sea level rise has slowed

A new paper by Cazenave et al 2014 digs deep to uncover the reasons for yet another unfortunate un-catastrophic trend change.

First, global surface temperatures stopped rising in the late 1990's. Now, it’s become irrefutable that, for the last ten years, the rate of sea-level rise slowed by thirty percent. Seas were rising at 3.5mm a year up til 2003, then the rate fell to 2.2mm per year for the next eight years. This is exactly what ninety-eight percent of expert Global Climate Models did not predict. The slowing sea level rise is extra problematic because it forms the backbone of the excuse for the long pause in surface warming that wasn’t supposed to happen either. The fact that it coincided with the global pause in surface temperatures was no comfort at all. The missing heat, after all, must be hidden in the oceans, and that must be causing the oceans to rise even faster than they were before (an obvious, inescapable fact of physics). So now climate modelers are forced to stack excuses — they need an excuse for the excuse. (It’s excuses-squared in the name of science.)

I must say its a marvel that climate scientists didn’t notice how El Ninos were raising sea-levels in the 1990's. Incredibly bad luck that they didn’t think to ask skeptical questions of the rate back then. Everyone seemed happy (apart from Nils, anyway) to accept the rapid rise at the time. (It’s funny how the Climate ScienceTM downward corrections only seem to happen to the peaks years after the fact but the acceleration of trends occurs in real time.) I don’t think this study tells us much that is definitive about sea levels, but it shows something about bureaucratized science driven by one-sided grants.

After all is said and done, let’s not forget that the raw satellite measurements of sea levels in the 1990s showed almost no rise at all. So the rise in the 1990's is already almost entirely thanks to adjustments. These now are adjustments on adjustments.

Worse, Geoff Sherrington also points out that we haven’t measured half the deep oceans, there are mass hydrothermal vents which may be changing in trend and about which we have virtually no data. “You cannot talk about ocean expansion until you have accurate measurement of the contributions from all sources. The bottom 50% is virtually unmapped.”

My favorite response to the problem of seas rising is, everyone just eat more fish. There are clearly too many fish in the oceans.

Much more here

http://joannenova.com.au/2014/04/sea-level-rise-has-slowed-it-must-be-time-to-correct-that-data/#more-35034