Claimed Five Inches of Global Sea level Rise Has Minimal Effects

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There are claims that since 1985 or 1990 there has been 3.4 millimeters per year of global sea-level rise. This is based up satellite altimetry. This is five inches of sea-level rise since 1985.

There are tidal gauges along all of North America and Europe.

I do not understand how the global satellite says the average rise is 3.4 millimeters per year but the vast majority of coastal gauges show 0 to 3.0 millimeters per year of rise. It looks like the average of all of the coastal sea-level rises from 1978 to today is more like 1.4-2.0 millimeters per year.

New York has a site which indicates that they have experienced 9 inches of sea-level rise since 1950. The NOAA indicates that New York and much of the east coast has had about 4.4 millimeters per year of sea-level rise since 1978. This would be 7 inches since 1978. The new york sea-level state site talks about a 3-inch rise since 1978. There was a 5-inch fluctuation between 1976 and 1983.

There are four causes of sea-level rise in New York, the slowing of the gulf stream and land sinkage are the largest contributors. Because the Gulf Stream has slowed down, it leaves more water on the East Coast. This, combined with sinking land, makes New York particularly vulnerable to an increased rate of sea-level rise in the future.

Canada and Alaska are seeing either very slow sea-level rise at less than half the rate of the US East coast or even declining sea-levels.

If there are big sea-level rise impacts then they will hit the US East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico first. California and West Coast effects would lag by 40-100 years.

47 thoughts on “Claimed Five Inches of Global Sea level Rise Has Minimal Effects”

  1. My step father who has lived in South Miami for decades says it is worse now and getting worse every year. As for Port Royal, that was caused by a massive earthquake, liquefaction caused by the earthquake, followed by a tsunami also caused by the earthquake.

  2. yep. Funding grants are not awarded to outlier results. Confirmation bias. If 99 papers say the sky is blue and one paper says it’s green, the journal editors will play it safe and reject the paper. Combine this insane approach to “science” with unreproducible results and very poor statistical analysis, and it’s just a cesspool. Not to mention political/agenda bias.

  4. There are several factors to consider. Most important, is the gauge land based? If yes then it is subject to two other forces, ground swell from saturation and isostatic rebound if in or near a glaciated area. Both of those increase the elevation.

  5. I can’t imagine there is any impact. Not only is the continent absolutely huge, but the number of ships traveling there are very few and all more or less go to the same ice-free place. They also visit in the summer, when the ice is anyway melting. And they don’t go near the actual land-bound ice as calving glaciers have a habit of creating unpredictable results.

  6. Sorry, but sea levels vary +/- 50cm on the planet at any point in time (once you take out tidal effects and gravitational pull). It has to do with thermal expansion. But 50cm or thereabouts is almost undetectable of course. If Earth was a bowling ball and you could hold it, you would be unable to feel any mountains, ocean depths etc. It would feel absolutely smooth (but not perfectly round, so it would be a funky ball to play with)

  8. Florida also use ground water who make the area sink.
    Also more people are moving in building more expensive houses, you also has the random mix of high tides and hurricanes.
    Restrictions on ground water use and building codes solves this.
    Both are expensive.
    Better to forward the bill to the federal government
    My tips is just that responses they should use.

  9. Miami itself is sinking faster than any sea level rise, so attributing it just to sea level rise isn’t accurate.

  11. Antarctica might well get more ice in an hot and wet climate because its so cold there if its hotter its still above freezing but you get more moisture in the air. It don’t snow much then its -25 centigrade, it does then its -2. The ice cap is also so high its very hard for moisture to get into it.
    However we need scary headlines to get clicks today.

  13. A friend who works at NOAA mentioned that cherry-picking research sampling is the basis for most published reports -and that in Antartica monitoring reveals that some glaciers are receding in some areas, whereas in other regions of the same continent there are glaciers rebounding and offset any net loss in Ice Mass. Somehow the growing Ice Mass events don’t make it into the published narrative.

  14. Grew up there and seen King tides (equinoctial and perigean spring tides) submerge roads in Miami since the 80’s, so whoever is saying that that hasn’t happened in the past is full of horse apples.

    The oceans are big puddles on the planet — except for storm swells, you can’t have a high spot in one place and not in another. As for your reference about Jamaica, the Island has a history of subsiding areas like what happened in Port Royal in 1692 due to excessive moral climate change.

  15. Weather related insurance is big business in Florida, but that aside, I grew up in Florida Keys and visit the state regularly, there is no notable rise in the water levels anywhere on the coasts. Granted that some municipalities like Miami Beach have bought into the hype and invested much money in pumping stations to address the coming doom. I’ve been there during weather events that drop as much as 24 inches of water in 24 hours and between ground absorption and runoff, the land just drains from one day to the next. When you see photos of roads under water it is from the annual equinoctial and perigean spring tides.

  16. Grew up in the Florida Keys where in the 1980s the additional inches of sea level resulting from equinoctial and perigean spring tides actually put some segments of Card Sound road under a thin layer of water. This would happen for a few days about once a year. If the sea level has permanently risen 5 inches then those roads would be permanently under water – which they are not. So I’m going to have to call BS on this one until we see the data sets and where they were taken.

  17. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227436

    Here is a paper showing rough estimates of affected areas and a likely time frame.
    I’m wary of the open access journal model, but there is no obvious red flags in the paper’s supporting references.
    ~
    Just spitballing, if you’re over 55 and don’t currently live in a blue area, there is a good chance you’ll be dead before flooding becomes a serious factor in your life.
    ~
    There are lots of problems in the world, not all of them are your problem, but that does not make them a fantasy.

  20. There’s other infrastructure issues (especially in Florida) – possibly no more below ground septic, saltwater intrustion into freshwater resources, roads and highways may need to be stacked higher into berms etc.
    Expensive, but nothing that can’t be done over a period of decades (or a century) assuming the place(s) stay relatively desirable. Otherwise it’ll just decay away like the rust belt.

  21. Florida alone is over 3 trillion total real estate value. So more like trillions. That being said this won’t play out overnight, but rather over decades.

  23. The sea-level rise varies by location. In January, I was at a beach in Jamaica where the rise in the sea has taken most of the beach. The rise is measured in feet not inches. In Miami, where by step father lives, he said that the roads get flooded when King tides happen, that never happen before.

  26. Needing higher pylons is scarcely a problem. If you take a drive through that area, you’ll see the smarter home owners have their houses about 10 feet off the ground.

    Putting them 11 feet off the ground ought to be good for an extra century.

  27. correct, see my latest post. But the modern glaciers not pushing as much on the land have minimal to zero effect (unless you are in Antartica). The post-glacial rebound is still happening, and it will for some time as the land keeps rising from the 3km of ice that crushed it, not that long ago.

  28. Never cross a river that is on average 4 feet deep!

    Brian, the University of Colorado is a global average. The global sea water levels varies a lot. Since 1993 we are talking about 40cm of variation plus or minus. Around the US coast is mostly zero or minus while around southeast Asia the sea is a lot higher. A 40cm variance when the AVERAGE is about 10% of the variance. Most of the global sea rise is a result of thermal expansion, and it is NOT uniform everywhere. HOWEVER (with a huge H), if you look at the Java Sea in this NASA data (below) you see a very big average sea rise. This is largely due to El Nino/La Nina events during this time period. Once you account for this, the global average rise is much, much lower (but still a rising trend).

    https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/globalsl.html

  29. I’ve sometimes wondered how much arctic/antarctic ice is lost from all the research and tourist ships slicing off shelf ice over recent years. I know: small ships, big ice. But what I’m talking about is the effect of creating channels where solid ice connecting edge ice to the main glaciers is cut, to be replaced by less stable second-formation ice, or not at all. This could expose new, inner edges of ice to further deterioration.

  32. Luke wakes up: He is still in the recovery tank on Hoth after nearly freezing to death. It was all a fevered nightmare…

  33. How is it a correlation, if for the first 10,000+ of those 20,000 years there was no GDP gain or lifespan gain?

  35. And the mortgage company’s? They won’t place a mortgage on a house facing certain doom. When that day arrives, billions of dollars of real estate becomes worthless. There’s already talk of just abandoning a few of the Keyes.

  36. That is an solution to the problem of terrible Star Wars spinoffs
    Movie 10 will be the stockholders strike back.
    Not sure how to fix the mess, its in an pretty hard place

  37. You have multiple effects: First you have areas in the north who is still going up because the ice age ended. One area in Finland is 1 cm/ year.
    Them you have volcanic islands sinking as the volcano is dead or hot spot moved away
    Atolls is an remain of this as the corrals outgrow the sinking.
    Active volcanic islands tend to get higher.

    Over to human caused effects or pumping out the ground water.
    Florida and Venice come to mind.
    Most don’t think about this, Norway had to raise their oil platforms in the north sea because the sea bottom sunk as they pumped out oil.
    If an area demand compensation because of global warming as the sea is rising put an hard ban on wells.

    Now islands in river deltas. They are made of mud and changes as the river changes.
    Yes humans impact this with diverting and restricting the river
    Its an reporter favorite, or the guys who say an stryker is an tank.
    Well they need click baits and honestly can not be experts in anything but if you are on thin ice be a bit more careful, however messing up hard give you clicks in the short term 🙂

  38. You say, “I do not understand how the global satellite says the average rise is 3.4 millimeters per year but the vast majority of coastal gauges show 0 to 3.0 millimeters per year of rise.” Brian, there is a narrative being pushed here. What more is there to understand. Everything around climate anything is pretty much bunk! The planet goes through cycles and those who want more power and authority via government programs and regulation will use ANY tactic to get what they want. Thousands of years ago the unwilling masses were convinced to go to war because god said so, and so said the divinely-appointed king and Pope. See, then it was religion used to control the masses, now it’s climate. Let’s see what they can cook up around the coronaviurs.

  39. But by the same logic, the sea level rise also correlates almost perfectly with the release of ever more terrible Star Wars spinoffs. So there’s a reason to oppose it.

  40. In similar fashion, some were attributing AGW related sea level rise for a few islands suffering inundation to the tune of a few feet. The reality is always more complicated, the sea didn’t rise a couple feet over a few decades, the seabed was sinking due to seismic activity and subduction.
    Not everything can be simplistic enough to be puzzled out after 15minutes of contemplation.

  41. We’ve averaged 5mm/year for the last 20k years. There is an obvious direct correlation to GDP per capita and lifespan. The higher the ocean gets the better off we are. Laugh if you will but that is stronger logic than the IPCC usually uses ever since the burden of falsifiable science was removed.

  42. Insurance companies don’t generally write competitive flood policies; they resell the federal government one.*
    Related though insurance companies are already refusing fire policies in certain areas.

    *they write policies for amounts that exceed the federal limits

  43. Keep your eyes on the flatlands of Florida. When the insurance companies refuse to write a policy and the mortgage companies won’t give you a lone, it’s game over…may the flooding commence.

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