WUWT readers are too scared to read about rising sea levels in National Geographic

I've added an update in the body of this article.

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I don't have much time today, so this item is short.  Which is a shame, because there have been a few articles lately at WUWT that are worthy of HotWhopper.  Hopefully I'll get to some of them later - like Pat 'n Chip's latest tripe (archived here).  But not right now.

Today I'll just make an observation.  I do find it interesting how often Anthony Watts and his readers say they are scared of being scared.  Quite a few of Anthony's readers say they have unsubscribed from National Geographic because they find it too hard to accept (and probably too difficult to read) articles about climate change.  That seems to be in line with research that shows that the conservative brain is hyper-sensitive to fear.  Who wants to be living in perpetual fear?  It's debilitating.  That's one of the main reasons why sites like WUWT are so popular.  It exists as a placebo for people who are scared; telling fearful people not to worry because "all the science is wrong".

Some of you might remember how back in August 2013, Anthony Watts protested an article in National Geographic about rising sea levels.  Anthony seemed to believe that ice doesn't melt as it warms.

Now Anthony Watts has posted another article on his blog (archived here) about another article in National Geographic about sea level rise.  He and his readers cannot cope with the thought that Miami may well not survive much longer than a few more decades.

Actually, in his normal fashion, the article isn't by Anthony himself.  He just added a couple of charts at the bottom.  It's an article about an article by Bjørn Lomborg about an article in National Geographic.  So I suppose this is an article about an article about an article about an article in National Geographic:)

The WUWT-ers took particular offense at the interactive graphic in National Geographic, which showed how coastlines would change if all the ice on earth were to melt.  The graphic is interesting.  I don't know how accurate it is, but it's fairly clear that cities will have to shift inland over the coming decades to centuries to millenia.  And that's all down to us pouring waste CO2 into the air now.  I expect that's what WUWT readers cannot cope with.  The idea that what we are doing today will have such a strong influence on future societies.

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Update

In the comments, Ryan suggested looking at the work of Jerry Mitrovica on the unevenness of sea level rise.  Click here to read Mitrovica et al (2009) "The Sea-Level Fingerprint of West Antarctic Collapse" in Science (subs req'd), or here for an article in Harvard Magazine, and here for a discussion in SkepticalScience and there's a good article by Michael Lemonick at Yale e360 - or use Google, or better yet, Google Scholar.

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One of these days I'll do an analysis of WUWT to see what aspects of global warming scare fake sceptics the most.  I'd say rising seas are fairly high up the list.  Maybe a big proportion live in Florida or on the east coast of the USA.

If you're interested, here again is a graphic showing the time frames involved in the different parts of the carbon cycle.  It shows the time period relating to ice sheets as multiples of thousands of years, which is longer than the ocean component (click for larger view):

Source: RealClimate.Org

The Emissions Gap Report 2013 says we have to do much better

According to the newly released The Emissions Gap Report 2013, we've got to change our energy sources more quickly if we're to stay safe:

Total global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, the last year for which data are available, already stood at 50.1 GtCO2e, highlighting the scale of the task ahead....

... In order to be on track to stay within the 2° C target and head off the negative impacts outlined above, the report says that emissions should be a maximum of 44 GtCO2e by 2020 to set the stage for further cuts needed-to 40 GtCO2e by 2025, 35 GtCO2e by 2030 and 22 GtCO2e by 2050. As this target was based on scenarios of action beginning in 2010, the report finds that it is becoming increasingly difficult to meet this goal.

From the WUWT comments

Here is a small sample of the protest comments from the illiterati at WUWT.  There are heaps more archived here.

omnologos isn't the only WUWT commenter who said:

November 5, 2013 at 10:58 am
When I discovered about the stupid issue with the statue of liberty, I have sent a letter personally to the Editor via snail-mail.

Zeke says "it's a nefarious plot!" (excerpt):

November 5, 2013 at 11:29 am
In many sea girt countries a majority of the people live near the coast. When these unscrupulous scientsists threaten the coasts, they are bidding for increased legislation, regulation, and control of the habitable land.

Bob Diaz seems to be unaware of the step-wise nature of the melting of ice sheets and says - let our descendant's deal with it:

November 5, 2013 at 11:31 am
Let’s do the math, they said a rise of 216 feet over 5,000 years. That comes to about 1/2 an inch per year or 4 feet 4 inches per 100 years. Even if we accept the number and there’s no reason to believe it, the rise is so slow that people have more than enough time to adjust to it.

Doug says global warming has caused the decline of National Geographic.  (Is that a variation on the creed of the Pastafarians?):

November 5, 2013 at 11:57 am
I grew up in a house where Science, Scientific American, and National Geographic were treasured. Their decline is a true catastrophe from AWG.

Andyj is wrong.  Earth won't be getting colder probably for at least 50,000 years.  He says:

November 5, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Haha. The title says “in 5,000 years”.. That will be right in the middle of the next ice age.
How uneducated are these politically motivated media types?

Newty demonstrates the (questionable) value and purpose of WUWT.  It's to allay fears of those who can't hack the facts about the warming world.  He says:

November 5, 2013 at 12:38 pm
Seriously though I was terrified before I first started coming here. I’ve recently become a father and we did question bringing children into the world when the threat of global warming seemed so certain and so imminent. I work with children and many of them are seriously anxious as a result of just this kind of article that sits in the school library. It reminds me of how I worried about nuclear war years ago. Fear is damaging our young who should grow up with optimism and hope.

Update: to prove my point that Newty's comment demonstrates the purpose of WUWT as giving false comfort to scaredy cats, Anthony Watts has since elevated his comment to an entire article - and made it Quote of the Week.  The comments show that it's not the children who are being scared, it's the parents who can't hack the facts. (Archived here.)


charles nelson says:

November 5, 2013 at 12:42 pm
One often wonders if the entire staff and contributors of publications like National Geographic believe this crap or is it just a handful of people in key positions pushing their own agenda.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the majority of people associated with NG are quietly cringing in shame at the hijacking of their once prized brand.

Harry van Loon is succinct in his dismissal and says:

November 5, 2013 at 12:43 pm
What absolute BS

J Martin is quite ignorant about atmospheric CO2, writing that "there is only 3Gt of CO2 in the atmosphere".  I'll let someone else do the arithmetic.  Suffice to say J Martin is out by at least two orders of magnitude; and if Crispin in Waterloo were correct (I haven't checked), the 23 Gt only equates to what we toss into the air in a matter of months:

November 5, 2013 at 1:04 pm
Crispin in Waterloo said that if all the ice melts then it can absorb 23 GT of co2 but there is only 3 GT of co2 in the atmosphere. So does that mean when the planet enters the next hot house period all life becomes extinct ? But equally the warmer temperatures should mean that the oceans will hold less co2 so maybe life survives. As the world would have to heat up before the ice melted that would release extra co2 which would then be reabsorbed by the melting ice. Could make for an interesting graph.

Stephen Skinner isn't familiar with the carbon cycle and says:

November 5, 2013 at 1:41 pm
If it takes more than 5,000 years to melt all the worlds land ice, if we carry on as we are, then that assumes we have 5,000 years worth of oil, coal and gas? I thought we are about half way through or somewhere near peak oil or is that not the case?

jono1066 says:

November 5, 2013 at 1:45 pm
looks ok to me,
looking at the maps I see a very small and acceptable percentage change in land area,
especially as the new land of the antarctic and greenalnd etc would be `new land` and you cant suggest that just because some inland areas would be below see level they would automatically be filled with water, and why would there be less vegetation with all that heated water around ?
I dont see the big problem (apart from who would believe that we could influence the earth to do something it wasnt going to do anyway)

Billy Liar says:

November 5, 2013 at 1:48 pm
I don’t believe that earth can possibly lose its ice as long as there is land at the South Pole.
Wake me up in a 100 million years time when Antarctica has drifted away from the geographic pole.

Antonia says:

November 5, 2013 at 1:50 pm
I’ll believe this crap when I see prestige waterfront properties in Sydney going for a song.
I cancelled my son-in-law’s gift subscription a few years ago. You’d think the head honchos at NG would wake up to themselves with all the cancellations. The fools probably blame the internet.

sophocles fakes being bored (yawn) then proceeds to write a very long post, which belies the yawn and says "it can't happen" (excerpt):

November 5, 2013 at 2:13 pm

Yawn.

So what? It can’t happen. As others have pointed out, there isn’t enough
sequestered FF (Fossil Fuel) to create enough CO2 to melt all the ice.
If we tried, the plants would just love it and all the little beasties in the seas
which created all the lime-stones and chalks would soon soak it all up.
But no, won’t happen. We’re not in control despite what the Witch Hunters
think. We’re in an Ice Age. To be a wee bit more precise, we’re in the
Holocene Interstadial (about the 17th or 18th Interstadial) of the Quaternary
or Pleistocene Ice Age.

The Ice Age is about 2.5 MegaYears old, It’s very young, as Ice Ages go.
It’s got another 60 or more MegaYears to run before this planet returns to
ice-free conditions.

papiertigre says:

November 5, 2013 at 2:14 pm
In all seriousness though, lets ask the question “what if…?”
First thing to observe is water is heavier than ice. So if all this extra water is compressing the Pacific basin, the land around the edges (Oregon California Peru Chile Japan Russia) is going to be pushed up. Spectacular earthquakes and eruptions will occur as the ocean plate is subducted by the coastal plates, but the net effect will be slim to no change in apparent sea level.  On the bright side: San Francisco’s death grip on California politics will be shaken up.

Serial disinformer Vincent Gray flounders in rising seas at WUWT

Anthony Watts, denialist blogger at wattsupwiththat.com has copied and pasted another disinformation article, this time by Vincent Gray from New Zealand (archived here).  Vincent Gray is writing at WUWT about sea level and gets lots and lots wrong.  Which is to be expected.  Vincent Gray has devoted the past few years to his new career of climate science disinformer.

Anthony Watts seems to think he should be shown respect because he's getting very old.  Vincent Gray is a climate science denier going back a few years now.  He founded the science-disinformation organisation "New Zealand Climate Science Coalition" back in April 2006 back when he was a sprightly 84 year old. Here is a bit of background on him from Wikipedia:

Credit: Vincent Gray
Source: Wikipedia

Vincent R. Gray (born 1922, London) is a New Zealand-based chemist, and a founder of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.

Gray has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge University after studies on incendiary bomb fluids made from aluminium soaps. He has had a long scientific career in the UK, France, Canada and China working on petroleum, plastics, gelatin, timber, paint, adhesives and adhesion, coal, and building materials with well over 100 scientific and technical articles, patents and chapters in books. In New Zealand, he was the first Director of Building Research and later, Chief Chemist of the Coal Research Association.[1][2] He has also published many articles and reports, seven in peer-reviewed journals. 

Some bits Vincent Gray got right...

What does Vincent say that's wrong?  It would take a lot less space to write about what he said that was right.  Here's an example of what he got right:

Chapter 13 of the IPCC 5th WGI Report claims that sea level will rise by an amount between 0.26 to 0.97 metres by 2100 according to which of their new scenarios actually happens

Vincent has given numbers from bottom of the "likely" range of the highest mitigation scenario, RCP2.6, to the top of the "likely" range of the no mitigation scenario, RCP8.5.  This is discussed on page 13-47 of the AR5 WG1 report.  The "likely" ranges are given as 0.4 metres for RCP2.6 and 0.73m for RCP8.5.  So even if we manage to reverse global warming this century (RCP2.6), seas will continue to rise as the earth system moves towards a new equilibrium.

Vincent goes through a few basics by way of introduction.  He is correct that for most of us land-dwelling organisms, it's the height of the sea relative to the land that's of most interest.  But that's about as far as "correct" goes in Vincent's article.

Vincent refers to the rather nice map from the UK's Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL).  You can click on the map to see the local sea level changes for different coastal locations as measured by tide gauges.  PSMSL recommends only using RLR (Revised Local Reference) data for time series.

So Vincent Gray got a couple of things right...but it's not long before he gets it horribly wrong.

Sea level is rising around the world

I won't go through everything that Vincent Gray wrote.  I'll just select a few of his "wrongs".  Vincent put up Figure 13.23 from page 13-117 of the IPCC report.  I took my own snapshot as below.  Click to see the larger version:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 page 13-117

Figure 13.23: Observed and projected relative net sea level change (compare Figure 13.20) near nine representative coastal locations for which long tide-gauge measurements are available. The observed in situ relative sea level records from tide gauges (since 1970) are plotted in yellow, and the satellite record (since 1993) is provided as purple lines. The projected range from 21 CMIP5 RCP4.5 scenario runs (90% uncertainty) is shown by the shaded region for the period 2006–2100, with the bold line showing the ensemble mean. Colored lines represent three individual climate model realizations drawn randomly from three different climate models used in the ensemble. Station locations of tide gauges are: (a) San Francisco: 37.8°N, 122.5°W; (b) New York: 40.7°N, 74.0°W; (c) Ijmuiden: 52.5°N, 4.6°E; (d) Haldia: 22.0°N, 88.1°E; (e) Kanmen, China: 28.1°N, 121.3°E; (f) Brest: 48.4°N, 4.5°W; (g) Mar del Plata, Argentina: 38.0°S, 57.5°W; (h) Fremantle: 32.1°S, 115.7°E; (i) Pago Pago: 14.3°S, 170.7°W. Vertical bars at the right sides of each panel represent the ensemble mean and ensemble spread (5–95%) of the likely (medium confidence) sea level change at each respective location at the year 2100 inferred from the four RCPs 2.6 (dark blue), 4.5 (light blue), 6.0 (yellow), and 8.5 (red).

Vincent makes the claim in relation to the above that:

Every one of these actual measured sea levels have shown no sign of change for at least ten years, yet all the projections claim that this settled behaviour will suddenly change to an upwards level of around half a metre by the end of the century.

No sign of change for at least ten years, he claims.  He's wrong!

Being naturally skeptical of people who have a history of lying, I checked.

Here are charts from the source that Vincent seems to have recommended, PSMSL.  I've managed to plot all but one of the locations he referred to when he said that seas weren't rising.  I couldn't find a recent series for "Bay of Bengal".  I'll leave it to you to decide just how many of the "every one" Vincent got woefully wrong.  As always, you can click the animated image for a larger view.

Data Source: PSMSL

Why Vincent decides on ten years to make a judgement is anyone's guess.  But even looking at a mere ten years of data there are only three of the above charts that Vincent chose for which it could be argued there is no perceptible rise since 2002.  For some of them the recent rise is very large.  And in all of them the seas are rising inexorably over time.

The temperature rise will be greatest in the Arctic

Vincent writes the contrary:

All the models assume that any temperature rise will be least at the poles and greatest at the tropics because the water vapour feedback is lower at the poles..They do not mention Antarctica where the ice is currently increasing

He's got this one back to front.  Models don't "assume", they project.  Models don't indicate that the temperature rise will be greatest at the tropics, they indicate that the temperature will rise most in the Arctic, which is what has been happening.  Here is how the IPCC projects temperature to change in different parts of the world as the world heats up.

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Chapter 14 page 14-144

FAQ 14.1, Figure 1: Projected 21st century changes in annual mean and annual extremes (over land) of surface air temperature and precipitation: a) mean surface temperature per °C of global mean change

The chart above indicates that most of the Arctic region will heat up by two degrees or more for every one degree increase in global average surface temperature - except for an area just south of Greenland. The land will heat up more quickly than the oceans.  The Antarctic will rise just a tad more quickly than the average surface temperature - and land areas in the tropics will heat up more than average, but not as much as the Arctic.

You'll have noticed that he got it wrong  about the Antarctic, too.  Sea ice in the Antarctic hit a record high this winter but sea ice doesn't affect sea level.  And on the continent ice is melting.  There is a net loss. Melting ice in Antarctica is estimated to be adding 0.59 ± 0.20 millimeter a year to global sea level. Any accumulation in the east is more than offset by the melting in the west and on the peninsula.

No measurements?

Vincent writes:

There are no measurements of temperatures on ice anywhere, on ice caps, oceans or glaciers. In all cases there are other influences.on their behaviour. In the Arctic it is the temperature of the ocean and the behaviour of the ocean oscillations.

I don't know what he's going on about here.  What does he mean by saying there are no temperature readings or records on ice or in the oceans.  Of course there are.  Denier Don Easterbrook will be very upset with him for telling that lie!

The temperature of the ocean influences temperatures on land in lots of places.  Extra hot oceans are being blamed for Australia's run of broken heat records over the past year.  Thing is, what's causing the oceans to get warmer?  It's all those extra greenhouse gases!

The ice in the Arctic is "growing" because it's winter, dummy!

Vincent writes:

The ice in the Arctic is beginning to grow now

Of course it is.  The Arctic is heading for winter.  But ice in the Arctic is on a death spiral.  Even science deniers should know that:

Getting back to sea level projections

Sea level projections rely on estimates of how quickly the ice sheets in Antarctica and the Arctic will melt.  And how quickly glaciers all around the world will melt.  But particularly the ice sheets on Greenland and in Western Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula.  If the ice sheets melt faster than expected then seas will rise more quickly, needless to say.  As it is, the ice will melt no matter what we do and the sea is going to rise a lot more than half a metre in the next few centuries.  What we can control is how much hotter the earth will get, which will determine to some extent how fast these ice sheets melt and probably how much of them melt.

The IPCC report states on page 13-108 that:

The total sea level commitment after 2000 years is quasi-linear with a slope of 2.3m °C^–1.

So over millenia, seas are expected to rise more than ten metres if the global surface temperature rises by 4.5°C.  And that sort of temperature rise is definitely on the cards the way we're going.

If all the ice were to melt, seas would rise about 70 meters - but that's over thousands of years, not decades. However seas may well rise by more than a couple of meters sometime in the next couple of hundred years - if not sooner then later.  This will spell a lot of trouble.  Not just for people who live on the coast but for the world as a whole.

From the WUWT comments

The comments are archived here with the main article.

Go Home is a lateral thinker and says:

October 30, 2013 at 8:00 pm
Once the seas get too high, we just need to start sequestering water in the antarctic. Problem solved. Probably cheaper than trying to slow the oceans rise by cutting co2.

Mike Smith is not at all sceptical about what Vincent writes and says:

October 30, 2013 at 7:05 pm
The models say the sea levels are rising. So, where’s the missing water? Hiding in the deep ocean?

Lyle's comment could be a Poe:

October 30, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Seems to me that measuring sea level a lot like measuring your altitude while jumping on a trampoline. A host of factors come into play in addition to those mentioned such as volcanoes on land, volcanoes at sea, erosion and kids skipping rocks

Hockey Schtick is a conspiracy theorist (as if you couldn't tell from the cyber-name) and writes (excerpt):

October 30, 2013 at 6:14 pm
No problem, just “upjust” the data:
Satellite sea level data has been “adjusted” upward by 34% over past 9 years alone

Mike is battling to sublimate his scepticism, but merely "thinks" without checking so his scepticism loses.  He says he "agrees with the overall thrust":

October 30, 2013 at 9:29 pm
The author appears to be making the case that we should only look at recent tide data (the last ten years) as this is the most accurate and coincidentally agrees with his point that CAGW is overblown. Since global temperatures have been static for 17 years it would be expected that thermal expansion of the ocean would also tend to become static over the last 17 years (with some lag). This seems to be a somewhat circular argument not withstanding the overarching difficulties of obtaining accurate data in the first place. I agree with the overall thrust of the piece but the evidence as presented doesn’t really support it one way or the other.

Denier weirdness: Anthony Watts walks on water in NYC after the seas have risen

More denier weirdness.  Anthony Watts, denier blogger at WUWT, found two photos of New York City that he seems to think proves that rising sea levels are nothing to worry about (archived here). The top one he thinks was probably taken around 1930 and the lower one was taken in 2010 (click to enlarge).

Credit: Fairchild Aerial Surveys Inc.
Source: NOAA

Credit: Gryffindor
Source: Wikipedia

Anthony is on a sea level denial kick with two articles in as many days.  He writes:

While there have been a lot of changes, most notably the mature trees now in Battery Park, one thing is clear – the city has not been inundated by sea level rise even though the NOAA Battery Park tide gauge indicates a rise of about 0.22 meter ( 8 3/4 inches)...

... As always, I remind our readers: Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history

That's good to know.  New York City is 22 cm closer to flooding than it was 80 years ago.  Is Anthony trying to argue that because Battery Park isn't permanently under water yet, that means that New York City will be okay forever?  When seas rise by another meter later this century or early in the next, or when when seas rise by several meters over the next few centuries - well, I guess Anthony and his readers won't be around at the end of this century so that might explain his lack of concern.

I reckon his article comes under the category of denier weirdness.  Is this what "okay" looks like?

FDR Drive, flooded by Hurricane Sandy, October 29, 2012
BuzzFeed

When seas rise half a metre, the edges of lower Manhattan will flood 20 times a year

As the ice melts, seas could be a metre higher within 80 or 90 years - or up to twice that.  From The Wall Street Journal (the New York financial district is one of the areas most at risk) - the future is now and it will get worse as sea levels rise:

While most of New York is above sea level, its subways, telecommunications cables, fiber-optics networks, plumbing and power mains aren't. "There is so much underground," says urban water management consultant Piet Dircke at Arcadis, one of four engineering firms that recently developed concepts for a storm surge barrier here. "The economic impact of flooding could be huge."...

...Under certain conditions, a hurricane now could generate a 30-foot-high storm surge and flood 100 square miles of New York. If ice melts and sea level rises, that risk increases. "If you have 20 inches (0.5 m) of sea level rise, the edges of lower Manhattan would flood 20 times a year," says Douglas Hill, a consulting engineer at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. "It would look like Venice."

Read the full article here.

Click here for a map of how rising seas will affect New York City.  You can choose different levels.

From the WUWT comments

Different people react differently - but not many WUWT-ers are denying outright that New York could be in trouble.  Click here for the archived article and comments.

Greg Goodman says:

September 21, 2013 at 8:05 am
Ya gotta admit the water does kinda look higher ;)

johnmarshall says:

September 21, 2013 at 8:16 am
Comparing those two photographs above it looks like a small sea level fall. There has been some reclamation round Battery Park in the mean time which might confuse the issue but nothing alarming with sea levels.

Darren Potter says:

September 21, 2013 at 8:35 am
Sea level isn’t rising, instead tide gauge is sinking do to anthropological expansion / construction. Which resulted in land subsiding under weight of the numerous and massive buildings crammed full of people.  Setting aside the sinking… The air sure looks a whole lot cleaner now than it did back in 1930s. Appears that increasing CO2 ppm, results in less Smog.

Jimbo says:

September 21, 2013 at 8:35 am
As one commenter mentioned on the other Battery Park thread much of Manhattan is reclaimed land. They asked what effect does millions of tonnes of steel, concrete and other human structures have on subsidence? (I paraphrase.)

Matt Ridley loses the plot, falls back on "CO2 is plant food"

I've been watching WUWT waiting for an article on the amazing and appalling one in a hundred year flood in Colorado.  But despite claiming to be an ex-tele weather announcer, and despite living close by in California, Anthony isn't interested in such things.

Instead, joining the list of crank articles on WUWT, Anthony favours a Matt Ridley "CO2 is plant food" bit of idiocy (archived here).  Here is a video from Peter Sinclair that hits that old denier meme on the head:

A spate of silly articles on WUWT - but what's new?

As usual there is a spate of silly articles coming out in advance of the new IPCC report later this month.  Anthony Watts is putting up all sorts of nonsense and it's hard to tell which is worse.

First - Tim "slayer" Ball can't read a simple chart

Yesterday he had Tim Ball, who denies the greenhouse effect, claiming it's been cooling for the past seventeen years (archived here). If Tim was interested in facts, he'd be saying that the average global surface temperature hasn't gone up in two years - not since the record high in 2010.  Instead he tries to bluff and bluster about 17 years.  Here's a chart showing 1995 (2012 minus 17) and 1996 (2013 minus 17) that demonstrates how woefully wrong is serial disinformer and greenhouse effect denier, Tim Ball.

Data source: NASA

Next it's Matt "CO2 is plant food" Ridley

Now the latest spin on WUWT is from Matt Ridley, who has gone completely nuts claiming that global warming will be "good".  All this would be laughable, if it weren't so sad.  What is it that addles people's brains to the extent that they can't accept reality?

Anthony thinks he has "BREAKING: IPCC AR5 report to dial back climate sensitivity" (archived here).  Whether that is true or not (see Justin Gillis NYT article), the article itself shows that Ridley has lost the plot completely. Matt tries to claim: (there is a) very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet.

Good grief.  Remember, that's coming from a self-labelled "rational optimist".  Irrational is more like it.  Ridley makes a ludicrous appeal to an "authority" that he pulled out of thin air - unnamed "experts":

Most experts believe that warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels will result in no net economic and ecological damage. 

Matt has a habit of making up stuff.  His "most experts" probably include deniers like Anthony Watts.  No rational person thinks that "less than two degrees" will result in "no net economic or ecological damage".  Governments picked 2 degrees to aim for as a cap because they figured that we might just survive that - albeit at great cost to the economy and the environment.

Matt's "most experts" are not climate scientists, that's for sure.  Not only is his claim about "most experts" not true, but at present we are on track to well exceed a doubling of carbon emissions this century which, even with the most conservative estimates of sensitivity, means that we are heading for very serious climate change with dire consequences.  If Matt Ridley and Anthony Watts and other science deniers have their way, we won't be worried about what damage a doubling of CO2 will bring, we'll be facing damage that a trebling or quadrupling of CO2 will bring - or worse.

I had to go to the Wall Street Journal (archived here) to read the rest of his silliness.  For example:

Warming of up to 1.2 degrees Celsius over the next 70 years (0.8 degrees have already occurred), most of which is predicted to happen in cold areas in winter and at night, would extend the range of farming further north, improve crop yields, slightly increase rainfall (especially in arid areas), enhance forest growth and cut winter deaths (which far exceed summer deaths in most places). Increased carbon dioxide levels also have caused and will continue to cause an increase in the growth rates of crops and the greening of the Earth—because plants grow faster and need less water when carbon dioxide concentrations are higher.

"Extend the range of farming further north" - does he seriously imagine that farming is going to suddenly sprout up on the Greenland ice sheet?  I wonder if he thinks that the sun will stay up for longer as the world warms?  And what about all the farming south that will go under?

"Improve crop yields?" - what about the reduction in crop yields as marginal areas extend further, as places like south western USA and south western Australia become even drier and hotter?

"Slightly increase rainfall in arid areas"? Not so.  Dry areas are generally expected to become drier and wet areas wetter.  Rainfall intensity will continue to increase.  Downpours aren't good for topsoil.

As for his silly "CO2 is plant food" argument - if everything else is equal, C3 plants (wheat etc) do respond to an increase in CO2.  But if there's no water or too much water it won't help the crop.  And it doesn't matter how much extra CO2 there is when it's too hot and dry.

Then Matt goes into full-on - "people in low lying coastal areas can go hang":

Up to two degrees of warming, these benefits will generally outweigh the harmful effects, such as more extreme weather or rising sea levels, which even the IPCC concedes will be only about 1 to 3 feet during this period.

Matt Ridley dismisses the sea level rise as "only 1 to 3 feet over this period".  "Only"? I'm almost lost for words with that one.  That means he cares little about places like Miami, much of which would be seriously damaged with a one foot rise in sea level.  Just look at the damage that Sandy wrought with a much smaller rise in sea level.  From Jeff Goodell at Rolling Stone:

With just three feet of sea-level rise, more than a third of southern Florida will vanish; at six feet, more than half will be gone; if the seas rise 12 feet, South Florida will be little more than an isolated archipelago surrounded by abandoned buildings and crumbling overpasses. And the waters won't just come in from the east – because the region is so flat, rising seas will come in nearly as fast from the west too, through the Everglades.

Not that Matt Ridley cares, he lives in England.  So what will happen to his little island after he's departed it? Here is one estimate - with a rise of one metre, the risk that the Thames Barrier is breached goes to one in ten years.  Bye bye London:

"With 50cm of sea level rise we would expect that level of protection to go down from 1 in 1,000 years to about 1 in 100 years, so under that scenario in every year there would be a 1 per cent chance of flooding. If you have a metre rise you go down from 1 in 1,000 years to 1 in 10 years," Professor Vaughan said.

We can expect more ludicrous articles like this one over the next few weeks as the people who don't want to mitigate harmful global warming deny the latest IPCC report of the science.

And to think that Anthony Watts complains about being lumped in with all the other deniers.  If he doesn't want people to think he rejects climate science, he will need at the very least to stop posting any and all contributions from "guest denialist authors" like Matt Ridley, perennially puzzled Bob Tisdale, Tim Ball, Christopher Monckton, Steve "mad, mad, mad" Goreham, David "funny sunny" Archibald and others.  And he'd have to stop making silly claims like he did yesterday, with his "it's natural" and other denier memes.

From the WUWT comments

As usual the fake "skeptics" at WUWT regulars aren't the least bit sceptical.  Here is a sample of the reaction:

Lanny says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:23 am
So basically the whole “Global warming thing” has been a tempest in a teapot.

Steve Jones is an uber conspiracy nutter who says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:39 am
They are putting an awful lot of effort into calculating these temp rises v. probability and none of it is via the scientific method. Their concern is to keep their gravy train rolling whilst distancing themselves from the more ridiculous projections that real world data is falsifying right now.
Let’s hope the IPCC falls off this tight-rope and soon.

JustMEinT Musings thinks global warming is one big joke and says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:41 am
so does this mean that Dr. Train Driver/engineer will be out of a job now :-)

Birdieshooter is completely ignorant of climate science and says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:42 am
Since earlier projections of increases in extreme weather,ie, hurricanes and tornadoes etc, have not come to pass, I wonder how they will address that aspect.

ConTrari is another deluded conspiracy nutter who says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:54 am
The basic question for IPCC in a world that is cooling not only in temperature but also in attitudes towards them, is how to preserve their status and funding. So they must backpaddle a bit, to avoid the danger of being called activist alarmists. It is, however, a razorthin edge to walk along, with the abyss of oblivion and insignificance on the other side of the knife’s edge.
They may adopt the practical view that in order to keep themselves clothed, warm and well-fed, the vision of a boiling globe and a starving humanity must be pushed a bit into the background.

Anthony Watts doesn't want to be thought of as a "denier" - ha! He and his blog are a joke!

Rising seas - maybe one or up to two metres this century

What do "a lot of scientists" think about sea level

If we're going to plan infrastructure for the next few decades, should we plan for the minimum projected sea level rise or the maximum?  I'd argue for the maximum.  It's fine if it doesn't happen but if it does we don't want to get caught out.

There has been quite a bit of interest in sea levels lately.  On WUWT today Anthony Watts has posted an article by Bjørn Lomborg who is scoffing at Justin Gillis on NPR. Bjørn Lomborg wrote the following, presenting it as if it were a direct quote (which it wasn't) as:

Justin Gillis tells NPR how much sea levels will rise:
“experts believe sea levels will rise at least 3 feet in the next century, and that number could be as much as 6 feet.”

The links in the WUWT article all went to some facebook pages but I figured it would be worthwhile seeing what Justin Gillis actually said in that interview.  So I googled  and found that the supposed quote was from a summary of an interview on NPR from 21 March this year - and it wasn't a direct quote.  Here is what NPR reported:

Gillis says experts believe sea levels will rise at least 3 feet in the next century, and that number could be as much as 6 feet.

A pretty serious problem

So then I went to the interview transcript to see what Justin Gillis actually said and came up with with this.  Note the section I've printed in bold italics.

DAVIES: So the melting of the land ice will contribute to sea level rise, unlike the melting of the ice in the ocean?

GILLIS: No question about that, and in fact the ocean is rising already. Many people know this. It's gone up about eight inches or so in the last century. That doesn't sound like much, but if you can imagine a very gently sloping shoreline, even eight inches of sea level rise has meant a whole lot of erosion. And in fact people have spent billions of dollars along the coastlines of the United States battling erosion already.

Now we're trying to understand, well, how much more sea level rise are we going to get over how long a period? The essential question is really how fast will this unfold. And a lot of scientists lately have been coming to the conclusion that we could fairly easily see three feet or so of sea level rise in the coming century and, you know, possibly as much as six feet.

So if we get that much, that's going to start to become a pretty serious problem.

The context: "The essential question is really how fast will this unfold."  and "we could fairly easily see three feet or so...". There is no "at least three feet" in the transcript.  That was what NPR said, not what Justin Gillis said.  See how in the various repeats a nuanced but informed speculation is turned into a bald certainty by NPR and then presented by Lomborg as a direct quote from Justin Gillis?  And the denialists call people who accept mainstream science "alarmists"!  It does pay to do your own research.

Now Lomborg insists that Justin Gillis is wrong (in what he didn't say) -  and refers readers to a recent AR5 draft, which I think he's arguing Justin Gillis should have seen back in March when he did the interview.  Time travel is no barrier to contrarians and lukewarmers.  Lomborg writes:

So, Gillis tells us the one end of the spectrum is 3 feet and the highest 6 feet, while the the UN says 1 foot to 2.7 feet. His *lowest* estimate is higher than the *highest* of the UN Climate Panel’s new, higher estimate.

Well, no he didn't tell us that.  You are wrong there, Dr Lomborg.  What Justin Gillis reported was "a lot of scientists have been coming to the conclusion that we could fairly easily see three feet or so of sea level rise in the coming century..."

The one bit of progress at WUWT is that they are touting the IPCC as the 'bible' on climate, for a change!

CSIRO confirms that we could see one to two metres by 2100, but probably no higher

What does Australia's CSIRO have to say on the subject?  I found this report, which reports "recent progress in understanding sea-level rise and also clarify confusion around interpretations of the IPCC sea-level projections".  The CSIRO report is not definitive.  For example:

Recent interpretations of geological data suggest that at the time of the last interglacial (~125,000 years ago), when sea level was close to today’s value, there was a period when “...the average rate of sea-level rise [was] 1.6 m/century.”14 This demonstrates that sea-level rise of 1 m or more by the year 2100 is plausible. (page 8)

...There is increasing concern about the stability of both the Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheets leading to a more rapid rate of sea-level rise. While our understanding of the relevant processes is limited, it is important to recognize that the uncertainties are essentially one-sided. That is, the processes can only lead to a higher rate of sea-level rise than current projections. (page 9)

The CSIRO booklet has a lot more information and sets out the factors affecting sea level quite well.  The main message is that ice will melt and seas will rise and they won't stop rising at midnight on 31 December 2099.  The other main message is that we have the power to limit the sea level rise, should we feel inclined to do so.  There is more on this page on the CSIRO website:

The AR4 explicitly states that larger rises cannot be excluded and its projections for sea-level rise do not give a best estimate or an upper bound. Note that since publication of the AR4, Pfeffer et al. (2008) have argued that a rise in excess of 2 metres is "physically untenable," and that a maximum rise of 0.8 metres (near the upper end of the IPCC AR4 projections) is more plausible.

So based on the best information I can find from CSIRO, seas may well rise by 3 feet (one meter) and could go as high as six feet (two metres) by 2100 but are not likely to go higher than that this century.  But they will keep rising over the coming centuries.

Many of you will have read the following on The Conversation or at RealClimate.org or elsewhere.  It is more confirmation that we cannot be complacent about sea levels.  Dr Levermann also talks of an upper limit this century of around two metres, same as Justin Gillis reported the 'experts' as saying and the same as reported by the CSIRO.

The inevitability of sea level rise

By Anders Levermann, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Small numbers can imply big things. Global sea level rose by a little less than 0.2 metres during the 20th century – mainly in response to the 0.8 °C of warming humans have caused through greenhouse gas emissions. That might not look like something to worry about. But there is no doubt that for the next century, sea level will continue to rise substantially. The multi-billion-dollar question is: by how much?

The upper limit of two metres that is currently available in the scientific literature would be extremely difficult and costly to adapt to for many coastal regions. But the sea level will not stop rising at the end of the 21st century. Historical climate records show that sea levels have been higher whenever Earth’s climate was warmer – and not by a couple of centimetres, but by several metres. This inevitability is due to the inertia in the ocean and ice masses on the planet. There are two major reasons for the perpetual response of sea level to human perturbations.

One is due to the long lifetime and warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Once emitted carbon dioxide causes warming in the atmosphere over many centuries which can only be reduced significantly by actively taking the greenhouse gas out again. This is because both the amount of heat and carbon dioxide the ocean can absorb is reduced, and so the temperature stays up for centuries or even millennia. Of course, not cutting emissions would exacerbate the problem even further.

The other reason is that both the ocean and the ice masses are very big and a warming of the surrounding atmosphere will only penetrate slowly, but inevitably, into them. As a consequence their sea level contribution continues even if the warming does not increase. Sea level rise over the last century has been dominated by ocean warming and loss of glaciers. Our recent study indicates that the future sea level rise will be dominated by ice loss from the two major ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica – slumbering giants that we’re about to wake.

Sea level rise contributions over 2000 years from: 

ocean warming (a), mountain glaciers (b), 

Greenland © and Antarctic (d) ice sheets. 

The total sea level commitment (e) is about 

2.3m per degree of warming above pre-industrial.

It is easier to understand a future world that has adjusted to a new equilibrium of higher temperatures than it is to understand the dynamic (perhaps rapid) transition from today’s world to a warmer one. That is why we used physical models for the ocean, the mountain glaciers and the big ice sheets to compute how the systems would be different if the world was warmer.

What we found was that for each degree of global warming above pre-industrial levels the ocean warming will contribute about 0.4 metres to global mean sea-level rise while Antarctica will contribute about 1.2 metres. The mountain glaciers have a limited amount of water stored and thus their contribution levels off with higher temperatures. This is over-compensated for by the ice loss from Greenland, so that in total sea level rises quasi-linearly by about 2.3 metres for each degree of global warming (see figure).

How fast this will come about, we do not know. All we can say is that it will take no longer than 2,000 years. Thus the 2.3 metres per degree of warming are not for this century. They need to be considered as our sea level commitment – the sea level rise that cannot be avoided after we have elevated global temperatures to a certain level.

Ben Strauss of Climate Central has considered the different possible future pathways that society might take and computed which US cities are at risk in the long-term. He poses the question as to what year, if we continue with greenhouse emissions at current rates, we will have caused an inevitable sea level rise that puts certain cities at risk.

According to his analysis, within the next few years Miami in Florida will be committed to eventually lie below sea level, while our future actions can still decide on whether we want to one day give up cities such as Virginia Beach, Sacramento, Boston, Jacksonville or New York City.

This is a decision society has to take for future generations. We will need to adapt to climate change in any case, but some things we will not be able to adapt to. Society needs to decide whether we want to give up, for example, the Tower of London, or to put the brakes on climate change so that we don’t have to.


Anders Levermann does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

And if you're not sick and tired of reading about sea levels, there was another article by Justin Gillis recently in the NY Times - you can get it here.  In it he talks about a new paper by O'Leary et al on the possible catastrophic collapse of ice sheets in the last interglacial - as a warning of what might happen this time around - though not immediately.

And if you want more still, you may be interested in this new article by Andy Revkin on Dot Earth.

Anthony Watts sez: Ice don't Melt in Warm Weather!

Wow, the crazy is coming thick and fast from Anthony Watts today.  In the space of not much more than 24 hours he's made a hash of a false allegation against the IPCC, become quite bewildered by the greenhouse effect, discovered aerosols and turned into a Little Ice Age bouncer, said if scientists agree on science (you know, like planets orbit the sun and stuff like that) then it must be false.  It could be that Anthony's head was turned when he was compared favourably with the High and Most Illustrious Birther and Curer of AIDS, Lord (Not a member of the House of Lords) Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, when he gave a denier presentation to a mob of wacky survivalist(?) medicos.

This time it's "Ice doesn't melt when it gets hot!"

I have a theory that the level of wackiness is inversely related to the number of hits on Anthony's blog.  The WUWT stats have dropped a bit in Alexa so he's pulling out all stops.  He can no longer attract real skeptics, except to laugh at him and his mates. So he's trying to attract people from conspiracy theory websites like "Jo Nova" and "Steve Goddard".  The last time WUWT stats went up Anthony was posting things like "it's insects" and the "Greenland ice sheet is less than 650 years old" (he ended up deleting that one).  While Victor Venema could be right that the spike was an artefact of the Alexa toolbar, it could also have been normal people popping in to have a gander at the supreme stupidity on WUWT.

After Anthony's bewilderment and denial just a few hours ago, that greenhouse gases can increase global temperature, he's topped it by implying that ice doesn't melt in the heat.  He's had to tell a fib about National Geographic first, and put up all his arithmetic workings (in case people think that because he doesn't understand anomalies from a baseline average, it means he can't add up).

Here's his fib.  He's picked up on a cover page from National Geographic, showing seas halfway up the Statue of Liberty.  He says that National Geographic didn't say how long it would take.  Anthony writes:

According to the Nat Geo article “Rising Seas”, it turns out that they didn’t tell their readers about how long it would take to reach the level depicted on the cover, so I’m going to do the calculation for you.

Alright, let's be kind and assume Anthony is illiterate rather than being deliberately deceitful, because National Geographic did indeed say how long it might take.  Here is what National Geographic wrote in the cover page article (my bold italics):

In May the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, the highest since three million years ago. Sea levels then may have been as much as 65 feet above today’s; the Northern Hemisphere was largely ice free year-round. It would take centuries for the oceans to reach such catastrophic heights again, and much depends on whether we manage to limit future greenhouse gas emissions. In the short term scientists are still uncertain about how fast and how high seas will rise. Estimates have repeatedly been too conservative....

...Unless we change course dramatically in the coming years, our carbon emissions will create a world utterly different in its very geography from the one in which our species evolved. “With business as usual, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach around a thousand parts per million by the end of the century,” says Gavin Foster, a geochemist at the University of Southampton in England. Such concentrations, he says, haven’t been seen on Earth since the early Eocene epoch, 50 million years ago, when the planet was completely ice free. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, sea level on an iceless Earth would be as much as 216 feet higher than it is today. It might take thousands of years and more than a thousand parts per million to create such a world—but if we burn all the fossil fuels, we will get there.

Anthony's done lots of sums and they are all there for the less numerate.  After lots of photos complete with little yellow  pink and black words, numbers, arrows and lines, he writes:

That puts the NatGeo waterline at approximately 214 feet, or 65.2 meters above mean sea level.

So - he's two feet below the sea level that National Geographic said "might take thousands of years and more".  Then he has a go at working out how long it would take if we let the seas keep rising.  He says it would take "23537.9 years".

Thing is, Anthony has made one huge assumption in his calculations.  Can you guess what it is?  Anthony has assumed that we will cut greenhouse gas emissions so drastically that seas will only continue to rise at the same rate as now.  No, I'm wrong about that.  His calculations assume that the sea level rise will only be 2.77 mm a year.  He's going by the tide gauge at The Battery - using not any recent trend, but a linear trend going all the way back to 1856 and stopping in 2006.

He's made another pronouncement as well.  Anthony says:

That’s right, 23 thousand 500 years! A new ice age will likely be well underway then, dropping sea levels. 

Anthony gives no basis for saying that.  No science is called upon.  Anthony just decides all by himself that the earth will have a little think, figure "Anthony sez it's about time" and set about having an ice age.

That's not what some scientists think.  In this paper in Science, Berger and Loutre calculate that even without global warming, Earth wouldn't start getting cold for at least another 50,000 years.  And we sure are heading into some global warming.

Anthony Watts assumes the world will cut CO2 emissions quite drastically!

Okay.  So my question to Anthony is - by how much would the world need to cut current CO2 emissions to restrict the sea level rise to that rate for the next 23,000 years and more?  Could it even be done or is a faster rate already built into the system?  What sort of geo-engineering would have to be put in place to stop the Greenland ice sheet from melting, to stop West Antarctic ice sheets from slipping into the sea, to stop all the world's glaciers from melting?

Come on Anthony, show us your workings :(

The National Geographic article is an interesting read if you are not faint of heart.

BTW I'm not suggesting that the world will keep burning fossil fuel and seal the fate of the world for thousands of years.  I'm certainly not suggesting that a total ice melt is inevitable.  But if idiots like Anthony Watts had their way for the next few decades then it could become inevitable.  The Anthony Watts of the world want to have their cake (low sea levels) and eat it too (keep burning CO2 with gay abandon).

We're probably already on track for at least two degrees of warming by the end of this century.  If by some quirk of fate economies didn't collapse as the world heats up and we kept on burning fossil fuels and chopping down forests, then it's not hard to imagine atmospheric CO2 getting well above 1000 ppm over coming decades.  The worse scenario is that economies did struggle or collapse entirely and the world gave up on the shift to clean energy.  Instead people kept on burning whatever fossil fuels they could extract till it all became too hard.

Think about this.  The chart below shows how quickly atmospheric CO2 would accumulate if it rose by 0.55% or 1% a year.  At current concentrations, that's at an initial rate of 2.2 ppm or 4 ppm a year respectively.  The average increase over the past ten years (2003-2012 inclusive) is 2.1 ppm a year, so emissions would have to continue to increase only very slightly for the lower.  If emissions kept increasing exponentially and/or the oceans started to absorb less the higher scenario is within the bounds of possibilities.

How WUWT tries to hide the incline in the sea level at Marshall Islands

Sheesh - this one could hardly be a more blatant example of trying to hide the incline.  And in such a clumsy manner too. Anthony Watts has put up a "short comment" by Nils Axel-Morner, a denier who specialises in denying sea level rises.

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 report describes the above chart:

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).

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"!

Flashback to 1940: Gradually rising earth's temperature and Kirtley Fletcher Mather

From the Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton, Qld. : 1878 - 1954) Monday 3 June 1940

GRADUALLY RISING

Earth's Temperature

The earth's average temperature is gradually rising, perhaps not from year to year or from decade to decade, but certainly over longer periods. As the world gets warmer more and more glaciers melt, oceans increase in depth, and more land is submerged. In that way temperature has a direct bearing on geography.

What would happen if the average temperature on earth shot up by as much as 10 degrees? Dr Kirtley Mather, an American geologist, has considered this very question, and he tells us that such a rise would change the world drastically. Vast expanses of ice in the polar regions would melt, increasing the average depth of the oceans by at least 50 feet. Thousands of square miles of land would be covered by water. Here are some of the possible results : Finland, Holland and Northern Russia would disappear; Norway and Sweden might become a new island; the United States would lose much of its Atlantic coastline, including such cities as New York and New Orleans; the tropics would become too hot for human habitation; the temperate zones would become tropical; and the mild climate of Greenland would attract thousands of settlers.

But no one need be alarmed by such prospects. According to Dr Mather, the 10 degrees rise in   average temperature which might have all these consequences is likely to take at least 15,000 years to develop. The probable increase in the depth of the oceans is an inch every 100 years.

---

Kirtley Fletcher Mather
Acc. 90-105 - Science Service, Records,
1920s-1970s,
Smithsonian Institution Archives

Kirtley Fletcher Mather (1888-1978) was a renowned geologist whose contributions range well beyond the geosciences. He was a scientist with a religious spirit and a social conscience. He graduated from Denison University in 1909, received the Ph. D. in Geology from the University of Chicago in 1915, and was awarded 6 honorary doctorates. Mather taught at the University of Arkansas (1911-1914), Queens University (1915-1918), and Denison University (1918-1924). For 30 years (1924-1954) he was a Professor of Geology at Harvard University, serving terms as Chairman of the Department of Geology and Director of the Harvard Summer School. In 1951, Mather was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and from 1957 to 1961 he was President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After retiring from the Harvard faculty, Mather continued to be very active as a lecturer, reviewer, and social activist.

A superb teacher and productive scholar — as evidenced by his dozen books, 250 professional articles, and 1,200 book reviews—Kirtley Mather was an exemplar of the interdisciplinary approach to understanding the world. His geologic writings concerned geomorphology, petroleum geology, paleontology, and popularizations of all phases of modern geology. His belief in the mutual merits of religion and science received wide attention in 1925 when he participated in the highly publicized Scopes Trial, on the side of Scopes, Darrow, and the evolutionists. A political liberal, Mather frequently opposed movements which he considered to be threats to human freedom and dignity. The rebellion against the Massachusetts Teacher's Oath of 1935 was led by Mather and he was an outspoken critic of the McCarren Act and "McCarthyism" in the 1950s. The volume and diversity of Mather's achievements are impressive, but equally noteworthy is the integrated wholeness of his view of the world.

Read more in (a fascinating and lively read!): Kirtley Fletcher Mather's Life in Science and Society
Bork, Kennard D. The Ohio Journal of Science. v82, n3 (June, 1982), 74-95
http://hdl.handle.net/1811/22847

Or the (boring) Wikipedia entry.


Click here for more flashbacks to climate articles in Australian newspapers.

Denier weirdness about melting ice sheets

Which would you vote for as the most uninformed comment about this study by Wouters et al: Limits in detecting acceleration of ice sheet mass loss due to climate variability.  In the abstract the researchers indicate they are looking to separate short term variability from the longer term melting from global warming:

We find that the record length of spaceborne gravity observations is too short at present to meaningfully separate long-term accelerations from short-term ice sheet variability.:

Choices are:

1. The headline chosen by Anthony Watts: New study: Arctic ice melt may be natural event, no consensus on cause.  (Someone tell Anthony - they know that human-induced global warming is causing the ice to melt.  What they are wanting to do is determine just how fast it's melting from global warming.)

Or

2. Dave who says:

July 16, 2013 at 8:30 am Shouldn’t melting sea ice lower sea level?

Or

3. RT who is probably confusing Antarctic sea ice with continental ice, writing:

July 16, 2013 at 8:45 am  Aren’t the NASA ICESAT satellites newer and show a net gain of ice on Antarctica? The study looking at both GRACE and ICESAT sure interpreted a net gain. I’d hope these researchers are familiar with that study.

Or

4. Ken Hall who says:

July 16, 2013 at 8:27 am  If all this glacial ice melt from Greenland and the Antarctic continent at the south is acceleralting so much, how come sea level rise has slowed down so much? Where is all the water going? Massive inland lakes are not increasing. In fact in areas of rapidly increasing local populations, such fresh water sources in some regions are becoming much smaller. So if the 99% of the ice cover which could increase sea levels, really is melting at an increased rate, surely the rate of sea level rise should be accellerating, but it is not. Why not?

Here is a chart showing the rise in sea level, which is currently around 3.2 mm a year.  It's speeding up not slowing down.

Data Source: U Colorado

 

Update: Anthony has a new article about another study on ice sheet melt. He talks of "quantifying numbers" and doesn't know the difference between determining the rate of melt and the total melt for a given temperature increase.