Australia is one of the most stable land masses on the planet, and has more gauges than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere, so it’s very useful for sea-level measurements. It also had a couple of rare continuous long records “… the two longest sea-level records in the southern hemisphere, Sydney Fort Denison from 1886 and Fremantle from 1897″ .
A new paper by White et al, concludes that Australian sea level rises are similar to global measurements (so not a bad proxy for the world), and that during times when CO2 levels were much lower — like before World War II, sea levels were rising at the same speed (or possibly faster) than they are today.
A generalized additive model of Australia’s two longest records (Fremantle and Sydney) reveals the presence of both linear and non-linear long-term sea-level trends, with both records showing larger rates of rise between 1920 and 1950, relatively stable mean sea levels between 1960 and 1990 and an increased rate of rise from the early 1990s.
Does a “larger rate of rise” mean larger than today, or larger than average — I think, given the error margins, that we could only be sure it was a similar rate. They do point out that the Australian sea level rise was slightly faster than the global rise from 1920-1950. But they did not say by how much (did I miss it?)
For example, Australian MSL rose slightly faster than the global average from 1920 to 1950, slower than the global average from about 1960 to 1990, and similar to the global average since about 1990.
Figure 2: (a) Overview of Australian sea-level data and comparison with global sea-level estimates, all expressed as OVMSL (section 2.3). The gauges flagged “TV” in column 10 of Table 1 are plotted in grey. The records flagged because of possible ground movement and credibility issues are plotted in cyan, but not used in calculating averages. The arithmetic mean of the tide gauges considered to be of reasonable quality is plotted as a heavy black line. The GMSL estimated from satellite altimeters (see Section 2.2) is plotted as a heavy red line, and the area-weighted mean from satellite altimeters along a line around the Australian coast is plotted in orange. The cyan trace that goes very high at the end is Wyndham, and the one that goes very low in the 2000s is Point Lonsdale. (b) As in (a) but after the signal correlated with the Southern Oscillation Index is removed (see Section 3). (c) The changing number of gauge stations available for use over time.
Figure 8 Figure 8: Upper panels show the fitted generalized additive models (GAMs) and approximate
pointwise 95% confidence intervals fitted to RMSL (adjusted for SOI and seasonality) at Fremantle and Sydney. Note the use of different RMSL scales. Lower panels show the nonconstant trends as instantaneous rates of change (first differences) and approximate pointwise 95% confidence intervals; dashed lines are the estimated long-term linear trend of 1.58 mm yr-1 for Fremantle and 0.65 mm yr-1 for Sydney.
They produce a model to try to sort out the factors that jostle sea levels up and down to find the long term underlying trend, and claim they can explain 69% of the variance, and most of it is due to ENSO.
Remember also that sea level rise started before Napoleon’s time, long before our evil CO2 emissions rose, so we can quibble over whether the pre WWII rise was faster around the world, or pretty much the same as today, but it’s all deck chairs on the Climatanic. We’ve increased our CO2 emissions dramatically in the last ten years and sea level rises have slowed. Over and over we get the message that CO2 is not the defining force of our climate, other things are changing it, and the models don’t know what they are.
This paper, though, ought to calm a few councils down. How much do we need to panic over Australian sea level rises that are the same now as they were when CO2 was ideal in the 1920’s and 1930s?
Another noteworthy point is that Australia is generally stable, but some places (like Hillarys, Port Adelaide and, potentially, Darwin) are sinking. I covered the bizarre difference between Hillarys and Fremantle here. The two spots are 20 km apart yet show vastly different rates of sea level rise. Panic-merchants prefer the shorter more exciting record from Hillarys.
In comparison to many regions on Earth, much of the Australian coastline is stable in terms of vertical land motion. The GIA component of VLM introduces only small contributions to RMSL (up to about -0.4 mm yr-1, in the sense of the land rising relative to the sea surface). However, localised subsidence at specific tide gauges is important for some sites (e.g. Hillarys, Port Adelaide and, potentially, Darwin), leading to a higher rate of RMSL rise at these locations compared to adjacent tide gauges…
Sea levels are more stable in the east and south, but they jump around more each year (by a whopping 10 -15cm) in the north and west. Blame the Pacific. The SOI and PDO have a significant influence on that. The bumps start near Indonesia and sweeps anti-clockwise around the nation, which is one of those fascinating but trivial bits of information you probably have no use for.
The RMSL signal is transmitted from the Western Pacific Ocean through the Indonesian Archipelago to Australia’s north-west coast (where the variability is highest), from where it propagates anti-clockwise around Australia (Wijffels and Meyers 2004) with magnitude decreasing with distance. Sea-level variability from the western equatorial Pacific Ocean is weaker along the Australian east coast where westward propagating Rossby wave signals from the subtropical Pacific Ocean directly impact on coastal RMSL (Holbrook et al. 2011). The Indian and Southern Oceans have a much weaker influence on Australian RMSL
than the Pacific Ocean.
Abstract
There has been significant progress in describing and understanding global-mean sea-level rise, but the regional departures from this global-mean rise are more poorly described and understood. Here, we present a comprehensive analysis of Australian sea-level data from the 1880s to the present, including an assessment of satellite-altimeter data since 1993. Sea levels around the Australian coast are well sampled from 1966 to the present. The first EmpiricalOrthogonal Function (EOF) of data from 16 sites around the coast explains 69% of thevariance, and is closely related to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), with thestrongest influence on the northern and western coasts. Removing the variability in this EOF correlated with the Southern Oscillation Index reduces the differences in the trends between
locations. After the influence of ENSO is removed and allowing for the impact of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) and atmospheric pressure effects, Australian mean sea-level trends are close to global-mean trends from 1966 to 2010, including an increase in the rate of rise in the early 1990s. Since 1993, there is good agreement between trends calculated from
tide-gauge records and altimetry data, with some notable exceptions, some of which are related to localised vertical-land motions. For the periods 1966 to 2009 and 1993 to 2009, the average trends of relative sea level around the coastline are 1.4 ± 0.3 mm yr-1 and 4.5 ± 1.3 mm yr-1, which become 1.6 ± 0.2 mm yr-1 and 2.7 ± 0.6 mm yr-1 after removal of the signal
correlated with ENSO. After further correcting for GIA and changes in atmospheric pressure, the corresponding trends are 2.1 ± 0.2 mm yr-1 and 3.1 ± 0.6 mm yr-1, comparable with the global-average rise over the same periods of 2.0 ± 0.3 mm yr-1 (from tide gauges) and 3.4 ± 0.4 mm yr-1 (from satellite altimeters). Given that past changes in Australian sea level are
similar to global-mean changes over the last 45 years, it is likely that future changes over the 21st century will be consistent with global changes. A generalized additive model of Australia’s two longest records (Fremantle and Sydney) reveals the presence of both linear and non-linear long-term sea-level trends, with both records showing larger rates of rise
between 1920 and 1950, relatively stable mean sea levels between 1960 and 1990 and an increased rate of rise from the early 1990s.
Conclusion
A large part of the inter-annual and decadal variability in sea level around the whole coast of Australia is coherent and highly correlated with the Southern Oscillation Index and can be represented by a single EOF. Removing this coherent variability from both tide-gauge and altimetry records around Australia significantly reduces uncertainties of sea-level trends with
more uniformity in regional trends than previously reported. An assessment of the two longest tide-gauges records (Sydney, 1886-2010; Fremantle, 1897-2010) shows that the rate of rise has been non-linear in nature with both records showing large rates of rise around the 1940s, relatively stable RMSLs between 1960 and 1990 and an increased rate of rise from the early 1990s. From 1966 to 2010, when there is good coverage of most of the Australian coastline, the average Australian relative rate of rise is slower than the global mean prior to about 1985, but the mean Australian OVMSL rate from tide gauges is close to the global mean. Since 1993, MSL trends are considerably higher than the global mean around Northern Australian
and similar to the global mean around southern Australia. Higher sea-level trends in northern Australia are largely associated with natural climate variability. Even after attempts to remove the effects of this natural variability, trends around most of Australia, show an increased rate of rise from the early 1990s, consistent with global mean trends.
h/t to Willie. Thanks.
REFERENCE
White, Neil J., Haigh, Ivan D., Church, John A., Koen, Terry, Watson, Christopher S., Pritchard, Tim R., Watson, Phil J., Burgette, Reed J., McInnes, Kathleen L., You, Zai-Jin, Zhang, Xuebin, Tregoning, Paul: (2014) Australian Sea Levels – Trends, Regional Variability and Influencing Factors, Earth Science Reviews, doi: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2014.05.011
Why us? We dont even make anything! We burn clean natural gas for our power! We like beer!
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Good topic this one – the “sea level rise scare mongering” by the outgoing ALP Party was appalling e.g Wong proclaiming that the Climate Commission said that SL would rise by 1.1 metres by 2100 and that local Govts needed to take heed – fortunately the Abbott Govt gave the Climate Commission the big heave ho – but still today many coastal councils are emending their building codes because of this unfounded scare mongering. Eustatic SL continues to rise at a snails pace, ie 2-3mm/year. In fact now that we are heading into a protracted “cooling cycle”, expect Eustatic SL to actually fall. Jo you make very good comments about the variation of “relative SL” along Australia’s coastline. It would be an interesting exercise to determine the “relative SL” at Carnarvon which is positioned on the “Gascoyne River Delta” – the subsidence at this location would be profound, a bit like Venice on the Po River Delta in Italy and New Orleans on the “Mississippi River Delta”.
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Will the 6
trollspersons who objected to the above and 2 below very good comments please reveal themselves and their reasons for so objecting?21
Nope , they will not.
Yellow fever !!!
10
I don’t think they are people.
I think they have some worms that crawl over their keyboards.
00
Yeah, that’s now.. Remember many alarmists belief holds that the coming of the great sea-level rise will be sometime between now and 2100. As to exactly when it’ll start going “out of control” is anyone’s guess; none of them have given any straight answer. Wonder why?
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This is what you call a ‘fair dinkum gotcha’, for climate change guru Prof. Tim Flannery!!
As opposed to the 9 karat-type that labor and the greens have been chanting the last three weeks Abbott’s alleged broken promises budget!! (Nine karat is being generous..its actually fools gdold!!)
I’d like to see the ‘lame-stream media’ have nice ‘little’ chat to the good (ptorkies-telling) Prof. Flannery about his sea-side mansion in the Hawkesbury region.
(Not to mention Dame Gillard’s sea-side home in Adelaide.)
Isn’t oh so hypocritical that they want all of Australia’s local councils to hobble all sea-side developments and valuations, in spite of sea levels rising a mere few millimetres in the last 50 years.
I hope this report gets a little more exposure than similar recent rebuffs to all the ‘IPCC. bollocks’ that we’ve been subjected to in the last decade or two!
Thanks, keep up the great work.
Warm regards, reformed warmist of logan!!
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I looked up altruism – selfless concern for the welfare of others.
So I give Gillard, Flannery, Gore, Suzuki the benefit of the doubt and it is with much pleasure that I present them the joint winners of the Altruist of the Decade Award.
Why?
Which other extremely wealthy individuals would selflessly sacrifice their hard earned coin to buy into a seaside property market.
A market now where they identified the catastrophic results of Climate Change and Sea Level Rise would decimate the values and submerge the property.
All this merely to help out despondent property owners who unfortunately purchased at the top of the market before the tides of doom rolled in.
100
Jo there is a score or more very recent PR SL studies that all show little difference for the last 100 years or indeed a deceleration in recent times compared to the earlier 20th century record.
This alone disproves the CAGW delusion.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html#Sea
The link above shows many of those studies and also another 1350 PR studies covering all of the CAGW iconography.
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Of course the recent Leclercque et al world glacier study showed that glacier retreat had slowed as well since 1950.
This deceleration just supports all the recent SLR studies showing the same trend.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/new-paper-finds-worldwide-glacier.html
How much longer can they get away with this giant con and fraud?
Don’t forget this delusional nonsense is costing the OZ taxpayer billions $ every year for thousands of years for a guaranteed zero return.
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Is it me, but are there are more ecoloons reading this than usual?
There seem to be an unusually large number of thumbs down.
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Na, it’s probably only one, happens when sceptics don’t respond on alarmists sites, and no one else reads them so boredom breeds mischief.
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Peter Miller: By my count it is 5 trolls that are doing the down ticking.
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“Is it me, but are there are more ecoloons reading this than usual?”
I certainly HOPE SO ! 🙂
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Neville,
Thanks for the reference to THE HOCKEY SCHTICK. It helps explain something I posted about at the weekend. I tried to reconcile two things. First, the satellite data for sea level rise since 1993 from the University of Colorado is a constant rate of 3.2mm per year. Second the measured ice loss from the polar ice caps, which study after study has showed is accelerating. Using the IPCC AR5 figures, polar ice cap melt rose from 0% to about 32% of sea level rise from 1993 to 2011, averaging about 21% in the period. Glacial melt accounted for 27% of the sea level, but the IPCC appear a little bit coy about saying whether this is accelerating to going in the opposite direction.
My analysis is here.
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And to think tide gauges and sea depth measurements were originally taken in fathoms as they were about whether the water was deep enough to sail through leaving room for error in case of a rogue wave or two. Now the professional measuring men are out with their new “itty bitty” computer measuring equipment taking measurements in millimetres and expecting us to panic. What a nonsense. All this handwringing over a 15cm increase or maybe 20cm when you have the ebbs and flows and moon dance of our oceans occurring over millennia. Where is the perspective?
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Really? This far into the Climate warming/change/weirding debate and you’re wanting perspective? You’re being unreasonable.
BTW Jo, I still can’t find the sarc tag.
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Well, you will just have to do the sarcasm with your usual urbane wit and poise then, won’t you?
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Okay, I’ll bite – was that sarcasm? 😉
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Oh, you noticed.
00
The alarmist graphs show an increase of 3 cm/decade. That is about nine inches in a lifetime. Everybody panic! Or not.
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As Willie Soon said “Sea level is more of concept than it is a measurement”.
The idea that such a parameter can be measured in millimetres with any sort of precision is the same fantasy that ‘global mean temperature” can me measured in hundredths of a degree. The world is well and truly mad.
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One thing I found out a few years ago is that the seas are not level. We all know that sea levels change due to tides – from a few centimtres in part of the Mediterranean to over 5 metres in the Bristol Channel – but average sea levels are higher in some parts of the oceans than in others.
00
Wait till Apophis hits in 2036. I’m waxing my board now.
By then it will be bigger than Everest. Surf’s up.
213
Jo,would it be cheeky of me to suggest that the anti clockwise movement you alluded to had something to do with the bath tube effect i.e. anti clockwise outflow in the southern hemisphere and clockwise in the northern hemisphere?
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It would be cheeky if you are calling Australia a plug hole… 😉
90
I wouldn’t use the word, “plug”. 😉
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Nah. That’s to do with the curl in a pig’s tail.
30
Great post Jo and apologies for linking another site but I remember this was also interesting regarding old sea level records http://notrickszone.com/2014/04/18/long-term-tide-gauge-data-show-21st-century-sea-level-rise-will-be-approximately-as-much-as-the-20th-century/
I remember some good information on long term tide marks along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria I’ll try and find it, a local in Port Campbell pointed out the tide marks in the inlet just last year and said they hadn’t changed in his 50+ years there.
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Sea frontage real estate is most affected by what the highest tides do over time and less by what the lowest tides do and on the east coast of Australia the highest tides are much the same as they were a century ago:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/trends/680-140.png
In Moreton Bay king tides are up to 200 mm lower now than they were in 1946 when they regularly covered the lawn at a house we lived in at Cleveland Point.
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Had a few discussions with Neil White, this paper’s author, about those SLs:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2013/01/king-tide-not-so-high/?cp=1#comments
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Jo
Al Gore, Tim Flannery and Julia Gillard don’t seem to be so worried about sea level rise, given their choice of accommodation.
A case of do as a I say, not do as I do, clearly.
Cheers,
Speedy
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speedy:
I understand that Flannery’s place is about 5-6 metres above the mean tide level. If I have the location right, Gillard’s place would be about the same. It’s about 200m from the beach and ESE from the Brighton pier if you want to zoom in.
Brighton is listed as 13.5 metres elevation, but that would be the old town hall, much further inland.
10
“I understand that Flannery’s place is about 5-6 metres above the mean tide level.”
We need a king tide and a massive release from Warragamba to coincide. 🙂
31
I am reminded of an old Hermann’s Hermit song. – Second verse, same as the first! (Song title – Henry the 8th).
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My current gripe with sea levels is that global warming is meant to be causing polar ice melt at accelerating rates. A number of studies have shown this. But there is no signal in the global satellite sea level data for the last 20 years, where the rise has been a constant 3.2mm
It could be offset by lower thermal expansion – but decreasing warming of the oceans would go against Trenberth’s deep sea heat hypothesis.
http://manicbeancounter.com/2014/06/01/reconciling-unipcc-ar5-polar-ice-melt-data-with-sea-level-rise/
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There is something wrong with your observational skills Jo if, from the graphs you supplied, 60mm rise from 1920 to 1960 is the same as 85mm rise from 1970 to 2010. There is a very clear acceleration in the the level rise which is entirely consistent with all of the Arctic, Antarctic melt rates and the atmospheric CO2 and methane build up, with the methane build up being seriously concerning (see Arctic-News Blog for information).
A highway in Auckland is now being raised 2.5 metres as king high tides were encroaching onto the carriageways.
For those who insist on living with their heads in the sand be aware that you will eventually drown in that position.
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Bilb, or could there be something wrong with your reading comprehension — the study refers to annual rates, so an absolute rise over a 40 year smoothed line is not what they were referring too. (See the units: yr-1)
They also said “with both records showing larger rates of rise between 1920 and 1950, ” which I read pretty conservatively, estimating that really we could only say the rates were similar.
As for the rest, there is a very clear deceleration (not predicted) since 2004. As I mentioned… do try to read the post before you comment next time. Thanks.
321
No, it is you who needs to read more carefully, particularly the last paragraph of the “conclusion”, which clearly states the exact opposite of the thrust of your argument
“Even after attempts to remove the effects of this natural variability, trends around most of Australia, show an increased rate of rise from the early 1990s, consistent with global mean trends.”
ie. The impacts of global warming and climate change (two very different phenomena) are becoming very clear in sea levels. Not at all aurprisin considering the huge loss of ice mass in both the Arctic and the Antarctic.
Now it is known that the floors of large ice filled valleys in Greenland are below sea level it is certain that sea level rise will find a new rate of increase in the coming decades.
010
Bilb – when they say “increased rate” they are comparing the 1990s to the pre-1970s not the earlier era. I searched for some numerical comparison of earlier rates with recent rates and couldn’t find any. Given the error bars I doubt it would be significant anyway.
What part of my conclusion: “the rates are similar” (meaning pre WWII compared to recent) don’t you get?
Nothing anthropogenic is “becoming clear in sea levels” except to the blindly faithful.
90
Ice loss in the Arctic will never result in sea level rising since that ice is floating on water. Actually when it melts sea level will fall because the ice has 5 to 10 percent air in it.
00
A little aside Jo but –
is a nice turn of phrase.
🙂
30
You put that reply to the scientific illiterate so much more politely than I would have.
By the way, not sure where the Port Adelaide tidal gauge is located, but that whole area was once under water. The rivers and creeks from the Adelaide Hills ran (?) down and banked up behind the sand dunes as a large lagoon. There was an occasional and usually stagnant outlet at the Patawalonga (Glenelg – place of stinking water) caused by Clostridia patawalongi which produces hydrogen sulphide. The other ‘drain’ was the Port River. In the 1930’s a permanent channel was cut through for the Torrens river which led to the draining of large areas of land. (Later the Patawalonga was dredged to allow free flow). There are a number of golf courses and sporting fields on this land, and they draw on bore water. This may be the cause of Pt. Adelaide sinking, and leading easily fooled people into thinking the sea is rising.
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The sea level rise is not consistent with the climate models – at least for the last 20 years of satellite data. The raising of the highway in Auckland is not due to rising sea levels. It will be due to either the road being located too low down in the first place and/or people being less accepting of occasional flooding than in the past. The satellite data – which is probably an estimate – shows sea levels rising at 320mm per century. That would take over 750 years for the raised road to be have the same flooding risks as now. Take the UNIPCC’s most extreme projection and it would still take nearly 200 years.
Of course, some who hype up even the UNIPCCs most extreme projections. I looked at one such projection a couple of days ago.
http://manicbeancounter.com/2014/06/01/sea-level-rise-extremism-of-professor-wanless-and-possible-consequences-for-miami-dade/
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You’re all over the place with your argument, Kevin M. Now you are saying that those nasty models are right and the empiral evidence is wrong? And the satelites are part of some conspiracy?.
I drove over this piece of road just last week with a local business person whose testimony is that the water level encroachment has become worse in recent years with cyclists riding through a lot of water to get to work. As far as plate techtonics are concerned Auckland is on the Indo-Australian plate near the Pacific plate subduction zone, so if anything Auckland should be rising slowly, so the need to raise the highway due to sealevel encroachment is even more convincing evidence. The people living with the problem know what is going on.
012
So the road was built when, BilB?
And then at a sea level rise of 320mm per century by satellite measurement, even during the “acceleration” phase, according to you, means that in the short time since the road was built (relatively), and in spite of the land rise (according to you) due to plate tectonics, they still have to raise the road 2.5metres (!!), and yet the road wasn’t built too low in the first place, or localised subsidence couldn’t be the true cause!
Sheesh- makes sense to me! Logical analysis or mathematics is not a strong point for you is it? By all means the unsubstantiated anecdote from a local business person should outweigh the fact that your contention doesn’t even remotely make sense, either in magnitude or in causation. And still, even more apropos is that adaptation to the (perceived) problem – i.e building a section of road higher, is far less expensive and socially disruptive than trying to de-industrialise the western world in the vain attempt to try and control the weather, based on an unsubstantiated hypothesis without convincing evidentiary support.
I think people such as yourself are absolutely delusional, certifiably so.
70
BilB,
So Auckland is rising, but even then the rate of sea level rise due to agw in Auckland is increasing more quickly than Auckland can rise…
This seems more likely to be a localized gravitic influence due to a large incoming extraterrestrial body rather than sea level rise due to agw.
Be afraid BilB, be very afraid.
As always, I’m troll in’ ya brother/sister (strike out whichever is not applicable).
00
James,
Auckland sits on top of several volcanos that are part of a string that runs from Mt Ruapahu to the South, to White Island in the North East. Both of those volcanos are active, and both are known to have hissy fits from time to time.
If, as BilB says, Auckland is moving up (or down, it makes no difference), it could indicate something, or nothing, regarding the volcanism in the region.
However, it does tend to make discussions about relative sea levels somewhat moot.
20
Just for the record. At Fort Denison (Sydney Harbour)sea level is rising about 0.65mm per year !
Now if you really think there is a huge differential between NZ and Sydney…… please explain how.
So if the local council in its moronity wants to raise a road 2.5m because of what some twerp with a climate model has said ‘might’ happen.. That’s their problem 🙂
It does give them a long, long time before they need to move it again, though 😉
00
How in Hades can they measure sea level to tenths of a millimetre?
00
They cannot. It is an average that breaks the first rule of mathematical precision.
00
You mean the record sea ice in Antarctica? Have you seen what is happening now with sea ice in the Arctic? Do you know what the Archimedes principle is?
Can you explain to us WHY ice melts in Antarctica, considering sub zero temperatures? Can you show us ANYTHING which is outside the bounds of natural variation?
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BilB,
Sea levels 1,000 years ago were much higher than today.
If we are not going to blame a few peasant cooking fires, and the odd angry oriental sky rocket back then it stands to reason sea level rise and fall is a normal condition.
Your have your head in the sand and there are only two options that should really concern you:
With or without vaseline?
101
No, no, no, BilB. You are mis-interpreting subsidence as sea level rise. Naughty. Go stand in the corner. When you get your feet wet from it, it does have the same effect, but the cause is quite different. The encroachment of the tide is not due to the mythological Rising Sea Levels at all.
That highway is a causeway laid across tidal mud-flats where the mud is over twenty metres deep on average.
It has been slowly subsiding—sinking into the underlying mud—over the fifty years since it was first built. Despite the claim in the NZTA bulletin [small pdf] (Note: SH = State Highway) about the re-engineering of the motorway, the carriageway itself has not yet been flooded even under strong winds from stormy conditions but the water has been slowly encroaching on each side for decades.
As the NZTA says:
(Has some good photos and maps.)
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[SNIP]
91
Dunno what you wrote, Griss, but if it’s good enough for a snip it’s good enough to back with a green thumb.
20
It came through the email. Something about oozing mud.
00
When you quote texts, Sophacles, quote them fully. The very next sentence is
“Climate change and rising sea levels mean that flooding may become more frequent in
the future. The newly widened motorway will be built on higher ground to reduce this
risk”
The carriageway has not yet been flooded but they do concern over pooling of water being a safety hazard. The fact is that without sea level rise they may very well have put this road work off for another fifty years if it were not also for the increased traffic flows. Climate Change also means higher storm intensity which causes larger storm surges. It is all part of the same picture, hence the 2.5 metre higher new road level.
18
You say I am confused! I think this is a case of the old saying “the pot calling the kettle black“.
The Wiki entry has a little rhyme to illustrate what this means
My mocking accusation is made on the basis of your reasons for the new road.
1. Increased traffic flows.
2. Pooling of water. That means water run-off is poor. Raising the height above the level of the land, and putting a camber on the road is a good way to stop this happening.
3. The climate change element.
10
I didn’t quote the `climate change’ sentence because, in the event, it was meaningless. It’s there for the same reasons cities appointed witch hunters in the 17th century: to keep the citizens happy they were being looked after.
00
Arctic ice has been melting but Antarctic ice? I would be interested in your reference(s). We know the Western Antarctic peninsular is the site of recent (and on-going) sub-ice-cap volcanic activity.
But the rest of the Antarctic has been increasing its ice cap, according to the satellite measurements.
Volcanoes are hot. They melt ice. It could be a contributory factor in the Arctic’s ice loss, too. Iceland is volcanic and has a number of active volcanoes, two of which (Eyjafjallajökull and Hekla) have erupted in the last decade.
There is a sea-floor spreading ridge across the Arctic floor, the Gakkel Ridge, with a chain of submarine volcanoes. It was the site (eastern end, I think) of a recent submarine (underwater) eruption in 2008 . This press release from the Max Planck Society, is indicative of the unexpected volcanic activity discovered there. Perhaps the Arctic ice loss from warming is from heat emitted by an alternative source.
Forget the GHW effects of CO2 and CH4. At 400ppm (0.04%) methane at 50 to 300 ppb (0.00000005% – 0.00000003%)
—that’s parts per billion for methane—are trace gases and at concentrations too small to be at all significant, despite the super-scary hype about them. If you are really worried about CO2, take a trip to the Smithsonian Museum and go look at those huge (7 – 8 metre tall and 40 metre long) dinosaur skeletons on display. That’s what you get with high levels of CO2 (2000 to 5000 ppm). Big animals. Compare the herbivore skeleton with the African elephant and the T-Rex with the African lion (for only 400ppm). Those animals are what you get with low CO2.
There is nothing new under the sun and I don’t see any problem with CO2 nor with methane. I also don’t recommend burying one’s head in unknown sand pits.
91
oops. Dyslexic and sticky keyboard: not to mention a similar brain … 🙂
The above should read:
At 400pm (0.04%) for CO2 and methane at …
but it didn’t read … (sigh).
30
Dear me, even my organic calculator is slipping its decimal points today!
Corrections:
0.00000005% should be 0.0000005%
and
0.00000003% should be 0.000003%.
Shame on me … I was only a couple of orders of magnitude out!
Still insignificant, though.
40
Sophocles now your are quoting Jo Nova’s imaginings as scientific fact. There was on new volcano discovered not a whole ring of them and the ice melt increase is detected is in the Thwaites Glacial region a very considerable distance from the Marie Byrd Land area.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/12/western-antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse-has-already-begun-scientists-warn
Whereas Jo’s speculations are well worthy of consideration they are nothing more than wild speculation without evidence and research. It is important to keep things in perspective. Your Gakkel Ridge (extensively covered in Polar-News blog) connection and volcanic eruption, for instance, was summarized as
“Scientists don’t see any significant connection, however.
We don’t believe the volcanoes had much effect on the overlying ice ”
It is all about scale, a “hot” volcano is but a blip against the volume of atmospheric CO2 and Methane.
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Jo’s speculations on volanoes under Antarctica is not presented as anything but a provocative question.
Your speculation that “CO2 did it” is based entirely on the same deficient data from volcanoes (because no one has quantitive volcano-joules-output) yet you and friends present it as if it is a fact. You demand our money and insult anyone who dares to point out obvious bleeding flaws.
Keep writing BilB…
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Not doing any research doesn’t mean a lack of evidence, BilB.
We have 160±50 Gt/year of ice melting. This comes out to be 5e13 kJ of energy to turn ice to water (± almost a third). One medium sized eruption is about 1e14 kJ of energy. There are 17 known volcanoes in the area but the number of eruptions per year and the energy emitted in between eruptions is unknown.
Remember that the volcanic activity only has to provide extra heat, not all of it. So which one is more likely, all this energy under the ice melting the bottom of the ice, or half a degree warmer upper troposphere melting the bottom of the ice?
00
All right, I’ve quoted it. And now, to quote from Hannah, J. and Bell, R.G. 2012. Regional sea level trends in New Zealand. Journal of Geophysical Research 117: 10.1029/2011JC007591:
and
COLE, T; 2010. An Acceleration in New Zealand’s Sea Level Record? MSc Dissertation, Otago University, found
The datasets were the Auckland, Wellington, Lyttleton and Dunedin tide gauge readings from 1901 to 2007.
So there is no acceleration in sea level rise. According to Hannah and Bell (2012) the rate of 1.7mm p.a is steady and will result in a rise of 17mm per decade or 170mm (17cm) per century if present conditions prevail.
With the Sun heading into a grand minimum, there will be overall cooling and sea level change can be expected to turn over and become negative for the next 59 years, ie: until `warming’ resumes.
BilB says:
I commute over that highway, twice a day and have done so for over three decades, in all weathers. I’ve watched it closely. I’ve never seen pooling of water on the carriageway. I commute on a large motorcycle so I keep a keen eye out for such a hazard. The actual carriage way is still sufficiently far above the sea to stay well drained. But at the rate of subsidence I’ve noted, it will not last more than another eighteen years, so I’m well happy to see the building up of the causeway.
Considering the amount of spoil excavated from the Te Atatu Peninsular for the carriage way widening and the cubic kilometers of the spoil from the road tunnelling at Waterview, they have to have somewhere to put it so why not build up the causeway?
However, CO2 and AGW has got nothing to do with it. Neither has sea level rise.
00
If I had quoted Jo’s speculative discussion as scientific fact I would have provided references.
My comment on the Arctic volcanic ridge was in the same spirit. A comment.
To date, no research has been done to provide any resolution for such speculation. We know more about the moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn than we do about the sea floor and submarine volcanism on Planet Earth. Trenberth claimed the `missing heat’ was `hiding in the oceans.’ He may not know just how right he may be!
If I were a volcanologist and I was asked such a question then I would say outright ‘I don’t know. It should be researched.’ I would immediately follow with `Give me a big grant and I will research it.’
It has been estimated there are about 4,000 SVs (Submarine Volcanoes) per million square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean. By extension, this would translate to over a million around the world. Only a few are known. A US Navy nuclear submarine, the USS San Francisco, ran aground, head on, into an unknown, uncharted sea mount, January 2005, on its way from Guam to Brisbane. Many of the Pacific Islands are dormant submarine volcanoes which made it into the atmosphere. We don’t know if they are actually extinct!
We don’t know what is actually happening down there in detail, only in little scraps. The sheer weight of the water on these eruptions keeps them well outside our ken, with little visible surface signature. Extending seismograph and hydrophone networks are beginning to give us some information about the doings down there.
We don’t know how much heat they put into the ocean, individually or collectively.
We don’t know how many are active.
We don’t know how long the active ones are active for.
There has been some serious speculation (elsewhere and not in this blog) that the El Nino phenomenon might be aided and abetted by undersea volcanism. The argument proposed was quite plausible. Refute it if you can.
With over 70% of the Earth’s surface covered by ocean, with the mass of the water over two orders of magnitude greater than the atmosphere, the oceans are in charge of our climate. The sun warms the oceans, the oceans warm the air. Until we know our oceans as well as we know the land surface, then to say it’s CO2 and not undersea rumblers is farcical.
20
If you think its CO2 melting the underneath of the ice, the only possibility is by warm ocean currents.
If so, how do those warm ocean current bypass all that expanding sea ice without melting it first?
Sorry bilb, but CO2 warming of West Antarctica doesn’t have any legs to stand on.
Its the ‘Black Knight’ of hypotheses.
11
I assume BilB is talking about Tamaki Drive.
It looks like the road was prone to flooding since the day it was made, being about the same height as the top of the beach. Notice the original stone wall to stop waves lapping on to the road.
00
No, we were discussing the North Western motorway, (State Highway 16) where it crosses the tidal mud-flats between Waterview and the Rosebank Peninsular on the western side of the city.
Tamaki Drive is on the eastern side and is still at least a metre above the spring high tides. That photo looks like St Heliers Bay. High tide stops about two thirds to three quarters of the way up the shingle. A Northerly pushes it further up. Spray from the waves in a strong storm will fling onto the road. Always has.
00
Thanks Sophocles. I read the other comments after posting so I was expecting a correction. Only found newspaper reports on the flooding of Tamaki Drive.
00
You’re welcome.
If my memory serves me, the `flooding’ is during heavy rain (and we get some torrential rain quite regularly) at the king tides. The stormwater drains go straight into the sea, and given enough jetsam, can block and back up. It’s a direct function of the number of take-away boxes/bags/wrappers discarded on the street. They can block the drain gratings and the resulting puddle/lake could be called a `flood.’ Given the modern standards of reporting …
00
I used to ‘argue’ back in the 70’s and 80’s that every State capital city should be bulldozed into the sea.
Apart from providing excellent fish ‘places’ it would also let the koalas and kangaroos roam.
And clean up the environment!
32
A little while ago I looked in detail at the Freemantle gauge data after claims where made about accelerating sea level rise there. (local global effect, right…)
I never showed much of the result which happened to get tangled up with Met Office claims for England. Both claims are spurious.
A quick scan of the White paper cited here suggests the authors did not do the detail work and are not reporting the true situation.
The Freemangle gauge is on a thin broken layer of limestone in a very complex deep alluvial coastal region. A critical point is the the north/south Darwin fault is to the east which means the Darwin region is not attached to a continental crust as some claim.
Freemantle showed a slow steady rise the same as competent gauges elsewhere.
In recent years a deep aquifier was pumped down 100 feet or so, then this was stopped.
Work on near associated gauges and height measures leads to quashing recent extra rise at Freemantle, the gauge sank. I note the paper mentions subsidence but omits to point out why. Did the authors check to see if there were reasons for ground movement?
The information to reproduce the above all came from the ‘net, plus maths works.
I mention Freemantle in this article about the Met Office, maybe usefully here including the primary UK tide reference at Newlyn, Cornwall. A pin set in granite bedrock many years ago.
http://daedalearth.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/met-office-spurious-sea-level-claim/
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the gauge at Newlyn is corrected by the fact that Cornwall and the west of england is still sinking at about 1.5mm a year in isostatic rebound from the ice age ( the north of england is still rising).
Newlyn is a couple of miles from Mousehole, which I visited today, home of the Penlee Lifeboat, which was lost on 16 dec 1981′ with all 8 crewmen and the 8 persons on board the Union Star including the master,his wife and 2 daughters after its engine failed during hurricane force winds.
An indication of fortitude of these men is that the lifecoat coxswain refused. to allow a volunteer on board because his father was there first and he would not take out two members of the same family that night. Newlyn is now the site of the replacement lifeboat.
30
I spent my early years in a coastal town and my father had a small fishing boat and took an interest in the tides. I was back there recently, after a lapse of 50 years, and frankly I could not see any obvious differences apart from a little coastal erosion.
150
Now that I’ve seen how large the Earth tides are I wonder how I’m supposed to worry about sea level rise measured in such frightening numbers as a couple or so millimeters/year.
But of course I’m expected to drop my brain in the nearest waste basket and rely only on the climate change “experts” whose crusade is obviously more important than even my health or safety, much less national politics, crime and a host of other things. Is that about right?
Well, I’ve some bad news for them. I’m not scared. I’m glad their case is evaporating like water in the sun in August. And I’m paying attention to my needs instead of theirs.
100
My latest analysis of the physics is that the atmosphere control well-mixed GHG warming to exactly zero and that the warming we did have was from Asian aerosols reducing cloud albedo.
There is no CO2-AGW. There is no problem from CH4 up to its self-absorption limit = 125 GT!
120
I believe that the sea-level has been rising at around 1 mm/year for the last several thousand years (with some ups and down along the way), as part of the general ice melting you get during an interglacial. So, assuming insignificant movement of the continent, these results are just natural variation, probably with a bit of thermal expansion on top.
50
The really important thing if you live next to the sea (Holyhead, Old North Wales) is: are the sea levels changing in such a way that it affects the way you do things? The answer is no. There are structures here that have been around for 200 years and are still working fine, no problems and no hint of any to come. The tidal variation here is huge, 10.3m, but everything is designed to accomodate that and so far there has been no panic-selling of seafront properties.
If a bunch of pseudo-scientists cook up a technical sounding paper which counsels mass hysteria then all well and good but are we honestly supposed to take it seriously?
70
So.. sea level rise 1920-1950 same as from 1980-2010
temperature rise 1915-1945 same as from 1975 – 2005 (even AFTER all the Jones and Hansen adjustments)
so….. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO INDICATION THAT EXTRA CO2 IS CAUSING ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE CLIMATE!!
CO2.. is the major building block of all life on Earth.
Anyone anti-CO2 is ANTI-LIFE !!
81
About 12,000 years ago one could walk from Hobart to Port Moresby as sea levels were much lower than currently, and around the Mediterranean the old Roman ports, say 2000 year ago, are now 10-30 km. inland from the current coastline. Both sealevels and land masses rise and fall, what is the big deal in a mm. or so?
41
O/T but interesting I thought … it turns out that having a position statement on climate change is too hot for the GSA (Geological Society of Australia):
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/earth-scientists-split-on-climate-change-statement/story-e6frg8y6-1226942126322#
(Paywalled – may need Google search to view)
I think the society’s second statement was pretty much on the mark but clearly it was not alarming enough for the alarmists, so they choose to drop it altogether:
Scientists disagree about something? Who knew?
20
Beat me too it Bulldust.
But aw shucks! There goes Cook’s et al’s 97% consensus all over again.
You almost have to feel sorry for Cook and Nuccatelli and Lewendowsky and the University of Queensland for their forays into the utter stupidity that they profess to call Climate Science that they seem to so often get themselves involved in these days. And in which they seem to very publicly and quite spectacularly come unstuck every time nowadays.
The cracks in the “consensus” just keep on getting wider and wider and if Cook and Nuccatelli and co aren’t a bit more careful they like Flannery, will be like the Oojah bird.
They will just disappear up the orifice of their own importance and stupidity never to be seen or heard from again
10
o/t
Exclusive video of Obama when Tony Abbott signals climate change likely to be excluded from G20 agenda
20
I suspect that very few on the skeptic blog scene are aware that the IPCC in it’s first 1990 First AR and AR2 [ Assessment Reports ] in the mid 1990’s used Tide Gauge data only to try and assess sea level changes..
Satellite technology was not yet to a point where it had the radar definition and the orbital accuracy required to assess the minute changes in sea levels the IPCC required to substantiate it’s then so called and increasingly alarmist science so it relied on Tide Gauge data changes for it’s assessments os changes in global sea levels.
[ Judith Curry has said on occassions that she believes the First IPCC AR was the most honest, reliable and most scientific of all the AR reports ]
For this they needed a very accurate calibrated gauge with a very long record behind it against which every other global tide gauge could be calibrated against and the adjustments for changes in geologically shifting land elevations could be adjusted for in the changes in regional and global sea levels.
So the IPCC in it’s wisdom chose a Tide Gauge in Hong Kong harbour.
It was one of six such gauges in the HK Harbour and it was the one gauge out of those six that was known by geologists to have the highest rates of subsidence due to the ongoing compaction of the sediments on which that Tide Gauge was located
I’ll let Nils Axel Morner provide the background to this as he describes it in a Hockey Schtick post from Feb/ 20 /2010.
_____________
Sea Level Expert: “Sea is not Rising”
[quoted]
“Another way of looking at what is going on is the tide gauge. Tide gauging is very complicated, because it gives different answers for wherever you are in the world. We have to rely on geology when we interpret it.
So, for example, …the IPCC choose Hong Kong, which has six tide gauges, and choose the record of one, which gives a 2.3 mm per year of sea level.
Every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area.
It’s the compaction of sediment; it is the only record which should not [be used].
And if that [2.3 mm] figure is correct, then Holland would not be subsiding, it would be uplifting. And that is just ridiculous.
Not even ignorance could be responsible for a thing like that. So tide gauges, you have to treat very, very carefully.”
Now, back to satellite altimetry. From 1992 to 2002, [the graph of the sea level] was a straight line, variability along a straight line, but absolutely no trend whatsoever. We could see those spikes: a very rapid rise, but then in half a year, they fall back again. But absolutely no trend, and to have a sea-level rise, you need a trend.
Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in [the IPCC’s] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge.
And that didn’t look so nice.
It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge. So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside.
I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow —I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not a measurement.
It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened.
And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!
IPCC Ocean-gate anyone?
[ / ]
__________________
The satellite data says that when all the cheapskate adjustment attempts at alarmism are removed, sea level rise if any, is no more than about 1.2 to 1.6 mms / year globally.
And even that rate of rise is slowing right down over the last half decade and doing so for reasons that the climate science and oceanographers still don’t understand and admit they are a long way from understanding the factors involved in the constant changing global sea levels.
51
Too early to go off topic?
Bad luck i want to share a story with you all.
The wife and i were watching another wonderful indoctrination program on our ABC last night called “Earth on fire” as part of the Insight series of climate change specials. The program began with the reporter speaking to a rentseeking wannabe in the bad lands of New Mexico. The rent seeker was explaining to the reporter how large sections of conifer trees have been wiped out through MEGA FIRES (Reg TM) and due to a flaw in its evolution the forest will never grow back and have now been replaced by grasslands………climate change in action.
When then cut to scenes of the pair driving in a car through an area not affected by the MEGA FIRES (Reg TM) complete with footage of all the little furry creatures that lived there. The reporter noted just how beautiful it was, then more footage of little furry animals.
We then cut to a scene in the rentseekers office and on display was a rather large map of the forest, this map should a very small number of fires which occurred in 1909, then another map from the 1970’s which showed a larger amount of fires, then a map of the 80’s which showed almost no fires due to that decade being “a substantially wet decade” said the rentseeker. Then we moved onto the 90’s which should a large increase in fires and then the 2000’s which showed the MEGA FIRE (Reg TM).
Once viewed like this it was obvious to all that this was the work of the
devilCO2, but then my wife said something that astounded me, my wife saidAnd with that she changed the channel.
I looked at my wife and said do you realise the number of dumb bastards out there that would not even think of that is staggering?
Which leads me to ask this question, how can a house wife and part time para legal with no background in science whatsoever, armed purely with logic and common sense have the ability to grasp the obvious when the ‘tards that continuely plague this site who claim to be the depository of all knowledge cannot?
71
if you had watched the next bit, that is exactly the debt seeker’s conclusion too.
23
rent… funny typo
21
I watched the next bit GA and no they then went on to fires in general and how the human cost had increased etc……………nice try though keep up the good work
00
You are a very fortunate man, my friend.
00
Well, she married you, so that right there indicates she is not ‘average’. 😉
10
I dont get too many compliments so i will take that as one if thats ok.
Cheers Phil.
00
It was meant as one. For both of you.
00
Slower sea level rise linked to El Nino and natural weather patterns
Last updated on 24 March 2014, 9:33 am
NEWS: scientists say slight drop-off in annual sea level rise could be a result of natural variations
. . .
Couple of links in comments including original paper pdf
10
To add to my comment above.
The thing that struck me most about that The Australian article on the Geological Society’s backing off of it’s alarmist statement on the so called Climate Change is the fact that a very large percentage of it’s members must have hit back and hit back hard for the alarmists to actually back down, something which climate warming catastrophe zealots are not noted for doing under any circumstances.
And that to me indicates that a very big shift is under way amongst some at least of those in the world of science who are now preparing to take on, head on in fact, the zealots of the catastrophic global warming faith before they can destroy the reputation of science any further in the eyes of an increasingly skeptical or worse, couldn’t give a damn about global warming and science, public.
It is a public who are becoming sick to death of having the constant alarmism rammed down their throats and who are becoming very aware of and increasingly cynical of the openly blatant self serving hypocrisy so many of those including a large and the loudest grouping of so called [ advocate ] scientists screeching the loudest about CO2 and catastrophic global warming who are the greatest beneficiaries of the tax payer funded self indulgence.
Their hypocritical self indulgence is far, far more damaging to the climate than that of any ordinary citizen and are far beyond anything the ordinary citizen can afford to ever hope to personally experience in the way of pleasurable enjoyment.
And some in science are starting to realise that they as scientists are being seen as the instigators and upholders and biggest beneficiaries of the increasingly discredited in the public’s eyes, the so claimed catastrophic warming which is leading to science starting to be the main butt of the reaction against the gross excesses of the global warming zealot led faith.
So to protect their backsides and their future as scientists they at last are starting to take on the global warming / climate change zealots in the various science establishments.
And from that in the long term, only good for society and science can come about.
00
tectonic plates gradually buckle -> some places appears that the sea level is doing up – but others going down – in reality: it is good that the tectonic plates are always buckling – otherwise, with constant erosion of the land and silt ending up into the sea = all the dry land would have eroded after couple of millions of years, and: there is enough water, to COVER UP the ”whole planet” with 2km of water on the top!!!The ”highest” point of land to be 2km under the water
2] sea level is rising, because:there is LESS water on the land. Aral sea is almost dry, lake Chad 70% of the water has disappeared, Sahara is getting dryer, Australia also…. where is all that water gone? yes, into the oceans
3] Warmist / Greens are against building new dams, to save the needed floodwater for better climate on the land. New dams attract extra clouds from the sea and improve the vegetation. Simple arithmetic: more water on the land as topsoil moisture, water storages, and humidity = less water in the sea. 1m3 of water in the new dam lowers 1km2 of seawater by one millimeter; why nobody is talking about new dams – especially for Australia and Africa?!?!?!
20
stephen the denier@ # 362
1 / Aral Sea.
Over 60% of the flow of the the Syrdarya River and Amudarya rivers which fed the Aral sea were diverted into huge irrigated cotton growing lands during then Soviet era leading the cessation of flows into the Aral sea and it’s drying up almost.
However the drying of the Aral Sea region is a centuries long phenomena.
From; Kazhakistan Discovery;
Why is the Aral Sea shrinking?
Let’s start from the name of the Aral Sea. It means the Sea of Islands referring to 1500 islands that existed before.
According to the map by Claudius Ptolemaeus (ad 90-168), a greek scholar, the Caspian and the Aral Seas were joint together, forming a huge inland sea. Then Zaraphshan and Amudarya rivers flew into the Caspian Sea.
And there were always essential fluctuations of the level of the Sea. By the beginning of the 17th century with the water receding, the islands started to emerge and by the beginning of the 19th century two rivers Zhandarya and Kuandarya stopped feeding the Sea.
&
In the first half of the 20th century the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth-largest inland saline body of water, with an area of 68 000 sq.km (42253 sq.mi), 426 km (264 mi) long, 284 km (76 mi) wide with the depth of 68 m (223ft).
The abuse of the rivers, main arteries of the Aral actually started in 1930’s, with the mass construction of irrigation channels. Years 1960-1990 the agricultural land area has doubled, so did the water consumption.
As a result in 1987 the shrinkage has naturally divided the Sea into three parts. The northern part as a whole was in the Kazakhstan side. And the Southern Uzbekistan part was divided into two.
After the collapse of the USSR Kazakhstan decided to correct the situation at least on its own side, which is todays North Aral Sea, fed by the Syrdarya River. Although the first two attempts have failed, in 2005 Kazakhstan was able to give it another go. This time the water levels have risen faster than expected and fish stocks increased. Now as this plan worked, the government is ready to build another dike.
In 2003, the lake was 30 meters (98 ft) in depth and 2,550 sq km (985 sq mi) in area; by 2008 it had reached 42 m (138 ft) in depth and 3,300 sq km (1,275 sq mi) in area.’
10
ROM,
during the Soviet times, there was lots of talks; to turn some of the water from river that drains into Arctic – to be turned south into Aral sea… now because everybody is obsessed with CO2 and the phony GLOBAL warming / and money squandered on the ”Climate from Changing Stoppers” = nobody talks anything constructive to be done.
Extra water on the land = IMPROVES THE CLIMATE –/– Global warming evangelist / propaganda is deteriorating the climate!!!
00
2 / Lake Chad
Lake Chad (in French Lac Tchad) is a historically large, shallow lake in Africa, whose size has varied over the centuries.
According to the United Nations (UN), it shrank as much as by 95 percent from about 1963 to 1998[5] yet they also state that “The 2007 (satellite) image shows significant improvement over previous years”.
Lake Chad is economically important, providing water to more than 20 million people living in the four countries that surround it (Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria) on the edge of the Sahara Desert.
Lake Chad is located mainly in the far west of Chad, bordering on northeastern Nigeria.
The Chari River, fed by its tributary the Logone provides over 90 percent of Lake Chad’s water, with a small amount coming from the Yobe River in Nigeria/Niger.
Over half of the lake’s area is taken up by its many small islands, reedbeds and mudbanks, and a belt of swampland across the middle divides the northern and southern halves while the shorelines are largely composed of marshes.
Because Lake Chad is very shallow—only 10.5 metres (34 ft) at its deepest—its area is particularly sensitive to small changes in average depth, and consequently it also shows seasonal fluctuations in size of about 1m every year.
Lake Chad has no apparent outlet, but its waters percolate into the Soro and Bodélé depressions. The climate is dry most of the year round with occasional rains from June to October.
Lake Chad gave its name to the country of Chad. The name Chad is a local word meaning “large expanse of water,” in other words, a “lake.”[6]
Lake Chad is believed to be a remnant of a former inland sea which has grown and shrunk with changes in climate over the past 13,000 years.
At its largest, around 4000 BC, this lake is estimated to have covered an area of 400,000 km², (approx. 154,000 sq miles).
Lake sediments appear to indicate dry periods, when the lake nearly dried up, around 8500 BC, 5500 BC, 2000 BC, and 100 BC.”[7]
00
Apologies for no URL link above;
Lake Chad reference
00
3 / Sahara getting drier ??
Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change?
Desertification, drought, and despair—that’s what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.
Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.
Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.
If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.
This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.
The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers).
Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.
The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan.
While satellite images can’t distinguish temporary plants like grasses that come and go with the rains, ground surveys suggest recent vegetation change is firmly rooted.
In the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, new trees—such as acacias—are flourishing, according to Stefan Kröpelin, a climate scientist at the University of Cologne’s Africa Research Unit in Germany.
“Shrubs are coming up and growing into big shrubs. This is completely different from having a bit more tiny grass,” said Kröpelin, who has studied the region for two decades.
In 2008 Kröpelin—not involved in the new satellite research—visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco.
“The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years,” Kröpelin said. “They have never seen so much grazing land.”
“Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass,” he said.
“Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back,” he said.
“The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable.”
20
“The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable.”
There is no truth that is ever “indisputable”. Just ask BilB, Michael the Realist, Brian aka Philip, BA4 and their alarmist brethren, who live by the creed of “leave no truth unturned”.
10
ROM,
the grass is not better from the ”phony, non-existent GLOBAL warming!!!”
For everything that happens in nature, there is/are a real and phony reasons! If in Egypt grass is growing, where it wasn’t before; look how much extra water / moisture every year is given to the land from Aswan dam – that moisture counteracts the damages from the tremendous dry heat PLUS that moisture attracts extra clouds from the sea ( clouds avoid dry land)
Therefore: the PHONY GLOBAL warming is preventing people to be told the truth / WHAT IMPROVES THE CLIMATE… especially in Australia, where climate can be tremendously improved by building extra dams, to save extra freshwater on the land. instead, everybody is competing to drain extra water into the sea, as if the sea doesn’t have enough water…
(actually, they are repossessing farmer’s water in Australia – to make the land even dryer, less moisture on the land -> less clods in future from the sea on that land!: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/5floods-droughts-we-dont-need-to-have/
00
stephenthedenier;
I’m all for building dams and before needed such as around our capital cities which quite possibly are going to have some serious water shortage problems when and if we get another period similar to the hot dry, droughty 1930’s again here in Australia.
The bloody greenies again are the biggest, nastiest most irrational civilisation destroying bunch of hypocrites ever in their opposition to any planning at all for building facilities to meet the future needs of our’s and most western nations.
And it is so noticeable that after all the screeching and arm waving about the damage and etc a dam will supposedly do to the the “natural environment”,[ that ‘environment ‘thing again which I’m getting totally fed up with being used in a most corrupted and degraded manner as an always on excuse for preventing and trying to stop progress of any sort anywhere,] that after a few years there are a hell of a lot of people out there on and around that new dam who enjoy water sports, fishing, greenies who want to build right on the foreshore of the Dam’s lake when nobody else has been allowed to do so and etc.
The lakes formed by dams become a real asset for everything nature wise and people wise within a big radius around the lake’s perimeter.
And look at the moaning from the greenies and all those who were so prominent in fighting the building of any major dam when those dams run dry in drought times and water restrictions are imposed.
And despite the stupidity of the building of a number of desalination plants due entirely to the utter irresponsibility and data less backed claims of an incompetent CSIRO and the idiotic alarmist Flannery and etc all claiming that Australia was going to be permanently drought stricken in the future followed of course by possibly the heaviest rainfalls in NE Australia for many generations, water desalination has proved to be one of natural water lacking Israel’s biggest successes.
[ Over and drought: Why the end of Israel’s water shortage is a secret ]
IF Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks can crack nuclear fusion and do so in a small transportable sized reactor as they claim they will do by 2017 then by mid century the world’s energy needs will be able to be met forever including the desalination of as much water as mankind will ever need.
If not Lockheed Martin then some other entrepreneurial group and there are a number working on this fusion research advancement, will do so and soon as the rewards for being first with such an infinite in power output and infinite in fuel availability, controlled fusion energy will reward the first too succed with prestige, power , influence and wealth that few have ever experienced on this Earth.
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Hello ROM
There is ‘’water shortages’’ in the Australian environment’’ constantly!! If there is more dams FAR from the big cities, inland; where the dry heat is created – big cities on the coast would have always plenty water. It’s the ‘’DRY’’ heat created inland that is vacuuming the moisture from water catchment areas for the big city… They are draining the fresh storm water into the sea – then want to desalinate that same water for big bucks… ROM, two of us have same attitude – we’ll have lots to talk about.
2] on ‘’fusion’’ sorry, I have to disappoint you: ‘’electricity from ‘’fusion of deuterium {H2}’’ will NEVER be produced on the planet! It’s a scam for taxpayer’s cash for ‘’permanent research’’ There is nothing to research, it’s simple, everything is known: {2H2=He}
For continuous ‘’fusion’’ is ‘’ESSENTIAL’’ two ingredients: temp of 21000C and very high pressure – they can have one or the other; BUT both simultaneously… never. Because there is no metal or alloy that will sustain prolong pressure under that temperature! They did succeed by installing a small atom bomb as catalyst – to produce heat and desirable pressure for the hydrogen bomb, but, that process was for only few seconds – to continue ‘’fusion’’ for electricity production – every metal as chamber would have melted like butter =
If it didn’t need the tremendous pressure for fusion – every star in the universe would have combussted in less than 10 minutes. Fortunately, that pressure is only deep inside every star, for continuous fusion (reason bigger stars burn out quicker) they have larger space with the essential pressure inside Anyway, please read my old post on Australian floods &droughts: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/5floods-droughts-we-dont-need-to-have/
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Repeat after me.
There can be no closed estimate of surface sea level rise until there is adequate data from the deep oceans whose hopeless under sampling represents about 50% of all ocean volume.
You can’t make an estimate by pretending that nothing is going on in the deeps. That is profoundly anti-science.
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”when CO2 was ideal in the 1920′s and 1930s”
WRONG! For the crops / trees would be even better if the amount of CO2 is more than it is today.
Rain washes the CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil and into the sea ( do you notice that: the air in the city smells differently after the rain than before?) – water is made by the good lord to wash things.
2] any farmer will tell you that: ”the crops are much more prosperous from 2” of rain than from the same amount of flood irritated water” – because rain brings more CO2 to the crops!!! CO2 IS THE GOOD GUY!
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also nitrogen i think but dont mind me carry on.
Cheers
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craker.
you are correct, also SO2 and other dirt gets washed, which is the best food / fertilizer for the trees crops. Actually especially for the trees, because farmers occasionally give sulfates to crops
of course CO2 is the best appreciated by trees, crops, coral, algae, thanks to rain – the more of it in the atmosphere -> the more is washed to where is needed
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the planet has SAME amount of water now, as she had 100 – 1000y ago; why would it be rising: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/sea-rising-or-not/
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It’s NOT Thermal Expansion. It’s WATER DISPLACEMENT from the Two (2) Billion Tons of SILT that washes down our earths rivers, and also the 600 Million Tons of WIND BLOWN DUST that blows into our earths Oceans each and every year.
Some parts of our earths oceans have SILT several hundred feet deep, this SILT layer has approximately 2.5 mm of SILT added to it each year, thus causing our sea levels to rise by approximately 2.5 mm each year.
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