Hi combjelly; Too bad, all your other links are to older literature. The (2011) paper is the one I quoted from extensively.
The problem for you is that the sea level rise is slowing down. So the later you look in time, the harder it will be to find papers that support your fears. Let's see what you have.
Your first link: This paper is from 2006 and doesn't show recent deceleration in sea-level rise. But you can see from Figure 2 (look at the bottom of the figure for the smoothed, decadal figures) that GMSL has steeply accelerated and decelerated five times in the last 130 years. When you have a series with these sorts of climbs and falls, you have to watch it for a *long* time to detect any real acceleration.
Looking at short term averages can give the wrong result. For example, it's a *lot* colder in the US now than it was 6 months ago. Does that prove that the US will be subzero by next summer? No, it's just the natural change in temperatures for a northern country.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The second link is the most recent article. I quoted from it extensively. It's bad news for your argument:
jcronline.org
The third article is about the impact of current projections of sea level rise and does not address the question of whether the sea level rise is presently *accelerating*. Instead it's about what global warming implies (which is another literature search problem:
sciencemag.org
The fourth article is about sea level changes over the past 2100 years. It's abstract states: "Since then, sea level has risen at an average rate of 2.1 mm/y, representing the steepest century-scale increase of the past two millennia." In addition to being a badly argued paper, it suggests that the present acceleration began in 1865 which is too long ago to be associated with CO2. Since Mann is a coauthor it has a hockey stick, but as with the old hockey stick, the same problems occur. That is, the only accurate data is the most recent and only this data can show quick changes. So of course the quick changes occur in the recent data. What's more, the chart for mean sea level is totally incompatible with the analysis of your second link, quoted above, and the paper has the additional problems of being model dependent (as opposed to being a straightforward analysis of the data).
pnas.org
The fifth article is about "rapid ice discharge from Greenland" and is dated (2004):
adsabs.harvard.edu
This idea, that Greenland would melt and raise the oceans, was a big bugaboo with the alarmists. However, the latest Greenland ice core shows that Greenland was 8 degrees C warmer than it is today during the Eemian. This warm spell lasted 6000 years. At the end of it, Greenland still had an ice cap. This proves that Greenland's ice is stable in temperatures that we could achieve in the next 1000 years and probably forever. (Note that we will run out of fossil fuels and that nature continues to absorb what we've made at faster and faster rates.) The Greenland ice core paper was authored (signed) by hundreds of scientists and published in the uber-prestigious journal Nature. This is big science:
nature.com
The sixth article "rapid wastage" is about Alaskan glaciers and their contribution to sea rise. It's old, from 2002. A better link for it is:
sciencemag.org
Here's what the United States Geological Service says about Alaska's glaciers:
"During the “Little Ice Age,” Alaska’s glaciers expanded significantly. The total area and volume of glaciers in Alaska continue to decrease, as they have been doing since the 18th century."
pubs.usgs.gov
That is, the melting of Alaska's glaciers is not something new and it's not due to global warming. And what would happen if all those glaciers melted? To answer that, we have to know how big the glaciers are. But why stop with Alaska? Let's look up the total volume of all the earth's glaciers:
"Through a combination of direct satellite observations and modeling, they determined the total volume of ice tied up in the glaciers is nearly 41,000 cubic miles (170,000 cubic kilometers), plus or minus 5,000 cubic miles (21,000 cubic km)."
news.yahoo.com
And what is the surface area of the planet's oceans? Again google gives a quick answer: 140 million square miles. So long division gives the amount of sea-level rise we'd get if all the world's glaciers melted:
41,000 miles^3 / 140,000,000 miles^2* (0.9*1.025) * (5280 *12 inches/mile) = 16 inches. (The factor of 0.9 is because ice is lighter than water and the 1.025 arises because sea water is heavier than water.) This is an over-estimate because (a) some glaciers are partly underwater (b) a lot of lakes will appear under the glaciers, and the removal of the weight of glaciers causes the continents under them to rise slightly.
In other words, all of the world's glaciers put together are just not that big of a deal. And of course melting them isn't possible. Here's a peer reviewed article that puts the history of Alaska's glacier melting into perspective. It's more recent the article you provided, 2009. Again, looking at page 2040 you'll note that the glaciers started melting in the 19th century. This is inconvenient for blaming them on mid 20th century global warming:
web.cortland.edu
Your last link is a 2008 article about ice melting in Antartica. A free source for it is:
ess.uci.edu
Here's the Nature comment on it, not all bad:
Riccardo Riva, a geoscientist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, independent of the study, says: “It provides a solid answer to the whole scientific community and the general public that over the last 20 years, the polar ice sheets did contribute to global mean sea-level rise by a significant amount.”
Yet large uncertainties remain, especially for Antarctica. The good news, says Riva, is that Antarctica is not losing ice as rapidly as suggested by many recent studies. What’s more, snowfall in east Antarctica still seems to be compensating for some — but not all — of the melting elsewhere in Antarctica.
It is unclear how these trends, such as ice loss from Greenland, will evolve, says Ian Joughin, one of the paper's co-authors and a satellite expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. “It really remains unclear whether such losses will decline, whether they’ll level off or they’ll accelerate further,” he says.
nature.com
This is cutting edge science. None of it is "settled science". The truth is they have no real idea what is going on and for how long it will continue. It will be decades before we know.
Here's a more recent correction (September 2012) to the Antartic ice loss estimates. As usual, a reduction but you never heard about it from your lefty greeny buddies:
Antarctic ice-mass balance 2002 to 2011: regional re-analysis of GRACE satellite gravimetry measurements with improved estimate of glacial-isostatic adjustment
"Our revised GIA estimate is considerably lower than previous predictions, yielding an (upper) estimate of apparent mass change of 48 ± 18 Gt yr-1. Therefore, our AIS mass balance of -103 ± 23 Gt yr-1 is considerably less negative than previous GRACE estimates."
the-cryosphere-discuss.net
"Considerably less negative" means good for my side of the argument and bad for yours.
In short the best "evidence" for sea-level rise is the modeling done by the usual suspects. It's all about promises about what's going to happen someday. In the present things are moving along just about the way they always have.
The big difference between now and 60 years ago (the last time that sea-levels were rapidly accelerating) is that now we've got a bunch of alarmists telling us we're all gonna die. And we're spending a lot more money on scientists who need jobs.
-- Carl |
