Above, my recent interviews with leading young scientists on the emerging “hockey stick” of sea level rise.
Below, today’s NYTimes article focusing on that issue.
Below that, more from Josh Willis of JPL on some recent wrinkles in the sea level record.
About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.
If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.
By far the most vulnerable state is Florida, the new analysis found, with roughly half of the nation’s at-risk population living near the coast on the porous, low-lying limestone shelf that constitutes much of that state. But Louisiana, California, New York and New Jersey are also particularly vulnerable, researchers found, and virtually the entire American coastline is at some degree of risk.
“Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force while we do almost nothing,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, an author, with other scientists, of two new papers outlining the research. “We have a closing window of time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas.”
but is there really anyone listening or really that concerned except the 5-10 percent of us climate hawks.
The fact is that 2/3 century of increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions and levels have resulted in no acceleration at all in rate of sea level rise. Sea levels are rising no faster now than they were 70 or 80 years ago (before there was a significant anthropogenic component to CO2 levels) . E.g.:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.shtml?stnid=120-022
cherry picking again.
re-watch video above.
Not cherry-picking at all, except that that’s a particularly long, high-quality sea level record.
I took NOAA’s list of 159 GLOSS-LTT tide guages, and added lat/lon, links, etc, and put them in a spreadsheet, here:
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/MSL_global_trendtable1.html
Those are the best sea level records we have. The great, great majority show either no trend since ~1930, or a slight decline in the rate of sea level rise.
I made several sorted versions of the table, too. If you click on the column headers, you can see them. Click on “year range” and scroll to the end to see the longest tide gauge records. I encourage you to click on the station names for a few of the longest ones. (Note: in a few cases, NOAA’s taken down their page, due to pending updates, so my link goes to an archive.org copy of their previous version.)
Some tide stations (like Wismar) show an increase in rate of SLR prior to the 1930s (in Wismar’s case it was in the mid 1860s), but that obviously wasn’t due to anthropogenic GHGs.
You can’t look at the actual tide gauge records without seeing that 2/3 century of increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions and levels have resulted in no acceleration at all in the rate of sea level rise. Sea levels are rising no faster now than they were 70 or 80 years ago. That means anthropogenic CO2 has, thus far, resulted in no detectable increase in the rate of sea level rise.
s/in the mid-1860s/around 1860/
Honolulu has a good long term tide gauge record, halfway around the world from Wismer:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=1612340
The longest record we have from the southern hemisphere is Sydney, Australia. NOAA’s page for Sydney is down at the moment, due to pending updates, but archive.org has a copy of a slightly out-of-date version:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110708170758/http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.shtml?stnid=680-140
Mumbai, India, has the longest available Asian tide gauge record:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.shtml?stnid=500-041
Seattle hasn’t seen any acceleration in sea level rise since the early 1920s:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9447130