Excerpt: The physics, and reality, do not support “mainstream” climate science models predicated on anthropogenic CO2 emissions as the principal driver of ice sheet melt and sea level rise. For example:
1. East Antarctica, which comprises two-thirds of the continent, has been gaining mass since 2003 (Martín-Español et al., 2017).
2. The Western Antarctic Peninsula has been rapidly cooling since 1999 (-0.47°C per decade), reversing the previous warming trend and leading to “a shift to surface mass gains of the peripheral glacier” (Oliva et al., 2017).
3. The Greenland ice sheet (GIS) has been melting so slowly and so negligibly in recent decades that the entire ice sheet’s total contribution to global sea level rise was a mere 0.39 of a centimeter (0.17 to 0.61 cm) between 1993 and 2010 (Leeson et al, 2017) . That’s a sea level rise contribution of about 0.23 mm/year since the 1990s, which is a canyon-sized divergence from the 61 mm/year that adherents of peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science have projected for the coming decades.
And now Australian scientists have published a new paper in the journal Earth Systems and Environment that “does not support the notion of rapidly changing mass of ice in Greenland and Antarctica“. The paper highlights the “loud divergence between sea level reality” and “the climate models [that] predict an accelerated sea-level rise driven by the anthropogenic CO2 emission“.
In fact, the key finding from the paper is that long-term observations from tide gauges reveal a “recent lack of any detectable acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise“. The modern rate of sea level rise acceleration – 0.002 mm/year² – is so negligible it falls well below the threshold of measurement accuracy.
The lack of a detectable global-scale sea level rise acceleration recorded in tide gauge measurements isn’t a novel finding. In recent years, dozens of other scientists have bravely come forward to challenge “consensus” modeling that implicates anthropogenic CO2 emissions as the preeminent cause of ice sheet melt and sea level rise.
Perhaps at some point “consensus”-based climate science will jettison its focus on models and projections of perilous future climate states directly caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions and instead embrace the observational evidence that may undermine the alarm.
Until then, we will likely need to continue learning about how many millimeters we humans raise sea levels for each kilometer we drive in our fossil-fuel-powered vehicles. Because that’s how “consensus” climate science works.
Parker and Ollier, 2017
[L]ocal sea-level forecasts should be based on proven local sea-level data. Their naïve averaging of all the tide gauges included in the PSMSL surveys showed ‘‘relative’’ trends of about + 1.04 mm/year (570 tide gauges of any length). By only considering the 100 tide gauges with more than 80 years of recording, the average trend was only + 0.25 mm/year [2.5 centimeters per century]. This naïve averaging has been stable in recent decades, and it shows that the sea levels are slowly rising but not significantly accelerating. They conclude that if the sea levels are only oscillating about constant trends everywhere, then the local patterns may be used for local coastal planning without any need to use purely speculative global trends based on emission scenarios.
The loud divergence between sea-level reality and climate change theory—the climate models predict an accelerated sea-level rise driven by the anthropogenic CO2 emission—has been also evidenced in other works such as Boretti (2012a, b), Boretti and Watson (2012), Douglas (1992), Douglas and Peltier (2002), Fasullo et al. (2016), Jevrejeva et al. (2006), Holgate (2007), Houston and Dean (2011), Mörner 2010a, b, 2016), Mörner and Parker (2013), Scafetta (2014), Wenzel and Schröter (2010) and Wunsch et al. (2007) reporting on therecent lack of any detectable acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise. The minimum length requirement of 50–60 years to produce a realistic sea-level rate of rise is also discussed in other works such as Baart et al. (2012), Douglas (1995, 1997), Gervais (2016), Jevrejeva et al. (2008), Knudsen et al. (2011), Scafetta (2013a, b), Wenzel and Schröter (2014) and Woodworth (2011).
[T]he information from the tide gauges of the USA and the rest of the world when considered globally and over time windows of not less than 80 years […] does not support the notion of rapidly changing mass of ice in Greenland and Antarctica as claimed by Davis and Vinogradova (2017). The sea levels have been oscillating about a nearly perfectly linear trend since the start of the twentieth century with no sign of acceleration. There are only different phases of some oscillations moving from one location to another that do not represent any global acceleration.
The global sea-level acceleration is therefore in the order of + 0.002 ± 0.003 mm/year², i.e. + 2 ÷ 3 μm/year², well below the accuracy of the estimation. This means that the sea levels may rise in the twenty-first century only a few centimeters more than what they rose during the twentieth century. This is by no means alarming.
The information from the tide gauges of the USA does not support any claim of rapidly changing ice mass in Greenland and Antarctica. The data only suggest the sea levels have been oscillating about the same trend line during the last century and this century.
Other New Supporting Papers Indicating No Anthropogenic Sea Level Rise Signal
The analysis in this paper is based on a recently developed analytical package titled ‘‘msltrend,’’ specifically designed to enhance estimates of trend, real-time velocity, and acceleration in the relative mean sea-level signal derived from long annual average ocean water level time series. Key findings are that at the 95% confidence level, no consistent or compelling evidence (yet) exists that recent rates of rise are higher or abnormal in the context of the historical records available across Europe, nor is there any evidence that geocentric rates of rise are above the global average. It is likely a further 20 years of data will distinguish whether recent increases are evidence of the onset of climate change–induced acceleration.
Detrended correlation analysis of a global sea level reconstruction 1807-2010 does not show that changes in the rate of sea level rise are related to the rate of fossil fuel emissions at any of the nine time scales tried. The result is checked against the measured data from sixteen locations in the Pacific and Atlantic regions of the Northern Hemisphere. No evidence could be found that observed changes in the rate of sea level rise are unnatural phenomena that can be attributed to fossil fuel emissions. These results are inconsistent with the proposition that the rate of sea level rise can be moderated by reducing emissions. It is noted that correlation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a causal relationship between emissions and acceleration of sea level rise.