Sea level rise has slowed. (It must be time to correct that data!)

Filed under the Semi-Satirical Press.

The Universe is surely conspiring against ecologicist scientists*. Their task is to convince the world that things are dire, and yet just as humans pump out more carbon dioxide pollution than ever before, many natural markers start behaving as if CO2 was having barely any effect at all. It’s all potentially so misleading.

A new paper by Cazenave et al 2014 digs deep to uncover the reasons for yet another unfortunate un-catastrophic trend change.

First, global surface temperatures stopped rising in the late 1990’s. Now, it’s become irrefutable that, for the last ten years, the rate of sea-level rise slowed by thirty percent. Seas were rising at 3.5mm a year up til 2003, then the rate fell to 2.2mm per year for the next eight years. This is exactly what ninety-eight percent of expert Global Climate Models did not predict. The slowing sea level rise is extra problematic because it forms the backbone of the excuse for the long pause in surface warming that wasn’t supposed to happen either.  The fact that it coincided with the global pause in surface temperatures was no comfort at all. The missing heat, after all, must be hidden in the oceans, and that must be causing the oceans to rise even faster than they were before (an obvious, inescapable fact of physics). So now climate modelers are forced to stack excuses — they need an excuse for the excuse. (It’s excuses-squared in the name of science.)

Fortunately, brave scientists have discovered a way to correct the data. The man-made global warming theory is as settled as ever, it is just that the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) has been affecting trends more in the last ten years than in the years before that (see Judith Curry’s discussion). The extra La Ninas after 2003 have drawn water from the oceans, and dumped it onto Brisbane and Somerset and that has been hiding the true man-made sea level rise. After corrections, the adjusted real sea-level rise is 3.3mm annually. The previous 3.5mm rise in the 1990’s has come down to 3.3mm. Thus and verily, the trend has not slowed at all, it’s really been linear for 20 years. (It was supposed to accelerate. I guess there are more adjustments to come?)

The implications are serious. Do we build sea-walls to deal with the actual sea-level rise (2mm a year) or the corrected sea-level rise (3.3mm)? Presumably a Senate Select Committee for Corrective Sea Services will have to be formed to review the implications. How about we build sea-walls to accommodate the actual rise, then measure those walls with climate-science-calipers and “correct” those measurements post hoc. Thus the corrected height of the sea-wall will always exactly match the corrected height of the sea. You know it makes sense…

But what the PDO giveth, the PDO can taketh away. If  La Ninas reduce sea-levels by dumping water over the land perhaps El Ninos raise the oceans artificially by drying out land-masses and keeping the water in the ocean? Apparently El Ninos rain more on the ocean, and La Ninas more on the land.

Ultimately the slowing sea level rise means one of two things. Either:

  1. It’s bad luck. The El Ninos caused a slightly faster sea level rise to occur in the 1990’s (so all the models overestimated the rise) then the La Ninas arrived and took away the fun just as skeptics were gaining momentum. Or:
  2. It was no accident, and conservatives and skeptics have control of the Pacific Trade Winds. (The bastards.)

 

Sea level, Global, 1994, 2000, 2014

GMSL rate over five-year-long moving windows   Figure 2: a, Temporal evolution of the GMSL rate computed over five-year-long moving windows shifted by one year (start date: 1994). b, Temporal evolution of the corrected GMSL rate (nominal case) computed over five-year-long moving windows shifted by one year (start date: 1994).

 

I must say its a marvel that climate scientists didn’t notice how El Ninos were raising sea-levels in the 1990’s. Incredibly bad luck that they didn’t think to ask skeptical questions of the rate back then. Everyone seemed happy (apart from Nils, anyway) to accept the rapid rise at the time. (It’s funny how the Climate ScienceTM downward corrections only seem to happen to the peaks years after the fact but the acceleration of trends occurs in real time.)  I don’t think this study tells us much that is definitive about sea levels, but it shows something about bureaucratized science driven by one-sided grants.

After all is said and done, let’s not forget that the raw satellite measurements of sea levels in the 1990s showed almost no rise at all. So the rise in the 1990’s is already almost entirely thanks to adjustments. These now are adjustments on adjustments.

Worse, Geoff Sherrington also points out that we haven’t measured half the deep oceans, there are mass hydrothermal vents which may be changing in trend and about which we have virtually no data.  “You cannot talk about ocean expansion until you have accurate measurement of the contributions from all sources. The bottom 50% is virtually unmapped.”

Jo says attributing sea level changes 2 kilometers down to “missing heat” from a trace gas 10 kilometers up is “not obvious”. Occams razor on Vodka.

For those who still want to investigate this paper, Graph S3 has the core of it apparently.

Rainfall, Sea level, Cazenave.

Figure S3: Black curve: mean detrended GMSL time series (average of the five satellite altimetry data sets) from January 1994 to December 2011, and associated uncertainty (in grey; based on the dispersion of each time series around the mean). Light blue curve: interannual mass component based on the ISBA/TRIP hydrological model for land water storage plus atmospheric water vapour component over January 1994 to December 2002 and GRACE CSR RL05 ocean mass for January 2003 to December 2011 (hybrid case 1). The red curve is the sum of the interannual mass plus thermosteric components. This is the signal removed to the original GMSL time series. Vertical bars represent the uncertainty of the monthly mass estimate (of 1.5 mm22, 30, S1, S3; light blue bar) and of the monthly total  contribution (mass plus thermosteric component) (of 2.2 mm, ref. 22, 30, 28, 29, S1, S3; red bar). Units : mm.

 Abstract

“Present-day sea-level rise is a major indicator of climate change1. Since the early 1990s, sea level rose at a mean rate of ~3.1 mm yr−1 (refs 2, 3). However, over the last decade a slowdown of this rate, of about 30%, has been recorded4, 5, 6, 7, 8. It coincides with a plateau in Earth’s mean surface temperature evolution, known as the recent pause in warming1, 9, 10, 11, 12. Here we present an analysis based on sea-level data from the altimetry record of the past ~20 years that separates interannual natural variability in sea level from the longer-term change probably related to anthropogenic global warming. The most prominent signature in the global mean sea level interannual variability is caused by El Niño–Southern Oscillation, through its impact on the global water cycle13, 14, 15, 16. We find that when correcting for interannual variability, the past decade’s slowdown of the global mean sea level disappears, leading to a similar rate of sea-level rise (of 3.3 ± 0.4 mm yr−1) during the first and second decade of the altimetry era. Our results confirm the need for quantifying and further removing from the climate records the short-term natural climate variability if one wants to extract the global warming signal10.”

Was this about the “missing energy”? Oh yes it was…

“The term missing energy is related to an apparent inconsistency between interannual variations in the net radiation imbalance
inferred from satellite measurements and upper-ocean heating rate from in situ measurements. Although progress has been achieved and inconsistencies reduced, the puzzle of the missing energy remains, raising the question of where the extra heat absorbed by the Earth is going. The results presented here will further encourage this debate as they underline the enigma between the observed plateau in Earth’s mean surface temperature and continued rise in the GMSL.”

An enigma, I note, that was made more enigmatic by these corrections rather than less so.

Cazenave et al may be right about the ENSO effects on sea-levels, but we know surface temps are not warming, and we know the ARGO buoys didn’t find the missing energy, and we know satellite measures of sea level showed the rate had slowed. The “enigma” is solved by accepting that man-made global warming is a minor force. Or we can do what bureaucratic-science does and adjust the adjustments and make excuses for the excuses until we get the answer our hearts and grants desired.

Last word goes to  Roger Sowell from Judith Curry’s site:

My favorite response to the problem of seas rising is, everyone just eat more fish. There are clearly too many fish in the oceans.

————————-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 REFERENCE

Cazenave, A.,  Dieng, H., Meyssignac, B., von Schuckmann, K., Decharme. B., & Etienne Berthier (2014)  The rate of sea-level rise, Nature Climate Change | Letter   [Abstract] doi:10.1038/nclimate2159

 

Other posts on Sea Levels:

*Ecologicist Scientist (definition): n. A scientist who uses eco-logic, meaning renewable anaerobic reasoning.

(Sorry, I didn’t set out to satirize this paper. It just happened..)

9.5 out of 10 based on 93 ratings

174 comments to Sea level rise has slowed. (It must be time to correct that data!)

  • #
    Robert JM

    The funny thing is that claiming the missing heat is in the oceans actually falsifies CAGW! There is no water vapour positive feedback if the heat is underwater!
    Of course if people pulled their head out of the sand they might notice that clouds are the main driver of global temp.
    tropical clouds vs global temp

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    • #
      the Griss

      “There is no water vapour positive feedback if the heat is underwater!”

      And none in the atmosphere either.

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      • #
        the Griss

        ps.. if you want feedback, you have to have something to start the loop.

        That something DOESN’T EXIST !! Therefore NO FEEDBACK.

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    • #
      Lord Jim

      The funny thing is that claiming the missing heat is in the oceans actually falsifies CAGW!

      But then we get boiling oceans! (Guess that will make it easy to eat the fish…)

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    • #
      Andrew

      Quite so. I regularly annoy my warmy friends by saying “in the ocean? Great – a negative feedback that reduces atmo warming by 99.9999%!”

      Then irritate them more with “so is ocean acidification – if all the CO2s dissolve in the ocean there’s none in the atmosphere even to cause the residual 0.0001% warming. “

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    • #
      Steve

      I am very happy to see this professor speaking common sense….

      http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/global-warming-is-rubbish-says-top-professor.html

      “Written by Neil Hudson, Yorkshire Post on April 29 2014.

      He doesn’t believe in ‘global warming’ and says ‘climate change’ is a meaningless term used as a sop by big business to create money.

      Climate change is once again back on the agenda following the publication of a number of reports from Government and the UN.

      On Monday, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first report in seven years on the now widely accepted phenomenon known as ‘climate change’.

      And this week, the House of Commons Science and Technology committee also published a report, damning the media for confusing ‘fact’ with opinion and pushing the message that, in terms of freak weather, ‘the worst is yet to come’.

      In spite of the seemingly overwhelming tide of scientific opinion on the matter, there are still some who steadfastly refuse to jump on the ‘global warming’ bandwagon.

      Emeritus Professor Les Woodcock is one of them. When I ask the former NASA scientist about ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, he laughs.

      “The term ‘climate change’ is meaningless. The Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial, that is since the Earth was formed 1,000 million years ago. The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis [about] our climate [which says it] has been adversely affected by the burning of fossil fuels in the last 100 years, causing the average temperature on the earth’s surface to increase very slightly but with disastrous environmental consequences.

      “The theory is that the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel is the ‘greenhouse gas’ causes ‘global warming’ – in fact, water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04 per cent.

      “There is no reproducible scientific evidence CO2 has significantly increased in the last 100 years.”

      130

  • #
    Neville

    Good post Jo and don’t forget that glacier retreat has decelerated worldwide since 1950.
    Remember 1950 is the date set by the IPCC as the time when the impact from co2 started. Except in this case it wasn’t, but ya gotta laugh.

    http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/new-paper-finds-worldwide-glacier.html

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    • #
      handjive

      Some inconvenient glacial news:

      Archaeologists have discovered sophisticated prehistoric stone walls deep beneath the surface of Lake Huron that give the clearest portrait yet of the mysterious people who lived in the Great Lakes region at the end of the Ice Age.

      “It’s just way more complex than anything we’ve seen before,” said John O’Shea, a University of Michigan archeologist who published his findings Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

      As the glaciers were beating their final retreat about 9,000 years ago, water in the lake was about 100 metres below today’s level and the Alpena-Amberley Ridge was exposed.
      . . .
      Apparently they rounded the caribou up with jeeps.

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  • #
    Carbon500

    Sea level rises quoted to a fraction of a millimetre? Who believes figures like these? And where on the planet have these amazing increases in sea level made a scrap of difference to anybody?

    321

    • #
      Gasbo

      I would love to know how anyone can arrive at a sea level considering that the tectonic plates are in a constant state of flux.
      The planet isn’t a solid lump of rock but a multi layered orb made of different materials some that are liquid,and these different liquid layers are shifted around by gravitational and magnetic forces.

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      • #

        If the seas will expand with temperature then why won’t the land also?

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        • #
          Gasbo

          I don’t know much about the science but if all this extra water is supposed to turn up from the melt of the Poles won’t the extra weight of the water pushing down onto the lowest points force the land upwards?

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        • #
          jack

          water is a liquid. land is a solid. liquids expand in relation to heat and shrink when cooled. simple science.

          10

          • #
            Rereke Whakaaro

            … liquids expand in relation to heat and shrink when cooled. simple science.

            It is not that simple, when it comes to water.

            All materials expand, to some degree, depending upon the coefficient of expansion. And that includes dirt.

            A significant proportion of land (depending upon location and soil type) is actually water because of organic processes, and sub-surface aquifers. So the rate of expansion will differ, and it is not that simple a science, at all.

            Also, water expands as it freezes, not that we need to worry in a warming world. Except to note that sea levels would marginally decrease if just the floating pack ice melted. But that does not look like simple science to a lay-person.

            Dumbing down the science, is one of the ways that a minority of scientists managed to fool a significant proportion of the population. Let us not be part of that.

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            • #
              Graeme No.3

              Since floating pack ice displaces its own weight of water, I assume you are claiming that in melting it cools the surrounding water slightly (hence shrinking it).

              10

  • #

    Perhaps the volume of CO2 coming out of the sea accounts for a bit of non rise.
    Some water could also be in those now full dams that will never fill again too.

    191

    • #
      the Griss

      “Some water could also be in those now full dams that will never fill again too.”

      Without doing any maths at all.. I’d estimate about 0.00000000000001 mm

      182

      • #

        “Without doing any maths at all.. I’d estimate about 0.00000000000001 mm”. Surely they can fix that with a few isostatic adjustments.
        Better add a lot of full rivers and lush green grass then to help prove disaster.

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  • #

    The Wikipedia article on altimeter. (OK, a bit lazy but its a start).

    Combining these data with the precise location of the spacecraft makes it possible to determine sea-surface height to within a few centimetres (about one inch).

    That is the whole rise measured by satellite altimetry.

    And prior to this

    The two different wavelengths of radio waves used permit the altimeter to automatically correct for varying delays in the ionosphere.

    and

    A microwave radiometer corrects any delay that may be caused by water vapor in the atmosphere. Other corrections are also required to account for the influence of electrons in the ionosphere and the dry air mass of the atmosphere.

    I seriously doubt that they could measure the change in height of a lake with that sort of precision let alone a couple of oceans that usually have waves from 0.3 to 30m.

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    • #
      Roy Hogue

      I see I’m not the only one who has wondered, marveled in fact, about the ability to measure millimeters from a distance of what, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles, when I doubt they can track the position of the satellite to an accuracy of a couple of millimeters. Let’s never mind the waves on the ocean surface. This is like measuring clearance to 2 or 3 thousandths of an inch with a carpenter’s tape measure. Well, not quite that bad but certainly not all that credible.

      Then we have to decide if 3+ millimeters/year is actually alarming. I didn’t lose any sleep over it.

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      • #
        Grant (NZ)

        This is like measuring clearance to 2 or 3 thousandths of an inch with a carpenter’s tape measure

        No. It is like trying to explain to a class of students how big an angstrom is by drawing one on the blackboard in chalk.

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  • #
    Lord Jim

    The Universe is surely conspiring against ecologicist scientists*. Their task is to convince the world that things are dire, and yet just as humans pump out more carbon dioxide pollution than ever before, many natural markers start behaving as if CO2 was having barely any effect at all. It’s all potentially so misleading.

    Once again conjecture trumps observation. Maybe one day CAGW consensus ‘science’ will deign to raise itself to the level of an empirical falsification or confirmation. At the moment it’s stuck in a world of theory dependence where every observation must be made to conform with an a priori view of how things must be.

    190

    • #
      Peter C

      Climate scientists prefer conjecture over observation. That is why the term “Climate Scientist” has become a joke term.
      http://climatechangeeducation.org/videos/youtube/im_a_climate_scientist.html

      Skeptics prefer data. Hence my efforts to examine the workings of a thermos flask. A thermos flask is supposed to keep heat in by reflection from the silvered surface. Hence by analogy, CO2 helps keep the Earth warm by returning Infrared radiation to the surface (down welling radiation).

      My results with the thermos however indicate that radiation energy is conserved by the very low emissivity of the surface, not reflection. Hence radiating gases (ie greenhouse gases), cool the Earth by increasing the emissivity, not keep it warm.

      40

      • #
        Robert JM

        Quantum physics would suggest they both insulate the surface while cooling the atmosphere. The perfect combo for convection!

        20

        • #
          Peter C

          Maybe Quantum Physics does suggest that. However my results so far do not show any heat retention from reflection, once emmissivity is taken into account.

          I hope I can write something coherrent about it for the weekend unthreaded.

          Do you know of any other experiments which might directly address the controversy of the effects of reflected radiation? From my reading it seems experimental physicists of the last century were able to measure the radiation emission of black bodies, leading to the Quantum Theory (Planck and Wein). The absorbtion characteristics of matter however seems to have been passed over.

          20

  • #
    scaper...

    Not going there.

    Hehehehehe

    50

  • #
    ROM

    Jo might moderate me for this from sheer boredom but here goes;

    A stack of selected bits of totally useless information about the world’s Oceans.

    To get an idea on just how big the Pacific actually is relative to the planet, put one of those world map globes on it’s stand at about eye level with the tilted axis of the North Pole facing directly away from you.
    Turn the globe until the 150 degree longitude in the mid Pacific is directly facing you and stand back a couple of metres.

    You will now see NZ , the eastern coast of Australia, on the left. The SW coast of the USA and the west coast of Mexico and just a smidgin of the South western South american continent on the right. and way down at the bottom you will see the Pacific facing coast of Antarctica.

    Plus of course those 25,000 Pacific islands most of which are south of the equator and which vastly outnumber the number of islands in the rest of the world’s oceans

    Thats the Pacific.
    It covers about one third of the Earth’s surface

    The world’s oceans contain about 1.335 billion [ one thousand, three hundred and thirty five million ] cubic kilometres of water .
    Sydney Harbor contains 0.56 cubic kilometes of water

    An estimated 50-80% of all life on earth is found under the ocean surface and the oceans contain 99% of the living space on the planet.
    Less than 10% of that space has been explored by humans. 85% of the area and 90% of the volume constitute the dark, cold environment we call the deep sea.

    The average depth of the world’s oceans is 3688 metres . On land the average height is 840 metres

    The Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench Challenger Deep off Japan is 11,033 meters (36,201 feet) deep.

    The pressure at this deepest point in the ocean is more than 11,318 tons/sq m, or the equivalent of one person trying to support 50 jumbo jets.

    You could take Mt. Everest and place it at the bottom of the trench there would still be over a mile of ocean above it.

    The oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface and contain 97% of the Earth’s water.
    Less than 1% is fresh water, and 2-3% is contained in glaciers and ice caps

    90% of all volcanic activity occurs in the oceans.

    Earth’s longest mountain range is the Mid-Ocean Ridge more than 50,000 km in length, which winds around the globe from the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic, skirting Africa, Asia and Australia, and crossing the Pacific to the west coast of North America. It is four times longer than the Andes, Rockies, and Himalayas combined.

    Mauna Kea is an island and if the distance from the bottom of the nearby Pacific Ocean floor to the peak of the island is measured, then Mauna Kea is “taller” than Mount Everest.
    Mauna Kea is over 10,000 meters tall compared to 8,848 meters for Mount Everest – making it the “world’s tallest mountain”.

    The top three metres of the ocean hold as much heat as the entire atmosphere.

    Antarctica has as much ice as the Atlantic Ocean has water.

    Each year, three times as much rubbish is dumped into the world’s oceans as the weight of fish caught.

    Oil is one of the ocean’s “greatest” resources. Nearly one-third of the world’s oil comes from offshore fields in our oceans. Areas most popular for oil drilling are the Arabian Gulf, the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

    A mouthful of seawater may contain millions of bacterial cells, hundreds of thousands of phytoplankton and tens of thousands of zooplankton.

    10,000 years ago the ocean level was about 110 m lower than it is now. If all the world’s ice melted, the oceans would rise 66 m.

    The average temperature of all ocean water is about 3.5°C.

    The largest recorded tsunami measured 60 m above sea level caused by an 8.9 magnitude earthquake in the gulf of Alaska in 1899 traveling at hundreds of km/hr.

    Oceans; Have 1,100 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere (99.9% of the heat capacity of the Earth’s fluids)

    Contain 90,000 times as much water as the atmosphere (97% of the free water on the planet)

    Receive 78% of global precipitation

    The total amount of carbon in the ocean is about 50 times greater than the amount in the atmosphere, and is exchanged with the atmosphere on a time-scale of several hundred years.

    At least 1/2 of the oxygen we breathe comes from the photosynthesis of marine plants.

    The two most common elements in sea water, after oxygen and hydrogen, are sodium and chloride. Sodium and chloride combine to form what we know as table salt.

    Sea water salinity is expressed as a ratio of salt (in grams) to liter of water. In sea water there is typically close to 3.5 grams of dissolved salts in each liter.
    The normal range of ocean salinity ranges between 3.3-3.7 grams per liter .

    As water travels through the water cycle, some water will become part of The Global Conveyer Belt and can take up to 1,000 years to complete this global circuit.

    Presently about 40% of the world’s population [ 3 billion ] lives within 100 kilometers of the coast.

    And if we run short of water there is another Arctic oceans worth some 1000 kms down under east Asia

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    • #
      RoHa

      “The oceans …. contain 97% of the Earth’s water.”

      And 97% of scientists believe the AGW theory. Coincidence? I think not!

      40

    • #
      Leigh

      “90% of all volcanic activity occurs in the oceans.”
      If your pumping massive quantitys of lava into the oceans, wouldn’t that be displacing massive quantitys of water?
      Wouldn’t that cause minor increments in the sea level?
      Did I not read somewhere in recent months that volcanic activity has slowed in recent years?
      Could that not possibly be associated with the slowing of sea level rises?
      Or does all of the above not auger well with the the catastrophic global warming brigade?
      We are after all arguing about the proverbial bees dick here in measurments of between 2mm and 3.5mm.

      40

    • #
      Rogueelement451

      Could you please provide the source for this?

      00

      • #
        ROM

        I used half a dozen sources including the NOAA and quite a few other ocean based sources and I would have to go back through my history to sort out which was used where as most of the info is from sites I have used a few times before but have to rely on memory mostly for the more unusual information to find the site that has the information
        Plus a number of book marked sites on dozens of subjects, each with sometimes dozens of sites in those book marks.
        I keep on forgetting that I either have them or where the hell I filed them, something to do with my date of birth I’m told and usually finishing up using the search engine.

        Some sources as is usual on the net or anywhere are quite a bit suspect in their data or have data that differs and has to be checked.
        Plus some trusted science sites I take regular looks at which often throws up unusual information , the outlines of which I seem to have the happy knack of remembering and so knowing what to look for.

        There’s gaps! Now what was my name again!?

        In my information quests I always check the URL’s and from the URL can nearly always get some idea on just how official and most probably accurate the site will be in it’s information ‘
        If I am not happy with the general selection of sites the search engines turn up I rewrite the search terms and try again.

        I then check the various selected sites themselves on their information and it only takes seconds to see if it is propaganda or probably genuine and accurate and officially based information with a high degree of believability and accuracy of the data.

        My rejection rate on sites is probably higher than 90% and for information in the sites used maybe 60 to 75 % unless I know the information can be corroborated.

        Nearly all the information on oceans, sea levels, argo floats and etc plus quite a lot of other information I have posted on this thread and Jo’s blog I have already covered nearly two or more ears ago in the Weather Zone climate forum arguments which often got down to the basics and had to research and find that information back then so nearly all of it is being recycled so as to speak..

        The Globe of the world and Pacific oceans relative size example was purely my idea which I went looking for one night out of curiosity a couple of years back .
        The volume of ocean water [ NOAA ] was known but checked as I researched that when arguing about the amounts of CO2 needed to alter the ocean’s Ph to a less alkaline status on the WZ forum.
        The Arctic Ocean sized volume of water a 1000 kms under east Asia is some very new geological and seismic results which has created quite a stir in geological circles and was published a year or so ago in various science sites so a bit of googling found that again.

        That deep water trapped in rocks is the results of long ago tectonic movements of the crustal plates .

        And I don’t use Wiki for this sort of item except as starting point in some cases to check with and against other sources.

        Simply the information in that list was a selection out of maybe three times as much information from half a dozen sources for a number of items that might be of general interest.
        I hope I have helped in some small way to expand our posters and our many lurkers knowledge base of our oceans.

        10

    • #
      Mortis

      “The Pacific. You don’t comprehend it by looking at a globe, but when you’re traveling at four miles a second and it still takes you twenty-five minutes to cross it, you know it’s big.” – Paul Weitz, Commander of the STS-6 mission, the first of the Space Shuttle Challenger flights.

      00

  • #
    Richard

    I don’t know how anyone can still support the CAGW-theory without dying of embarrasment.

    271

    • #
      Leigh

      Richard, I picked up this quote on another blogg.
      I liked it so much I kept it.
      I’ve dropped it in a couple of alarmists blogs as my own.
      My apologies to the original poster but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.
      If it gets a run it doesn’t seem to last long.
      Funny that.
      “If your going to lie for the  “noble cause”  of fighting global warming, don’t.
      There are no “noble cause lies” this false ethic is for rogue politicians and dictators. If the truth is too painful for you, say nothing at all, better still if you are a CAGW follower – say nothing except “sorry” – we have heard more than enough!”

      20

  • #
    Bones

    Don’t blame the universe for the wally warmer idea going south.No BS story with a baseless arguement is going to last forever,they had a good run,collected lots of folding stuff,ruined plenty of lives and adjusted the world population,so now if they all just toddle off somewhere else we can all get back to normal.Does anyone have a big hole we can hide the gangreens in?

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    • #
      Rereke Whakaaro

      … if they all just toddle off somewhere else we can all get back to normal.

      Define “normal”.

      10

      • #
        Greg Cavanagh

        May I give this a go?

        Normal = Unimpeded by somebody else’s ideology.

        30

      • #
        Bones

        G’day RW,normal would be when your pocket is no longer being raided by a world wide organization with a BS story and a lot of expensive remedies for a non problem.Local scam artists are easy to deal with,but when they involve government help as in the CT,that is not normal.If we could have a few thrown in the clink for misleading info and straight out lies,that would be a bonus.

        40

        • #
          Rereke Whakaaro

          Unimpeded by somebody else’s ideology … and

          … normal would be when your pocket is no longer being raided by a world wide organization with a BS story and a lot of expensive remedies for a non problem.

          And during what period of history did we not have at least one group of people doing those things?

          10

  • #
    ROM

    Oh for some pics on here as this presentation is barred from copying !

    Quoted from Frame 3 of NASA’s PP Presentation “Geodetic Reference Antenna in Space” (GRASP): June 2011

    Impact of TRF Error on Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) Record from Space borne Altimetry:

    [ TRF = Terrestrial Reference Frame ]

    Quoted ;
    Impact of TRF on GMSL [ Global Mean Sea Level ] Record from Tide Gauges ; competing approaches for TRF realization yield estimates for sea-level rise ranging from 1.2 to 1.6 mms /yr.

    Somebody is fiddling the sea level books and how, for these are the real actual increases in sea level from a workshop presentation on reducing satellite sea level measurement errors down to;

    quoted from frame 3 of this presentation.

    Desired accuracy for measuring global mean sea level [ GMSL] rise is 0.1 mm/yr

    And that Boulder, Colorado presentation I suspect was never supposed to get into the public domain.

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      ROM

      Strangely I haven’t come across any reference in the commentaries, maybe because I haven’t read all of them as yet, on the Global Tide Gauge Sea Level reference source which I have had bookmarked for probably all of most of the past decade

      The reference source is the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level

      In this source you will find the world wide tide gauge sea level station trends, some hundreds of them, both in data and graph form and maps and etc.

      And after perusing a number of tide gauge stations data you might get the impression that just what the hell are these so called scientists on about when they spruik off on supposed catastrophic sea level rises happening.
      In a large number of stations you will see that sea levels have both risen and fallen over the decades but there isn’t much in it.

      I don’t know with the latest IPCC AR5 but certainly I think in the IPCC’s AR3 the sea level trends were taken from one key tide gauge station situated in Hong Kong harbour.
      The gauge in question was one of five in the Hong Kong harbour and the geologists very firmly told the IPCC sea level “experts” that particular gauge was the most geologically unstable gauge out of the five gauges where it had a known sinking rate of a part or a millimetre or more per year.

      This of course was gold to the catastophists and their pathalogical alarmism and reinforced their claims of catastrophic rise in sea levels from melting ice or so they claimed, a claim now shot to hell as the global ice cover is steady or increasing over the last couple of years.

      And a claim blown out of the water now so as to speak by the failure of the whole sea level rise catastrophism to be barely detectable, thats if there is any such overall increase in average global sea levels at all after all the various highly suspect “adjustments” are stripped out.

      A sea level rise which Nils Axel Morner, the global sea level rise expert is adamant is not happening ; see JoNova Dec 2012 and other sources

      For the PMSL site, to access the global tide gauge station data which starts in Europe and heads east around the globe if you are looking for a station.
      The data source is a bit hard to find on the PMSL site so the Global Tide Gauge data can be found here
      For individual station’s graphed sea levels over time plus tide gauge station details just click on the stations “ID” number in the ID column.

      For additional info http://www.gloss-sealevel.org/data/#.U2B14a5LaHs

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      • #
        ROM

        As we seem to be on all things oceanic at the moment, a look at the local ocean temps, currents, altimeter; ie sea level variations and of course the local ARGO floats and their data might be of interest to some.

        The main relevant IMOS [ Integrated Marine Observing system ] provides a number of maps which when clicked through take you onto the next step.
        Clicking on the small bottom map of Australia gives the positions of the ARGO floats in Australia’s vicinity.

        Clicking on any one of those green. blue and green yellow dots in the ocean gives one the graphs and details of that particular ARGO float’s measurements of the ocean depth strata for the it’s last ten day long dive and drift before surfacing to radio it’s data for that dive to the satellite system and then going back down again to it’s 2000 meter deep drift for the next ten day cycle before repeating the process.

        The difference in the ARGO location dot’s colour is the sea level height at the point where the ARGO float surfaces which is measured by radio altimeter means by the satellite from the data transmissions of that ARGO float.

        Alternatively if you want to take a random sample of floats unless you know their ID and there are a few ARGO fans who follow individual float, you will find a matrix of ARGO float ID’s here under the WMO number

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      • #
        vic g gallus

        I had a look at some of the data. It is hard to deduce anything from MSL change per year. They actual monthly changes differ a lot. This was interesting though.

        I looked at a few dozen stations and the rise between 1940 to mid 1950 occurs often. I might go through the data more critically but it does look like some evidence that ocean currents play a large role. The oceans seem to have risen when the atmosphere stopped warming.

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    PhilJourdan

    I disagree with Roger Sowell on Nuclear Energy, but I do read him. And his wit is well worth it!

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  • #
    speedy

    Tony from Oz – I know you’re out there, but I’ll say it for you…

    Nyuk, Nyuk,Nyuk, Nyuk…

    Of course, there’s a lot more than 3 Stooges in the world these days, but 97% of them think “An Inconvenient Truth” is a documentary.

    Cheers,

    Speedy

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    liberator

    I’d love to have the smarts to do some detailed calculations but its well beyond my skill. A few years back (2010), when there was a very noticeable dip or decrease in sea level rise – the climate scientists looked for an answer – and they found it – La Nina. Australia had a very very wet year and as a result a lot of water was trapped on the continent. They had moisture graphs to show this and the comment was “see this is where all the water has gone – is trapped on the continent of Australia”. That is why there was this very obvious decrease in sea levels. Until all the water trapped on the continent runs back to the ocean the levels will stop rising. Now the question is – how much water was rained across our vast land – and other countries for that matter to see such a significant drop in sea level rises? It would have to be gigalitres upon gigalitres – would it not? What percentage of ocean was now trapped as rainwater across this vast land?

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-scientist-explains-the-mystery-of-recent-sea-level-drop/
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/23/australian-floods-global-sea-level

    I’ve seen the articles and yeah maybe they make some sense – but where is the calculations – a pretty coloured picture that shows a wet patch in Australia just doesn’t cut it for me. (I cant find the actual image right now). So I’ll ask again, how much water fell onto and was trapped in Australia to see a 7 mm drop in sea levels for 12 or so months? Did any one do the real calculations or just took this “explanation” as being truthful without doing the maths? They may be right – but without the maths how do we know?

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      The Murray-Darling Basin is 1,000,000 km2 in area. The worlds oceans cover 360 times this.

      We had 280 mm in the first deluge and 80 mm in the second a couple of months later. Queensland averaged 200 mm in Dec 2010. Lets make it a very generous 300 mm average stored in the basin. The coastal rivers would have emptied rapidly into the ocean.

      300/360 is .8 mm. Plausible, but the 300 mm average is probably a large overestimate.

      According to ROM above, 22% would have fell on land anyway so its more like 0.6 mm.

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      • #

        I should add that most of it drained or evaporated with a couple of years. It can’t explain 0.6 mm/year difference over 10 years.

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        • #
          Greg Cavanagh

          Aliens are siphoning off our water.

          I know the Fitzroy river, in flood, has about a 7 day flow time from the top of the catchment to the ocean.
          I think Brisbane river is about 12 hours or less.

          The water that stays in pools or soaks into the ground is a very small volume of the total that fell out of the sky.

          If you’re looking at sea level averages over periods of years, I think you’ve got to look somewhere other than rainfall for the answer.

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          • #
            vic g gallus

            The Murray-Darling drains very slowly. It is very large and flat (about 30m above sea level at the junction of the two with about 5-600 km to go to the mouth. The are many flood plains and artificial lakes/reservoirs. The Menindee lakes are over half a million megalitres. I think that it took 6 weeks for the Queensland flood waters to reach the Murray and then there is still water in the lakes.

            There is a huge flood somewhere around the world every few years so its all a bit silly. That amount of water was probably on par with a particular heavy fall in the Amazon.

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    • #
      Geoff Sherrington

      Liberator,
      Your concern is shared.
      Also, what was the global rainfall total? Did a big dump on Oz coincide with a big dry somewhere? (Need rainfall tallies over the oceans as well as land to investigate this.)

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  • #
    Gee Aye

    Wow the asters I was funny

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    • #
      Gee Aye

      Asterisk not asters. And I actually thought it was a poor attempt in case I confused the like of Angry.

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  • #
    ROM

    Somehwhere in that now closed WeatherZone Climate forum which you can stilll read there was debate on this claim and I think there are the crude calculations I did based on the information available at the time on the amount of water that fell across northern Australia and the supposed effects on global sea levels.

    The claims seem to be in the ball park re seal level changes as a result of that immense rainfall event but no way can I recall what they were or exactly where to find those figures in the thousands of posts in that WZ climate forum.

    Jimbo on WUWT quoted the the Scientific American the other day as calling it Floods of Biblical Proportions to which I said BS. and then went on to the Murray floods of 1956 and the paleo Murray flood of about 1750, some 38 years or thereabout before Cpt Phillip landed at Sydney Cove on 26 Jan 1788.
    That paleo flood was about twice the size of the immense 1956 flooding of the Murray.
    Adelaide Uni has done some work on the past Murray floods and this is a wrap up of what they found re that gigantic flood.

    The greatest River Murray flood eclipses 1956 levels

    To establish the reliability and timing of pre-historic floods, known as palaeofloods, the researchers looked at the distribution of the Black Box Gum in the River Murray valley..

    “Black Box is considered to be a reliable biological indicator of past flood levels because it grows in distinct horizontal lines on the River Murray floodplain. Its seeds germinate in the debris deposited on the floodwater fringes of the riverbank,” Professor Bourman said.

    “Radiocarbon dating of samples collected from existing gums revealed that the trees were of a modern age, with establishment in the last 250 years. This gives us an indication of the possible timing of the pre-historic flood of around the year 1750.

    “The researchers also undertook a survey to obtain the heights of individual trees at their bases. This showed that the palaeoflood reached a maximum height on the River Murray at Overland Corner of 18.01 metres, making it greater than the largest flood on record, rising 2.11 metres above the 1956 flood height.

    “Having measured the cross-section of the river, they applied the Manning Equation to determine the discharge of the prehistoric flood. This was estimated to be 7,686 cubic metres per second, almost double the discharge of the 1956 flood, which measured 3,950 cubic metres per second,” Professor Bourman said.

    “Given the calculated discharge and proposed age of the flood, the students were able to calculate when on average a palaeoflood might return. This was measured at 1000 years. This means that every year there is a 1000 to one chance of a flood of that magnitude occurring, as it certainly will, at some time in the future.

    Another Australian commenter on that WUWT post also posted of Aboriginal stories from the very early 1800’s when they claimed the Murrimbidgee had a flood event that was about 18 feet higher than the largest known historical flood there since white man settled the area.

    And for what it is worth as the word of mouth legends of old times will be lost when my generation dies. The Twitter generation in their ignorance will see to that.

    My grand parents use to talk of horse thieves droving stolen horses from what is now Victoria to the new settlements in what is now Queensland BEFORE the explorers had supposedly opened most of that inland NSW region up.

    Nope! I can’t verify any of that but it had come down to them via their own parents from the mid 1800’s.

    Another reason I subscribe to the theory of the desperados of every tribe and group were the ones who on the run for pinching women or killing somebody important made for them far distant hills where they would be OK until the respectable members of the tribe had journeyed and were exploring those hills for more game and food supplies.
    At which point the desperado’s moved on to new country again.
    Of course the fact that they were the first there is never mentioned anywhere at all and quite possibly quite innocently as the explorers and “first” settlers in the area genuinely thought they were the first.

    Thus is history created but rarely exactly as we are led to believe how it happened.

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      That link is gone but I do remember that they estimated that 4 times the amount of precipitation as in 1956 was required.

      I also remember reading that in 1956, the Mannum pub at a bottle neck in the river near the end of the Murray, had to serve beer from the second floor balcony. The desperate locals tied up their punts to the balcony rails.

      Lakes were created to buffer the floods but nothing like that happened last time around. These also stopped the 73 and 74 floods reaching 1956 levels, but the river still reached heights much greater than in 2011.

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      • #
        ROM

        Vic @ #16.1

        Yep! They were serving beer from the second floor of that Mannum pub. The water was only about two feet below the second floor.
        The pub or maybe the locals had built a narrow, about a couple of feet wide sandbag walkway which must have been all of 10 to 12 foot high from the dry bank for perhaps 15 or 20 metres to the second floor of the pub.

        I was an newly minted 18 year old licence holder with the Holden farm ute who was chasing some skirt in Murray Bridge with a mate. Sadly for my elevated ambitions no luck there so I had a good look at that immense flood.
        The only crossing points for the Murray into the Adelaide area on the west side of the Murray were at Murray Bridge and Renmark . All the ferries along the Murray were out of action due to flooding.
        I’ve been back through Mannum a number of times and when I look at that Pub way down near the old River, I marvel at what was the depth of water and what some will do to get a drink.

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  • #
    Mark D.

    I still think this is the rooster coming home to roost. The temperatures and sea levels were previously over “adjusted” generally to support (confirmation bias) their case of CAGW. Eventually the data will have to “come back and roost”.

    Satellite measured “evidence” never matched tide gauges.

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      CC

      I believe that this is the take home comment and the real reason for the weather OZ has experienced, “… [you] conservatives and skeptics have control of the Pacific Trade Winds. (… bastards.)”

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  • #
    thingadonta

    Maybe if we go into another Little Ice Age we need to worry about sea level fall, wouldn’t that put a spanner in the works of the IPCC.?

    Most mass marine extinctions occur when sea levels fall, but don’t hold your breath waiting for research alarmism to remember this little fact.

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    Roy Hogue

    One more boogeyman bites the dust. How sad. 🙂

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  • #
    KinkyKeith

    Geological FACT>

    In the last eight thousand years there has been a cumulative drop of 6 metres minimum in ocean levels.

    There have been a couple of intermediate rises of 4 and 2 metres and the flux is becoming smaller with time.

    The last major movement is unfortunately for the IPCCCC a fall of 1.2 metres in the last couple of thousand years.

    We are now arguably in the most STABLE period of sea level experience in the last ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS!

    When the next big freeze commences oceans will once again drop as ice accumulates at the poles.

    Focusing on small variations over 20 years or so is, in this context, just plain nuts but politics and money and corruption and vested interests mean that the public (read taxpaying suckers) are still being force fed this “oceans are rising” crap.

    Who benefits?

    The list might start with any politician or scientist who attends UNIPCC meetings in New York or Geneva; what a chore.

    KK

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    • #
      Bones

      KK,you will never ever ever get a job with the ipcc if you keep making up stories like this.Have you got any more,you only got two red spears.

      70

      • #
        KinkyKeith

        Well Bones, at the end of the last Glaciation 20,000 years back, New York Central Park was under an ice sheet nearly a mile thick, 1500 metres.

        I guess we can blame the Americans and Canadians for letting all that ice melt which then caused oceans to rise by about 125 metres.

        Most of the melt was over in 12,000 years and there seems to have been an overshoot somehow with oceans being at least 6 metres higher than current levels for a period.

        The last 6000 years has been characterized by ocean oscillations, rising and falling through decreasing amplitudes to the present innocuous state of affairs, deemed by the IPCCCC, to be very dangerous.

        The interglacials, where we currently sit in great comfort, are usually 15,000 years , give or take, but the 100,000 year cycle is shortening and may be about 90,000 years.

        They are fairly predictable if you are prepared to work to time scales of + or – 3,000 years.

        I would love a job in the UN sipping champers besides Lake Geneva but as you say, not bloody likely.

        KK

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        • #
          Bones

          When not sipping your favorite drinks in Geneva,you could go skiing and ice skating on the shores of the Gulf Of Mexico,the next time the arctic reaches there.

          10

        • #
          Roy Hogue

          Yes KK, blame the Americans for melting all that ice. We might as well take that burden on our back along with everything else we get blamed for. Maybe the president can even make another apology tour of the nations we’ve mistreated. We did it intentionally too — all those fossil fuel burning machines we love so much generated so much heat that it melted all that ice retroactively so we’d have a nice ice free continent when we got started here. And we didn’t even make a move to stop it. Looks like we caused all this climate change right here in the USA after all.

          You better run and tell the IPCC right away!

          Patent the time travel capability too. Just think what a business opportunity that will be.

          😉 😉 😉 😉

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          • #
            Bones

            Roy,you’re a sick puppy,Even Lord obuma can’t do that.I do like the retroactive bit and the time machine.We could send the ipcc and the gangreens back to manage the dinosaurs and keep the climate on track.

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            • #
              Roy Hogue

              “Sick puppy?” No, no , no, Bones! Just an evil sense of humor, that’s all. And by the way, you don’t do too badly in that department yourself. 🙂

              10

  • #
    WhaleHunt Fun

    My favorite response to the problem of seas rising is, everyone just eat more fish. There are clearly too many fish in the oceans.

    Yeah and the Japanese have been doing the hard yards pulling out the biggest types of fish and the utter ingrates known as the Greens have been whinging about the only people doing something about sea-level rise. Bloody hypocrites.

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  • #
    Newport_Mac

    http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c015433ac485d970c-pi

    Sea levels were much higher during the Medieval Warm Period which negates a CO2 influence.

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  • #
    Sonny

    Well,

    You guys can mock and scoff all you like but I’m not prepared to take any chances.
    I just went to the local pool store and bought myself some pool floaties. I will be wearing them all the time (uninflated), just in case we get a few more mm over my lifetime than expected. Then a few quick puffs and away I go while the rest of you drown!

    Haha!

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    • #
      Bones

      Sonny,just to be ultra safe,you better build an ARK.Let me know how you go with the council permit.

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      • #
        Greg Cavanagh

        If you cited the IPCC and put enough hysteria into your application, I could see it passing quite easily.

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  • #
    Rogueelement451

    Given what we know of the IPCC and Climatologists over the past 30/40 years ,there is a high degree of certainty that they have a)fudged the figures b) done zero work and leaned on a few diverse universities to issue peer reviewed bollix or c)The oceans have given up so much CO2 that the volume is actually critical?

    I love discussing the anomalous expansion of water, it is critical to sea levels since apparently 81% of oceans are at a temp of less than 4c. Because of impurities that figure may not be so relevant ,maybe a scientist could tell me , but if it moves from 4c to say 5.5 c then only a super nova could warm our oceans that much.Cooling Atmosphere = cooling seas =less than critical 4c = less volume.
    Opening myself up to be educated here , but whats up with that?

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    • #
      vic g gallus

      I’m guessing that you’re referring to 4°C temperature of pure water at 1 atm pressure. That is when pure water is the most dense. It expands as the temperature drops lower than this(hence ice floats). Sea water doesn’t do that.

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      • #
        the Griss

        “Sea water doesn’t do that.”

        Then why does sea ice float.?

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        • #
          Greg Cavanagh

          I think it’s because the ice crystals squeeze out the salt. Therefore is mostly fresh water ice. Which is why you get pools of water sitting on top of the ice in the Artic. It’s extra saline solution.

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      • #
        Rogueelement451

        I think you will find that sea water does do that but not at 4c. I,m not sure of the figure but have been told that is is higher ,around 5,5 because of the impurities.Always willing to learn ,so would be pleased if someone could advise. Incidentally, has anyone ever done a peer reviewed paper on seawater expansion related to heat? If the anomalous expansion is at a higher number than 4c , then we will have to wait a few thousand years for the sea to warm up that much, around about the time the sun explodes i,d guess.
        Freezing of sea water does indeed remove the impurities , I recall a plan once to drag an iceberg to Australia? Fresh water!

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        • #
          Roy Hogue

          Many icebergs are freshwater from the start, having fallen on land as snow and then moved in glaciers to the point where they break off into the water. Much of the Arctic ice will be snowfall as well and will be fresh water when floating down the North Atlantic looking for unwary ships to sink.

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        • #
          vic g gallus

          Its the era of Goggle. This link was found in the Wikipedia entry for sea water.

          The density of sea water depends on the salinity but it does decrease all the way to 0°C even in the least saline sea water. Its not linear (smaller change as the temperature drops).

          Sea water will freeze at about -2 with water nearby that doesn’t freeze becoming saltier and denser, like warm and evaporating sea water does, so the circulation in seas is very complex.

          # the data in the table for the first entry corresponds to 1.01604 g/mL

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          • #
            Rogueelement451

            So if sea water freezes at -2c as opposed to zero , would the anomalous expansion point be at 2c instead of 4? If so ,do we need to be worried about the sea cooling not heating?

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            • #
              vic g gallus

              There is no anomalous expansion point with sea water. It would be very close to freezing but other more important things happen to change the density near freezing.

              You will find that there is warmer water near the sea bed than the surface near the Antarctic coast, but this is more about the surface waters being less saline so that it is not more dense even though it is colder.

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  • #
    Athelstan.

    Yeah right……the nightmare of Sea Level rise, well I read Nils and he said don’t panic – nothing to ‘see’ here.

    + Antarctica and Greenland ain’t gonna melt in a hurry.

    Rising SL was always a ‘scare story’ put about by the eejits of alarmism. Further, when I found out that Al Gore was buying beach front property my panic subsided thus – I then had to dump my contingencies,
    a. move to Scotland post glaciation isostatic readjustment means Scotland is rising.
    b. build a house on stilts.

    c. Forget about SL rises and pour another beer.

    Anyway, then there is plate tectonics and other movements and crustal mechanisms – expansion? Plus, all sorts of other stuff the models don’t cater for.

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    • #
      Roy Hogue

      After I saw Gore’s fantasy predictions of sea level rise disaster — and after I could stop laughing — I decided to never lose any sleep over it.

      There are some things against which you cannot make yourself safe if they happen. And being in the way of a major sea level rise is one of them. So you have to take whatever comes at you — if it comes. Some of those things, like flooding of coastal areas from climate change also have next to zero chance of happening. At least no chance of happening fast enough to prevent coping with it. When you add one to the other you still have zero.

      The whole scare is an exercise in selling fear to the gullible to get attention, money and power.

      There are places in California where houses are in more danger of falling off an unstable cliff overlooking the ocean or falling down an unstable mountainside (both have actually happened) than there are places with any danger from sea level rising up and suddenly swallowing them.

      And still people want to live in such places. Houses on the beach get a major pounding and no end of damage from the surf during any bad storm. Malibu is full of them. But they fix it up and stay there. Very few leave unless the house was totaled and some rebuild, even after total loss and come back. Why are we worried about a few uncertain millimeters a year? I don’t get it.

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      • #
        Athelstan.

        And still people want to live in such places. Houses on the beach get a major pounding and no end of damage from the surf during any bad storm. Malibu is full of them. But they fix it up and stay there. Very few leave unless the house was totaled and some rebuild, even after total loss and come back.

        Same here Roy.

        Yes, indeed I wonder, astounded actually and they’re [the beach front properties] too damn close – the Pacific is a mighty big ocean and the waves have lots of miles to roll and roll.

        I could live on the coast but I’d choose my spot – it would HAVE be on a depositional coastal spot and off an inlet maybe but even then – during a big storm [yeah even in England] – dunno if I could sleep at night.

        Maybe…………… but never in California! Living on the Pacific plate and something called the San Andreas fault sequence…. and worse than that – they’re all Democrats!

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        • #
          Mark D.

          Maybe…………… but never in California! Living on the Pacific plate and something called the San Andreas fault sequence…. and worse than that – they’re all Democrats!

          Let’s see here pacific plate full of Democrats, San Andreas fault sequence…….What could be wrong with that?

          Give it time, give it time.

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          • #
            Roy Hogue

            Give it time, give it time.

            Implying that it will get worse. You know Mark, I was once told to cheer up. After all, things could be worse. So I cheered up and sure enough, things got worse.

            I hope you’re not a prophet! 😉

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          Roy Hogue

          …they’re all Democrats!

          To be honest, I fear the Democrats more than I fear the San Andreas fault. I’ve lived through the worst that earthquakes could throw at me for a long time without losing but a few trinkets knocked off a shelf in 1994. The Democrats have cost me a lot of money in the form of excessive taxes and regulation. So you be the judge. But I’ll take my chance with nature before I’ll take my chance with Sacramento dominated by Democrats. If it was viable for me to leave California I’d be somewhere else right now.

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          • #
            Roy Hogue

            Some of us are Republicans though. Unfortunately it’s become hard to tell them apart in many cases. 🙁

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  • #
    J Martin

    “correct the data” which I feel kind of implies support, I would prefer “adjust the data” which I feel kind of implies disaproval.

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    • #
      GreggB

      Exactly, JM. You cannot correct data – it is what it is. You can correct measurement errors (and create new ‘data’ in the process), but you had better be able to state exactly what the error was, its causes and exact magnitude before making the attempt. Anything else is, as you say, adjusting the data. It has the potential to be interesting, but I’d be hard-pressed to call it science.

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    Andrew McRae

    More info on sea levels. Nils Mörner gave a presentation at the EIKE climate conference last year which is online at youtube. 38 minutes. Interesting how many factors affect what a tide gauge reads.
    That guy really doesn’t mince words.

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  • #

    A few months back I wrote an essay on what we know about sea level trends.

    Some of the points we made have already been covered here in JoNova’s post & the comments, but we go through all the main issues & problems systematically: http://globalwarmingsolved.com/2013/11/what-is-happening-to-sea-levels/

    Essentially most of the “trends” in the satellite estimates are not present in the raw data, and there are numerous problems with the tidal gauge data. As a result, it is not clear what trends (if any) in global sea levels there has been since the 19th century.

    Let me know what you think…

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      cohenite

      A very good overview Ronan.

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    • #

      Thanks for putting in the work, Ronan. SLR is a complicated, unspectacular affair which has been drawn into the climate debate as a simplistic but spectacular affair. How they get a modern disaster out of such a slow and long term process is beyond me. I’m pretty sure Bass Strait, which was dry around ten thousand years ago, didn’t fill up after 1980.

      Bookmarked!

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      • #

        Thanks Robert!

        If you get the chance, you might find some of our other essays interesting too. Many of our conclusions initially seem to contradict popular opinion, but we try to make sure our conclusions are based on the data, and to stress where we think uncertainties lie, and where different opinions exist.

        We take the “data is king” approach to science, instead of the “theory is king”/”model is king” approaches which seem to be more popular these days. Unfortunately, this isn’t always easy, because sometimes the data seems to disagree with what we “know” should happen, and we find ourselves constantly forced to question theories and assumptions which had always seemed reasonable. It would be so much easier to go with one of the other approaches – theories & models give much simpler and easier-to-understand results… 🙁

        Still, I guess Nature doesn’t really care what we think she should be doing, so I think the “data is king” approach is ultimately the way to go…

        “It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast: it keeps him young” (Konrad Lorenz, 1903-1989).

        If you have the time and like to get into the nitty-gritty, we have written up some of our more technical work into 8 articles, which we’ve submitted for open peer review at a new forum we’ve set up called the Open Peer Review Journal.

        As for how worries about SLR have become such a shrill and panicky topic, could it be as Arnold Glasow said, “the fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion”?

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  • #
    Bruce

    Phew!
    From 1955 the upper oceans have warmed by an immeasurable 0.07deg C and satellites provide raw data that shows a barely measurable increase in sea level rise.

    What is a nice boy to believe?

    Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent? (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

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    • #
      the Griss

      “From 1955 the upper oceans have warmed by an immeasurable 0.07deg C”

      That’s a very odd statement. 🙂

      If its immeasurable, how do you know it occurred?

      Anyway, I would love to see how they “accurately” measure the sea temp back in 1955 🙂

      The average sea temp is another one of those things one can only really guess at, let allow calculate to nearest 1/100°C

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      • #

        Hi the Griss,

        I actually gave a bit of a discussion of Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) & Ocean Heat Content (OHC) in our essay on the Urban Heat Island problem, which might answer some of your questions… but maybe lead to more! 😉

        Our analysis of global land temperature trends shows that for rural stations, it was probably just as warm in the 1930s/1940s. This obviously contradicts the consensus view that current global temperatures are “unusually warm”.

        So, we wanted to check if there were any other “global warming indicators” we could use to directly compare global temperatures (a) now and during (b) the 1930s/1940s. Remarkably, despite all the claims that there is “lots of evidence for global warming”, most of these estimates only look at the post-1950s period!

        Anyway, SST measurements are one of the very few estimates which actually consider pre-1950s. So, we decided to have a look…

        It turns out that when you average together the available SST/OHC measurements since the 1955s, there seems to have been some global warming during the 1980s/1990s. But, the data is quite limited, so it is unclear just how much (see Figure 15 in our essay). Also, the data becomes much more unreliable if you go any further back in time.

        So, unfortunately, it seems we can’t rely on the current SST estimates to directly compare current global temperatures to those in the 1930s/1940s. 🙁

        Our discussion on SST/OHC is in Section 3 of the above essay. Is that of any help?

        10

    • #
      Roy Hogue

      An immeasurable 0.07deg C you say? Stop me if I’m wrong here, but if you’re going to immeasure something then you must also know the immeasurement error inherent in your inability to measure (did I really say that?).

      Looks like a situation in which you cannot even know what you don’t know — probably can’t even know that you don’t know anything. Climate science — truly the gift that keeps on giving. 😉

      20

  • #
    Beachcomber

    Horrors. This slowing of the sea level rise is worse than we thought!

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  • #
    James Bradley

    I’m no expert, the localised sea-level rises that inundate some South pacific islands and lift others is confusing for me so I would just follow the actions of the real experts on global warming, climate change and sea-level rise and purchase waterfront properties as did Tim Flannery, David Suzuki, Al Gore,Julia Gillard etc etc etc…

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  • #
    Rob Moore

    Speaking of -pinheads,pings or pockets of warming….in the ocean- I find it hard to believe that the mass of a passenger jet can disappear off the planet. Never mind flying endless hours in futile searching – I’ll bet that every country with a nuclear sub has been snooping around and they can pick up a ping easily (if it is indeed there)
    Mis information and fabrication is a daily chore for our media and this whole UN inspired game has pretty well run it’s course as it has bled the wealth of the “sucker” countries. Here in Australia the climate change industry is in “panic mode” as their budgets are about to be slashed . The CSIRO via their mouthpiece -the ABC have been putting out the most shrill desparate press releases ever.
    What a waste of time and energy and resources this whole charade has been for the last two decades.Could have paid for our new jet fighters and we would be in a much better position as a country!

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  • #
    George McFly......I'm your density

    Jo, I think you have made a mistake.

    You said: The “enigma” is solved by accepting that man-made global warming is a minor force.

    I think this should read: The “enigma” is solved by accepting that man-made global warming is a major farce.

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  • #
    Neville

    This is what you call real man-made global warming.
    Just manipulate the data until you get the desired result. And you can actually turn a cooling trend into a warming trend in some USA states. REAL man-made warming to increase the USA temp trend over the last 100+ years.

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/29/one-way-adjustments-the-latest-alteration-to-the-u-s-climate-record/#more-108398

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  • #
    TdeF

    Water expands when heated. The expansion from 0.3C of heating alone would give 90mm rise in seas averaging 4km in depth. The heating of water filled with gas in equilibrium with the air above (98% of CO2 is in the oceans, so the effect is 50x) would fully explain the 50% increase in CO2 in the air, so not fossil fuel at all. The lack of dilution of C14 in the air confirms this. The dilution is only 2%, the Suess effect, not the 33% which would occur if the extra CO2 was fossil fuel. So far this is schoolboy physics. It means simply that the oceans have heated very slightly over the last century. So maybe it was just solar activity after all? How inconvenient is that? 97% of all people who vote left believe in Global Warming. So do 100% of all those who benefit financially from it.

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  • #
    John F. Hultquist

    We are instructed to listen to UN experts (“climate scientists”) but instead of reporting on science they start with the assumption that climate change (“warming”) is human caused. While they are wrong, they cannot admit to being so. That is why they need excuses. Reasonable people use an inverse power function in evaluation of excuses by experts. CAGW proponents have reached the point that their credibility has crossed the zero mark and is now in negative territory. That’s for skeptics. Believers are not influenced by science so failed models and excuses don’t matter.
    It is interesting that when asked via an open ended survey by Gallup about important problems facing the USA, respondents do not mention global warming, climate change, or weather weirding.
    http://www.gallup.com/poll/1675/Most-Important-Problem.aspx

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  • #
    pat

    here’s a potential use for all that water, once it’s been desalinated in the moth-balled desal plants…and provided the science works out & the EU money keeps flowing! the latest & greatest in the MSM today:

    28 April: European Commission: Press Rlease: From sunlight to jet fuel: EU project makes first “solar” kerosene
    An EU-funded research project called SOLAR-JET has produced the world’s first “solar” jet fuel from water and carbon dioxide (CO2). Researchers have for the first time successfully demonstrated the entire production chain for renewable kerosene, using concentrated light as a high-temperature energy source. The project is still at the experimental stage, with a glassful of jet fuel produced in laboratory conditions, using simulated sunlight…
    The four-year SOLAR-JET project was launched in June 2011 and is receiving €2.2 million of EU funding from the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7)…
    Finding new, sustainable sources of energy will remain a priority under Horizon 2020, the seven-year EU research and innovation programme launched on Jan. 1, 2014. In the call Competitive Low-Carbon Energy published on December 11 last year, the Commission proposed investing €732 million over two years in this area…
    Project press contact
    Dr. Andreas Sizmann
    Bauhaus Luftfahrt e.V.
    http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-481_en.htm?locale=en

    Solar-Jet – Partners
    The partners combine their special expertise in solar energy conversion (ETH), fuel synthesis and fuel economics (SHELL), fuel combustion and high-temperature chemistry (DLR), future technology assessment, future socio-economic development analysis (BHL) and project management (ART).
    http://www.solar-jet.aero/page/partners.php

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    • #
      Graeme No.3

      Pat:

      there are a number of groups working on this scam. Total nonsense! Sure it can be done as has been known for 100 years, but the amount of energy needed rules out any medium scale, let alone major scale, production. You would have to burn fossil fuels to provide enough (concentrated) energy to reverse the reaction…Oh wait a bit.

      The press releases will continue until the funding dries up.

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    pat

    re Bauhaus Luftfahrt, who put out the Solar-Jet Press Release:

    LINKEDIN: Bauhaus Luftfahrt e.V.
    Bauhaus Luftfahrt is an interdisciplinary research institution funded by the four aerospace companies Airbus Group, Industrieanlagen-Betriebsgesellschaft (IABG), Liebherr-Aerospace and MTU Aero Engines as well as grants of the Bavarian Ministry for Economic Affairs and Media, Energy and Technology. The non-profit association is an internationally-oriented think tank…
    In every project, the technical, economic, social and ecological aspects are considered holistically.
    RECENT UPDATES:
    3 MONTH AGO:
    Bauhaus Luftfahrt e.V.
    Bauhaus Luftfahrt`s “Ce-Liner” concept for a potentially emission-free short-range airliner has been nominated for a major environmental prize. At the GreenTec Award, Europe´s largest environmental and business prize, the Ce-Liner has been shortlisted among the ten best projects in the category “Aviation”. Out of all ten nominees, the winner will be chosen by a public online voting and an independent expert jury. The team of Bauhaus Luftfahrt would be grateful if the “Ce-Liner” concept receives your vote at http://lnkd.in/dhdzFD6.less
    http://www.linkedin.com/company/bauhaus-luftfahrt-e.v.

    29 April: Local Germany: Scientists make rocket fuel from sunlight
    Researchers hope to eventually use the renewable fuel to power different forms of transport and said on Tuesday they had succeeded in producing the world’s first jet fuel from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide…
    The centrepiece of the four-year project, known as SOLAR-JET, is a solar reactor that uses focused sunlight to heat up a metal oxide. Water and carbon monoxide are then passed into the reactor at 700C, where they spit up and form into a synthetic gas composed of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
    The gas is then compressed and sent to Shell, where it is converted into a hydrocarbon fuel similar to conventional kerosene…
    http://www.thelocal.de/20140429/german-scientists-make-rocket-fuel-from-sunlight

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    • #
      Andrew McRae

      Renewable jet fuel? Sign me up.

      Only…. They might want to look at the economics of the gas refinery and how much more energy is used to turn the syngas (CO &H 2) into kero than is available from combusting the kero.

      But any technology which can close the loop and recycle carbon in an economically useful time frame has got to be a step forward for sustaining powered aviation into the next century. The fossil fuel era, by definition, must end. The only question is whether it will end involuntarily because we ran out of economically exploitable resources, or whether it will end voluntarily because we invented something better.

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      • #
        ROM

        Andrew McRae @ # 39.1

        The US Navy has been messing around with making jet fuel out of CO2 and Hydrogen for a few years now using CO2 and Hydrogen extracted from sea water which is catalysed and turned into jet fuel using catalytic processes along the lines of the Fischer – Trospch process.

        With their big nuclear powered Nimitz class Aircraft Carriers each with four reactors on board, there are about 12 super carriers out of the 40 carriers operated by the US Navy, that are nuclear powered so this class has power to spare under most circumstances so energy to power the catalysing process is not a problem.

        As jet fuel costs around the $6 / US gallon by the time it is refined on shore, and then shipped sometimes half way around the world in their 15 specilised fleet oilers ie; tankers, to the A/ C carriers and the rest of the fleet at sea, it looks like the jet fuel can be produced on board from CO2 and hydrogen extracted from sea water for the same or less cost and without the vulnerability of having to rely on a very long and highly vulnerable chain of supply.

        For the scale of the US Navy’s fuel supply chain

        In Fiscal Year 2011, the U.S. Navy Military Sea Lift Command, the primary supplier of fuel and oil to the U.S. Navy fleet, delivered nearly 600 million gallons of fuel to Navy vessels underway, operating 15 fleet replenishment oilers around the globe.

        [ one US Gallon = 3.785 Ltrs ]

        Fueling the Fleet, Navy Looks to the Seas

        For the techo lads and gals here is the process from the above US Navy site

        How it Works: CO2 + H2 = Jet Fuel NRL has developed a two-step process in the laboratory to convert the CO2 and H2 gathered from the seawater to liquid hydrocarbons. In the first step, an iron-based catalyst has been developed that can achieve CO2 conversion levels up to 60 percent and decrease unwanted methane production from 97 percent to 25 percent in favor of longer-chain unsaturated hydrocarbons (olefins). In the second step these olefins can be oligomerized (a chemical process that converts monomers, molecules of low molecular weight, to a compound of higher molecular weight by a finite degree of polymerization) into a liquid containing hydrocarbon molecules in the carbon C9-C16 range, suitable for conversion to jet fuel by a nickel-supported catalyst reaction.

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  • #
    Bones

    The following is a description of Wikipedia from the Andrew Bolt blog.I don’t know where he got it ,but it shows how wiki and the ipcc use the same methods for their info.Also included would be the ABC.

    ‘It has more editors and more entries than any other encyclopaedia ever. Most of the contributors are anonymous and no entry is ever finished. It is constantly changing. Any entry may be different each time you go back to it. Celebrities and companies pay PR agencies to edit entries. Controversial topics are often the subject of edit wars that can go on for years and involve scores of editors. Pranksters and jokers may change entries and insert bogus facts. Whole entries about events that never happened may be created. Other entries will disappear without notice. Experts may be banned from editing subjects that they are leading authorities on, because they are cited as primary sources. University academics and teachers warn their students to exercise extreme caution when using it. Nothing in it can be relied on. You will never know whether anything you read in it is true or not.

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  • #
    RoHa

    I don’t like fish. Does that make me some sort of Eco-terrorist?

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  • #
    Liv

    Bones the article came via WUWT via Spiked Online.

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  • #

    To Joanne Nova, thank you for the assist, and for my little quote. I can’t remember where I first heard that, but it stuck with me.

    On a more serious note, I have recently found that the long-term trend in rainfall over the oceans strongly correlates with long-term sea level rise, SLR. I do not understand how this could be possible. It the relationship is real, it would appear worthy of study to determine if there is any overall SLR at all.

    I note that the oceans off the western coasts of both North and South America have little rainfall, and show a decrease in sea level over time. At the same time, the area of the ocean with greatest SLR is just to the east of the Philippines and New Guinea, and has very great rainfall.

    For a reference, please see my little blog post at

    http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/sea-level-rise-and-annual-rainfall.html

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    • #

      Roger, actually I did already follow your link (or someones link to your link) and found it an interesting idea. Yes, worth some more discussion. – J

      20

  • #
    Neville

    Lomborg talked about the average IPCC 2007 eatimate of SLR by 2100 in his book “Cool It” It was about 29cm by 2100 and most of that ( about 23cm) was the result of thermal expansion. Not melting of Greenland or Antarctica or other glaciers etc.

    The Royal Society graphs showing SLR trends using all the IPCC models also shows that there is little to worry about until 2300. And Lomborg states that studies show there will be less to worry about after that date.
    IOW 89% of the planet’s ice ( Antarctica ) is negative for SLR for the next 300 years. So where is dangerous CAGW SLR to come from, perhaps outer space. Ya gotta laugh or go mad listening to these idiots. Here’s the graphs for Greenland 10% and Antarctica 89% for the next 300 years.

    http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1844/1709/F4.large.jpg

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  • #
    Geoff Sherrington

    Neville,
    But do you not concede my point that you cannot attribute expansion to a particular mechanism until you have identified and measured all the mechanisms?And that mechanisms in the lower 50% of the oceans have scarce been studied at all? And that we know that there are heat sources on the ocean floors, magnitude unknown? And that it is pathetically poor science to quote an uncertainty of 0.4 mm per year in an expansion of 3 mm per year or so, when the expansion due to ocean flor heating is unknown?

    Even my old Mum usef to stir her cup of soup before sipping it, in case there was some hotter soup at the bottom.

    The absurdly poor science being shown in all papers on sea level rise – unless they specifically deal with the known unknowns – is incomprehensible and it is unpardonable because it is wrong at the level that school children would imediately undertand.

    60

    • #
      Neville

      Geoff that’s way beyond my expertise but you may be correct. But is it just unknown or perhaps a known unknown?
      First it has to measured accurately at extreme depths and then you would have to be satisfied that it was accurate. Probably a long term exercise.
      But it’s way beyond my understanding.

      20

  • #
    Reinder van Til

    The amount of tornadoes and hurricanes are not par with IPCC prophecies either. Where are they hiding?

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    • #
      Rereke Whakaaro

      They are hiding in the South Pacific, passing themselves off as cyclones.

      41

      • #
        Andrew McRae

        You know, Rereke, we’ve joked about this sort of thing before, but someone really ought to travel to the sunny islands of the South Pacific between May and September on a 6-month scientific survey to find the missing hurricanes.

        The grant application almost writes itself.

        This combined with our previous research finding that the rate at which volatile liquids such as alcohol evaporate are a proxy measure of surface air temperature, and the whole rort project is a shoo-in.

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        • #
          Bones

          G’day Andrew,I read your ‘previous’ research and if you want to bring sex into your research you would need a sub branch called ‘Anthropornagraphic’,should go real well on your junket,(sorry)research trip.Could your good self or RW send pictures(videos perhaps)purely for scientific backup.

          01

    • #
      PhilJourdan

      Same place as the missing heat.

      10

  • #
    pat

    26 April: UK Daily Mail: Jon Rees: Britain STILL depends on coal for 40% of its electricity – but now it is making a Russian mine owner hugely rich, not us
    Thirty years after Arthur Scargill led the miners out on strike – to be followed by the wholesale closure of the British coal industry – it is not a union leader from Yorkshire but a billionaire from Russia who has his finger on Britain’s light switch.
    Britain now imports four times as much coal as it produces, and Russia, which is subject to international sanctions over Ukraine, is our biggest supplier, providing close to half of all the coal we bring in.
    And the company responsible for the bulk of that is the Siberian Coal Energy Co, whose chairman and majority owner is Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko.
    Our dependence on Russian coal has been thrown into sharp relief both by the rising tension between the West and Russia over Ukraine and by last week’s vote by miners to agree to the closure of two of Britain’s remaining three deep pit mines.
    ‘If the Prime Minister says he does not like what Russia’s doing in Ukraine, Putin can always turn round and say he’ll be sending Russian coal east not west this year,’ said Chris Kitchen, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers…
    Now, two of Britain’s last three deep mine pits will close within 18 months after the admission by UK Coal, Britain’s biggest coal producer, that it could no longer go on…
    However, Britain missed out on a share of his riches. Kitchen said: ‘Selby was producing coal which was selling for £1.05 per gigajoule, which was only just break-even. Two years later, coal was selling for £2 a gigajoule, so if it was open now it would be making money.
    ‘The point is that the Government should have an energy policy for the long term, to smooth the peaks and troughs, and we do not have that now. If we did, Drax power station in North Yorkshire would still be using 70 per cent British coal….
    ***A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: ‘Coal is available from many regions, including America and Australia, so not just Russia. There is currently an abundant supply of coal on world markets.’
    Kitchen said: ‘We are not climate change sceptics. But surely you just have to look at the National Grid website to see how little power was generated by wind last Friday to realise how much we still need coal?’ …
    http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2613948/Britain-STILL-depends-coal-40-electricity.html

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    • #

      Hey, let’s call wind power by a new name.

      GOLDILOCKS Power

      When it blows hard and there’s too much wind power (yeah! Right!) they pay the wind generating companies to shut down, so they get money for not generating power. The cost gets passed down directly to all power consumers, so ….. you pay.

      When it blows too little, all those smaller plants which only run for short times have to run longer and because their costs are so high, then the cost of power spikes again, so ….. you pay.

      So, the wind has to be ….. just right ….. all the time for it to pay its way.

      Pity the wind can’t be umm, legislated, umm, regulated, umm, asked to play the game, and then electrical power would be cheap for everyone concerned. (Yeah! Right!)

      Tony.

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      • #
        Andrew McRae

        Tony,
        There is certainly a need for wind and solar energy to be called by a new name. I am partial to acronyms myself but some other epithet may be more popular as the only acronym I have devised is an awkward one.

        The Greens are marketing geniuses.
        Only a marketing genius would figure out how to take the singularly worst inherent flaw in solar and wind power systems and spin it into a desirable marketing term: Renewable.
        Just think of how these systems are renewable. The sunlight falls upon the panels and the wind whips across the ridge of turbines and the Clean Energy™ streams into surburbia and everything is fine and dandy. Then sunset happens and the solar panel dies. But fear not, my brethren! Gaia’s solar messiah shall rise again! And sure enough, for the faithful and unfaithful alike, the sun rises the next morning, the first rays of sunlight hit the panel, and… the solar power is RENEWED. The wind picks up again and the wind power is then RENEWED. The only reason these energy systems are renewed is because they die so frequently! Why is coal power not “renewable” energy? Because it never dies to begin with, it just keeps on generating 24/7 as long the coal supply lasts.
        It is just marketing genius to sell the cause of the unreliable output under a desirable word such as “renewable”.

        Hey, you know when a nuclear power plant runs out of puff they can change the fuel rods over to fresh ones… does that mean nuclear power is renewable?? Where is the line here?

        Anyhow, we should discard the term “renewable” as being misleading marketing propaganda. A more accurate term should be substituted.
        Here are some potential ingredients for the new term:

        Ambient / Diffuse
        Stochastic / Probabilistic / Randomised
        Energy / Power
        Collection / Gathering / Interception / Trapping
        System / Facility / Apparatus

        From these combinations, I choose the term: DREGS
        “Renewable energy systems” = “Diffuse Randomised Energy Gathering System”

        For example, the Greens page on Clean Energy would now read as follows.

        Clean energy roadmap

        We need to do more to encourage clean energy investment in Australia. The Greens’ plan to get to a 100% DREGS Australia.

        What do I need to know?

        The Greens have a plan to make Australia the best place in the world to build DREGS.
        The Greens’ Clean Energy Roadmap sets out a framework to build an Australia powered by DREGS.
        The Roadmap has three pillars:

        • Power Australia with at least 90% DREGS by 2030, by increasing the DREGS Target. This will give investors the certainty and stability they need to plan.
        • Increase Clean Energy Finance to $30 billion, $3 billion per year for ten years, to drive more change and private investment into DREGS.
        • Frame a national energy grid to make planning DREGS possible.

        This is clearly a more accurate description of Greens policy as well as providing intangible benefits of mild amusement.

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        • #
          Graeme No.3

          4 letter Acronyms turn people off.

          Occasional Random Electricity (ORE) or better Electricity Some of the time ( SOT ) or Expensive Electricity Sometimes ( EES ).

          If you want to use 4 letters try Infrequent Expensive Electricity ( IFEE ).

          Try as I might I can’t get something to fit ( SILLY ).

          10

          • #
            Manfred

            GRIP — Green renewable intermittent power
            RIP-OFF — Renewable intermittent power – off. (An advertising exhortation to save power).
            CRAP — Costly renewable alternative power.

            My warmest ist apologies to all.

            31

          • #
            KinkyKeith

            🙂

            00

          • #
            Bones

            Graeme,your Silly does’nt refer to power,just the gangreens,Senile Idiotic Low Level Yobbos.

            10

    • #
      Gasbo

      If you’re going to rob Peter to pay Paul first make certain Peter and Paul NEVER meet.

      00

  • #
    handjive

    Would YOU be underwater if the polar caps melted?
    21 April 2014: Map reveals what our planet would look like if sea levels rose by 260ft

    Global sea levels have risen by 8 inches (20cm) since 1880 and scientists predict they could rise up to 3ft (98cm) by 2100.
    But despite the UN’s recent threats of war, famine and extreme weather, such a dramatically different world caused by sea level rise can be hard to imagine.

    To help picture the future, Martin Vargic, an amateur graphic designer from Slovakia, has created a map depicting the planet with sea levels around 260ft (79m) higher than they are today.

    He imagines what Earth would look like if the ice sheets surrounding the North and South poles melted, releasing five million cubic miles of water into the world’s oceans.
    Whilst at first glance it doesn’t seem much different to a map of the world today, a closer looks shows huge unshaded areas swamped by water with today’s existing coastlines depicted in dotted lines.
    ~ ~ ~ ~
    21 April 2014: IPCC needs to ‘use more numbers’

    “The IPCC would be wise in future reports to actually embed the intervals that they’re referring to, when they use phrases such as ‘very likely’, in the sentences themselves,” says Smithson.
    “That certainly gets people closer to complying with their interpretations of that.”

    10

    • #

      So, let me see if I’ve got this right.

      This wonderful new piece of excellent investigative journalism sees this journalist predicting that Climate Change will knock the Earth off its axis.

      All the doom and gloom soothsayers say that there will be a temperature rise of a maximum of 3 degrees by 2100.

      So, that being the case, then the average mean temperature for Antarctica will rise to (Summer temperatures) Minus 5C to Minus 28C, still, umm, way below the melting point for ice, even considering that the high mean temp here is at the periphery of the Antarctic Continent. Winter mean will rise to Minus 37C – Minus 91C.

      Still, I suppose the Continent could heat from underneath and all that ice, (in places almost 5 Kilometres thick of solid ice) could just, umm, slide right off, and just float to warmer latitudes. It wouldn’t need to melt immediately, because Archimedes said something about that once.

      So, that sliding off will never happen, so I guess the Earth will just have to play along and be knocked off its axis then, so all that ice melts.

      Either that, or this scenario of wonderful investigative journalism is something that won’t happen for, (oh let’s be doom mongering ourselves) another thousand years or so.

      Hmm! Need a lot of popcorn for that wait.

      Tony.

      A lie travels around the World before the truth even gets its pants on.

      60

    • #
      Truthseeker

      Well the North Polar Ice cap melting would have no effect on sea levels because the ice is all sea ice. It has already displaced the water it is going to (melt an ice cube in a glass of water and let me know how much the water level rises in the glass). Similarly for the Antarctic sea ice.

      The temperature range of the Antartica land mass is between around -30C to -40C. Long way to go before that gets to +1C …

      10

    • #
      Gasbo

      Cool,looks like some decent fishing to be done in central Australia,and who is going to miss Sydney?

      00

  • #
    pat

    30 April: Bloomberg: Biggest LBO Ends in Bankruptcy as Energy Future Files; Ranks With Enron’s Collapse
    By Steven Church, Tiffany Kary and Linda Sandler
    Energy Future Holdings Corp., the Texas power company that plans to leave bankruptcy in less than a year, can’t reduce its $50 billion in debt without fighting junior creditors who face losing their investment…
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-29/energy-future-files-for-bankruptcy-protection-in-delaware.html

    10

  • #
    pat

    the MSM favourite today – but wonder if the coverage will include ***

    30 April: Bloomberg: Obama Power-Plant Pollution Rule Upheld by Top U.S. Court
    By Greg Stohr and Mark Drajem
    President Barack Obama garnered his second legal victory this month in his effort to clean up coal-fired power plants, as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a rule designed to cut pollutants that cause smog and acid rain.
    The justices, voting 6-2 to overturn a lower court, backed an Environmental Protection Agency rule targeting air pollution that crosses state lines. Advocates for utilities and coal producers argued that the EPA’s approach was too intrusive and would force plants to clean up more pollution than necessary to deliver clean air in downwind states…
    The ruling may prompt utilities such as Southern Co. (SO), Energy Future Holdings Corp.’s Luminant and American Electric Power Co. (AEP) to shutter coal-fired power plants or invest billions of dollars in new pollution-control systems.
    The Obama administration says the rule will prevent as many as 34,000 premature deaths a year…
    ***While the decision upholds the rule by the EPA, its practical implications are uncertain. That’s because the high court left open the ability of states to individually challenge whether they should still be part of the program, and if the mandated reductions are justified given improvements in air quality in downwind states.
    “There are a lot of legal challenges for this rule that lay ahead,” said William Bumpers, a lawyer at Baker Botts LLP in Washington…
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-29/obama-power-plant-pollution-rule-upheld-by-u-s-supreme-court.html

    30 April: Bloomberg: Eric Roston: George Will Knocks Out Another Instant Climate Classic
    The “whole point of global warming” is not, as Will would have it, to execute a liberal headlock on the American people. If global warming has a “whole point” of any kind, it is, it appears, to warm the globe, perhaps intolerably. That’s what progressives and conservatives of good will and common sense are seeking to stop.
    No one has yet described any physical laws linking atmospheric heat retention with American liberal activism or right-wing special-interest media buys. Let’s worry about that one when it’s peer-reviewed and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Climate Change and Encroaching Progressive Czarism.
    Watch the full interview. Some of his comments are standard, if scientifically questionable, policy considerations. However, they are devalued by his tendency to do things like conjure and attack anti-science straw men and then source his scientific thinking to newsmagazine stories published in the 1970s…
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-29/george-will-knocks-out-another-instant-climate-classic.html

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      Graeme No.3

      Pat:
      “The ruling may prompt utilities to shut coal-fired power plants or invest billions of dollars in new pollution-control systems.”

      I think they will do the first. With the USA grid near capacity recently, that would mean blackouts. A few days later the coal-fired power plants will be started up and no-one (except a few ignored, and ignorant, greenies) will question their right to run.

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        Graeme No.3,

        never a truer word spoken.

        Three days would be it would take.

        One hour to shut all the plants down. 2 minutes for America to grind to a halt. 2 more hours of frantic phone calls on a mobile phone system that has ground to a halt.

        And then two days 20 hours and 58 minutes to run them all back up again, synch the lot of them, and bring them online with the grid.

        Then one phone call from The White House ….. “Don’t ever do that again.”

        Then weeks, probably Months, for America to get back to normal.

        Then just round up all the dead people and bury them.

        The prospect is absolutely frightening.

        Tony.

        Post Script. Not ONE coal fired plant in the U.S.larger than 750MW has closed in the last 6 years plus.

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          You see, taking that much power out of the system overloads the remaining power plants, and all plants then fail in a cascade, taking virtually minutes.

          And nothing can come back up until it’s all back up.

          All the Nukes will SCRAM. Offline.

          Gas fired will be up the fastest, but again, that will be local power only and temporary as other come back up.

          The Nukes may come back relatively quickly, but again, only local, and probably best to keep them offline until everything is back.

          For an example of this see this link.

          Northeast blackout of 2003

          And if you read nothing else there, look at the sequence from 4.05PM until 4.13PM, 8 minutes in all.

          Tony.

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          michael hart

          The Great Lakes Brewing Company has named a beer after it!
          “Blackout Stout” 🙂
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Brewing_Co.

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    ROM

    Tony is that;

    Then one phone call from The White House ….. “Don’t ever do that again.”
    Or

    Then one phone call to The White House ….. “Don’t ever do that again.”

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    the Griss

    OT, a bit.

    A few days ago, someone mentioned an avalanche on Mt Everest that killed some people.

    At the time I wondered if any of the MSM or climate trogs had linked it to “climate change”

    Seems some one has..

    Seriously, yes they did !!!

    Quite hilarious really 🙂 .. They just keep getting kookier and kookier. !!!

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      Manfred

      No surprises here Griss, in the utopian Green New Zealand, whose kookie collective are profoundly enamoured of the UN and clamouring to obtain a place on the Security Council.

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    pat

    Andrew McRae said –

    “The Greens are marketing geniuses”

    not so any more in Brighton!

    26 April: UK Daily Mail: Ian Birrell: Lunacy of the town that turned green: A ban on bacon butties. Traffic-calming sheep. Transgender toilets. Sounds like a send-up? In fact, it’s the all-too-real story of how Britain’s loopiest party took over Brighton…
    Brighton Pavilion is the Green Party’s only seat in Parliament
    Idealism and environmental improvements have gone down well
    Other stunts like Meat-free Monday and transgender toilets, not so much
    In addition, the party’s inexperience in power has left them struggling
    A rising tide of splits, stunts, U-turns, gaffes and divisive industrial disputes has alienated voters and angered businesses here in a city better known for its bohemian tolerance, while outlandish proposals for a ban on bacon butties and plans to use sheep for traffic calming have earned only derision.
    The serious side of politics has suffered, too – a demonstration of the dangers that await when protest parties win power. A doomed attempt to impose the biggest council tax rise in the country ended with humiliating warnings that Whitehall could be forced to take over the Town Hall.
    Welcome to the Green Republic of Brighton and Hove…
    At last month’s council meeting, a Green member accused a former Tory leader of wearing a swastika. She wasn’t. It turned out to be a traditional Irish emblem on her necklace…
    Graham Cox, a Tory councillor and former head of Sussex CID, said the Green council promoted an image of Brighton as a place of protest and alternative lifestyles that welcomed the homeless.
    ‘They don’t care about things like cutting the grass and keeping flower-beds tidy, so our town is getting scruffier. They are basically ***hippies who don’t give a damn about such things.’…
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2613905/Lunacy-town-turned-green-A-ban-bacon-butties-Traffic-calming-sheep-Transgender-toilets-Sounds-like-send-In-fact-real-story-Britains-loopiest-party-took-Brighton.html

    i often wonder how come we’ve allowed old hippies to take over the country.

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    llew Jones

    A bit off topic but a reminder that there is no such thing as the natural environment. At least not since humans have been tinkering with it. Which only goes to show the incredible ignorance of the Greens in particular and ecology in general:

    Nature Today Is Anything but ‘Natural’

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article/376815/nature-today-anything-natural-jonah-goldberg

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      Safetyguy66

      Nice article llew

      I agree with that premise so much, the notion that everything was in “harmony” until humans harnessed fire is just denial at best but is more often a lack of understanding of history.

      The concept of natural imbalance seems utterly lost on the ecological self flagellates. Modern man is the source of all change, all natural affectation and of course all evil. Considering many of the people advocating the pre combustion natural harmony theory have high level degrees, I regard it as a sad indictment on our higher education system that these infantile notions not only exist, but flourish in the university environment.

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    Rogueelement451

    Any of you guys following the spat between Roy Spencer and Principia Scientifica?

    http://www.principia-scientific.org/skeptical-arguments-that-don-t-hold-water-pierre-latour-s-rebuttal.html

    Quite honestly the debate is way over my head so I think I,ll Stick with Stefan the denier,simple solutions for a simple mind.
    It does display the dichotomy though , between the luke warmers and the slayers and I do not think it helps the skeptical cause one bit to have internecine dispute. The warmista ballerinas do not have such problems , they simply quote the IPCC line and all is good.
    This being a sceptic is a difficult business. All I do know , is that observation concludes that the IPCC science is crap and needs to be exposed at all times.

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    pat

    new on WUWT:

    WUWT: New paper finds climate sensitivity to CO2 is lower than previously believed, strong natural variability in Southern Hemisphere
    (NOTE: I’m traveling today, and thus I’m posting this article from The Hockey Schtick as it deserves attention and discussion.
    At 10AM EDT, an announcement about a new skeptic publication in Nature Climate Change will follow this article – Anthony)
    A commentary published April 25th in Nature Climate Change concludes on the basis of a new Southern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction that estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2 are lower than previously believed…
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/30/new-paper-finds-climate-sensitivity-to-co2-is-lower-than-previously-believed-strong-natural-variability-in-southern-hemisphere/#more-108435

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    Yes, I predicted sea level rise would turn to falling a few years after the climate itself did turn to cooling.

    Of course sensitivity to carbon dioxide is lower – it’s actually very slightly negative. For water vapour it’s noticeably negative, just as we see in the fact that the wet adiabatic lapse rate is lower.

    The presence of a planetary atmosphere causes the surface temperature to be higher than the so-called radiating temperature of the whole planet+atmosphere system. This is due to the gravito-thermal effect postulated by Loschmidt in the 19th century, written about by Dr Hans Jelbring in “Energy and Environment” over 10 years ago, demonstrated in the Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube and proven from mainstream physics in my book “Why it’s not carbon dioxide after all.” This is why the base of the nominal troposphere of Uranus is hotter than Earth’s surface: it’s troposphere is 350Km high, so the thermal gradient, calculated to be what is observed, leads to the expected temperature. None of this has anything to do with incident solar radiation (or back radiation) striking a planet’s surface. On Earth solar radiation mostly passes through the thin surface layer of the oceans hardly warming it at all. Hansen didn’t think about the real world – just his flat Earth diagram full of fiction. Do you follow Hans or Hansen?

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    Robber

    Thanks Jo. Solid reporting and analysis as always. Do you know the most frightening thing?
    We don’t have one politician or business leader who has the guts to stand up and ask these questions. I’ve given up on the MSM.
    Do we need our own campaign? Planes carrying banners over cities – the world is not coming to an end, no warming for 17 years. I know, it is not as compelling as “we are all doomed!” And oh the ignominy of being dismissed as a denier.

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    John Morland

    I still vividly remember Tim Flannery publiclay saying in September 2006 that sea level rises could be as high as 4 metres in 10 to 15 years time.

    At a Climate Change Commission (under the previous government)public meeting I reminded him of his statement. He replied that he was referring to what could happen to sea levels at the end of an ice age.

    Well, I did not recall that qualification.

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    Mickey Reno

    I wonder if Josh Willis will ever reconsider his decision to delete data from certain ARGO floats because it showed too cold for the cause? Maybe he was the detecting “the pause” and just didn’t realize it. We’ll probably never know.

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    John in Oz

    Is this more scare-mongering and which data are they using?

    http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/south-australians-warned-they-may-have-to-carry-cost-of-losing-their-homes-to-rising-sea-levels/story-fni6uo1m-1226901369729

    An action plan prepared by state, federal and local governments…………

    Around 60,000 homes in South Australia are considered at risk of a predicted sea level rise of half a metre over the next 50 years.

    Even at the higher mean rate of 3.1mm/year (from Cazenave et al 2014) this would be a 155mm rise, not 1/2 a metre.

    Perhaps it is mandatory to take any figure you wish to make a point with and multiply by 3 to ensure that the point is rammed home.

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    Steve Case

    ” Seas were rising at 3.5mm a year up til 2003,”
    According to today’s data that’s true, but according to the data at the time it was only going up at 2.6 mm/yr. You can check this out on the Internet Archives WayBack Machine.

    The historical data has been rewritten to the tune of about 0.9 mm/yr. Take that 0.9 from the 2.6 at the time, and over the last ten years, sea level rise may be as little as 1.7 mm/yr.

    There’s been so much correction and editing of original climate data that the truth may never be known.

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