The Norman castle at Pevensey Bay is one of the most historic sites in Britain. It is built inside of a Roman wall, and was William the Conqueror’s headquarters. It was also used as a defense outpost by Brits and Americans in WWII
It is currently several miles from the sea, but at the time when the Romans and Normans built the structures, the water lapped right up to the edge of the stone. The map below shows the bay 900 years ago, and the current seashore as a dashed line.
The inner wall is the Norman castle, and the outer wall is Roman.
Climate experts say that that there was no Medieval Warm Period, because they are paid to lie for White House political purposes.
It was not just in Europe either.
Tony please remove the e-mail since I forgot to.
Thanks, Tony
I thought I would get the papers posted up front to spike the guns of the trolls. (I have more on tap.)
Good information Gail.
Also the MWP may have been hotter than previously thought according to tree rings.
And also from oxygen and carbon isotope data.
But the Pope says there is catastrophic man-caused global warming… who do you believe, a bunch of uninformed anti-warmists, or the right hand man of God?
SO what if it was? How does that change the fact that sea levels ARE rising and land will be lost? You just want to play Devil’s advocate.
petkov , Sea levels have Not shown any appreciable rise ; this has been the case for some years. Gail has shown natural variability existed before any CAGW nonsense.
Stable tide gauges show a rise of 1.2mm/year.
That is 12cm in 100 years.
Are you s.s.s.s.SCARED yet ?
The Maldives obvious aren’t .. here is their latest airport.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/1maldivess11.jpg
With all that asphalt on one side, aren’t they worried about the island tipping over? Was Hank Johnson consulted on this?
It wasn’t poor Congressman Johnson’s fault, it was the asphalt. Or perhaps I am saying the same thing…
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Petkov, it doesn’t matter whether sea levels are rising, what matters is whether human CO2 production is changing (accelerating) the rate of rise. It’s not. Sea level rise is linear and pre-dates human production of CO2:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=1612340
Morgan, back n the calif drought thread I could not find the date of the graph you linked showing only five inches of calif rain YTD. At any rate it is apparently very wrong and 15 inches is far closer per the links I left there.
http://www.hyzercreek.com/California-Drought-levels.jpg
That’s an old graph. It was a scam to include a partial year on a graph of complete years. And they put it in red to boot. Climate douche bags.
It says on the graph that rain year 2014 goes from October 1, 2014 to September 30, 2015 so 2014 isn’t over yet. It makes sense because rain in California basically stops in the summer. If it’s up to 15 inches already, is that calendar year 2015 or rain year 2014/15?
I believe my link was to rain year 2014, 2015 starting Oct 1st. The 15 inch was a WAG from eyeballing Southern Calif at about 8 inches and NC at closer to 25″.
“SO what if it was? How does that change the fact that sea levels ARE rising and land will be lost? You just want to play Devil’s advocate.”
SO what if the sea levels ARE rising?
Without an understanding of the measure of how climate changes all on it’s own, it is impossible and dishonest to attribute any change to man’s activity, and therefore foolish to conclude that a minuscule tweaking of the concentration of a trace gas at great expense will stop or reverse a long term trend. It is the alarmists and the IPCC executive that deny natural climate change, they deny the medieval warm period and other cyclical warm periods over the last 10,000 years in order to claim the modern warm period is unnatural and unprecedented. remember the IPCC has decreed that all modern warming is due to man which is equivalent to making the claim that the climate does not change naturally. if the sea levels were higher during the medieval warm period (if this map is not just a local effect) then the alarmist position is discredited. that’s why it matters.
“all modern warming is due to man ”
If that were the case we should be congratulating ourselves.
Still LOTS more to do to get anywhere near the temps of the MWP, RWP and the rest of the much warmer Holocene optimum. 🙂
Pity its not the case. 🙁
We are still very much at the cold end of what is termed the Holocene Neoglacial Period of cooling and increasing glacial and Arctic sea ice,
Just fractionally above the coldest period in the last 10,000 years.
IPCC: “I am become Vishnu, the destroyer of worlds.”
That is all they were mandated to study, so naturally they try to embiggen it to the max, in order to do the same to their own importance.
Correct. The IPCC charter…
“ … to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”
They were never asked to investigate natural variabilty, it was a kangaroo court from the start, a lynching.
The point is that the climate is cyclical and man has nowhere near the influence on it that we’re being told. The sea level was higher before during the very perio9d which Dr. Mann and his cohorts tried to wipe out of the record with his “hockey stick”
graph. The higher seas confirm other evidence, such as the mild climate in Greenland at the time, so we know it’s been warmer before, the seas were higher, and they’ll be that way again sooner or later without our influence.
petkov….a fine example of circular reasoning if ever I saw it. Sea goes up, sea goes down. Get over it.
The sea levels are rising and falling at about one foot per century,(less subsidence and more for geological up-thrusting) as it has for the last 10,000 years. If you cannot outrun the oceans movements in this time scale you are truly pitiful.
You beat me to it.
Sea level Rise has to be the ultimate example ofn making a molehill into a mountain.
One good storm can do a lot more to change the coastline than a pitiful few millimeters of sea level rise a year (if that). A millimeter is about the thickness of a plastic credit card but you would think, from the hand wringing of the Alarmists and politicians, it was a hip deep (one meter) rise in sea level every year.
Heck the trade winds change the sea level by a couple of feet and so do various positions of the moon.
The lunar effects on the sea are an interesting point that has not had much investigation. There is a north south component that has about a 1500 year and may explain the D-O events. E.M. Smith has gathered several of the papers:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/lunar-resonance-and-taurid-storms/
MORE:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/?s=lunar
Clever Warmists buy up shore and ocean property at flood-sale prices after creating a sufficient down-market.
Ephesus Turkey is now 4km from the sea! LOLOL It was a port!
Yes, I visited there, and the port city of Ephesus (from the time of the Book of Ephesians) is now a long way from the coast. I was told by the tour guide that because of the receding coastline the people of Ephesus had packed up and moved and rebuilt their town on the coast more than once.
However, I was told that a major part of the cause was silt buildup from the Cayster River.
How does silt buildup 4km above sea level?
Maybe the silt added 4 km of land. Happens all the time.
“How does silt buildup 4km above sea level?”
By H2O eroding mountains and washing the material into the sea. I read somewhere that at one time the Appalachians were higher than the Rockies. Material from the Appalachians is deposited all across NC
Not “above.” It’s horizontal distance, not vertical. (Actually, I think it’s even more than 4km.)
They said the same thing about the port of Pisa being silted in by the Arno river. But silt build up in estuaries generally occurs in rivers that are near grade and thus have significant meanders and a relatively slow flow. Rivers that have a stronger flow due to greater drop in elevation generally have a straighter path and the stronger flow suspends the fine particulates and carries the well away from shore. At Pisa the claim of silting just does not stand up. The path of the Arno meanders above the city but straightens out as it nears the coast. At Ephesus the claim of silting certainly does because it is recorded historic fact backed by geologic evidence but to say that silting alone caused the city to move 8 km from it’s original location on the Aegean seems a bit much http://www.ephesus.us/ephesus/ephesus_location.htm.
the same in Japan. The “Keisei sen” train line follows the old coastline and goes through many towns that were on the edge of tokyo bay, but are now many kilometers from the water.
Seashell fossils on Mt Everest – something happened and not because of CO2.
The same kind of thing that happened to make the peak of the Matterhorn come from the African plate.
oh, and on a geological time-frame, the tide is steadily going out, because the earth (and all the other planets) are swelling in size as they collect high-speed nutrinos that get stuck under our feet. search “earth is growing” on youchoob for a simple graphic representation. love your site, by the way. AVE PALESTINA!
The British cinque ports are now landlocked except for Dover which is only kept open by constant dredging. The ocean has fallen 9 feet since Roman times.
Got a reference for that 9 feet (presumably globally)? Did you factor in postglacial rebound and possible tectonic movements?
Oh yeah. Dover in the UK is very tectonically active, it is surrounded by volcanos and earthquake insurance is impossible to get.
You don’t need a reference. The structures all over the world which once were sea side and now are inland are the “reference”. Pisa Italy was once one of the four Maritime Republics of Italy made rich so it could build it great cathedral and what we know as the leaning tower by it’s port. Now it is seven miles from the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Pevensey Castle is now a mile from the coast even though it is best known for the bodies of executed prisoners being thrown into the ocean from it’s ramparts and draw bridge.
There are many more former great ports or cities that are now far from the seas that made them a prime location for settlement in the first place. At least a dozen ports for Roman days are now inland ruins. If you were really interested in that kind of thing. Archeology that falsifies the claims that current sea level rise is unprecedented in history, you would know that already. http://salt.org.il/frame_arch.html
You would know that Ephesus in Turkey is 5 km from the Mediterranean but during Roman times it was right on the shore. etc, etc, etc….
Here is another paper:
Glacial geological evidence for the medieval warm period
The ancient port of Athens was recently uncovered and it is about a mile from the present day ocean.
Greece is earthquake-prone and therefore the ground level is far from stable.
Late Quaternary highstand deposits of the southern Arabian Gulf: a record of sea-level and climate change
This study shows a sea level highstand ~1 to 2 meters above the present level about ~5500 years ago not all that far from Greece in a relatively stable area.
Mid to late Holocene sea-level reconstruction of Southeast Vietnam using beachrock and beach-ridge deposits
Translation the sea level was up to 1.5 meters higher than today in a tectonically stable area 6,000 years ago
Sea-level highstand recorded in Holocene shoreline deposits on Oahu, Hawaii
This study shows a sea level highstand ~1.6 meter above the present level from ~5500 years ago to 2000 years ago on the other side of the world from Greece and England. It also shows a high stand similar to the techtomically stable Vietnam.
If you want to get into the problem of rebound…
A new Holocene relative sea level curve for the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica
nora(DOT)nerc.ac.uk/15786/
15.5 meters = 50.8 feet now THAT is some kinda sea level fall! The mid-Holocene (~6000 BC ) was when the grasslands of Egypt started drying out to form the Sahara desert. As the climate gets colder it gets drier.
By 5,000 years ago, African climates and vegetation in most areas were drier than in the early Holocene, but still generally moister than today’s.
Arabian Peninsula. Becoming drier. Conditions were drier than at 8,000 years ago, but still moister than today. The occurrence of Neolithic sites within Arabia between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago indicates moister than present conditions (Petit-Maire et al. 1994; S. Stokes, pers. comm. Aug. 1994), and Lioubimtseva (1995) suggests that scrub would still have been widespread in the west Arabian mountains and steppe in northern Arabia. On the basis of various indicators, Whitney et al. (1983) suggested that in much of the Arabian Peninsula the annual rainfall was about 250-300 mm during the mid Holocene, in contrast to the present 50-100mm, and enough to give a semi-desert rather than the present desert vegetation.
Saharan region. Drying under way. A switch towards drier climates apparently began around 6,100 14C years ago and intensified around 4,500 14C years ago. There is a fall in the level of many lakes at around 5,000 years ago (Lioubimtseva 1995) reaching a minimum sometime between 5,500 and 4,000 years ago (Damanti & Harrison 1995). A range of other indicators also suggest that by 5,000 years ago, a significant drying of the climate of the whole Saharan region had already occurred, relative to the situation at 8,000 years ago (Lioubimtseva 1995, Vernet 1995). However, the climate was still much moister than at present; there are many indications that rainfall was sufficient to allow a much more extensive vegetation cover than at present.
Baumhauer (1995) suggests on faunal, pedological and lake-level evidence that at his central Saharan site, annual rainfall during the mid-Holocene (after about 6,500 14C years ago) was about 150-250 mm; enough to support semi-desert vegetation. In the present eastern Sahara hyperarid region at Oyo (19N, 16E), Ritchie (1994) suggests on the basis of pollen evidence a cover of steppe and semi-desert communities between 6,000 and 4,500 years ago. This stands in contrast with the present landscape which is almost totally devoid of vegetation….
….Hoezelmann et al. also suggest a very extensive area of wetlands south-east of Lake Mega-Chad, rivalling the lake itself in scale; they suggest that rainfall in the catchment area was around 300-350mm higher than today in order to sustain this high water level. Other extensive wetland areas are suggested for the eastern Arabian Peninsula….
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/new_africa.html
I am mentioning the higher rainfall in the Arabian Peninsula and Saharan region 5000 years ago because the hand-wringing Alarmists never mention that higher temperatures,melting glaciers and higher sea levels also means a much greener earth with the tropical desert belt shrinking and the growing season in the north (Canada, Russia, China) expanding to higher latitudes. A net gain in food production areas. Even the minor cooling of the 1970s lead to decreased harvests, fear of mass starvation and a 1974 CIA report on climate.
18,000 years ago, during the Wisconsin Ice Age much of Africa was desert.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/afr18k.gif
Africa 8,000 years ago during the Holocene Optimum the Desert belt had retreated to a much smaller area. (Remember other studies I posted yesterday said the Arctic was ice free in summer and 3C warmer)
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/afr8k.gif
Even 5,000 years ago the Desert belt was still smaller than today.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/afr5k.gif
Today the Tr Des 7 (7. Tropical extreme desert (very sparse vegetation, or completely barren) has expanded to cover the entire northern part of Africa.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/afrpres.gif
There are caves in the western desert in Egypt with many signs of occupation during the Holocene Optimum 8,500 to 7,200 years ago:
http://www.academia.edu/1800109/Djara_-_Cave_Art_in_Egypt_s_Western_Desert
Thanks Billy I was not aware of those caves.
Kurtz Lambeck and Masao Nakada (1990) research proves sea levels on the Australian coastline in the Late Holocene were up to 2 metres higher than present! Highstands and Pumice Deposits are physical proof along the North Queensland Coast. http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/lambeck_k/pdf/139.pdf
A quick look at the site on Google Earth was instructive. while the grounds at the castle are 25-28 feet above sea level, only 1100-1200 feet away, it’s 1 ft above sea level.
That does not necessaraliy mean anything. Geologists use notches and benches to determine paleo-sea levels.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/hearty-and-neumann-2001-fig-54.jpg
(Hearty and Neumann 2001)
I had the great pleasure to take a research submarine down the Great Wall off of Grand Cayman, to a depth of about 900 feet (not quite 300 meters). On the way, there was a quite obvious beach — from a past sea level — at around 320 feet (about 100 meters) down. It was quite striking, quite extensive, and demonstrative of the low ocean levels tens of thousands of years ago. Apparently it was stable enough for long enough to carve the quite distinctive beach.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Wow that is very cool, that must have been created during the last ice age (or the preceding ones).
If only there was an accurate way to measure such things.
😉
I’m glad you are taking some time off, and think it is remarkable you keep this site operating even while taking time off. Of course it helps that you have attracted such an interesting bunch of commentators, some of whom really know their stuff.
To get me away from “bad influences” I was sent, as a teenager, to a sort of “Outward Bound” type school way up in the northeast corner of Scotland. (We played rugby against Wick and Thurso, which are way up there.)
The way the land was rebounding up there from the ice-age was obvious and impressive. The waves had gnawed away at the land, creating a flat area the surf once charged over, and then that flat area was lifted something like twenty feet above sea level. It extended for miles and miles along the coast, and, because flat areas are rare in the Highlands, it was used for gardens, pastures, and yes, rugby fields. I was glad the rocks were rounded by the action of long-ago waves into cobbles, when an entire scrum toppled on top of me and my face was being ground into the turf.
What is interesting about Greenland is that the land doesn’t just rebound when the ice retreats, but also settles when ice returns. It is difficult to know where to look, for signs of the Greenland Viking’s docks. Should you look inland, because the land has rebounded? Or should you look off shore, because the land has settled?
To make matters even more befuddling, land close to the sea can be rising even as up a valley an advancing glacier can cause land to settle.
One of the most bizarre cases of less-weight-causing-land-to-rise doesn’t involve less ice, but glaciers grinding away the stone on the bottom of a valley. As the glacier grinds and grinds and grinds, the glacier itself may weigh the same, but so much rock is removed that the land rises. The glacier keeps grinding downwards, and the land keeps rising. Where the center of the glacier sits the rising land may get ground down, but to either side the land rises up and up and up until you wind up with the incredibly steep-walled and beautiful fjords of Norway.
When you consider the majesty of a fjord, doesn’t it seem a bit silly that some fret about the sea rising a milometer?
Here’s some good isostatic rebound in Nunavut, northern Canada:
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/40688562?source=wapi&referrer=kh.google.com
Awesome picture. Thanks.
So why is it called Pevensey Bay when there is no bay?
The correct name should be Pevensey Former Bay, so there.
(stupid Brits)
Hey Gail, don’t forget the Greenland Ice Core studies. They also demonstrate that AGW is a crock full of it……
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/07/sea-levels-higher-during-medieval-warming-period-research-shows-current-sea-level-rise-began-by-1750.html
I hope it’s okay to post this link in support of the article.
Sea levels at Pevensey may be in decline….you need to look over a longer period than 2000 years to see it…..over the past 20k or so years the trend has been a rise. The MWP is just a tiny blip at the highest recorded level on the right of this graph.
The area is known as ‘Pevensey levels’ because they are very flat and even a tiny change in sea level can dramatically change the surface area of land which is considered as wet, from that considered to be dry
http://www.pevensey-bay.co.uk/images/sealevel-rise.gif
Chris,
Thanks that is a really nice way of showing sea level and as you say a very flat area is going to accentuate any changes.
Excellent picture indeed above, as is the graph of the Pevensey Levels effect. It would have been nice to slow it down for recent times.
I’d guess that isostatic rebound has been going on the whole time in that area, since the loss of ice around 20,000 years ago, but the separate and quicker rise of sea level from that ice outpaced it. Now that the sea level rise has slowed down, isostatic uplift has finally got a chance to have its own effect seen. But because it is slow, it had been evident only as a slight modification to the separate rise of the oceans as the ice sheets drained away.
We don’t have much ice left to melt; we’re pretty close to the maximum between glaciations. It seems likely to me that the small rises and falls of the last couple of thousand years are going to be the dominant (though modest) rule now.
A return to the Holocene Climate Optimum is conceivable, though hardly in the manner and timespan the catastrophists want. It might cost a bit of shoreline, but the gain in productivity will be astounding, and badly needed. The alternative, giving way to the inevitable next round of glaciation, is an unhappy prospect.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
“We don’t have much ice left to melt;”
Actually, there was probably quite a lot less ice for most of the first 5000 years of the Holocene.
Biosamples show that sea ice was “seasonal” at most during that time.
We are actually only just a bit down from the anomalous extremes of the LIA.
During the next glaciation there are going to be some great farming opportunities in the middle of the English Channel.
And the oportunity to find Neddie Seagoon’s piano.
as cfxx would say..
“I don’t wish to know that”..
or
“I don’t like this game.” 🙂
Yes Andy, cfxx has been acting like a Goon,,, but not as funny…
Not his fault, he’s just “a silly twist little boy.”
typo ….
“silly twisted little boy”
The English, French, and Dutch are going to have to fight over who gets what parts of Doggerland.
EH, The legend in my family is we own from Calais to Dover so Doggerland is already claimed.
Hey Billy Liar! “During the next glaciation there are going to be some great farming opportunities in the middle of the English Channel.”
Looks like the English Channel itself may be too deep to farm, but looking more to the east it was pretty good the last time…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
“At about 8000 BC the north-facing coastal area of Doggerland had a coastline of lagoons, saltmarshes, mudflats and beaches as well as inland streams, rivers, marshes and sometimes lakes. It may have been the richest hunting, fowling and fishing ground in Europe in the Mesolithic period.”
The Hurd deep is the deepest part of the Channel at 172 meters. The rest of the Channel is 70-90 meters deep:
http://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/117/1/203.abstract
During the last glaciation there was plenty of land in the channel; all the green in this picture:
http://craies.crihan.fr/wp-content/uploads/Manche25ka.jpg
from:
http://craies.crihan.fr/?page_id=2323
For what it’s worth, some of the English & French sea level change is from the islands tilting from the continual crustal rebound of northern Europe. As Scandinavia, the Baltic/North Sea area (including the seafloor) and (to a lesser extent) Scotland rebound upward, the east coast of England and the other side of the channel are being tilted up, and the southwest coast and Wales are tilting down slightly.
Yeah, it’s caused by global warming all right – the glaciers melting off in prehistory, that’s taking geological time scales to reset to its natural equilibrium.
There’s also been debate over whether water accumulated around Doggerland from melt, before the sea level rose to meet it, and it breaking loose to scour the Channel deeper than it would have been from mere sea level rise.
More evidence here, of higher sea levels in more recent times: http://www.john-daly.com/ges/images/rossmark.jpg
There is a mediaeval village, Culross, in Fife, Scotland.It used to be a fishing village, but now it is about a mile inland. This is not because the sea level has fallen, but because the land is still rebounding from the removal of the weight of ice with the ending of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago.