Vanuatu - something unusual and somehow encouraging

I'm busy updating spreadsheets for Pacific islands, mainly those in the Pacific Sea Level Project of the Australian National Tidal Unit - the straight-up and factual branch of the BOM. I updated Vanuatu last of all, as I'm working in alphabetical order. Here's the chart for the full record from 1993 to last month (November 2016):

The level has dropped to almost exactly what it was in 1993, from a peak in 2008-9. It seems to be a combination of SOI dropping from its high in 2009-10, a drop in sea temperature from 2008, and a rise in barometric pressure after 2011. A change of 1 hPa (=millibar) results in a change of 1cm in sea-level. Higher pressure, lower sea-level, and vice-versa. "Storm-surge" is due to low pressure (and high onshore winds) in a storm system. This is SOI to November 2016:

I'm checking on nearby (well, relatively) stations to see if there's anything remotely similar. I've already checked CGPS station data; here's that for Port Vila; the tide gauge is about 1 km away at the Cruise-ship port.

Source: SONEL

Although the red velocity analysis on the left says "Not robust", there's little change. More later maybe.

"Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America" - finally laid to rest. RIP

There's been some discussion about sea-level rise on the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. in the comments on the recent "Doubling up the sea level scare for Paris using the old ‘one-two punch’ line" post at WUWT. I posted a couple of charts there, and I intend to return to the Sallenger et al article in this post's title. They used windows of  60, 50 and 40 years for their analysis, and showed this chart for New York; incidentally the only time-series chart in the entire article - rather surprising since they analysed dozens of gauge stations around North America.

Supplementary Figure S7.  New York City annual average sea level data with three
regression results used in this study for the most recent 60-year subsample (1950-2009).
The mean elevation of the annual NYC sea level data (1893-2009) was removed and time
t = 0 was set at year 1950 (t = year – 1950) for these regressions.

I'm in the habit of using a variety of techniques to analyse gauge records, especially long ones like New York, as I did in a previous post about the "Hotspot". Those two 30-year regression lines above prompted me to plot a 30-year sliding window for New York, using the data from 1893-2013, slightly longer than Sallenger et al, who used PSMSL annual average data to 2009 - I've used annual averages calculated from monthly data. Their data had three recent years missing because a few monthly data points are missing, and PSMSL exclude such years. I suspect the differences are small though.

Data from PSMSL

The first thing that's obvious is that 30-year periods ending in the 1950s actually had rates higher than the 1980-2009 period shown on their chart above. So the modern acceleration is nothing new; in fact the earlier acceleration was more rapid. It also shows that projecting a 30-year rate forward to 2100 is both unscientific and ignoring history completely. I certainly don't expect future years to mirror the big fall in rates after the mid 1950s, but I do expect something of a drop. Sallenger et al just didn't look for any cyclical pattern in the gauge data. They mentioned it was possible that there were such patterns, but their analysis was effectively designed to mask it by comparing differences in rate between adjacent windows. If that was plotted, the 1950s peak above would be a trough! Why do I expect a gradual drop in rate? Because it's already underway!

Rates (mm/year) for 10 year (121 month) sliding windows.

Note how irregular peaks "kicked in" at the end of the 1960s; the latest peaked after Sallenger et al's 2009 end date, in 2010/11. Sandy Hook is an island S of the entrance to NY harbour. A more up-to-date (to 2014) plot shows the descent from the last peak more clearly:

Rates (mm/year) for 10 year (121 month) sliding windows.

Finally, here's the rate evolution, Rates are computed from 1950; the final point is 2014. When I've time, I'll update all my NY charts to date, and replace any above that need it.

In 2009, the rate was still rising; now it's levelled off. Sallenger et al's projection is already out-of-date. RIP

Plagiarism, Lies and Bullshit - Part 1

Back in April this year, Anthony Watts gave prominence to a "paper" by Nils-Axel Mörner & A. Parker - Australian sea level data highly exaggerated, only 5 inches by 2100. It's clear that neither he, nor any of the commenters on that post actually appear to have read the "paper", or if they did didn't do so with a critical or sceptical eye. Are they all sceptics in the general sense, or not? I'm an AGW sceptic, and I'm also a sceptic in the general sense - I believe nothing I read until I've checked out its conclusions, claims, methodology, and sources in detail. I've done all those checks on the "paper" (I use inverted commas deliberately), and have found all that this post's title implies. The "paper" is titled "Present-to-future sea level changes: The Australian case", and can be found here.

Mörner & Parker claim that the Australian government, aided and abetted by Australia's National Tidal Centre. a branch of the Bureau of Meteorology, have adopted an "exaggerated" figure for recent sea-level rise as "official". None of their cited sources contain the figure, nor statements of recent acceleration as claimed  - it's a "straw man". Indeed, the NTC takes pains to stress the short-term nature of the trends reported for its 16 SEAFRAME stations managed by their Australian Baseline Sea Level Monitoring Programme (ABSLMP), and warns against placing reliance on the data at present. There's a term which describes making unsupported claims, as M&P have done here, especially when the cited sources actually say just the opposite.

Astonishingly, this "paper" contains no data whatsoever to support its "conclusions". Despite having claimed to analyse "86 stations", there is no list of any stations analysed, no tables of results and just one chart for Fremantle, which in fact neatly refutes one of the claimed results (and more besides). Several "analyses" are claimed to have been carried out, but aren't mentioned again, and so no results or summaries are given. Not a single station trend for any relevant period is quoted.

Even more astonishing is not even a list of the 16 "ABSLMP" (Australian Baseline Sea Level Monitoring Programme) stations, which are supposedly central to the "paper" is given. The reader is left in the dark; reproducibility, a central requirement of published papers, would be impossible without a deal of research on the part of anyone attempting the process. I'm not in that position however - I've been studying all aspects of Australian sea-levels in some depth over recent years. Because of that knowledge, and the spreadsheets and charts to hand, I knew instantly that the claimed summary results were fiction. How much of a fiction will be seen below. The author(s) appear to believe that 1990-2010 spans 20 years, a figure they mention several times.

This is their claimed methodology:

We fit linear and 2nd order polynomial lines to the sea level data recorded along the coasts of Australia in order to assess the accelerating trends and to compare with the reconstruction of Church and White[12]. 

If Y is the mean sea level (MSL) and X is the year, then clearly the sea level rise is SLR=dY/dX and the sea level acceleration is SLA=d²Y/dX². The linear fitting gives the average SLR over the observation period. The 2nd order polynomial fitting gives the average SLA over the observation period.

There's no further mention of  any "2nd order polynomials" at all. "The 2nd order polynomial fitting gives the average SLA over the observation period." - no it doesn't, it gives the equation for a curve.

What about "rebutting" several prominent authors on sea-level rise?

Out of this highly variable spectrum, Douglas [16] selected 25 records and arrived at a mean sea level rise of 1.8 mm/year, Church et al. [11] selected 6 records and arrived at a value of 1.4 mm/year, and Holgate [20] selected 9 records and arrived at 1.45 mm/year.

The word "selected" is meant to infer some kind of "cherry-picking". However, two of the three cases, you won't find the claimed figures for number of stations "selected", and in none  the claimed statistic. Comparing Australian data to global data puts it in context, and no more.

Douglas didn't "select" anything. There were only 23 (not 25) long-term stations available to analyse, and his result was global. Douglas didn't estimate a figure for overall sea-level rise. Peltier (2001) used Douglas's data, corrected for GIA, and came up with 1.84 mm/year.

Church & White (hardly "et al." at all) used 290 stations, and don't mention a set of 6 stations in any context. You'll search in vain for the "1.4" figure, their figure is 1.7 ± 0.3 mm/year.

Amazingly enough, Holgate did actually select 9 stations for analysis; his intention was to test whether a small set of high-quality, continuous (no gaps) records to "composites" of many sets of world-wide gauge data of varying lenght and quality. His estimate was 1.74 ± 0.16 mm/year, and not 1.45.

Here's a list of claimed analyses, and results given for the Australian stations:

70 "non-ABSLMP" stations 1990-2010, linear trends: average 0.1 mm year
2nd. degree polynomials for same: none
70 "non-ABSLMP" stations 1990-2000 linear trends: none
2nd. degree polynomials for same: none
70 "non-ABSLMP" stations 2000-2010: none
2nd. degree polynomials for same: none
16 ABSLMP stations 1990-2010 linear trends: none
2nd. degree polynomials for same: none
All 86 stations 1990-2010, linear trends: average 1.5 mm/year
and "No fitting produces a sea level rise in excess of 1.5 mm/year".

Those last two claims alone demonstrate that the "results" aren't results at all. - they're fabricated. If the average of the 86 is 1.5 mm/year, then some must have been lower, and some higher, but we're told none was higher than 1.5 mm/year. Therefore they must have all been identical at 1.5 mm/year, yet we're told that 70 of the 86 averaged 0.1 mm/year. Also, of the 70 stations that averaged 0.1 mm/year, some must have been higher, and some lower, with many negative. Now that would have been remarkable, in the scientific sense - news to broadcast. M&P haven't even realised the implications of their laughable "statistics".

Check out that last claim against my analysis of the "86 stations" - actually 85. Six stations are so remote from Australia they aren't relevant at all - thousands of km away. I've included them however, to get overall statistics to compare. I've started my list beginning on the north Queensland coast in the Gulf of Carpentaria, progressing clockwise via Tasmania to Milner Bay, Northern Territory, which is also on the Gulf, ending with the remote and decidedly non-Australian stations.

Station 32 is Sydney, which we're told had a "negative trend", though we aren't informed what it was -  details later.

Stations  65-79 are on the W and NW coasts; 66 is Fremantle, 77 is Darwin. 80-85 are "off the map" and very distant. Spaces on the charts indicate that no meaningful analysis for those stations was possible because of very limited data for the period. There were no zero trends, and none was negative.

Full station details are shown in the table at the end of this post.

The average for all stations is 4.05 mm/year, with standard deviation 2.51, minimum 0.17 mm/year, maximum 9.38 mm/year. The average for the 16 ABSLMP stations is 4.35 mm/year (not quoted by M&P, though central to their theme), and that for "non-ABSLMP" stations is 3.90 mm/year. Contrast those figures with the claims of M&B-P, 0.1 mm/year for the "non-ABSLMP" stations, and 1.5 mm/year overall.

There's a claim that the trend fo Sydney was negative over this period, but In fact it's positive over 1990-2010, and more positive over the actual 20 years 1991-2010. Here's the proof, with both trends:

Trends for Sydney, 1990-2010 and 1991-2010                                            Data Source: NTC

Strangely no trend figure is given for one of the most analysed stations worldwide, though perhaps not so strange because it must by now be clear that M&P haven't analysed any Australian stations over "20 years", nor over 21 years either. I intend to keep this post reasonably short and to the point, but what about the "plagiarism" and "bullshit"? Disinformation, and its partner in crime, unadulterated bullshit, is present throughout, like some constant and annoying in-store muzak. Here's a glaring (and hilarious) example:

The sea level changes along the Australian coastline have been measured at many locations starting in the late 1800s. In the early 1990s, the Australian Baseline Sea Level Monitoring Project was designed in order to monitor the sea level changes around Australia and to identify decadal trends with respect to the enhanced greenhouse effect. A sequence of SEAFRAME[36] stations (SEA-Level Fine Resolution Acoustic Measuring Equipment) was installed on 16 South Pacific islands to measure the sea level and to record meteorological parameters (both at stations previously covered by standard tide gauge equipment and stations previously not covered by tide gauges). The vertical stability of the gauges is surveyed by State organizations using GPS.

That's novel, installing tide-gauges on Pacific Islands to measure sea-level around Australia. This gives "telemetry" a whole new meaning. I'll poke around in some more ordure in Part 2 which will follow very shortly.  What about plagiarism? surely not? On page 3 is stated (my bold):

Previously , the National Tide [sic] Centre analyzed all tide gauge data from stations having more than 25 years of recording. This survey ended in year 2003, and was replaced by the ABSLMP data set containing the measurements restricted to the 16 ABSLMP stations. Nowadays, NTC neglects all the data previously measured at these stations as well as at other sites, many of which exceed 25, and sometimes 50, years of recording.

The NTC replaced the National Tidal Facility of Australia (NTFA ) in January 2004. Why is he scolding the NTC for ceasing the issue of reports at all? Why is he bemoaning the loss of reports with linear trends? Trends which he says are "misleading"? His charge against the NTC is that they produced a "misleading statistic" concerning the ABSLMP stations. They did not, and would not have done, as I'll explain later - his citations are fake - they don't contain what he claims, nor anything remotely resembling what he claims.

The reason for his charge of "neglect" will soon be clear. Figure 1 in the "paper", is said to represent the full-record rates for 39 stations with "long-term" (25 years or more) of data in 2009. If data was available to end 2010, you might ask as I did, why quote the number of such stations for 2009 if you had data for "all stations" to 2010? Also why analyse that data to 2009 - a long-term station in 2009 is also a long-term station in 2010. "many of which exceed 25, and sometimes 50, years of recording" - doesn't he know how many in each category? In fact it's most, not many which exceed 25 years in 2010, and it's just two which exceeded 50 years - Fremantle and Sydney.

Here's Figure 1, with the legend "AUSTRALIA" in large friendly letters, in case anyone might be unable to identify what it represents.

There's already a problem - Mörner&Parker (Parker is actually Alberto Boretti, more in Part 2) couldn't have analysed the 39 stations on that map; one of them (Port Adelaide Inner Harbour) ceased operation after 2008, and since the data was virtually identical to Port Adelaide Outer Harbour (hardly surprising!) the NTC pulled the record from the data webpage in 2010, well before M&P say they accessed the data. How do I know that the station is represented on the map? Is my knowledge of Oz stations encyclopaedic? Yes and no, it's extensive (ahem!), but I know exactly which stations that map shows, because as it happens, I have a copy of the map myself, a nice crisp and unfuzzy one, along with a table of station results, in a July 2010 report produced by the NTC. It's a report which M&P (or just Mörner?) took pains to claim (above) wasn't produced after 2003, and is titled "Australian Mean Sea Level Survey 2009"; the graphic is on page 8:

Note the caption - Mörner's map is captioned

Figure 1 : Distribution of tide gauge station [sic] in Australia. Location and average rates of the 39 tide gauge stations in mainland Australia having a period of recording of at least 25 years. The mean rate of all 39 stations is 0.9 mm/year.

That caption implies by omission that the 39 figure is the most recent, though it applies to 2009 only, as the text states. Ignoring the fact that "mainland Australia" on the map includes three islands (Tasmania's hard to miss, and the names "Booby Island" and "Lord Howe Island" are a bit of a give-away). Mörner's graphic is fuzzy, with degraded colours and showing all the signs of having been taken from a screenprint, with aliasing artefacts in the image. I'll compare sentences (in sequence) from the two paragraphs preceding Mörner's map (M&P) with bulleted points from page 1 of the NTC report (NTC) reproduced below. You'll note from the page shown below that the sequence of statements is identical:

M&P:  In 2009, there were 39 sites on the Australian mainland (Figure 1), where relative sea levels had been measured for at least 25 years and with the average length being 42 years .
 NTC:  There are 39 Australian locations where relative sea levels have been measured for at least 25 years. The average length of these records is 42 years.

M&P:  The average trend of all the 39 stations is 0.9 ±1.9 mm/year.
NTC:  The average trend from all 39 stations is 0.9 mm/yr with a standard deviation of 1.9 mm/yr.

Following that statement, the NTC report says

Some of the stations exhibit unrealistic trends due to undocumented datum shifts. A more realistic average trend obtained from 29 stations within 1 standard deviation of the mean is 1.4 mm/yr with a standard deviation of 0.7 mm/yr.

Mörner missed  that bit out. I wonder why?

M&P:  The geographical pattern of relative sea level trends around the Australian coastline is fairly uniform (Figure1).
NTC:  The geographical pattern of relative sea level trends around the Australian coastline is fairly uniform in general.

M&P:  Parts of the Australian coastline are strongly affected by the ENSO events.
The longest sea level records show quasi bi-decadal sea-level oscillations.
NTC:  Annual mean sea levels around the Australian coastline are strongly correlated with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signal. Annual mean sea levels generally fluctuate in accordance with the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI).
The longest sea level records show decadal sea-level oscillations with periods of around 20 years.

NTC: The Australian Mean Sea Level Survey is updated annually.

There's nothing wrong of course, with using graphics, nor quoting text, from someone else's publication(s), if citations are given. In this case however, Mörner has not only failed to cite the source, he's explicitly said it doesn't exist! There's only one word for that - plagiarism, compounded by a blatant lie to cover his tracks. He's simply pinched the summary stats from the NTC report to 2009, including the standard deviation. None of the other claimed results include a standard deviation. Plagiarism is intellectual theft, and when blatant lies are added, the result is fraud.

Would a "sea level expert" really need to lift almost an entire page from a NTC report? From an organisation he's criticising? The hypocrisy is staggering! Not only that, but the number of long-term stations, and the statistics themselves, which apply to the period to 2009, and aren't exactly relevant here. Data was available to 2010, so why not do the trends and quote results to 2010? Mörner claims to have analysed 86 stations to 2010, so the spreadsheets should have been available. I say "claims", because there's not one scrap of evidence any such analyses were done, in fact just the opposite.

In a "paper" which claims to have analysed "all 86" Australian stations, 39 overall and 86 over the last two decades to 2010, amounting to some 297 trend analyses and 258 polynomial fittings, you'd expect several tables, a few sample charts, even a list of stations at the very least, wouldn't you? They're supposed to be there to inform the reader, summarise the results, and not least to show evidence that the work's been done, and that the summary results are valid. The sum total is one long-term chart for Fremantle, and a rather small bunch of totally unsupported statements. Statements which don't in fact  reconcile. And this heap of crap was given prominence on WUWT, of which a commenter there recently said "Everyone knows nobody gets away with bad science or math here".

Why on earth try it on to this extent? Mörner's relying on his target audience being uncritical and chauvinistic, generally ill-informed about sea-level in general, Australia in particular, and he's also confident that not one of them will check on anything he writes. None of those characteristics apply to yours truly. I've found evidence that Boretti-Parker is not an honourable man either, inclined to bend truth into fiction. He (as Boretti) is listed on the Principia Scientific website as a contributor - it's the lair of the "Sky-dragon slayers". Enough said, I think.

There are other claims in the "paper" - it might have been sub-titled "This paper is bought to you by the number 1.5", including a ludicrous claim to have analysed "all 2059 PSMSL stations". I'll shred that in Part 2. What's really ironic is that along the the Pacific coast of N & S America, tide-gauges do indeed show very low rates of rise, even a fall over recent decades, something Mörner denies. That's a strange contradiction, as he also denies any increase in global sea-levels. Unfortunately, no-one informed all the other tide-gauges worldwide of this "great truth"; for them it's "business as usual".

The M&P "paper" isn't just bad science - it's a total lack of science backed up by no data whatsoever - science fiction. The clues, in the form of "bad math", inconsistencies and disconnects are evident to anyone with a critical and sceptical eye. Those on WUWT, posters and commenters, who uncritically accepted a "paper" so thin you can read small print through it, need to re-examine their critical and sceptical faculties and motives.

Part 2, in which I turn over the ordure with a long stick, and explode more Mörner myths, coming very soon.

APPENDIX

NTC data for all stations here, and PSMSL data and charts here - search the page for Darwin; stations are listed clockwise from there. Values are mm/year.

	Averages for all stations, clockwise
	Station	1990- 2010	Running mean	Omiitted value
1	Mornington Island, QLD	Insufficient data		8.61
2	Karumba	7.94	7.94
3	Weipa	6.92	7.43
4	Booby Island	6.25	7.04
5	Goods Island	7.67	7.20
6	Thursday Island	2.00	6.16
7	Turtle Head	6.96	6.29
8	Ince Point	8.20	6.56
9	Port Douglas	3.85	6.22
10	Cairns	1.83	5.74
11	Mourilyan Harbour	1.40	5.30
12	Lucinda	3.11	5.10
13	Townsville	2.63	4.90
14	Cape Ferguson *	2.78	4.73
15	Abbot Point	Insufficient data		11.7
16	Bowen	2.29	4.56
17	Shute Harbour	2.33	4.41
18	Mackay	2.08	4.27
19	Hay Point	1.24	4.09
20	Rosslyn Bay *	3.36	4.05
21	Port Alma	1.60	3.92
22	Gladstone	1.43	3.79
23	Bundaberg	0.94	3.66
24	Urangan	0.28	3.50
25	Mooloolaba	1.52	3.41
26	Brisbane	3.19	3.41
27	Gold Coast Seaway	3.22	3.40
28	Norfolk Island, NSW	7.04	3.54
29	Yamba	0.93	3.44
30	Lord Howe Island	3.41	3.44
31	Newcastle	1.66	3.38
32	Sydney	1.25	3.31
33	Botany Bay	2.45	3.28
34	Port Kembla *	1.6	3.23
35	Eden	1.23	3.17
36	Stony Point, VIC *	1.71	3.13
37	Lakes Entrance	Insufficient data
38	Hovell Pile	5.31	3.19
39	Melbourne	2.38	3.17
40	Point Richards Channel	Insufficient data		5.14
41	Geelong	2.29	3.14
42	Point Lonsdale	0.35	3.07
43	Port Welshpool	Insufficient data
44	Queenscliff	2.93	3.07
45	West Channel Pile	2.30	3.05
46	Lorne *	2.46	3.03
47	Portland *	2.84	3.03
48	Devonport, TAS	Insufficient data
49	Low Head	Insufficient data
50	Spring Bay *	3.11	3.03
51	Hobart	0.17	2.96
52	Granville Harbour	Insufficient data
53	Burnie *	2.98	2.97
54	Victor Harbor, SA	2.02	2.94
55	Port Stanvac *	4.52	2.98
56	Port Adelaide	5.08	3.02
57	Port Giles	4.40	3.05
58	Wallaroo	2.53	3.04
59	Port Pirie	6.96	3.12
60	Whyalla	0.59	3.07
61	Port Lincoln	3.34	3.07
62	Thevenard *	3.34	3.08
63	Esperance, WA *	4.10	3.10
64	Albany	4.50	3.12
65	Bunbury	3.47	3.13
66	Fremantle	5.27	3.16
67	Hillarys *	7.84	3.24
68	Geraldton	6.12	3.29
69	Carnarvon	5.69	3.33
70	Exmouth	6.42	3.38
71	Onslow	6.93	3.44
72	King Bay	6.83	3.49
73	Cape Lambert	7.43	3.55
74	Port Hedland	8.12	3.62
75	Broome *	9.32	3.71
76	Wyndham	9.38	3.79
77	Darwin, NT *	7.78	3.85
78	Gove Harbour	5.69	3.87
79	Milner Bay *	7.54	3.92
80	Cocos Islands *	7.86	3.98
81	Macquarie Island	6.84	4.02
82	Casey, ANT	6.22	4.05
83	Commonwealth Bay	Insufficient data
84	Davis	2.29	4.02
85	Mawson	5.59	4.05
	All stations average	4.05
	ABSLMP average	4.35
	Other stations average	3.90
	Standard deviation	2.51
	Minimum	0.17
	Maximim	9.38

Sea-level in Australia and the Southern Oscillation Index

I've read a fair bit about the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) over the years, about how much ENSO (El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation) affects sea-level in the Pacific. I've noted effects, particularly the El Niño "dip" in the western and central Pacific, and the corresponding "spike" in the east (especially the US Pacific shore). However, my impression was that it was just the extremes, El Niño and the less-well defined La Niña that had any real effect on Pacific sea-level. Before I continue, it's worthwhile quoting what Australia's Bureau of Meteorology has to say about the SOI; it's succinct and informative:

The Southern Oscillation Index, or SOI, gives an indication of the development and intensity of El Niño or La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean. The SOI is calculated using the pressure differences between Tahiti and Darwin.

Sustained negative values of the SOI below −8 often indicate El Niño episodes. These negative values are usually accompanied by sustained warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, a decrease in the strength of the Pacific Trade Winds, and a reduction in winter and spring rainfall over much of eastern Australia and the Top End. You can read more about historical El Niño events and their effect on Australia in the Detailed analysis of past El Niño events.

Sustainted [sic] positive values of the SOI above +8 are typical of a La Niña episode. They are associated with stronger Pacific trade winds and warmer sea temperatures to the north of Australia. Waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean become cooler during this time. Together these give an increased probability that eastern and northern Australia will be wetter than normal. You can read more about historical La Niña events and their effect on Australia in the Detailed analysis of past La Niña events. 

The ENSO Wrap-Up includes the latest 30-day SOI value, as well as other information on indicators of El Niño and La Niña events.

 The graph below shows monthly values of the SOI in recent years.

  Source:BOM

On the following page they have links to data tables; Wanting to create a spreadsheet of monthly SOI values (from 1876!) I was dismayed to find the table to be structured as years down and months across. However, using Excel's Copy and Paste-Special/Transpose functions I was able to do it, laboriously year by year. Here's the result for 1959 to May 2013. The reason for the not-so-obvious start year will become obvious very soon.

SOI index 1959-2013    Data source: BOM

I've added a 25-month (2 year) centred moving average to smooth out the spikes without suppressing the signal. A 13-month MA would seem to be more appropriate, but gives too "lumpy" a trace; a 37-month MA smooths just too much. Like Goldilocks' porridge the 25-month MA is "just right".

Comparing the SOI plot with a sea-level plot is easy, but I wondered if I could add the SOI to a sea-level chart in some way. One problem is that the signal is relatively small, and the other is that it varies around a (flat, obviously) zero value. I hit on the wheeze of "magnifying" the SOI signal, and normalising the start of the SOI moving average with the start of the sea-level moving average, incrementing the magnified SOI by the monthly sea-level-trend increment. I tried a factor of 10 for magnification, on the basis that the SOI signal is based on air pressure at sea level, and one hPa change leads to a 10 mm sea-level change (in the opposite direction). My assumption may not have had much maths behind it, but the "porridge effect" operated and it was "just right". Here's the result for Darwin:

Darwin complete sea-level record 1959-2012       Data source: BOM/NTC

I don't now what you think, but I'd call that a rather good correlation, especially over the right-hand half of the chart. Here's one for Fremantle over the same period.

Fremantle sea-level 1959-2013  Data source: BOM/NTC

For both Darwin and Fremantle, note that the recent (since 1994) sharp upward trend has begun a downward reverse, more clearly predicted on the SOI chart which extends to last month (May 2013). The large and broad downward bulge around 1983 corresponds with the intense (some would say most intense on record) El Niño of 1982-3. It shows up well on the 25m MA sea-level plot for Darwin (and most Australian stations), but sea-level rose at Fremantle during that event. All the other El Niños show up on both charts; the broad low during the early 1990s (1991-2 and 1994-5 El Niños, with just 1993 between) and the intense but shorter 1997-8 El Niño. The 2010 El Niño was a more subdued affair.

I think it's clear that the SOI doesn't just affect variations in sea-level, it drives them, at least on the west coast of Australia. In a future post I'll look at other Oz stations for correlation, and where correlation is poor, explore possible reasons.

Damp Data from Down Under - Australian Sea Level Update

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology finally go their act together and published sea-level data (to the end of 2012) at the end of May. Prior to that, the latest data (other than for the newer ABSLMP stations) was to the end of 2010. I've been hard at work updating and expanding my database, and will update my reference page soon. In the meantime, I present charts for the two long-term "poster-children", Fremantle and Sydney. Both much analysed, much discussed, and often misrepresented. A certain Andrea Boretti spent many hours, produced many spreadsheets and charts, wrote many pages, and tortured the Sydney data at length until it confessed that there wasn't much of note going on there - in other words, there was no sign of any significant acceleration in the rate of rise.

In my humble opinion, if your intention is to analyse the rate to identify any significant change, then do just that. There's no need for "sliding windows", spectral analysis, polynomial curve-fitting or anything else. For example, calculate the rate from the start year to a succession of years, e.g. 1900-1910, 1900-1911, and so on to the last year of data. I've made it a standard analysis in almost all of my spreadsheets, and shown examples in a number of posts. While the amount of variation in the long-term rate reduces with the data length, significant year-to-year changes are still clearly represented in addition to longer-period change. Here's the chart for Sydney - I've used a 121-month (10-year) centred running mean. The rate has increased a little from the previous chart's 0.89 mm/year (to 2010).

Sydney, NSW - Sea level 1914-2012  (Data source: BOM)

The plot of the annual rate shows a break in slope at 1997, and a small increase thereafter.

Sydney, NSW - trend in mm/year from date on lower axis.

Fremantle has seen a definite change after 1994 - the running mean shows an uptick after then. This is not surprising, all West and North-West Australia stations show similar upticks, an acceleration in fact; in the Fremantle case after around 40 years of little change, even a slight reduction after the middle 70's.

Fremantle. WA - Sea-level 1897-2012   (Data source: BOM)

The long-term trend plot reflects the change, with a break in slope at 1994, and an increasing upward trend after 1998.

Fremantle. WA - trend in mm/year from date on lower axis.

There are those who would have you believe that nothing of the sort has happened; "situation normal, no change", but the evidence is clear. More on this in a post in preparation. However, the fairly sharp increase in rate over the last couple of decades around the west of Oz and the far-western Pacific in general is matched by virtually no change on the eastern shores - North and South America, and little or no change in the central Pacific. It's quite clear to me that what the satellites have recorded over the last 20 years is fairly accurate - those who would have you believe otherwise never actually compare tide-gauge data for exactly the same period as the satellite timespan. If you've seen such claims, check out what was actually compared - nothing, just a few longer-term charts produced. "See, there's no comparison!" they say, when they've done no comparison whatsoever. More (in detail, with real comparisons) on that in a future post too.

The Nodal Tidal Cycle - more evidence

You've probably never heard of Port Pirie. It's a mining town and port (really?) in South Australia, north of Adelaide, though Australians might call it a city. In common with many ports in Australia it has a tide gauge.

Nothing very spectacular to see there, just a pronounced dip caused by the intense 1997/8 El Niño, followed by a step rise and a relative stasis, and a low overall rate of rise. Apart from the lesser dips going back to 1969, all caused by previous El Niños, there's no obvious signs of any cycles in the data. That data provided by the BOM's National Tidal Centre, has a standard deviation included for the hourly data which is averaged to create the monthly averages plotted on the chart. The standard deviation reflects the variability of the hourly data through the tidal cycles, and that variability is increased or reduced by the effect of the 18.61-year period of the nodal tidal cycle (NTC). If the standard deviation is plotted something quite spectacular appears.

Proof if any is still needed, of the lack of any great influence of the NTC on mean sea-level. Using the standard deviation to show the effect of the NTC on tidal variability is a technique I'd like to be able to claim as my own invention, but I have to give all the credit to one David Pugh, author of several excellent books on things tidal. It's obvious when you think about it - I just didn't think about it - doh! In common with other regions worldwide, some Australian stations show the cycle clearly (Port Pirie is just the clearest example) and some don't. Fremantle in Western Australia is another Oz station which clearly shows the cycle; it has a much longer record than Port Pirie, and the cycle has an evident upward trend. First the gauge record -

..... and the standard deviation showing the NTC -

Note the obvious upward trend - this doesn't indicate any marked effect on mean sea-level, but shows that the tidal range, the difference between low and high water, is increasing somewhat. I don't know whether this is a feature of west-coast sites or not, but Sydney on the east coast shows a much steeper downward trend. What the cause of these trends might be, I don't now, and I can't find any literature which might throw some light on it. Perhaps there's something here waiting to be discovered.

Peter Gleick speaks with forked tongue

Peter Gleick (who he?) has a piece on Science Blogs (h/t Tom Nelson) - (Mis)Understanding Sea-Level Rise (SLR) and Climate Impacts which is a neat summary of what follows that title. I won't use his first name again - it implies some degree of respect on my part, and I have no respect for this excuse for a scientist. He starts

One of the most important and threatening risks of climate change is sea-level rise (SLR). The mechanisms are well understood, and the direction of changes in sea-level is highly certain – it is rising and the rate of rise will accelerate. There remain plenty of uncertainties (i.e., a range of possible outcomes) about the timing and rate of rise that have to do with how fast we continue to put greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the responses of (especially) ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and the sensitivity of the climate.

Gleick is a self-confessed liar and thief, and here he's lying while stealing the truth. If it's certain that the direction (he feels he has to explain to his dummy readers that sea-level rise means that the level's going up - doh!) and rate of rise will accelerate. then how is it that there are simultaneous uncertainties about the timing and scale of that rise? He's saying here that the rate of rise depends on all the big climate uncertainties. He's right of course, but they're the big climate uncertainties, which means no-one actually knows what will happen, and over what precise timescale, least of all Gleick.

How soon before he mentions "superstorm Sandy"? All bets are off - straight away. The only thing that's predictable in this world today is the storyline of so-called climate "experts".

Even little changes can have big consequences. As we saw with Superstorm Sandy, where extremely severe weather was combined with a very high tide, on top of sea levels that have risen six to nine inches over the past century, even a little bit of sea-level rise around the world has the potential to cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damages and the displacement of millions of people.

The "little bit of sea-level rise" didn't cause "hundreds of billions of dollars of damages and the displacement of millions of people" - the storm surge did. Does anyone (including Gleick) really think that it was the "six to nine inches" that caused all the damage? There are a few things that he needs to get his head around, and it's a big head, so in theory he should have no difficulty. Sandy hit the shore at the time of a spring tide. These higher-than-normal tides occur twice a month, when the Earth, Sun and Moon are aligned, with the higher tide when there's a new Moon - the Sun and Moon are close together in the sky, and their combined pull on the oceans is maximised. luckily Sandy didn't strike at high tide, so the coast was spared the worst. When the surge and the tidal factors are taken into account, the "six to nine inches" matters hardly at all. He knows that, and if he doesn't know it, he's as confused mentally as when he created his fake email accounts. He drones on

The Pacific Institute, among many other organizations, has been working to understand and evaluate the nature of the threat of sea-level rise and the risks posed to coastal populations, property, and ecosystems. In 1990, a colleague and I published the first detailed mapping and economic assessment of the risks of sea-level rise to the San Francisco Bay Area, looking at populations at risk, the value of property in new flood zones, and the costs of building some kinds of coastal protection (“adaptation”) to protect higher valued assets. That early report can be found here.

Sea-level along the Pacific coast isn't rising, it hasn't risen appreciably anywhere in the last thirty years, and it's generally falling at the moment. See my posts here, here, here, here, and more recently (2 days ago)  here. Gleick isn't a sea-level expert, he's a hydrologist, and neither was or is his colleague and co-author Edwin P. Maurer, who's an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, and who says of his work

My research is directed at a variety of topics, related to large scale modeling of land surface processes. This includes investigations into forecasting and predictability, and effects of changes in land use and climate on the hydrologic response of regions.

Land surface processes - nuff said? Then follows a lot of waffle about misunderstanding simple terms and trends and risks. I like the first one however, which shows that sometimes there's a disconnect between his brain and his fingers (or vice-versa)

Misunderstanding #1: Predication versus Scenario. There is a big difference between a prediction and a scenario. Scenarios are tools for examining how changes in some kind of conditions (such as greenhouse gas concentrations) might affect something else (such as climatic conditions or sea-level). They are stories of possible futures based on a range of assumptions. Almost all studies of climate impacts evaluate scenarios to examine possible future conditions, risks, and threats.

There's a big difference between predication and prediction too. He's right about one thing - scenarios are stories in that they're science fiction. To frame a scenario, reasonably likely outcomes are needed, but he said himself, that
"There remain plenty of uncertainties (i.e., a range of possible outcomes)" and that scenarios are based on not just a set, but a range of assumptions. Some climate models predict project a cooling future. All models produce different results on each run, and so the individual runs have to be averaged for each. The various models also vary widely in those averaged results.

The final depiction of the results is a chart which looks like a spreading bunch of twigs. Then assumptions have to be made about the results, and a range of further assumptions made to produce a whole range of scenarios. Which of those scenarios are then chosen? You already knew the answer, as I do. It's a classic example of confirmation bias, choosing the results wanted while ignoring everything else.

There's only one valid prediction, and that's whatever happens won't have been predicted by models. Some runs by a few models may get close, but those runs will be lost in the averaging process, and the resulting averages rejected if they don't match the confirmation bias. Then, some time in the future, when the models are seen to have been wildly wrong, the Gleicks and the Manns and the Trenberths and the Schmidts will pop out of the woodwork, and assure us that we misunderstood what they'd been saying, that the models really got it right all along, and produce some smoothed-out piece of discarded printout from their waste-baskets to prove it. Wait a minute - they've been busy doing that to explain why the "warmer winters" turned into colder winters, and exactly why there's been a stasis in global temperature while they were busy telling us "warming is accelerating". They knew it might happen all along, but just didn't mention it.

Act now to stop environmental destruction, while it's too soon

Here's another post on an alarmist claim about sea-level rise. I know, I know, but it's my bag an' you just gotta put up with it. Look at it from my point of view and sympathise. Now where was I? Oh yes - Mike Heral of the Daily Aztec (I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley, all that tearing out beating hearts and such) bemoans that America's seeming indifference to sea-level change is "pretending the monster isn't there". He obviously hasn't been reading what I see daily, reporters, bloggers, greenies and "sea-level coordinators" verbally spreading their arms like anglers "It'll be that high or maybe three times as much". Reporters need to get out more, or rather stay in and read more. Enough beating about the heart bush, read what he has to say in Act now to stop environmntal [sic] destruction.

America’s reaction to the rising sea level is even more disappointing than the San Diego State’s men’s basketball season. Or I should say, our non-reaction to rising sea levels. When we were young and scared of monsters under our beds, we’d close our eyes and pretend the monster wasn’t there. Our wishing made the monster go away. Pretending climate change and a rising sea level isn’t happening will not make it go away. Irrational denials have lasted too long. The time to prepare for rising sea levels is now. Too bad San Diego isn’t listening.

San Diego, in particular the ordinary citizens and those who actually know what's happening down on the beaches, isn't listening because there's currently nothing to listen to. There's no "rising sea level" on those sun-kissed beaches (I can wax quite lyrical at times), and there hasn't been for three decades. The long-term rate of rise has been dropping, and is now less than it was in 1983. Below I provide a couple of "irrational denials" to illustrate what I mean. They should make Mike's monsters go away, but Mike wouldn't listen anyway. he's quite at home with his monsters, but wouldn't admit it. Alarmists often (not to say usually) project their faults onto sceptics. One such projection is to claim that sceptics are "hiding their heads in the sand". Mike could have been hiding his head in the sand at San Diego since the early '80s, and wouldn't have got his hair wet, with the exception if the upward spikes caused by the '83/84 and '97/'98 El Niños.

San Diego, California - annual averages 1906-2011                 Data source: PSMSL

This is what Mike could see if he took his head outa the sand.

San Diego, California - 1980-2011                                  Data source: PSMSL

The trend evolution plots the trend from 1906 to the year on the bottom axis.

San Diego, California - trend evolution 1970-2011             Data source: PSMSL

There's your "monster", Mike - because the sea-level isn't rising, the long-term trend is still dropping, and there's no sign of it stopping (yet). There's no sign of ostrich-like alarmism stopping yet either. Mike finishes by saying

Protection costs. Imagine how much less the cost would’ve been if San Diego began preparing for sea level rise in the ‘90s. Imagine how much more it will cost if the city waits another decade to begin. The more cities wait to fortify threatened communities the more the taxpayer will pay.

Imagine how the taxpayers might have complained about having forked out for something unnecessary back then. There'll be plenty of time to act if and when the situation changes. Mike, you need a simple lesson in economics. Building back then wasn't cheaper, it just cost fewer dollars. It's called inflation, and building now or in the near future will be cheaper because of more efficient techniques and better materials and design.

UPDATE 1st March 2013

I left a comment on the Daily Aztec page, not using my blog handle, nor linking to this blog, politely pointing out a few facts about sea-level at San Diego, and linking to NOAA & PSMSL pages showing no net change in three decades. My comment remained "awaiting moderation" for 3 days. It has now disappeared. Inconvenient facts simply don't make a good story.

“Recycle everything you can" and save the planet - WUFT?

No, the WUFT in the title isn't due to my distorting the well-known mnemonic WTF, though it might as well be WTF. It refers an article on the the WUFT-FM, "News and Public Media for North Central Florida From the University of Florida" website - Whitney Gray discusses how endangered species may adapt to the climate change at the Public Interest Environmental Conference. Who she? She's

Sea level rise coordinator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and Florida Sea Grant, spoke in a Friday morning session of an environmental conference on the University of Florida campus.

What does a "Sea level rise coordinator" actually do? Just how do you coordinate sea level rise? Coordinate it with what or whom? Does she coordinate rows of citizens on the beach commanding the sea to retreat, like latter-day Canutes? Never mind, I'm done wonderin', just as I've ceased wonderin' what a "Climate Change Officer" does for a local authority - anti-rain dances?

When asked about how species in Florida are affected, Gray said she believes they are at a uniquely high risk, due to the state’s sloping land and problems with rising sea levels.

“The average person can do so much,” she said. “Recycle everything you can; treat every bit of waste as if it was a resource to be used over again instead of creating new.”

Gray recommends restoring your yard with native species to help create a good environment for the species already there. She also said people who are more inclined toward activism can participate in different campaigns and donate money.

"Sloping land" creates a risk? It only creates a risk if you're on roller skates (no brakes). WRT sea-level, it only creates a risk if it's sloping downwards, away from the sea. Then you've got a real problem (unless you're Dutch of course). If it slopes upwards then you can watch the breakers in safety and comfort. “The average person can do so much,” she said - how many "average people" are there in Florida? Recycle that bag and save a frog - simple really. How does "restoring your yard with native species" help to "create a good environment for the species already there"? Extending the food chain maybe?

Gray said she feels it’s her mission to help people understand what rising sea levels could do to Florida.

“To me, it’s important that people understand that it’s not just going to effect their life, their little bubble that they live in, but it’s going to effect the lives of everything around them,” she said. “Our economy is intrinsically tied to our environment and our ecology, so we’re going to feel effects.”

That's the nub of the problem, then - "average people" living in "little bubbles". "Sea level rise coordinators" with empty minds and empty thoughts and a "mission". God help us all.

Climate Central scores grade F in geography

There's a lot of it about - sea I mean. There's also a lot of reports around just now in which alarmists appear almost to be gloating over a paper in Geophysical Research Letters titled The gravitationally consistent sea-level fingerprint of future terrestrial ice loss (Spada et al . 2013), [h/t Spiel Climate.] That bastion of truth and objectivity might not be said to be gloating, but there's an element of "See - told you so!" in their article Ice Melt Means Uneven Sea Level Rise Around the World. More of that and their "grade F" later.

What that paper says (in essence) comes as no surprise to me. Sea level rise around the globe is far from even. There are many reasons for that "lumpiness", two of them being thermal expansion and gravitational effects.

We solve the sea-level equation to investigate the pattern of the gravitationally self-consistent sea-level variations (fingerprints) corresponding to modeled scenarios of future terrestrial ice melt. These were obtained from separate ice dynamics and surface mass balance models for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and by a regionalized mass balance model for glaciers and ice caps. For our mid-range scenario, the ice melt component of total sea-level change attains its largest amplitude in the equatorial oceans, where we predict a cumulative sea-level rise of ~25 cm and rates of change close to 3 mm/yr from ice melt alone by 2100. According to our modeling, in low-elevation densely populated coastal zones, the gravitationally consistent sea-level variations due to continental ice loss will range between 50 and 150% of the global mean. This includes the effects of glacial-isostatic adjustment, which mostly contributes across the lateral forebulge regions in North America. While the mid range ocean-averaged elastic-gravitational sea-level variations compare with those associated with thermal expansion and ocean circulation, their combination shows a complex regional pattern, where the former component dominates in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean and the latter in the Arctic Ocean.

That mouthful is down to modelling, of course, and if you accept their estimates of ice melt, I see little wrong with their results. What I do see that's wrong, is all the alarmist pundits jumping on the bandwagon and extrapolating what the paper says about their little corner of the globe, or the "poster-children" of predicted sea-level rise, like Bangladesh, Tuvalu, etc. As my pet subject is the study of sea-level and changes thereof, I find myself often peering at maps while I sip my gin-and-tonic. Authors of articles like the one at Climate Central might find it beneficial to do the same - peering, that is, though sipping G&T would do them no harm either. Alex Kirby, their geographer in chief, says

Improved projections of the contribution of ice to sea level rise produced by Ice2sea will feed into the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2007, the IPCC’s fourth report highlighted ice-sheets as the most significant remaining uncertainty in projections of sea-level rise.

The researchers found that ice melt from glaciers and from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is likely to be critically important to regional sea-level change in the equatorial Pacific ocean

There the rise will be greater than the global average increase, affecting in particular western Australia, Oceania and the small atolls and islands in the region, including Hawaii. Another area which should expect an above-average increase is the east coast of South Africa and Madagascar.

The first paragraph is interesting - "will feed into the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" given that it's just undergone the review stage. Late entries anyone? However, the next paragraph states exactly what's in the abstract above; "regional sea-level change in the equatorial Pacific ocean", yet what Alex considers to be in the equatorial Pacific ocean is interesting. He thinks western Australia and Hawaii are included, and he also appears to think that the Hawaiian islands are "small islands".

Given that Honolulu is only a couple of degrees south of the Tropic of Cancer, and that only half of the western Australian coast is north of the Tropic of Capricorn, I think he's stretching the definition of "equatorial" just the teeniest bit. The biggest of the Hawaiian islands is about 250km north-south.  Still, why let a few inconvenient geographical facts stand in the way of a good story?

Perhaps he, other alarmists, and IPCC authors, might like to peruse the abstract of A synthesis of the Antarctic surface mass balance during the last 800 yrs (Frezzotti et al 2013) [h/t Greenie Watch]

Global climate models suggest that Antarctic snowfall should increase in a warming climate and mitigate rises in the sea level. Several processes affect surface mass balance (SMB), introducing large uncertainties in past, present and future ice sheet mass balance. To provide an extended perspective on the past SMB of Antarctica, we used 67 firn/ice core records to reconstruct the temporal variability in the SMB over the past 800 yr and, in greater detail, over the last 200 yr.

Our SMB reconstructions indicate that the SMB changes over most of Antarctica are statistically negligible and that the current SMB is not exceptionally high compared to the last 800 yr. High-accumulation periods have occurred in the past, specifically during the 1370s and 1610s. However, a clear increase in accumulation of more than 10% has occurred in high SMB coastal regions and over the highest part of the East Antarctic ice divide since the 1960s. To explain the differences in behaviour between the coastal/ice divide sites and the rest of Antarctica, we suggest that a higher frequency of blocking anticyclones increases the precipitation at coastal sites, leading to the advection of moist air in the highest areas, whereas blowing snow and/or erosion have significant negative impacts on the SMB at windy sites. Eight hundred years of stacked records of the SMB mimic the total solar irradiance during the 13th and 18th centuries. The link between those two variables is probably indirect and linked to a teleconnection in atmospheric circulation that forces complex feedback between the tropical Pacific and Antarctica via the generation and propagation of a large-scale atmospheric wave train.

Perhaps Spada et al should have waited a bit before publishing. Perhaps Alex should read more - an atlas maybe? Perhaps I'll have another G&T.

Ask Marylin about "Superstorm" Sandy - she knows!

By accident, I discovered an amazing piece on Parade magazine, of all places, in the Ask Marylin column written by Marylin vos Savant. Most readers' questions are of the "Should My Daughter Attend Her Prom or a Family Wedding?" variety. A reader asks her

Marilyn: Was superstorm Sandy so bad because of global warming?

she answers

In this case several factors not directly related to climate change converged to generate the event. On Sandy’s way north, it ran into a vast high-pressure system over Canada, which prevented it from continuing in that direction, as hurricanes normally do, and forced it to turn west. Then, because it traveled about 300 miles over open water before making landfall, it piled up an unusually large storm surge. An infrequent jet-stream reversal helped maintain and fuel the storm. As if all that weren’t bad enough, a full moon was occurring, so the moon, the earth, and the sun were in a straight line, increasing the moon’s and sun’s gravitational effects on the tides, thus lifting the high tide even higher. Add to this that the wind and water, though not quite at hurricane levels, struck an area rarely hit by storms of this magnitude so the structures were more vulnerable and a disaster occurred. One way global warming may have contributed is that the area’s sea level is somewhat higher than it was a century ago. A bit of good luck: Tides would have been even higher if the moon had been closer to us. Instead, it was just a few days from apogee, the point in its orbit where it’s farthest away.

Wow - just WOW! Later, another reader, clearly an alarmist (from Boulder, Colorado - not much threat from sea-level rise there), sticks his size-twelve boot in - check her response this time

Marilyn: While your comments about Sandy were informative, they didn't include the most significant link between the storm and global warming. (January 20, 2013) Sandy was the largest storm ever to make landfall in the U.S. in terms of size (1,000 miles in diameter) and total energy. The enormity of both measures was generated by a rise in sea surface temperatures, about 5 degrees F above normal over much of Sandy?s route. Sea level rise over the last century (about a foot) contributed to the storm's damage; by the year 2100, the sea level rise at New York City is forecast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to be more than three feet. Our little blue ball is heating up; the consequences will be unpleasant.

Marilyn responds:

Thank you, Donald. I did mention the sea level rise, but I considered the warmer-than-average coastal waters to be a weather condition, not a global warming condition.

Full marks Marylin! I'll be emailing Marylin to congratulate her on her original concise and factually accurate answer, and her polite put-down on the supplementary question. I'll also ask her if she has a view on climate sensitivity, and if she knows anything of the role of cosmic rays in cloud formation - well, you never know, do you?

What's the Heartland Institute up to now?

A while ago we had Nils-Axel Mörner and Willy Soon making fools of themselves, claiming that crowds viewing horse-jumping on Atlantic City's Steel Pier had caused temporary subsidence of the pier, and therefore its tide-gauge, easily refuted by reference to other gauges along the north-east coast, which show similar variations. They were trying to show that tide-gauge sites are always unstable, by attempting to show that just one of the 2,000 or more sites worldwide might be unstable. For some reason unknown to me, the Heartland institute thinks that Mörner has something useful to say on sea-levels worldwide. Debunking his outrageous, always changing, and unscientific claims is easier than showing that Bill McKibben can't "do the math". I excoriate Mörner here, here. here, and here.

Now we have James H. Rust, who's

a policy advisor for The Heartland Institute, a retired professor of nuclear engineering, and an outspoken critic of unnecessary alarmism over man-made global warming. He funds several scholarships for students majoring in chemical engineering at Purdue University. He currently is delivering a talk titled “America's Failed Energy Policies and The Reason Why.”

.... suggesting that NOAA has "something to explain" about his straw-measurement of sea-level at Fort Jefferson, Florida. What's a "straw-measurement"? It's like a "straw poll" - rough and ready, and you can't get much rougher than a brick, which is how James does his measuring.

Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas of Florida has an ocean-fed moat that surrounds the large fortress constructed from 1846 to 1875 and never finished. At the single entrance to the fort on its Southern side is an entrance surrounded by a border of marble. Around this border is a brick facade. Sea level height and changes can be measured by the number of bricks above the ocean water line beneath the marble border at the bottom of the entrance.

At 2:30 p.m. February 2, 2013, seven bricks were exposed beneath the fort entrance. These bricks appeared dry and this gave reason to believe the observation was made at high tide. Checking tide data for the Dry Tortugas confirmed 2:20 p.m. was high tide for February 2, 2013.

Checking books in the Fort Jefferson bookstore produced a picture of the fort entrance taken in January 1937. This picture showed all dry bricks above the water line and indicated about 7 and 3/4 bricks were above the water line. A brick and one layer of mortar has a height of about 85 mm and it was estimated the change in Gulf of Mexico water level for the 75-year period was 75 mm. This indicates an annual change in water level at Fort Jefferson of 1 mm per year.

Really? A change in the entire Gulf of Mexico water level estimated from a single observation on one day in 1937 compared with another made at high-tide on one day in 2013, and at a single location? Would temperature measurements made at those two moments be able to tell us whether the temperature there was rising, falling, or remaining much the same over that period? Of course not, whatever the trend, that trend doesn't predict what will occur, or indicate what had occurred, on any particular day. He continues

It may be argued the 1937 picture was not been taken at high tide. If this is true, then the change in sea level would have been less than 1 mm per year. It may be argued the fort is sinking due to its extreme weight. If this is occurring, the sea level rise would be smaller than 1 mm per year.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) has a map of the world showing sea level changes at hundreds of locations around the world.

The closet [sic] NOAA sea level change data near Fort Jefferson is for Key West, Florida and Cabo San Antonio, Cuba. Both locations are about 70 miles from Fort Jefferson. For the period 1913-2012, Key West has a sea level rise of 2.24 mm per year. For the period 1971-2009, Cabo San Antonio has a sea level rise of 3.30 mm per year.

Sea level rises in both locations reported by NOAA data are considerably greater than rough measurements made at Fort Jefferson. It is left for NOAA to explain this discrepancy on sea level rise for locations so close to each other.

It's not for NOAA to explain anything, as we'll see, and here's a tip from me - don't ever accept an invitation to go sailing in the Gulf with the prof. My Google Maps tracing tool shows Fort Jefferson to be 225 miles NW of Cabo San Antonio, which is the extreme westernmost point on Cuba. His geographical knowledge might be said to be somewhat lacking, in common with Nils-Axel Mörner, as I'll show in a later post (v. soon). Not that geographical knowledge is a real issue here, but a sense of (scientific) direction is.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, it's often said, and James has even less than that on this subject. He might have been an excellent professor of nuclear engineering, and he might be "an outspoken critic of unnecessary alarmism over man-made global warming", as I am, but he knows jack sh**, well, you know, about the tides or sea-level in general., and in the Gulf of Mexico in particular. Let's educate him a little.

There are two high tides a day (more accurately every 24h 25.2m), in this part of the Gulf of Mexico, and they follow what is, apparently unbeknown to James, the lunar tidal cycle, dominated by the gravitational pull of the Moon, modulated by that of the Sun. Not all places worldwide have two tides a day; some have only one, and some have two tides during part of the cycle, and one for the remainder. In a few areas, like the central Baltic, there are no tides whatsoever.

NOAA, who he says has "something to explain", has convenient tide data pages for their gauge sites. Here's the one for Feb 2-3 2013 at Key West.

Water level for 2-3rd Feb 2013 at Key West, Florida                                 Source: NOAA

Note that the actual tide was a little over 6" or about 16cm above that predicted. Brick-centric observations by James indicate that there was a rise of some 7.5cm over the 76-year period (2013-1937 = 76, not 75). That means of course, that had the tide followed orders, the 2013 level would have been less than the 1937 picture showed. How so? Is the sea-level here, and at Key West, an excellent proxy, not rising? Indeed it is, as the NOAA plot (thoughtfully not provided in the blog post for our edification) shows

Key West, Florida 1913-2012                                                                     Source:NOAA

This gives the impression that It's not possible for any average monthly level in 2013 to be less than that in 1937, but that's because this chart has had the "average seasonal cycle" removed (top left). It's not raw data, and it's done to make the overall picture clearer. Here's the raw plot

Key West, Florida 1913-2011                                                                Data source: PSMSL

Now it's obvious that many months in the middle-thirties had higher averages than many months in the entire period since. Here's how the data for February varied. I've highlighted Feb. 1937.

Key West, Florida; February average 1913-2011                                Data source: PSMSL

January 1937 was lower at 7055mm, but that's still higher than many months since, January 2009 for example at 7029 mm.

Here's a NOAA plot from 2nd Feb to yesterday, 17th Feb.

Water level for 2nd-17th Feb 2013 at Key West, Florida                            Source :NOAA

It should be clear by now that any single observation is just that, even when compared with another single observation, whether measured in metres, feet and inches or bricks. Rusts's post was titled "A New Sea Level Rise Data Point: Not Too Serious", and it's just that, a data point, but it reveals he's missing the point. He's right - it isn't too serious, but he's not right because of any observations or deductions he's made. He's right because the trend of sea-level rise at Key West, which he's unaware of, but which I already had in my spreadsheet for Key West (as in most others I maintain) shows this

Key West: trend in mm/year from 1913 to year on lower axis           Data source: PSMSL

..... that there's been no change in trend over the last four decades. Also, GPS at Key West Naval Air Station shows that the site is subsiding at about 0.63 mm/year, which means that true sea-level there is rising at about 1.5 mm/year. Subsiding due to crowds flocking to see the 'planes take off and land, maybe? Heavier modern 'planes? The fact that this area of the Gulf eastward including Florida is subsiding? Need any more hints?

I'm "an outspoken critic of unnecessary alarmism over man-made global warming" too, but I make observations on what I know something about, and when I see an erroneous or unscientific analysis or conclusion by anyone I'll make it my business to point out any flaws. Sea-level at any spot is modified by rate of change, wind direction, barometric pressure, and sea temperature. Conclusions by retired professors of nuclear engineering on topics outside their sphere of expertise are clearly modified by preconceived notions, and a total lack of knowledge of what they're writing about.