Roy Spencer: Study - Sea Level Rise Revised Downward

If I had not looked past the headline of the press report on a new study, I would have just filed it under “It’s worse than we thought”. 

A new study in Nature reported on July 17 carried the following headlines:

“Satellite snafu masked true sea-level rise for decades”
“Revised tallies confirm that the rate of sea-level rise is accelerating as the Earth warms and ice sheets thaw.”

When I read that, I (like everyone else) assumed that corrections to the satellite sea level data since 1993 have now led to a revised trend toward faster (not slower) sea level rise. Right? 

Wrong.

Bryan Leyland: Things you know that ain't so - sea levels are rising

“Things you know that ain't so - the sea level is rising rapidly and this will continue to increase”. 

We are constantly being told by the Royal Society of New Zealand and others that the sea level is rising more and more rapidly and we must be prepared for a rise of something like 1 m over the next 100 years or so – 10 mm per year. This is a serious matter because many Councils are now restricting building close to the sea and putting restrictions on existing houses that have substantially reduced their value.

There is no scientific foundation for this belief. It is based on the output of computer models that, so far, have been shown to consistently overestimate the rate of sea level rise.

Richard Rahn from the Cato Institute: Promoting Very Unsettled Science

If you have been to the beach at Treasure Island, Florida (adjoining St. Petersburg), you will notice something very odd. The hotels (many of which were built in the 1950s and ‘60s) and the seawall are very far from the water in the Gulf of Mexico — giving an extraordinarily wide beach. It was not always that way. 

When the hotels and seawall were built, they were set back from the high tide a normal hundred yards or so; but over the years, there was a natural but unforeseen accretion to the beach — which, having grown up in the area, I observed. (It can be seen on Google Earth.)