Hi Wharf Rat; Re: "We see more heat being trapped in the oceans, and sea levels are rising. Look at the sea level record for the last decade. It's going up like gangbusters, hasn't slowed down."
One of about a dozen purported explanations for the failure in global climate models is that temperatures quit rising in the atmosphere because the extra heat went into the oceans. If that were so, then it's not enough that the sea level record for the last 17 years go up. Instead, since we are discussing a change in heat going into the oceans, the sea level rise would have to accelerate. But this is demonstrably not the case. Here's the latest (April 24, 2014) NASA data on sea level rise from the U. Colorado Sea Level Research Group website:
sealevel.colorado.edu
Citation: Nerem, R. S., D. Chambers, C. Choe, and G. T. Mitchum. " Estimating Mean Sea Level Change from the TOPEX and Jason Altimeter Missions." Marine Geodesy 33, no. 1 supp 1 (2010): 435.
No acceleration at all.
On the other hand, you could argue that the amount of heat absorbed by the oceans is so small that it wouldn't effect the rate of sea level rise. But that also implies that the amount of heat absorbed by the oceans did not go up significantly in the last 10 years. Consequently there's little reason to suppose that the oceans significantly heated up. Thus the pause is a true pause in atmospheric temperatures and even if it averages out over time, it's an indication that atmospheric temperatures are nor rising as fast as they were before.
In any case it is clear that there has been no acceleration in sea level rise.
What's more, from the slope of the above, you can see that the current level of sea level rise is 66mm in 20 years (from1994 to 2014). They claim it is 3.4+-0.4mm per year or 64+-8mm per 20 years. Since there are 87 years left to 2100, this gives us an estimate of sea level rise in 2100 of 87*66/20 = 287mm = 28.7 cm = 11.3 inches. They give estimates for sea level rise as follows, from different sources, and they're all in very close agreement:
GMSL Rates
CU: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr
AVISO: 3.3 ± 0.6 mm/yr
CSIRO: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr
NASA GSFC: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr
NOAA: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr (w/ GIA)
The threat of sea level rise is entirely in models and estimates that are not linear extrapolations of current behavior. What's more, since sea level rise continues to act linearly, any model that has predicted non linear sea level rise has not yet been verified and so is not trustworthy.
In short, if you retreat from claiming that "air temperature warming is going to doom us" to "sea level rise is going to doom us" you have much weaker scientific evidence for it.
-- Carl |
