SEA-LEVEL SCARE DEBUNKED

Benny Peiser has recently had a correspondence with some of the people at "Nature" magazine over the way their online site ignored an article (by Raper and Braithwaite). in their own magazine about sea-levels NOT rising as much as was once thought and promoted another article (by Church & White) in another journal that said the opposite. Below is a fairly devastating excerpt from one of Benny's emails to "Nature" staffers. Benny points out, among other things, that the alarmist paper even contradicts what the IPCC (the world HQ of the global warming religion) says:

"But let's forget for a moment how this editorial accident happened and why Nature editors selected an alarmist paper on sea level rise for the spotlight instead of an anti-alarmist paper published by Nature on the same day. Is there really "no real contradiction between the two papers in any case," as you claim?

For a start, the paper by Raper and Braithwaite is a fundamental critique of the 2001 IPCC model that assumes "that glaciers melt away completely for any warming rather than approaching a new equilibrium." Instead, the two new models used by Raper and Braithwaite estimate a sea level rise due to the melting of glaciers and icecaps of ~0.05 m by 2100, "about half of previous projections." [Note for those of us who still cannot hack metric: 5 centimetres is about 2 inches -- a tiny rise]

Now, the irony of the latest Nature affair is that the lead-author of the "previous projections" criticised by Raper and Braithwaite, is none other than John Church himself, the star of your news story. Given that Church's IPCC chapter on sea level rise is questioned and his high estimates essentially halved, it does look a bit dodgy to provide him - on the same day that his high estimate is debunked - a platform to announce that his latest finding "matches up nicely with (IPCC) model predictions."

What is more, you didn't even mention that the contentious claims by Church and White are more alarmist than (and in fact contradict) the current IPCC TAR "consensus" which states: "No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected." It will be interesting to monitor whether Nature's media promotion given to a 'consensus-breaking' paper will be able to overturn the 2001 IPCC stance. Perhaps we are even seeing the beginnings of another "hockey stick" controversy. After all, Church and White haven't provided any new sea level data - they've only applied a different statistical method to the same data set, data that previously didn't show any significant acceleration.

In fact, Cabanes et al. (2001) who analysed sea level trends between 1950-1998 suggest that the very limited coverage of historical tide gauges cannot provide a meaningful estimate of the average global sea level rise for the past century. And since most historical tide gauges were located in regions of substantial ocean warming, they suggest that the estimates of 20th century sea level rise from tide gauge records may have been overestimated by a factor of 2.

Finally, a recent paper by Volkov and van Aken (2005; see abstract below) suggests that "the recently reported local trends of sea level are not necessarily related to the global sea level rise, but may be part of interdecadal fluctuations."

These any many other papers confirm the existance of huge uncertainties. What this means is that the jury is still out whether or not there is any significant acceleration of global sea level. Nature editors would be well advised to provide more balanced and a less alarmist coverage of climate change research and debates. But after years of complaints, I'm not holding my breath. Nature's apparent addiction to worst-case scenarios and prophecies of fire and brimestone are difficult to kick".




SEA-LEVEL RISES AND FALLS CAN BE REGIONAL RATHER THAN GLOBAL

(New paper in GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, 2005 L14611 (2005) by Denis L. Volkov, Hendrik M. van Aken. Abstract only. Note also the lead post on this blog on Feb. 1st below which argued for large paleo-climate events being regional rather than global).

Climate-related change of sea level in the extratropical North Atlantic and North Pacific in 1993-2003

Abstract:

Climate-related change of sea level is one of the most challenging concerns for humankind. Here we present a comparative analysis of the interannual variability of sea level in the extratropical North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans based on the high-accuracy TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1 and ERS-1/2 measurements from November 1992 to June 2003. We found indications of the interdecadal variability of the sea level in the North Pacific possibly related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and suggested that the observed decadal rise of sea level in the subpolar and eastern North Atlantic may have been related to the interdecadal change. While the North Atlantic subtropical and subpolar gyres decelerated, the opposite occurred in the North Pacific. The year-to-year variations of sea level showed coherence between the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Ni¤o/La Ni¤a and Pacific Decadal Oscillation events and respective gyre-scale changes.




RECENT TRENDS OF SEA-LEVEL RISE MAY BE DUE TO INTERDECADAL FLUCTUATIONS

(Below is a summary from CO2 Science Magazine, 1 February 2006 of the Volkov & Aken paper above)

What was done

Noting that satellite altimetry data have shown sea level change to be characterized by an uneven spatial structure, with positive trends in some regions and negative trends in others (Cazenave et al., 2004), the authors constructed maps of Sea Level Anomalies (SLAs) for the extratropical North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans that they obtained from merged Topex/Poseidon-Jason-1+ERS-1/2 altimetry data for the period October 1992 to July 2003, after which they used Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis to identify dominant modes of interannual SLA variability.

What was learned

Volkov and van Aken found that "the spatial patterns of the observed sea level trends in both oceans [were] identical to the spatial patterns of the EOFs-1 of the interannual SLA data," and that "the year-to-year variations of sea level showed coherence between the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Ni¤o/La Ni¤a and Pacific Decadal Oscillation events and respective gyre-scale changes."

What it means

In the words of the two Dutch scientists, "the results of this work suggest that the recently reported local trends of sea level are not necessarily related to the global sea level rise, but may be part of interdecadal fluctuations." This conclusion is reminiscent of the upper-ocean heat content findings of Levitus et al. (2005), who concluded that "phenomena associated with the variability of the 0-700 m global ocean heat content integral for 1956-2003 are characterized by gyre and basin-scale spatial variability and time-scales approximately decadal and longer," which variability, in their words, "is dominated by the reversal of polarity of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation in the late-1970s and El Ni¤o phenomana."





SCIENTISTS PLAY DOWN RISING SEAS

Below is a summary of the non-alarmist article that was almost completely ignored by the media:

Manchester scientists studying global warming are predicting a much lower rise in sea levels than previously feared. Researchers say melting glaciers and ice caps will cause just a 0.1m (sic) rise in global sea levels by 2100 - less than half the increase of several earlier predictions. But they show that melting of glacial and mountain areas is accelerating fast leading to flooding and land slides in mountainous regions such as Nepal.

Dr Sarah Raper, a climatologist from MMU's Centre for Aviation Transport and the Environment, said: "Our research predicts a relatively low sea-level rise from glaciers and icecaps, compared with earlier work, but the local effect of accelerated glacier melt is going to be very important and may already be increasing catastrophic damage in the form of glacier lake outbursts in high mountain regions.

The Manchester research, published in the scientific journal Nature, suggests that the slow-down or lower estimate, is due to a greater amount of the world's ice being located at the ice-caps - around « - which because it is slower melting than glaciers, is contributing less water flow into the oceans.

Dr Raper and Dr Roger Braithwaite, a geographer at Manchester University, projected expected future climate statistics to a sophisticated model of glacier mass and volume which accounts for a host of variables including glacier shrinkage. Dr Braithwaite said: "Our analysis should not been seen as diminishing the importance of sea level rise since glaciers and icecaps are only one of the contributors." Glacier and icecap melt is responsible for roughly a third of sea level rise, the main cause being simple water expansion due to temperature rise, known as thermal expansion.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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