BS Levels High - Sea Levels Uncertain

George Rebane

Reading a recent post on NC Media Watch on climate change and sea levels made me go back and redo some previous research on the difficult problem of measuring sea levels.  The bottom line is that measuring the earth’s sea levels (yes, there are many of them) is still a difficult and unsolved problem.  At least it’s unsolved to the level that is claimed by the climate change hysteria heroes.

Here’s a readable report ‘Global sea level change: Determination and interpretation’ by Bruce Douglas of NOAA – this is the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that contains our national brains in matters having to do with sea levels.  In this report Dr. Douglas gives an account of the enormously difficult problem of even talking about a notion called ‘sea level’ let alone measuring its value.  And in no way can we build the quantitative causal chain to sea level values from any of the multitude of cross-linked factors that affect it – even if one does accept that we are suffering from anthropogenic global warming. But Douglas does conclude that the future is hopeful, and that some day we might be able to actually estimate what the global warming crowd already claims is a done deal.

Salient points made by Douglas -

- currently it takes an observation interval of 100-150 years to get a reliable measure of sea level trends;
- the best we can determine is that for the last 150 plus years the sea levels have been rising at a little less than 2mm per year;
- today we don’t have a clue what they might be doing in the short term;
- there’s hope that we can get our arms around most of this measurement problem, but no one’s done it yet.

Bottom line – the scary reports of actual worldwide sea levels and their future behavior are nothing but the latest calamities piled onto the crapola cart that is regularly wheeled through the public square for political purposes.  The sheep scare easily and vote accordingly.  The real question one should ask is why such reports from prestigious and responsible scientific institutions are not reported, and why they have not become part of the (suppressed) public debate on climate change.