He's posted a chart of the monthly sea level at Majuro, Marshall Islands as measured by the SEAFRAME gauge. His chart stops at the beginning of 2010, so here is a similar chart from a more recent report. Note the scale is in metres.
The sea level data recorded since installation is summarised in Figure 14. The middle curve (green) represents the monthly mean sea level. The upper and lower curves show the highest and lowest values recorded each month. We see that largely, the monthly mean values are quite stable throughout the year, with the exception of 1997 and 1998, where the level fluctuates during the El Niño.
As for trends, this is what that report states:
As at December 2010, based on the short-term sea level trend analyses performed by the National Tidal Centre using the Majuro SEAFRAME data, a rate of +4.3 mm per year has been observed. Accounting for the inverted barometric pressure effect and vertical movements in the observing platform, the sea level trend is +3.8 mm per year. ...
...Figure 4 shows how the trend estimate has varied over time. At first the trend appeared to indicate an enormous rate of sea level decline, followed by a period of apparent rise. Due to the 1997/1998 El Niño when sea level fell 29 cm below average, the trend went negative again, and remained so for about one year. Given the sea level record is still relatively short, it is still too early to deduce a long-term trend.
Anthony or Nils writes:
This is a sea level graph (from Majuro) and is shows a general sea level stability from 1992 to 2010.
No traces of any acceleration!No traces of any acceleration! And he can tell that how exactly? When the scale is on a 30 cm grid? What was he expecting? A rise of a metre or so every decade?
(Does anyone know why WUWT deniers are so fixated on acceleration and don't seem bothered by a plain old rise in sea level, with or without acceleration?)
The WUWT article provides a single link to a report and it's an old one, dated June 2002, and says:
The Majuro records, for sure, contradicts and acceleration claim; even a general “rise”.
In conclusion, don’t “hang your hat” on the Kwajalein graph. Look around and observe!
Look around and observe
Yes, let's do that. Let's look at another recent report from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology Pacific Climate Change Science website. It's got a lot of information there, including a report called: Climate Change in the Pacific: Scientific Assessment and New Research. Volume 2, Chapter 7 is about the Marshall Islands. On sea level, the report states (my bold italics):
Monthly averages of the historical tide gauge, satellite (since 1993) and gridded sea-level (since 1950) data agree well after 1993 and indicate interannual variability in sea levels of about 20 cm (estimated 5–95% range) after removal of the seasonal cycle (Figure 7.9). The sea-level rise near the Marshall Islands measured by satellite altimeters (Figure 7.5) since 1993 is about 0.3 inches (7 mm) per year, more than the global average of 0.125 ± 0.015 inches (3.2 ± 0.4 mm) per year. This rise is partly linked to a pattern related to climate variability from year to year and decade to decade (Figure 7.9).
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| Figure 7.9: Observed and projected relative sea-level change near the Marshall Islands. (a) The observed in situ relative sea-level records are indicated in red, with the satellite record (since 1993) in light blue. The gridded sea level at the Marshall Islands (since 1950, from Church and White (in press)) is shown in orange. The projections for the A1B (medium) emissions scenario (5–95% uncertainty range) are shown by the green shaded region from 1990–2100. The range of projections for the B1 (low), A1B (medium) and A2 (high) emissions scenarios by 2100 are also shown by the bars on the right. The dashed lines are an estimate of interannual variability in sea level (5–95% range about the long-term trends) and indicate that individual monthly averages of sea level can be above or below longer-term averages |
Anthony is so keen to deny any hint of the effects of global warming that he posts rubbish from Nils Axel-Morner instead of "looking around and observing"!
