According to the WMO, the rate of sea level rise doubled right when sea level monitoring satellites went up.
Sea levels rose at 3 millimeters (0.12 inch) a year, almost double the 20th-century rate of 1.6 millimeters a year.
UN Charts ‘Unprecedented’ Global Warming Since 2000 – Bloomberg
This indicates one of several possibilities :
- Satellites perturb sea level
- The WMO is staffed by complete morons, who switched measurement systems and then blamed the new numbers on CO2.
- The WMO is staffed by scumbags, who switched measurement systems and then blamed the new numbers on CO2.
Here is the tide gauge data for Hoek Van Holland, which has a continuous record going back 150 years. The rate of sea level rise there has been steady 2.4 mm/year for the entire period from 1864-2012.
I think we can rule possibility #1 out
The WMO is a very corrupt, incompetent organisation.
It’s a simple case of Al-Gore-rithm. Data fiddling.
They need a bit of time with cell-mate Gyro Jerry to really understand why Preparation H is the best selling hemorrhoidal uproar medication:)
hockeyschtick and wuwt
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/new-paper-finds-global-sea-levels.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/03/new-study-using-grace-data-shows-global-sea-levels-rising-less-than-7-inches-per-century/
are both reporting on papers which find slr in range 1-2mm/year both in last decade and last century
one of the authors of one of the papers is Woodworth aka Prof Phillip Woodworth MBE of Proudman Oceanographic Laboaratory, whose Liverpool UK address just happens to be the same as PSMSL
Both Proudman and PSMSL are junior members in a group of quasi UK Governent agencies the leader of this group is DEFRA (department for enviroment food and rural affairs)
others are EA (Environment Agency) NE (Natural England) Met Office (i guess you’ve heard of this one), there are others such as PSMSL and Proudman.
The beauty of this arrangement is noone has to take the blame, they can point at someone else and say they told us to do it. In particular it allows them to ignore any discussion of observations, for example EA say we have to take DEFRA projections of sea level rise. DEFRA say we are required to follow IPCC.
I live in Essex about 1/2 mile from sea wall. Essex is particularly low lying and has a lot saltmarsh which EA and NE claim they are required to protect and extend by EU law. The way they intend to do this is by knocking down sea walls and flooding farm land, curious as EA is a body responsible for flood defense.
DEFRA “predicited” sea levels had been rising at 4mm/year since 1990 and the rate would accelerate to 15mm/year by 2085. Since 1990 was in the past it was a simple matter to use data at PSMSL to show this was not so.
What I also discovered was EA could not calculate rate of sea level rise, they had to hire a consultant and they couldnt do it either.
http://jeremyshiers.com/blog/a-very-bad-way-to-calculate-sea-level-rise/
EA seem desperate not to put anything in writing which contradicts DEFRA’s figures, but they sent me an earlier paper by Phil Woodworth who found rates of about 1.5 mm/year. I looked at data from PSMSL for stations around UK and surprise surprise got very similar rate to Prof Phil. http://jeremyshiers.com/sealevels/20111116/20111116_uksealevels.html
In April 2012 I wrote to some bloke at EA about discrepencay between Envisat figures and DEFRA projections. By chance this was a day or two before James Sexton posted that Envistat figures had been (ahem) adjusted, so I had another look at figures and compared the results. http://jeremyshiers.com/blog/sea-levels-still-rising-and-envisat-records-altered-to-show-this/
The main think I found was that people who made the adjustment were so incompetent they couldn’t even manage a simple case of data corruption.
All the data, even that at PSMSL, is subject to revision at any time. on the uk_sealevels page I noted that between July and December 2011 the data at PSMSL for Workington changed from -7.24 mm/year to +7.85 mm/year – now that’s what I call an adjustment.
So in summary it’s all about policy and politics – if the data is inconvenient?
Don’t be silly we hold it, we can change it at any time to anything we want.
So what happened
After 1991 Mt Pinatubu erupted and sea levels fell
After a while sea levels bounced back and were given a kick by 1998 El Nino
And in 1993 satellite went up and DEFRA/EA announced superduper highly accurate sea level measurements which were 3mm/year high than previously thought and, joy of joys, backed up IPCC .
But as this graph clearly shows (courtsey of Phil Woodworth)
http://jeremyshiers.com/blog/?attachment_id=631
it’s just short term bounce back.
And now if you try and get any comment about decline in sea levels (even using FOI) they keep shtumm.
This might seem like a protracted self serving ramble only relevant to Essex and UK
but what happens here matters to the rest of world
DEFRA/EA/Met Office are key supporters and supplier of data and papers to IPCC
They have very large budgets which allows them to commission research, any suggestion the results of this research are agreed in advance is totally false
The idea of soft defenses and “managed retreat” is spreading from Essex and UK around the world like some malign virus. Abbots Hall Farm has even made it to wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_retreat
the fact that perfectly good farmland has been flooded.
DEFRA/EA/NE are blind to the irony that if their projections of sea level rise are correct any salt marsh they manage to create (and that’s doubtful) will be flooded and hence die
Holland is subsiding steadily too so this apparent sea level rise is probably due to sea level staying exactly where it is.
Averaged out around the UK, there has been no rise at all in the last 10 years.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/uk-sea-levelsno-increase-in-last-10-years/
I have a degree in remote sending and never trusted the satellite data, as it seemed to ‘perfect’, and did not match in situ observations. As much as we love our satellites in the remote sensing arena, we must never forget that they are only supplemental to actual observations on the ground.
A variation of 3 is that it was widely known for many years that tide gauges gave a lower figure than satellite measurements. Rather than attempt to find out why, they went with the scary satellites where ‘adjustments’ can be subject to layer upon layer of obfuscation and which rely on numerous models.
How can the measurements from a satellite which takes nearly 2 hours to fly over a swath of the earth to which it doesn’t return for 10 days be used to measure the altitude of the global water surface which can change very quickly with very small forcing from local barometric pressure (1 mb = 1cm change in sea level)? Not to mention the numerous long period changes due to the gravitational effects of the sun and the moon.
I vote for #2, but then, that’s just me.