Notes on Tuvalu
Proof of Global Warming, thanks to Dale and those clever Thais.
Dale and I decided we would go live on Tuvalu and personally measure the rising or falling ocean level during rum breaks, not that there is a causal relationship there.
The ocean rising threat was made popular by the Daily Mirror in London and the Washington Post back in 2002 or 2003. It doesn't matter enough to look it up. The CATO Institute mocked the articles saying a recent Science magazine piece contradicted the panic invoked in the Washington Post article.
I looked into this claim and didn't find that the magazine said sea levels had actually decreased. It did say how terribly difficult it is to say one way or the other.
The CATO article claimed you can't measure it against the Tuvalu beach. The beach being smaller, in some places, because the sand was being removed for building. This argument seems to be somewhat supported by a Chinese study noted below. That study concluded there was inappropriate human activity in areas showing signs of reduced beach, etc. and not much evidence that the ocean was creeping in on the poor folks.
I have collected some abstracts and have listed them below along with links. Let me grossly summarize by saying this oceanography seems a young science with precious little firm stuff to grab onto regarding sea level. It is hard to walk on water. The scientists seem to agree that the last hundred years saw a sea rise, sort of and more or less depending where you are, of 1.8 mm/y give or take one or two tenths of a mm. [what the hell is that in metric speak?]
The rise for the this long period remains unexplained by scientists, except by the unnamed ones at the IPCC who say the 1990's 3mm/yr increase was caused by thermal expansion of the water, more than half the increase, and the rest by glacial run off. I didn't find any studies anywhere that even mentioned such notions. There is an AGU abstract (boy, I hope these abstracts aren't hoaxes) that has similar higher numbers in places measured but says such flucuation is within the error posited by prior estimates. The curious language is that they were looking at the excess rise in sea level, as though a rise in the 2mm area is the norm.
By the way, 1 mm is a thousandth of a m. A m is the socialist term for almost a yard. They call the m a meter, oh, sorry, a metre. One mm, or 3.2808×10−3 feet, is really small. Another way to think about it is the Gene Standard Units. Two mm = the diameter of my pencil's lead, the GU. So, the oceans have been increasing by one Gene Unit per year, more or less. You can see the difficulty of trying to measure an increase in the sea by Gene Units. At the current rate of increase, even assuming the IPCC's rate of 1.5 GU/yr, in a hundred years there will be nearly, using God's measurements, almost a foot rise.
OK, to be honest that is something to ponder. By itself, such a rise would be meaningless to humans over a 100 years, again assuming constant increase, so the focus of concern needs to be on the notion that the earth's ice will melt rapidly in significant amounts. If so, then you need to buy that house on a good rise.
What I found curious is that one study found the Mediterranean Sea to have been actually lowering since the 1960's (-1.3 mm/yr) when other places maintained the old rate or slightly lower rate of increase, i.e. not the IPCC's 3 mm/yr. As the title indicates, the lowering is said to be consistent with the warming and increasing salt content of the water. Other articles, as well as the IPCC, posit that seal level was rising because of the warming of the water. I don't think it can be both, can it? Any answers out there?
By the way, from what I learned, you don't want to move to TUVALU for reasons other than inundation. Maybe Hawaii? Or, the new resort Sitka.
Some light reading:
Xue Chunting 1 
| (1) | Qingdao Institute of Marine Geology, 266071 Qingdao, P.R.China |
Received: 29 December 2003 Accepted: 25 June 2004
Key Words sea level rise - land loss - coastal erosion - artificial channel - aggregate mining
| Xue Chunting Email: chunting@qingdao.cngb.com |
Link
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 27, NO. 12, PAGES 1731–1734, 2000
Sea level drop in the Mediterranean sea: An indicator of deep water salinity and temperature changes?
James Rennell Division for Ocean Circulation and Climate, Southampton Oceanography Centre and Institute of Maritime Law, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Centre for Coastal and Marine Sciences, Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Bidston Observatory, United Kingdom
Abstract
Coastal sea level data from seven tide gauges in the Western Mediterranean and the Adriatic show decreasing sea levels after 1960. Control stations in the Black Sea and in the northeastern Atlantic indicate sea levels still rising after 1960. The sea level trend in the Mediterranean before 1960 was between 1.2 and 1.5 mm yr−1, while in the Atlantic and the Black Sea stations it was between 1.8 and 2.2 mm yr−1. After 1960 the sea level in the Mediterranean is decreasing with rates up to −1.3 mm yr−1, while in the Black Sea the sea level trend remains unaltered and at the Atlantic stations sea level keeps rising with reduced rates of 1.0–1.2 mm yr−1. The change of the Mediterranean sea level trends, which is in excess of the sea level trend reduction at the Atlantic sites, is consistent with increases in temperature and salinity of the Mediterranean Deep Water. The reduction of sea level trends at the Atlantic sites is probably related to the North Atlantic Oscillation. © 2000 American Geophysical Union
Index Terms: GLOBAL SEA RISE: A REDETERMINATION
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Bruce C. Douglas1
| (1) | Department of Geography, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA |
Seasonal global mean sea level change from satellite altimeter, GRACE, and geophysical models
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Original Article
J. L. Chen1 , C. R. Wilson1, 2 , B. D. Tapley1, J. S. Famiglietti3 and Matt Rodell4
| (1) | Center for Space Research, 3925 W. Braker Lane, Suite 200, Austin, TX 78759-5321, USA |
| (2) | Department of Geological Science, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station C1100, Austin, TX 78712-0254, USA |
| (3) | Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA |
| (4) | Hydrological Sciences Branch, Code 614.3, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA |
Received: 5 May 2005 Accepted: 9 August 2005 Published online: 10 November 2005
Keywords Sea level change - Global - Seasonal - GRACE - Altimeter - Hydrology
| J. L. Chen Email: chen@csr.utexas.edu Phone: +1-512-2326218 Fax: +1-512-4713570 |
| C. R. Wilson Email: crwilson@mail.utexas.edu |
| J. S. Famiglietti Email: jfamigli@uci.edu |
| Matt Rodell Email: Matthew.Rodell@nasa.gov |
References secured to subscribers. LINK
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| Subscriber Access to Full Article (Nonsubscribers may purchase for $9.00, Includes print PDF, file size: 1169575 bytes) JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 110, C09006, doi:10.1029/2004JC002817, 2005 Sea level rise and the warming of the oceans in the Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA) ocean reanalysis Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA Department of Oceanography, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA AbstractA new reanalysis of the global ocean circulation is used to distinguish between the steric and eustatic components of sea level rise. Recent altimeter observations indicate an increase in the rate of sea level rise during the past decade to 3.2 mm/yr, well above the centennial estimate of 1.5–2 mm/yr. This apparent increase could have resulted from enhanced melting of continental ice or from decadal changes in thermosteric and halosteric effects. The contribution from steric effects is explored using the new eddy-permitting Simple Ocean Data Assimilation version 1.2 (SODA1.2) reanalysis of global temperature, salinity, and sea level spanning the period 1958–2001. The applicability of this ocean reanalysis for sea level studies is evaluated by comparing subseasonal variability with a collection of 20 tide gauge station sea level records, comprising a total of 740 years of data. A positive relationship is found at all gauge stations, with an average correlation of r = 0.7 after correction for the inverted barometer effect. Dynamic height calculated relative to 1000m from the SODA1.2 reanalysis, used as a proxy for the steric component of sea level, is compared with satellite-derived sea level for the years 1993–2001. During this 9-year period dynamic height increases at a global rate of 2.3 ± 0.8 mm yr−1, a substantial acceleration beyond the multidecadal steric rate of 0.5 mm yr−1. The similarity of the rate of increase in the thermosteric contribution to sea level rise as well as the similarity of its spatial structure in comparison with satellite-derived sea level rise suggests that the recent acceleration in sea level rise is explainable to within the error estimates by fluctuations in warming and thermal expansion of the oceans. Received 23 November 2004; accepted 25 May 2005; published 9 September 2005. Keywords: sea level rise; ocean warming; reanalysis. Index Terms: 4513 Oceanography: Physical: Decadal ocean variability (1616, 1635, 3305, 4215); 4556 Oceanography: Physical: Sea level: variations and mean (1222, 1225, 1641); 1616 Global Change: Climate variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513); 4260 Oceanography: General: Ocean data assimilation and reanalysis (3225).
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 110, C03008, doi:10.1029/2004JC002522, 2005 Consistency of long sea-level time series in the northern coast of Spain Grup d'Oceanografia Interdisciplinar, Instituto Mediterraneo de Estudios Avanzados (UIB-CSIC), Mallorca, Spain Grup d'Oceanografia Interdisciplinar, Instituto Mediterraneo de Estudios Avanzados (UIB-CSIC), Mallorca, Spain Grup d'Oceanografia Interdisciplinar, Instituto Mediterraneo de Estudios Avanzados (UIB-CSIC), Mallorca, Spain Área del Medio Físico, Puertos del Estado, Madrid, Spain Área del Medio Físico, Puertos del Estado, Madrid, Spain ETSI Telecomunicación, Departamento de Física Aplicada II, Universidad de Málaga, Malaga, Spain AbstractSea-level time series recorded at three stations of the northern Spanish coast (Santander, Coruña, and Vigo) are examined with the aim of obtaining reliable interdecadal trends. The records are about 6 decades long, and their consistency is checked by means of an Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis. Major benefits of the analysis are the detection of undocumented changes of sea-level reference and the filling of data gaps. For the last decade, the consistency of the trends is also checked against shorter, collocated and nearby records. Results indicate that during the second half of the twentieth century, sea level has been rising at a rate of 2.12, 2.51, and 2.91 mm/yr in Santander, Coruña, and Vigo, respectively. Meteorologically induced trends are evaluated from the output of a sea-level numerical model forced by a re-analysis of 44 years of atmospheric data. Results are −0.44, −0.27, and −0.21 mm/yr, respectively, indicating that in the study region the meteorological forcing acts in the sense of slightly slowing the sea-level rise. On the other hand, sea-level records and the North Atlantic mean temperature exhibit a similar interannual evolution, which points to the thermosteric effect as responsible for the positive trends. Regarding the difference between stations, about a third of it can be attributed to spatial differences in the meteorological forcing. The remaining contribution is attributed to spatial differences in the increase of the ocean heat contents, as suggested by the analysis of SST series during the last decade. Received 8 June 2004; accepted 11 January 2005; published 8 March 2005. Keywords: sea-level trend; meteorological forcing; steric effect; Northern Spanish coast. Index Terms: 4556 Oceanography: Physical: Sea level: variations and mean (1222, 1225, 1641); 4215 Oceanography: General: Climate and interannual variability (1616, 1635, 3305, 3309, 4513); 4513 Oceanography: Physical: Decadal ocean variability (1616, 1635, 3305, 4215); 4594 Oceanography: Physical: Instruments and techniques. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004JC002522.shtml
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posted by Gene | 7:34 PM
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