UN’s Warsaw Climate Conference Makes Desperate Junk Science Sea Level Claim
The UN’s latest Climate Conference (COP19) in Warsaw marks an astonishing new low for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Despite 50,000 angry Polish protesters demanding an end to the shameless fakery of the ‘science’ about man-made global warming, the IPCC now claims that:
“during the last hundred years … the sea level increased for the first time since the last ice age,” Tom Nelson reports.
The claim will come as a big surprise to some of the world’s leading oceanographers.
As the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) recently reported, such a claim is readily discredited. Peer-reviewed studies by experts in sea level rises (not climate ‘scientists’) suggest that no only have sea levels gone on rising irresistably for the last several thousand years, but that there is compelling new evidence pointing to the existance of multidecadal cycles in the historical mean sea level observations from many ocean basins.
Don Chambers from the University of South Florida led the research team that found that tide gauge records from across the globe show oscillations with a period of about 60 years in all ocean basins except the Central/Eastern North Pacific. [1]
Oceanographers are still grappling with the implications of these findings, which seem to suggest a 60-yr quasi oscillation of sea levels. If so, these oscillations are remarkably similar to those identified in other earth/climate systems including ocean circulation, global mean surface temperatures, large-scale precipitation patterns, and atmospheric pressure, among other things.
As Professor Pat Michaels notes: “Many of these cycles can be traced back hundreds of years—an indication of a natural (rather than manmade) origin.”
Oceanographers are building more compelling evidence that the most recent cycle slowed in the 1980s and an acceleration occurred in the following decades. Professor Michaels observes this is “precisely when the IPCC notes that the rate of sea level rise has been increasing.”
As the Chambers study shows:
“The 60-year oscillation will, however, change our interpretation of the trends when estimated over periods less than 1-cycle of the oscillation. Although several studies have suggested the recent change in trends of global [e.g., Merrifield et al., 2009] or regional [e.g., Sallenger et al., 2012] sea level rise reflects an acceleration, this must be re-examined in light of a possible 60-year fluctuation. While technically correct that the sea level is accelerating in the sense that recent rates are higher than the long-term rate, there have been previous periods were the rate was decelerating, and the rates along the Northeast U.S. coast have what appears to be a 60-year period [Figure 4 of Sallenger et al., 2012].”
Michaels concludes that “The bottom line is this: the more people look for the anticipated acceleration in the rate of sea level rise, the less evidence they seem to find in support of it. All the while, we eat into the 21st century with a rate of sea level rise not much different from that experienced during the 20th century—and one which was hardly catastrophic, readily proven by a simple look around.”
Reference:
[1] Chambers, D., M.A. Merrifield, and R. S. Nerem, 2012. Is there a 60-year oscillation in global mean sea level? Geophysical Research Letters, doi:1029/2012GL052885, in press.
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