Hi bentway; Re: "Sea level rise won't be a problem for me personally, I live at 5000 ft. I am trying to figure economic angles and financial plays by which to profit from it."
You're the same kind of fool as the religious fanatics who sell all their belongings because one religious personage or space alien, or another is going to come save the world (or return to save the world).
Let's stick to the peer reviewed literature from the research groups that are paid to analyze sea level rise and nothing else. You can find alarmist crap from the global warming gurus who typically are paid as climate scientists, but you can't trust their stuff. Instead, go straight to the source, the people who analyze sea level rise and nothing but sea level rise.
That would be the "Sea Level Research Group" at the University of Colorado. They're paid by NASA to analyze the satellite data on sea level that comes from NASA's satellites. They are the defining word in sea level rise. Here's their website:
sealevel.colorado.edu
On the front page of their website you can see their graph of the satellite data for sea level rise. Note that there is no acceleration visible. Sea level has been following a straight line for 20 years:
In the above, TOPEX and Jason-1,2 are the NASA satellites that they are paid to analyze.
Since they're interested in the oceans, they know a lot more about the history of the oceans than you do. Here's one of their recent peer reviewed published papers on the recent increase in sea level rise. Instead of attributing it to global warming, they say it could be just an oscillation that's been going on for a few hundred years:
Is there a 60-year oscillation in global mean sea level?
Chambers, Merrifield and Nerem
Geophysical Research Letters, volume 39, issue 18, September 2012
Chambers, D., M. Merrifield, and R. S. Nerem
Abstract: We examine long tide gauge records in every ocean basin to examine whether a quasi 60-year oscillation observed in global mean sea level (GMSL) reconstructions reflects a true global oscillation, or an artifact associated with a small number of gauges. We find that there is a significant oscillation with a period around 60-years in the majority of the tide gauges examined during the 20th Century, and that it appears in every ocean basin. Averaging of tide gauges over regions shows that the phase and amplitude of the fluctuations are similar in the North Atlantic, western North Pacific, and Indian Oceans, while the signal is shifted by 10 years in the western South Pacific. The only sampled region with no apparent 60-year fluctuation is the Central/Eastern North Pacific. The phase of the 60-year oscillation found in the tide gauge records is such that sea level in the North Atlantic, western North Pacific, Indian Ocean, and western South Pacific has been increasing since 1985-1990. Although the tide gauge data are still too limited, both in time and space, to determine conclusively that there is a 60-year oscillation in GMSL, the possibility should be considered when attempting to interpret the acceleration in the rate of global and regional mean sea level rise.
sealevel.colorado.edu
Let me translate the above article for you.
The people who are responsible for analyzing sea level rise are not convinced that it's entirely due to global warming.
That's right, the NASA scientists who do sea level rise are what you call "deniers", LOL.
Along this line, you can also see a 60-year oscillation in the temperature data. Here's a nice peer reviewed article on that subject:
fel.duke.edu
The 60-year oscillation is most acutely seen in the far north. Thus 1940 and 2000 were both years in which some parts of the arctic were quite warm. If you look at this graph that I snagged from the global warming alarmist website "skeptical science", you can see the 60-year oscillation. And you can also see that temperatures have been steadily climbing since 1840:
bprc.osu.edu
Now there's two things to note on the above graph. The first is that there's been a steady climb in temperatures since long before CO2 had much of an effect (starting in roughly 1980). The second is that there's a 60-year oscillation in the temperature data. The sea-level data shows that same steady rise and that same 60-year oscillation. But you can also see that we're hotter now than the linear rise would predict. That difference is the CO2 signal.
It is definitely true (and is consensus) that CO2 is a cause of global warming. But as you can see from the above graph (which was too big for me to easily link into this thread), if you're trying to estimate what the warming will be in the future, you need to take into account the fact that we're just finishing a bump in the natural 60-year oscillation. Best current estimates are that the temperature rise from 1980 to 2000 was equal parts CO2, 60-year oscillation, and the steady linear climb in temperatures that started way back around 1820.
But the CO2 alarmists assumed that *all* the 1980 to 2000 temperature rise was due to CO2. Consequently they overestimated how important CO2 as to global temperatures. The number that expresses how much temperatures rise relative to CO2 is the "climate sensitivity". Thus the alarmists estimated the climate sensitivity too high by about a factor of 3. And recent research is naturally lowering that number.
-- Carl
P.S. Your fringe science beliefs will be oh so much more amusing as the number of people who believe in that poppycock decreases. What you believe made sense perhaps 10 years ago but as more and more scientists work on the problem, the alarming possibilities that began the field are slowly being corrected. Newer data has been reassuring. That is, instead of an acceleration, we got a pause. |
