Just in case you missed it, there has been yet another example of data manipulation in the endless round of adjustments that bring reality closer to the models. Thanks to James Taylor in Climate Change Weekly for drawing our attention to it.
Sea levels are one of the top five most critical measurements to tell us about the planet’s “heat”. Remember, they say “it’s worse than we thought” and that sea level rise is accelerating. Yet the measurements by the best equipment available — satellites — tell of a steady linear rise of just 3mm year after year, except for lately, when it’s been lower. (What kind of scientist can’t predict where a straight line is headed?)
Sea level is hard to measure — the sea is not flat — the ground also moves, but satellites measure the world’s oceans every ten days to an accuracy of several millimeters, and what’s more, they measure it compared to the center of the Earth (see below). NASA says so. So it is hard to explain why, after delaying the latest (shrinking) results for a couple of months past the usual posting date, they now announce that they’ve added “a correction of 0.3 mm/year due to Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA)”.
The trend since 2006 has been flatter than the previous 12 years.
According to the University of Colorado the GIA is apparently needed to compensate for all the glaciers which have melted — taking the weight of the ice off the continents, and letting that land rise up.
Silly me, I thought the point of worrying about sea level rise was the concern about sea-rising compared to the beaches, what’s the point of building a levee to keep out the water if the beaches are rising as well?
Hidden in the adjustment is the news that (they say) the world’s land masses are rising 10% as fast as the oceans. Who knew? The continents are getting 0.3mm higher each year!
NASA Ocean Surface Topography describes how accurate satellites are:
From its vantage point 1336 kilometers (830 miles) above the Earth, the US/European Jason-1 and OSTM/Jason-2 ocean altimeter satellites measure the height of the ocean surface directly underneath the satellite with an accuracy of 4-5 centimeters (better than 2 inches). Traveling in excess of 7 kilometers (4 miles) every second as they trace out an orbit, the spacecraft cover the global oceans every 10 days (the “repeat period” of the satellite orbit).
To take a measurement, the onboard altimeter bounces these pulses off the ocean surface and measures the time it takes the pulses to return to the spacecraft. This measurement, multiplied by the speed of light, gives the range from the satellite to the ocean surface. After correction for atmospheric and instrumental effects, the range measurements are accurate to less than 3 centimeters. The range measurements are subtracted from POD-derived estimates of the satellite orbital height, resulting in ocean height measurements that are good to 3 centimeters (just over 1 inch) relative to the center of the Earth.
This accuracy figure pertains to a few-kilometer spot on the ocean surface directly beneath the satellite. By averaging the few-hundred thousand measurements collected by the satellite in the time it takes to cover the global oceans (10 days), global mean sea level can be determined with a precision of several millimeters.
If authorities inform us the sea level rise is accelerating, how would we know?
We could all go down to our local beach and look, but we could be told by the data masters that the rises are happening “somewhere else”. Only people with access to the raw data can really know what is going on.
To prevent servitude due to statistical manipulation all we need, see, is to put up our own satellites and collect a second set of independent data right? I’ll pass around the hat…
Like so many adjustments the pattern is undeniable. It may be unconscious projection, but the researchers leave no stone unturned in the quest to find the “right” answer. Any individual adjustment can be explained in apparently reasonable-sounding terms (at least until you think about it). The pattern of non-random changes that nearly always favors the scare campaign, cannot.
ADDENDUM
When do the adjustments start?
What’s not clear from the release by UC is when the GIA adjustment begins. Mike Jonas, a diligent Watts Up reader produced this quick (unverified) graph of the difference between the old UC data and the new data. The adjustments for the whole period (1994 – 2011) non-randomly average above zero, but the larger and more consistent corrections seem to start around 2002.
Click to enlarge the image
The big unknown
From an alarmist’s point of view, the changes must be hard to explain too and you wonder if they ever pause and ponder. Somehow, someway, the thermometers, hot air balloons, Argo buoys, and satellites are all giving answers that need adjustment in the same direction. [Cue spooky music]. The instruments are systematically and repeatedly underestimating global temperatures, sea levels, ocean heat content. How could that be? It’s like there is an equipment-conspiracy…
UPDATE:
Ecotretas has done a different before and after graph of the sea level figures — specifically, on the rate of the yearly rise. Which ever way you look at it, the trend is falling.
4/5ths of the Earth’s surface is ocean, so the land has to be rising at 1.2mm/year!
30
The rate of sea level rise is going down, fast!
Please check it out at
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2011/05/rate-of-sea-level-rise-going-down.html
Ecotretas
50
Ecotretas, nice graphs! I’ve added a link in the post at the bottom. Thanks.
50
Recently the Journal of Coastal Research published articles on coastal tide gauge measurements for the US and Australia. Both articles concluded that there has been a deceleration in sea level rise. The small number of tide gauge measurements listed at the University of Colorado’s own web site also shows a smaller sea level rise than the recently published adjusted satellite data.
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/pdf/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00157.1
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/full/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00141.1
20
The Glacial Isostatic Adjustment is not due to the current melting of glaciers. Instead it is related to the loss of the major ice sheets formed mainly in the Northern Hemisphere during the last glacial.
The mass of ice depressed the continents and resulted in an adjustment within the mantle (isostasy), such that the crust distant from the ice sheets was uplifted. Once the ice sheets melted, the mantle started readjusting to the loss of mass. This is a slow process, and can be observed in a small scale around Hudson Bay and the Baltic Sea in the Northern Hemisphere. Here the crust is still rising, lowering sea levels, and slowly draining these epicontinental seas (shallow seas entirely over continental crust). The water displaced by the rising crust is added to the rest of the oceans, increasing their volume.
Further, the crust that rose during the glacial is now sinking slowly, causing sea level rise.
The GIA is to account for these processes. It is one of the sources of disagreement between satellite measurements and tide gauge measurements, primarily because it relies on a suitable mathematical description of the distribution of gravity around Earth.
It is reasonable for the GIA adjustment to be changed, provided people compare sea level changes with the same GIA.
It also does not alter the evidence that the rate of sea level rise has been slowing since the start of the 20th Century.
41
We can easily represent things as we wish them to be.
~Aesop
20
The satellites can measure sea level and they can also measure land level either raising or lowering. I just don’t get the need for adjustments.
20
I wonder what the sea level rise really is, as mesured from the center of Earth.
They say you can subtract 0.3mm/y and then get the real sea level, because they have added 0.3mm/y. (They dont tell exactly from what year they did it).
But now i get confused, because the GIA raises the land, so i think that to have sea level relative to land you should subtact 0.3mm/y from real sea level (relative to center). In that way sea level relative to land should be 0.6mm/y lower than the graph they show.
The worst is, that in a couple of years they forget about the adjustments they made, and do them once more.
Am i missing something?
20
“The instruments are systematically and repeatedly underestimating global temperatures, sea levels, ocean heat content. How could that be? It’s like there is an equipment-conspiracy…”
Great line! I’m going to steal this one . . .
30
How much cosmic dust rains down on the earth each day and who do we blame for the sea level rise it causes? Figures vary a lot but it could be tens to hundreds of tons each day!
Does the cosmic dust rate change with the solar wind?
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=33618
Does it fall evenly or at the poles etc?
Does it significantly fertilise the ocean surface?
Yet another form of NON man made change.
20
Throwing some warped logic back at the Greens, how much sea level rise can be attributed to more whales and polar bears swimming around now compared to the old days?
11
Willem @ 4, All of the talk about land rising and sea rising and one offetting the other may well have an explianation. The main issue, however, is the overall effect on what we have been lead to believe is the primary concern. This is that we are facing Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming which will kill billions of people and destroy the planet. One of the boogy men in this fantasy is a massive increase in sea levels that will drown all of the coastal areas where people live. Even with the adjustments the current situation is not a scenario which can even be described as “sea level rise is increasing faster than we predicted”, let alone one in which we are all going to drown.
I am wondering when some political leaders will actually have the balls to stand up and say that the emperor has no clothes.
20
I can’t help wondering how much of the 4-5cm when measured from 1336km is due to waves. Do they aim the beams at the peak or at the trough?
20
Sea-level rise is just another of the bogeymen rolled out by the AGW eco-fascists to frighten the population into doing their bidding. Any individual with half a brain can work out for themselves that there are many possible causes of local &/or global sea-level rise. Think about near-coast subduction zones which are pulling the coast down, with sudden rises when an earthquake brings the plates back into equilibrium. Then there are the tens of millions of tonnes of sediment carried into the oceans by rivers & glaciers every year. Not including our Murray River, whose headwaters are too low to carry much sediment over its length. And, like the Nile at Aswan High Dam, most sediment is dropped above the many weirs & dams along its course. Then there is India, pushing the Himalaya’s ever higher as it rams into Asia, even as the lower slopes & hills are washed towards the Bay of Bengal by the resulting monsoon. How this complex interaction of processes affects sea-level is anybody’s guess, & I defy the scaremongers to prove they have taken every single cause of rising sea-levels into account before they blame it on humans burning fossil fuels.
20
I worked directy to the RAN Hydrographer in 1992 and was told that not only did they not have tidal datums (average levels) for the vast majority of Australia’s coast more specific than half a metre but that according to GPS Alice Springs was moving up and down half a metre. I never checked this out, it was nor relevant to my task, but it is food for thought given that CSIRO now claims exact tidal records before satellite observation
20
“…,researchers in the US are now claiming that as many as 10 million such objects each weighing about 100 tonnes hit the Earths atmosphere each year. The amount of water they have brought to Earth would be so great that they could have produced all the earths oceans”
New Scientist May 12, 1988
http://books.google.com/books?id=nfJPdScNqJsC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=little+ice+age+comets&source=bl&ots=bEuZQfFQGR&sig=u5dMNBs_TyTeQzHwsng3003ugug&hl=en&ei=V23UTZ7iDs_NrQfDkcWOAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=little%20ice%20age%20comets&f=false
20
Recent sea levels in Perth have fascinated me. The Swan river from Perth to Fremantle is basically at sea level, and it rises and falls with the tides. I cycle around the Swan, 3 or 4 mornings a week. In the summer of 2009/10, levels in the Swan were consistently low, with bits of river bed you never normally see often exposed at low tide. In the summer and autumn of 2010/2011 (i.e. now), the river has been very high. Several jetties were completely or very nearly underwater a few days ago, and no bits of exposed river bed showing at all for the whole summer. And its not rain – as anyone can tell you, it doesn’t rain in Perth any more (ok, slight exaggeration).
Of course there is nothing in this related to the earth warming. It is ocean currents and atmospheric pressure and other things I don’t know about. But I still find it fascinating!
So good on the ocean scientists for continuing to improve their understanding of sea levels. Long may they continue.
20
JB we so have to book in a cycle and coffee on some pleasant Perth sunny winter morning sooner rather than later. drop me a line on my Town of Vincent email address.
20
Also – you’ve got to respect Turnbull for saying it as it is:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/19/3220796.htm
Before people on the right bag Turnbull… this is actually savvy politics as it essentially confirms to skeptics that the coalition’s policy is easy as ABC to cancel at the drop of a skeptical hat, and reminds possible disaffected moderates that there is still a Voice Of Reason in the party (from their perspective).
People should get on the Turnbull bandwagon… I’d vote for him.
11
Ian in 10 well you’d have to define “old days”. But anyway Whales and Polar bears are 70% water anyway.
20
Just a point of correction, the abbreviation for the University of Colorado is CU (for whatever reason a number of state universities follow this unusual convention; e.g., DU for University of Denver, KU for University of Kansas, IU for University of Illinois).
20
Who do I contact in Australia for the ground level for building a new house?
I could use OGL (Old Ground Level Year) – GIA (uplift @ 0.3mm PA)+ SLR (Jason Estimated Sea Level Rise PA) + or – JMEA (Jasons measurement Error Adjustment PA) – SAOR (Statictical Adjustment of Records from 2002 PA) So we rationalise and end up with:-
OGL – GIA + SLR + or – JMEA – SAOR = Land Rise per annum (from OGL to now = 19 years) –
WOW my place is 20mm lower than it was 19 years ago – but I have to consider the Flood Incident Rate every 10 years. Or do I? Did I forget the + or – 0.4mm in the graph of seasonal signals?
I give up? I’m just going to use the original figure.
Just one question – if the sea’s rising and the land is rising also – that that mean the Earth is getting bigger?
20
Sorry, IU might be insulated underwear, not University of Illinois.
20
David, your question is a good one. Also don’t forget land being washed into the oceans, as some 5 billion metric tons of sediment are anually.
20
I just calculated that the effect of sediment to sea water displacement is negligible (only 0.02 mm/year or so) but what about underwater volcanos and other effects? David’s question fundamentally is a good one.
11
Don’t forget the 200km2 of groundwater extracted each year by irrigation. This adds about 0.6mm to the oceans each year.
20
Matt b:
May 19th, 2011 at 11:50 am
Ian in 10 well you’d have to define “old days”. But anyway Whales and Polar bears are 70% water anyway.
How about the good old days when science started with real observation of the real world( as distinct from conjecture on modelled conjectute)
10
MattB @ 18. To embark on a hazardous and extremely damaging economic course with no firm reason to do so and without a get out of jail card is both niave and stupid. This probably explains why Turncoat is not the leader and the Labor party is heading for oblivion.
20
Today’s (Thursday) Adelaide Advertiser has a story of Adelaide with 0.5M sea level rise by 2100. This is over 5.5mm/yr for the next 90 years or so which is a far cry from the 3.1mm/yr for the past 20 years or so from the University of Colorado graphic above.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology released a survey report http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/drs/pubs/366/co/co_03_aust_mean_sea_level_survey_2003.pdf)”> that found South Australian sea level rates (with years of data) were:
Port Lincoln 1.57mm/yr (38.2)
Port Pirie 0.07mm/yr (60.4)
Port Adelaide (Inner) 2.1mm/yr (42.0)
Port Adelaide (Outer) 2.09mm/yr (61.1)
Victor Harbour 0.88mm/yr (36.5)
So, why are the ‘models’ using higher levels of rise? An agenda, maybe?
Of course, not satisfied with 0.5M rise, they also included the ‘possible’ effects of 0.8M (8.98mm/yr) and 1.1M (12.3mm/yr), just to push home the message that we need to reduce carbon (dioxide) emmissions.
Looking at the figures for the rest of Oz, most of the sites recorded between 0 and 2mm/yr increase, 4 were 2-4mm/yr, 2 had 0 to -2mm/yr and one in the NT had -2 to -4mm/yr.
Not time to get the wellies out yet.
10
“Alistair” (1),
Prove it !
10
Jo – your post is very timely. Greg Combet has come out this afternoon with another set of maps this time showing Adelaide drowning by 2100 or something. Even if the sea level rise was true he’d only have to talk to the Dutch for a few practical tips on dealing with it.
Or the Danes…perhaps he should read the latest edition of Geophys Res Letts.
20
A bit OT but interesting….
Next they’ll tell us it’s not warming that fast, after all
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/next_theyll_tell_us_its_not_warming_that_fast_after_all/
THE GLOBAL WARMING faith led by hypocrites
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/a_faith_led_by_hypocrites/
Bob Brown strained
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/brown_strain/
Bob Brown filletted
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/brown_filletted/
10
Thanks for the wry chuckle, Bruce of Newcastle (31):
That’s delightful, you can’t make-up this sort of stuff.
10
Greg Combet’s BEACHSIDE home at Newcastle……..
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/combets-new-luxury-home/2007/11/15/1194766872658.html
What a Hypocrite !
10
Great Stuff Manalive
Kevin has a new million $ mansion at Sunshine Beach http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/story/2011/02/16/our-kevins-31-million-homecoming-its-like-oprah-co/
Greg Combets seaside home at Newcastle (see Manalive at 33)
Maybe MattyB and John Brookes will still be able to ride their bikes around the Swan together. (Not Wayne)
10
“Just one question – if the sea’s rising and the land is rising also – that that mean the Earth is getting bigger?”
A ballooning earth? Brilliant. Now why didn’t the alarmists think of that one? Far more scarey than just getting hot. How long before it bursts? Lets hope a spy from here doesn’t report back to Flannery, Combet or Gillard.
10
[…] ….Hidden in the adjustment is the news that (they say) the world’s land masses are rising 10% as fast as the oceans. Who knew? The continents are getting 0.3mm higher each year! Joanne Nova continues »… […]
10
Jo,
Science is so badly screwed up that I have to question everything.
One question comes to mind, is the satellites trajectory falling in orbit? Or is it perfectly balanced at the same orbit considering many satellite do fall out of orbit. This would give the impression of rising land mass.
Next if that is correct, then all of the planet MUST be expanding.
Here is the simple calculation to show this is incorrect:
2mm land rise a year times 1 billion years means that there was 2 million meters of water over the land mass. ????????
Considering that the oldest salt mine is dated at 1 billion years ago and is situated 250 meters above the land mass.
10
Jo,
I had forgotten that science does not figure we have lost a single drop of water yet we have planets that show signs that they had plenty of water that they lost through their atmospheres into space over time.
10
John Brookes at 17
Check out
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/full-coverage/9452099/pilbara-storm-causes-unusually-high-tides/
or even BOM website!
10
Matt B and pattoh above, about 13 posts ago:
Define the “old days”? Well, it could be anything but let’s say around the time of Shackleton’s expedition to Antarctica in 1914-15. The book “Endurance” by Alfred Lansing describing that ordeal is well worth a read. I read it before travelling to Antarctica myself in 2005. It was amazing to experience snow falling at 85 degrees south.
In contrast the “good old days” by definition is somewhere in one’s own lifetime. It looks like ending on July 1st this year!
10
So the sea is like the water in a bucket on a heater.
If you measure the depth of the water in the bucket, it gets deeper as it warms, due to thermal expansion.
But apparently, the bucket is also rising. So to determine the real water surface height, you have to add the amount the bucket rises to the depth. You then know exactly where the new surface is.
But what’s that got to do with anything? All that matters is when the bucket is going to overflow, so adding the amount the bucket rises is simply lunacy.
10
From CU i took this explanation of GIA:
What is glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), and why do you correct for it?
Page edited: 2011-05-18
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The correction for glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) accounts for the fact that the ocean basins are getting slightly larger since the end of the last glacial cycle. GIA is not caused by current glacier melt, but by the rebound of the Earth from the several kilometer thick ice sheets that covered much of North America and Europe around 20,000 years ago. Mantle material is still moving from under the oceans into previously glaciated regions on land. The effect is that currently some land surfaces are rising and some ocean bottoms are falling relative to the center of the Earth (the center of the reference frame of the satellite altimeter). Averaged over the global ocean surface, the mean rate of sea level change due to GIA is independently estimated from models at -0.3 mm/yr (Peltier, 2002, 2009).
I read it so, that the sea level is DROPPING 0.3mm/y caused by GIA alone (if the water volume was constant). It is confusing that they then add 0.3mm/y to compensate for that.
Can anyone explain it?
10
I have a great deal of trouble accepting this latest grasp at straws by NASA.
The Earth is approximately a sphere though it is somewhat ‘flatter’ at the poles than around the equator. If I recall correctly the Earth’s circumference is approx 0.3% greater around the equator than the poles. From memory The reasonable hypothesis for this is due largely to the centrifugal forces caused by the earth’s rotation.
I can accept the proposition that during glacial periods the land masses at the poles would be forced even flatter due to the heavy layer of ice. After all we know for example there is some 3kms of ice sitting above the south pole which does depress the land in that area. To some extent, the land will simply become compressed, but there is also displacement outwards away from the poles, not just downwards.
The Earth is a sphere with a dense, liquid centre. Imagine a golf ball in a vice. As you tighten the vice, the ends in contact with the vice (the poles), will become compressed and flatter. But the golf ball will expand around the middle (the equator) to cope with the pressure at the ends.
In the Earth’s case, the sea levels relative to the land would rise at the poles, as the land compresses, and fall at the equator as the land gets pushed higher. If the pressure is released at the poles, through melting of the ice, the land is allowed to rise back. In that case I can see that relative to the land, the sea levels would fall as that land rises. But in the middle, around the equator, the land will sink slightly as the world regains shape. In relative terms, the sea levels would rise.
So if there is to be an adjustment for GIA adding to sea level rise at the poles, there needs to be an opposite adjustment at the equator. In fact this sea level variation as described, through regaining of the Earth’s shape, could explain some of any ‘sinking’ of land, particularly around the Southern Asia and the Pacific Islands; those ‘at risk’ places we heard about at Copenhagen?
I haven’t read the paper which justifies the use of 0.3mm/year as the GIA adjustment factor, so it is possible that NASA have considered the equal and opposite pressures around the Globe, and have calculated 0.3mm as a net average global adjustment to sea levels. However if so using a single figure of 0.3mm/year for GIA is about as stupid as referring to a ‘global average temperature'(GAT).
The GIA figure is meaningless because sea levels in any one place in the world will be affected by many variables to differing degrees. Regional weather patterns, lunar and other astrological positioning, the earth’s rotation and angle of the axis, circulation of deep ocean currents, circulation of the earth’s magma, winds and jet streams and indeed and the extent of glaciation and any melting are just some of the factors which determine sea levels in any one region of the world.
If the NASA scientists claim compression by the ice during glacial periods does not affect the height of the land around the equators, then as the land rises at the poles (expanding back to shape), this would cause water to be displaced towards the equator and would result in sea level rises relative to the stable height of land around the equator. In this case, there would still need to be a reduction factor from any sea level rise recorded around the equator and in particular at the ‘at risk’ places mentioned above due to water being displaced by rising land masses.
This latests attempt by NASA and related parties to explain why sea levels aren’t rising dramatically as they had predicted, show they are less about real science and more about politics. No surprise there!
10
Thanks Jaymez. This was my question:
“If land is compressed by ice somewhere, somewhere else must “expand,” surely?”
I’d have thought it was really, really basic logic, and I cannot see a way around it. Your golf ball analogy is spot on! NASA Folks are on something if they either can’t figure that out or won’t figure that out.
10
Chris Gillham, a university-trained journalism graduate from Perth gives an excellent run down of the historical Perth meteorological observation sites at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/19/perths-summer-hottest-or-not/
He notes how there has been some mathematically suspect rounding of the data going on in press releases as well.
10
O/T but important:
Battle lines have been drawn between WA and Canberra as a result of the State Budget:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/newshome/9479041/iron-ore-bonus-to-go-east-swan/
I can’t go into much detail on this unless people want a discussion on the mechanics of the CGC … let’s just say it is too close to home re. my work. All that aside, I think the proportion of the GST expected to be drawn out of WA to the eastern states is immoral, unconscionable and a whole lot of other adjectives not suitable for this blog…
10
Ian Hill @ 41
You are right, that was just a “tinnie from the hill”.
However after sitting through Bob Brown being interviewed on 7:30 by Chris Uhlman a couple of days ago( http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/brown_filletted/),
I too am seriously worried for Aus after July 1.
When Bob Brown was pressed about replacing the foriegn earnings which his policies would diminish or destroy he had no credible answers.
Earlier posts here about a “magic horn of plenty” or a magic pudding were succint. Bob would appear to have overdone the Fairy Dust.(rehab in a gulag may be efficacious)
10
John Coochey:@15
Re. The preciseness of tidal datum for the Australian coast.
It is simple you just feed all the figures into a computer, and it will give you a calculated average to within two decimal places.
Hey presto precise and accurate data.
Error bars?
There was no mention of error bars in the project brief.
The brief was to calculate a precise rise or fall of the sea level, and that is what has been done.
Anyway if you include error bars the results would be meaningless, and the funding for the entire project would have been wasted.
The GPS system was set up for military purposes, half a metre is more than accurate enough for a cruise missile. It was never intended to be more accurate than that.
10
19 May: Sun, Canada: Conservatives kill carbon tax
OTTAWA — Conservatives have kiboshed a carbon tax, Environment Minister Peter Kent confirmed Thursday.
“It’s off the table,” he told reporters Thursday after accepting an award from World Wildlife Fund International on behalf of Parks Canada.
“There’s no expectation of cap-and-trade continentally in the near or medium future.”…
http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/canada/archives/2011/05/20110519-133514.html
10
It’s really hard to devote yourself to ideas like “the truth” and moral concepts like “being true to yourself”. Even harder is the discipline of an idea like “never stop questioning your own assumptions”. I think it’s scary that people reading this blog fear they’re wrong about their assumptions. But we keep questionining what we understand to be the truth. This is ultimately not about slagging opponents. It’s about knowing the truth.
10
Thanks David@40. That explains the recent high tides, but not the lack of low tides all summer!
BTW, Jo, could you pass on MattB’s email address – see #18 above.
10
John in 15 and Binny in 49,
Military GPS is much more accurate than civy, GPS has inbuilt errors which civy GPS cannot see whilst military GPS can see and compensate for.
There are ways around this by using a known surveyed reference point to work out the errors, the problem with GPS is that it is NOT accurate inregards to height military opr civy.
Sure it is good enough to measure height above sea level but not to such accuracy.
The reason why they give you such an accurate value is to give the perception that they know what they are talking about, that is all.
10
John Brookes at 52
The tide heights are all available at http://tides.willyweather.com.au/wa/perth/kings-park.html
I only did Kings Park – all tides were about the same summer 2009/10 (even seem higher in early 2010)compared to summer 2010/11 – you’d have to do an average on all the data. Is is possible that the SWAN was silted and now washed out with the storm surges (like the recent one) Perth continually have?
10
Last year I emailed M Ablain and Anny Cazenave about (a) the reference point used as a datum for sea level change – it was, after much French discussion, described as the coordinates of a network of satellites – not the centre of the earth; and (b) if there was any evidence of the Expanding Earth hypothesis of Prof S Warren Carey, late of Uni of Tasmania. Anny did not think she saw variation in the satellite figures that would explain an expanding earth. One of Sam Carey’s thoughts was that the value of the gravitational constant might be non-constant. So there’s another set of variables to add to the degree of difficulty.
If, as you report, the land mass is also rising, one would have to do independent studies of the constancy of g.
Carey was a amjor force in plate tectoncs acceptance, which some say was his concession that spreading sea floors required subduction. Carey proposed that spreading sea floors could also be consistent with an expanding earth. He is often reported wrongly on this point, as in http://geology.about.com/od/biographies_ac/a/warrencarey.htm
To his death, he awaited satellite evidence of measured expansion. Is it there, or is it not? Je ne sais pas.
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Here I put a question, which should not be too difficult to find an answer for, and the answer would be very useful to know.
What was the diameter of the earth 300 million years ago? Or 200?
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@Geoff Sherrington:
May 20th, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee the former head of engineering at Monash University discussed the expanding Earth hypothesis in considerable detail in his book A Voyage of Discovery.
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Jo – the point about the new GIA adjustment is that they are now no longer measuring “sea level”. By specifically correcting for a variable which affects sea level they are now articulating ‘sea level minus that variable’. Whoch makes it something else – maybe water volume (??) but certainly not sea level.
The variable in question is an effect of mantle material moving away from oceanic basins towards the continents to compensate for the land getting higher as it goes through isostatic compensation for the removal of ice (since the last ice age). Effectively this makes the ocean basins a little bit deeper and bigger …. the bucket size is increasing !!!! And the water level in the bucket IS AFFECTED BY THIS. So they shouldn’t make a correction. But they do.
I have no idea why they correct for this. Sea level is sea level is sea level …. and it changes due to a myriad of time dependent variables. Why they correct for this one is a mystery. The sea level is dependent on it … so by correcting for it they no longer reflect true sea level. Imagine this effect was 10 times larger … then sea level could be slightly dropping but they would still report a rise of 3mm per year !!!!! if this isn’t rampant global warming alarmism, I don’t know what is.
The emperor truly has no clothes.
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Stick to hairdressing, please. And I’ll have mine short, back, and sides. (So to speak. I’m taking liberties with my current hair-situation to make that joke.)
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Thinking the GIA adjustment through, adding the GIA adjustment to the measured satellite sea level rise does not make sense, the resulted number is not reflecting anything in the real world, it is an artificial value.
If they measure continents rising, the only thing that makes sense is to substract the GIA from the measured satellite sea level rise. This would give the relative sea level rise towards the continents.
So,the CU should not add the 10% but subtract the 10% – this is the right measured value.
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The UC seems to have forgotten where the job started.
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Solar ponds do not work by back-radiation.
Visible light passes through the water. This light is absorbed by the black plastic at the bottom which then heats up. The plastic heats the water by conduction and convection – not radiation.
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“The adjustments for the whole period (1994 – 2011) non-randomly average above zero, but the larger and more consistent corrections seem to start around 2002.”
Don’t let the change in noise level on the newer satellite fool you. From the given graph it looks like the difference plot is flat up to about 1998. That just happens to coincide with when global mean temperature (whatever that is) stopped rising.
They messed with the temperatures so much no one believes them too much any more and we are told we need other “metrics”. One suggested metric is GMSL.
No sooner do we start looking at it than they start doing the dodgy adjustment game on GMSL.
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As far as I can make out from the CU website , they explain GIA as being needed since ocean basins are getting deeper.
This is the other end of the see-saw that says continental land is in 10,000 year “rebound” due to less ice mass loading it. Land goes up ocean basin goes down. It has a certain logic if you accept the rebound idea.
However, what does this mean about the new, improved , washes whiter, sea level data. “Sea Level Ultra”.
The satellite measured sea level relative to the centre of the Earth has not changed, they’ve just decided to play with the numbers. The “sea level” is now a few mm above the sea 😕 … an rising.
On a cold clear night you should be able to see a ghostly shadow hovering just above the waves !!
So what does this “Sea Level Ultra” represent? It’s not the physical sea level relative to the centre of the planet.
It is some unreal , half way house, to measuring ocean volume which can be used as a measure of temperature trend (though that requires a lot of different data as well).
In any case this new quantity needs a new name since it is certainly not the global mean sea level.
I think “Sea Level Ultra” should help sell it to the TV dwelling public.
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Anyone wanting a better explanation of what this new “metric” represents physically could direct a question to Dr Nerem at Colorado U. :
nerem@colorado.edu
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OK, they have fleshed out their explanations a bit since I last looked, I guess they have had a lot of queries.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/what-definition-global-mean-sea-level-gmsl-and-its-rate
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/what-glacial-isostatic-adjustment-gia-and-why-do-you-correct-it
“…we would like our GMSL time series to be a proxy for ocean water volume changes. This is what is needed for comparisons to global climate models, for example, and other oceanographic datasets.”
So it’s now a “proxy”. As I suggested above that makes it a physically unreal quantity that is neither a volume nor sea level. And there is a fairly clear statement about the motivation.
I would have thought that if you want to do that sort of comparison you need to change the model output (or apply an adjustment to it) NOT frig the sea level data.
A more honest answer would be that they want the public to see more sea level rise when they look at GMSL. Millions of people drowning in Bangladesh and it will all be our fault. (Brushing over that the country is not sinking)
Sadly this is yet more political spin interfering with science.
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The apparent rise in ocean levels(MSL) could be accounted for by factoring in or adjusting for the change in the Geoid as well. Say if the Geoid were scientifically and geodetically adjusted say as it was between 1990 and 1999 and found to be lower with the sea unchanging the one could possibly show a greater difference and conclude that there is a rise. Or conversely. There really are too many factors that can be manipulated an probably are. I believe the sea has changed little while the various datums have changed as better information becomes available. Some would suggest that a little cherry picking has been practiced and that the public is really ignorant about geodesy and geologic processes.
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[…] Jedenfalls ist die so neutral präsentierte Daten-“Justierung“ alles andere als das. Ein Leser bei Whats Up With That, Mike Jonas, hat aufgepasst und die alten Daten grafisch mit den neuen Daten verglichen. Das erstaunliche Ergebnis präsentierte er in der Diskussion zu diesem WUWT-Artikel. Dieses merkwürdige Adjustment war auch bei JoNova Gegenstand der Debatte: 10% of sea level rise is due to land rising? […]
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Perhaps if glaciers melt into the oceans, the added weight will depress the mantle under the ocean floor. This will force the mantle upwards under the continents, cracking them apart in great volcanic outbursts.
Or, perhaps not.
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