Sea Level Rise attacked on FOX; gets my Stupid-Story-Award
A story saying that the data about Sea Level Rise had been adjusted “in an attempt to exagegerate the effects of global warming” was featured on the FOX NEWS website on Saturday, June 18
This caused me to rethink my “stupid climate story of the week award” a few days earlier about an article that said we were heading for a mini ice age (see my previous blog post). The FOX piece is a good contender for the Award.
Their full headline was:
“Changing Tides: Research Center Under Fire for ‘Adjusted” Sea-Level Data.
It quotes a lawyer for the Heartland Institute, an organization well known for disputing human impacts on climate.& They explain that researchers at the University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group have adjusted the data by 0.3 mm per year to account for land masses rising. Just to understand the scale of this, the current global rate of sea level rise (SLR) is measured to be just over 3 mm per year. So the adjustment is about 10 percent.
The attorney from Heartland quotes Dr. John Christy, a professor from the University of Alabama, as agreeing that is best to just look at SLR in terms of what you see at the coast. That sounds reasonable, until you understand what they are saying, and the basis of their headline attack, indicating that this is all part of the “Al Gore exaggeration.”
This can be explained rather simply, without any science jargon:
Sea Level has been rising for at least a century — almost 8 inches the last century. The rate of rise has doubled in the last thirty years, and correlates well with the warming ocean temperatures (more than a degree in the last century) and the melting of Greenland and glaciers worldwide for many years now.
Current projections are for sea level to rise by as much as 6-7 feet (1-2 meters) by the end of this century, which will have a devastating effect.
What Dr. Steve Nerem, the Colorado scientist they attack, explains is that they are adjusting for the uplift of the North American continent. As he describes the continent is moving upward ever so slightly as a result of the disappearance of the ice sheets that peaked during the last ice age 20,000 years ago. This is a truly amazing phenomenon that is well accepted by geologists.
The continents are rebounding from the weight of the ice sheets, a few miles in thickness. The uplift is very slight and will decrease. Nerem mentions that it will amount to about an inch this century. Uplift reduces the appearance of sea level rise at the coast.
To explain this and just to use some simple numbers for example. Imagine you had a property at the coastline — on the beach or on a canal. You placed an accurate ruler to measure the water height and were able to average out the tides and waves (which the scientific instruments do).
Over a decade imagine that you measured a six inch increase in water height; that would be the relative rise at that location. But a geologist in the area showed you studies that showed the land had moved upwards a half inch during the same time. (Again, this is an exaggerated figure just for the example.) To know how much the ocean had actually risen, you would have to add the half inch that the land had moved up at your site, to your measurement of six inches. Thus,the true increase in global sea level would have been six and a half inches.
In actual fact the numbers are a bit smaller, and there are MANY other factors to take into account. It is worth noting that in many places the land is SUBSIDING, or going down. For example, this is occurring significantly around Norfolk (Virginia) and New Orleans. In those places the adjustment would be the opposite, to understand what is happening to global sea level.
Such adjustments are necessary to balance the measurement observations so that when it is projected out over the course of the coming decades, that we have as accurate an estimate as possible. It is continually being refined.
For the Heartland Institute and FOX to point to such an adjustment as part of the “global warming hoax” is ridiculous. They have added to public confusion, not understanding. Perhaps that was their intent. They now share my “Stupid Climate Story of the Week Award” with the previous post about us heading into an ice age because of a few years of solar cooling.