will only consider using data that fits his intended result. This is how proxies with exceptional resolution, like Law Dome, get dismissed and only handfull of carefully selected trees are accepted as post-modern climate science gospel.