New paper finds sea level rise has decelerated 44% since 2004 to only 7 inches per century
A paper published today in Global and Planetary Change finds global sea level rise has decelerated by 44% since 2004 to a rate equivalent to only 7 inches per century. According to the authors, global mean sea level rise from 1993-2003 was at the rate of 3.2 mm/yr, but sea level rise “started decelerating since 2004 to a rate of 1.8 ± 0.9 mm/yr in 2012.”
The authors also find “This deceleration is mainly due to the slowdown of ocean thermal expansion in the Pacific during last decade,” which is in direct opposition to claims that the oceans “ate the global warming.” This finding debunks alarmist claims that ocean heat uptake has increased over the past decade, demonstrating instead that ocean heat uptake has decreased during the global warming pause since 2004, and has gone negative since 2007, as shown by fig. 4b indicating steric sea level rise from thermal expansion has been negative since 2007.
The paper adds to several other peer-reviewed publications finding either no acceleration or a deceleration of sea level rise during the 20th and 21st century, and thus no evidence of any human influence on sea level rise:
JM Gregory et al Journal of Climate 2012
M Beenstock et al 2013
NOAA 2005-2012 Sea Level Budget
Dean & Houston 2011 & 2013
Scafetta 2013
Holgate 2007
Boretti 2012
Morner 2004
Jevrejeva et al., 2006 & 2008
Wöppelmann et al., 2009
Roemmich et al 2013
IPCC 2007:
“no long-term acceleration of sea level has been identified using 20th-century data alone.”
IPCC 2013:
“It is likely that GMSL [Global Mean Sea Level] rose between 1920 and 1950 at a rate comparable to that observed between 1993 and 2010”
Figures from the paper & abstract:
Fig. 2.
The instantaneous rate of interannual variability of (a) the GMSL, (b) the global mean steric sea level, and (c) the global mean ocean mass, i.e. the first-order time derivative of third IMFs shown in Fig. 1.
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Fig. 3.
a. Regression of total sea level (observed by altimeters) during 1993-2012 on the third IMF of the GMSL given in Fig. 1a.
b. Same as Fig. 3a but for the steric sea level.
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Fig. 4.
a. The intrinsic trend of the GMSL, i.e. the first-order time-derivative of the trend function of the GMSL given in Fig. 1a. Thick solid black line denotes the mean intrinsic trend of all the sub-samples of the GMSL during 1993-2012. Thin solid black line gives the linear trend of the GMSL rise, and the thin dashed lines give its one standard deviation.
b. Same as Fig. 4a but for the intrinsic trend of the global mean steric sea level.
c. Same as Fig. 4a but for the intrinsic trend of the global mean ocean mass during 2003-2012.
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Fig. 5.
a. Mean trend of the total sea level rise during (top) Period 1 (1993-2003) and (bottom) Period 2 (2004-2012).
b. Same as Fig. 5a but for the steric sea level.
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Global Sea Level Trend during 1993-2012
- Xianyao Chena, b, , ,
- Ying Fenga, b,
- Norden E. Huanga, b
- a Key Laboratory of Data Analysis and Applications, State Oceanic Administration, China
- b The First Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration, China