Sea Level Rising Rapidly on Both Coasts, Could Even Flood San Francisco Airport in a Decade

Wonder what that rising water level will do to the fault lines along California. Something says salt water in there can't be a "good thing".

Sigh. How hard would it be, PopSci, to apply a small dose of healthy skepticism and a little independent fact-checking before just passing this stuff on as if it were the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

From the National Academy Press link in the article: "Tide gages show that global sea level has risen about 7 inches during the 20th century, and recent satellite data shows that the rate of sea-level rise is accelerating." Yes and no.

First of all if you go to the NOAA website that charts those tide gauges and sea-level trends, the trend on every single site on the U.S. West Coast (except North Spit, CA and Rincon Island, CA) is well below the predictions made by the book. In fact, they're even below the recent trend of about 3.0mm to 3.5mm (+/- 0.4mm) per year.

www.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html

If you go to NOAA's Global Climate Change Indicators site and look at the graph of global sea levels, you will see that the trend increases for the latter part of the 20th century, but then it starts to decrease around 2002.

http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/indicators/sea-level-rise.gif

So there is no measured evidence to support their claim of accelerating sea level rise. It's based on--guess what?--those wonderfully unpredictable computer models that have yet to accurately project what's happening in the real world.

Just because you increase forcings and feedback for glacier melt in computer models doesn't mean it's actually happening. In fact recent studies correlate sea level rise to increased runoff of ground water pumped from aquifers, something that certainly will not continue unabated as global population growth slows and water resources are managed more carefully to avoid depleting them.

This doesn't make any sense, I wish the article would go into greater detail as to how I could pour water into one side of a bowl and see water levels on only that half of the bowl rise? That is basically what it says is happening, and you can't blame the majority of people for being skeptical, let alone asking how it is possible.

Los Angeles will be the next great Atlantis---with most of the city underwater within 200 years. Good riddance.

Well... real estate values in the midwest should skyrocket as displaced former-coastal residents move back in-land. Farm land values will rise dramatically too because more people will need more food while still using roughly the same amount of land, forcing crop prices higher, and inflating the value of the land along with it. Good talk.

@NoOneYouKnow - yes. You also can't blame most people for thinking the earth was flat or that a heavier object falls faster than a lighter object. This is why we need more emphasis on science in our schools so that concepts such as these aren't so hard to grasp.

I'm not necessarily advocating for this article, but it isn't impossible for water levels to vary in different places. Sure, a small bowl of water will lay flat, but even if you start stirring a small current in it, the slopes will change and it can hit the sides differently. Translate that to the oceans, that aren't a perfect circle with a flat bottom and have many different forces acting on them, and its not hard to imagine that a surface area thousands of miles across could be just a few feet different on the other side.

In addition, most of the difference they are claiming in this article (on the west coast) is from rising and sinking land that doesn't have anything to do with global warming.

@laurenra7
you used the "trends" you linked incorrectly. Those values are for a minimum of 30 years and in many cases a much longer time period. Perhaps the word "trend" confused you. Next, the graphic of sea level rise you provided a link for certainly does not show a decrease since 2002. In fact, had you linked the page (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/) instead of the graphic, it states that the increase is due to ocean heating and that glacier melt (look up "Glacier Mass Balance" for some evidence) is expected to increase that process. I suppose you'll have to sigh at NOAA too! Oh those silly scientists.

@NoOneYouKnow
What claimed majority of people are you speaking for?
Perhaps laurenra7 can explain the errors of your simple "bowl" model. I would think there are many factors which dictate sea level differences around the world. (gravitational variance, currents, static weather patterns, seabed irregularities, water temperature, latitude, etc.)

gizmowiz06/26/12 at 8:51 am
Los Angeles will be the next great Atlantis---with most of the city underwater within 200 years. Good riddance.
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Gizmowiz,
The next spontanous bad thing that happens in your life, just remember what you said above and perhaps somebody will be saying, "good riddance" about you!

Human beings, people, familys live there ya know.

Food for thought.

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Every day is a new day!

@beantown117 What are you, a Democrat? My apologies for not knowing everything there is to know about everything. I elected not to take oceanography in high school and now i'm an idiot who doesn't know anything? Ha! For the record, there already is emphasis on Science - the only thing your required to know more of than Science is Math and English.

@The majority of that group who, like me, is uneducated on the matter. I wasn't claiming to represent mankind or anything. Anyhow, I did some of my own research on the matter and got the answer I needed. Probably should have done that first.. hehe.

So they were right when they said Califonia was going to slide into the ocean. We just mixed up the land moving or the water moving.

Never cared for California anyway. I'd bet may tax dollars will be spent again to help them out of their mess.

@NoOneYouKnow

Were you satisfied with the research you performed? If so, can you please post the link here for others to see?

Thanks.

"Sea Level Rising Rapidly,..." - as measured from a sinking ship

or

How about "Hot Temperatures Accelerating..." - as the day goes on

or

"Stock Market Soon to Hit Bottom..." - based on last hours losses only

or

"Man Loses Thousands of Pounds..." - but has netted hundreds more

or

"Moon almost Hits Earth..." - relative to a galactic scale

- Anthropomorphic Coastal Decline

The weight of all the buildings and houses along the coast is pushing the coast down. You can't deny that it is. Wouldn't you say the science of gravity says it is a fact. So we must stop all building along the coasts of all first world nations. We are affecting things and must be stopped. Though some will deny that it is a factor, science since Sir Isaac Newton says it must be. And if the factor is non-zero then we must treat it as a crisis and we must be stopped.

Some bad people will disagree, that the medicine is worse than the disease but they are fools, imbeciles who don't know what is good for them. They just don't understand mass and gravity, the lave pools underneath that are being displaced by the weight of the buildings. Or the effects on the environment that will result.

If you want people to stop building on the coasts, for whatever reason. And know that they won't. You make a social movement like this. And you will have people at each others throats to do it. They will see the other side as an enemy who must be stopped, rather than a reasonable debate about what levels of risk, the best balanced solutions and mitigating factors to introduce. You will make it into a war that the only solution is what you wanted in the first place, any questioning is an act of evil and stupidity. You will make it into a choice of death or self imposed slavery to one small number of international powerful wealthy people who will decide. everything. You will then if given the power give them both of those choices, not just the one.

Does this provide a more reasonable view of the world of the last years? Or is it more likely that its evil and stupidity of the many, rather than evil of the few? who know your weaknesses, your propensity to align in groups against another group, and that once you accept yourself as a member of that group you will fight to the death for it? whatever it is, even if it results in your own death? That using that dichotomy you can move people toward anything.

It might be worth a small amount of time for consideration, the possibility that this might be a factor in the events of the last years, wouldn't it.

Please correct the headline.

A decade is 10 years. The San Francisco airport is 15 feet above sea level. To flood the SF airport in a decade would require a 1.5 foot increase in sea level per year. The article cites a loss of 1 foot, requiring 150 years to raise the sea level 15 feet.

To match the information in the article, the headline should say "Sea level rises might flood San Francisco Airport in 150 years."

But, I guess if headlines make the story, you could say "Run for your lives! San Francisco is Doomed!!!!!!"

Sigh, I guess even I need to check the words in the post. That's 1 foot in 10 years, making 150 years. 1 foot by itself looked like I meant 1 foot per year.

Regarding the pattern in global sea level over time:*

"The first half of the century (1904-1953) had a slightly higher rate (1.91 ± 0.14 mm/yr) in comparison with the second half of the century (1.42±0.14 mm/yr 1954-2003)."

http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Holgate/sealevel_change_poster_holgate.pdf

Jevrejeva et al. 2006** noted "it is apparent that rates in the 1920-1945 period are likely to be as large as today's."

In fact, sea level had an average rise rate per year which was as much in the late 19th century as a century later, despite how human emissions rose by more than a factor of 10 over the period.

Regarding California sea level in particular, the San Diego measurement station history is shown in the publication linked above.

Especially with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and solar and GCR-cloud cycles, some variation can be seen beyond near-linear recovery from the Little Ice Age (having gotten somewhat low in the LIA compared to times like the Holocene Climate Optimum which was warmer than now, with the high thermal inertia of seawater thousands of meters deep making temperature recovery take up to centuries), but the average is not too much different than the world average.

What is special about the 1920-1945 period earlier mentioned? Look at the 1930s in the following graph, for the zone of the planet with the most average temperature change (much less near the tropics):

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif

The above picture is worth 1000 words, if one compares to the late 20th century to see how much (or not) the latter is unprecedented.

Anyway, so, regarding "the slightly sinking state is projected to lose one foot of land in 10 years":

I hope the claims here are representative of a new trend of activists in the CAGW movement making claims with so
nicely short timeframes, in this case apparently getting so overconfident from media support as to forget how much people can actually notice whether or not there is 1 foot sea level rise, especially if they live by the beach. I'm saving this as a reference, so I will show it to people 10 years from now.

* Also related: Holgate, S.J. 2007. On the decadal rates of sea level change during the twentieth century. Geophysical Research Letters 34: 10.1029/2006GL028492.

** Jevrejeva, S., Grinsted, A., Moore, J.C. and Holgate, S. 2006. Nonlinear trends and multiyear cycles in sea level records. Journal of Geophysical Research 111: 10.1029/2005JC003229.

@Robot,

Atlantis was real. the Atlantians were a race similar to our own but had special abilities given to them by the Annuaki. and yes water levels are increasing because the human race will join there Mermaid cousins soon. open your arms and embrace our lost family fro they are special beings!

"You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." -Morpheus

Far Out Man, I'll bet NOAA understands trends pretty well since they've been measuring oceans for quite a while now. This explanation from the link I provided:

"These measurements have been averaged by month to remove the effect of higher frequency phenomena in order to compute an accurate linear sea level trend."

Just because one year there's a dramatic rise or a dramatic slowdown doesn't mean it's a trend. Even a few years is nothing to get excited about. Averaged over a period of many years or decades you start to see meaningful trends. Averaged over hundreds of years, most of the short-term trends disappear because, frankly, they don't mean much.

Now here's where it gets confusing, and where we skeptics realize that climate alarmists are often talking out of the back of their necks. The NOAA puts average yearly sea level rise for the last 100 years at 1.7 mm a year. Also according to NOAA, "since 1993, global sea level has risen at an accelerating rate of around 3.5 mm/year."

If you look at the graph YOURSELF, you will see that before 1993 there were several periods of sea level rise greater than 3.5 mm a year. Look at the 1950's. Look at the period around 1960. Look at the period around 1980. Those were short-term trends that soon slowed down. Now look at the graph inset from 1993 to 2010. The period from 1993 to about 2002 shows a steeper rise than from 2002 to 2010.

So you can safely claim that the rate of sea level rise is GREATER from 1993 to 2002 than the 100 year average. But you can't say it is accelerating, because after 2002 it's actually slowing down.

@laurenra7
you are over-analysing the data. If from one year to the next the increase was 10mm, does that mean that mean sea level rise has been decelerating ever since? Of course not. Trend lines are mathematical constructs. They are not arbitrarily chosen at the viewer's whim. You must mathematically curve fit to match the data. That said, even just looking at the graph, you should be able to visualize the obvious upward curve indicating acceleration.

Now I have to point out that you first indicate that short periods should be ignored and then you resort to short period analysis later to refute the acceleration. While NOAA's individual data points are monthly averages, the reported increase is still an average over a minimum of 30 years and in most cases much longer than that. So, when you look at a particular location on the California coast and it reports 2mm/year increase, that is probably more than the mean sea level rise worldwide over that same period.

However, I must come back to the actual text attached to that image you provided. What say you about the conclusions that NOAA makes? Are you saying they are wrong about their own graph? What about the other images (indicators) all supporting their statements? Look at the glacier image three down from the one you referenced. How is this not evidence for you?

The problem with worlds oceans rising is the molecules of water are interacting with the suns energy and swelling up. It also explain why so many people in the world are becoming obese. Basically Earth is getting bloated on water.

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Every day is a new day!

@JediMindset

The Annunaki are not real. The Fallen Angels are literally fallen Angels. When the they fell to earth they brought much knowledge, that’s when humans went astray. This is the time of Atlantis. They had technology and abilities that we do not have today. But they rejected God, wanting to become gods themselves. And God destroyed Atlantis. And now we are going along the same path today.

Just look at the UFO phenomenon, every serious scientist that have looked into it and tried to debunk it has come to the conclusion that something is happening. Its just as much spiritual as it is physical..those “aliens” are really demons. They got the whole world fooled. The Aliens or Annunaki aren’t going to save anything, just enslave mankind in a new world order to worship satan.

David Icke, Michael Tsarion and all those new age yahoo’s tell 90% truth then 10% lies of Annunaki and men becoming gods. Don’t fall for it.

You are a smart guy, I wish you’d look into the word of God. Evoloution is a lie. God created man from dust. We’ve forgotten our past

Check out these videos and tell me what you think

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptjUhuv90vs&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BifWyLT6lDs

JediMindset,
Aldrons Last Hope, does not realize the current version of humans is a result of the breeding and tweaking and combining of alien DNA of the annuki or the god Enki. While it is true the fallen angels have been removed, all the tampered DNA is alive and well presently.

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Every day is a new day!

@Robot, what gives you that idea? It says clearly in the book of Enoch that the fallen angels had the ability to manipulate DNA. You should give it a listen sometime. All this Nirubu B.S is just there to hijack the truth movement. All these new agers base their research on the work of satanists. I suggest you take a look at the links I left JMS.

All the science and predictions in the world can not tell us what will happen! Relax, we will destroy ourselves and earth fast enough. We've destroyed everything else.

@Aldrons Last Hope, thanks for the info and the heads up. i read a lot of info from both david wilcock and David Ick. William Cooper did say to keep a look out for disinformation agents. i will watch the videos. i enjoy learning as much as i can in this short life.

@Robot

i think ALH knows a little more than most people on the subject of Chariots of the Gods.

"You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." -Morpheus

JediMindset,
Yes, I agree ALH knows a lot.
Still, Enoch was written after the history of the Sumerians. You need to research the history of Anu and Enki to get a true understanding of the war of the gods and that Anu was the god of the heavens and Enki made humans and was later punish. Though, I am happy the story of Enoch was found with the Dead Sea Scroll and I recommend, everyone to read as well the Sumerian history too.

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Every day is a new day!