Tuesday 15 December 2009

"2010 THE HOTTEST EVER" - MET OFFICE

The UK Met Office has stuck its neck out with this prediction, based on El Nino conditions in the Pacific. Only time will tell if they get it right, but it must be a brave effort.

4 comments:

  1. What a lot of tripe from the Met Office!It all seems rather pointless to a coastal dweller like me. You see, I live on the picturesque east coast of England where house prices go through the roof. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about so I started reading up on what Al Gore and the United Nations’ IPCC had to say. Apparently, the story goes that the ice caps and glaciers are melting so fast that in the next 50 years sea levels may rise up to 30 feet. Wow! But hold on a minute, I have never seen any evidence for it in my back yard. Oh dear! Apparently, I’m now a ‘flat earth denier’ for being sceptical of good old Al.
    Not being one to like being called names I did some reading what oceanographers – not climatologists or Al Gore – had to say about sea level rises.
    Here is what I found. Apparently, the most reliable data on sea levels comes from a set of the world’s tidal gauges. There is a very good web site on this by the University of Colorado where they present two graphs, Jason-1 Calibration and TOPEX Calibration. That’s funny, I thought, when I looked at it. Because those measurements say very similar things to what I read on other web sites. It seems a lot of oceanographers agree with the Colorado numbers. They include peer-reviewed papers by Antonov et al. (2005); Ishii et al. (2005) and Willis et al. (2005) who all report rises equal to seven inches per century.
    I then looked closer to home and found that here in England we have Simon Holgate from the U.K.’s Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory. Holgate in 2007 produced a history of global sea level from 1904 to 2003 based upon a set of reliable, long-term observations from nine tide gauge stations scattered around the world. He also finds that the levels are rising by about 7 inches per century. Is this normal?
    Well, apparently, yes because that’s exactly the rate of sea level rise we’ve been seeing naturally ever since the last ice age 11,000 years ago. Phew! Seems like the home sellers in my area got their numbers right and Al Gore got his wrong. Maybe we won’t be paying all those climate taxes after all?

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  2. John, your research has given the same result as mine. I hope your right about that final conclusion about not paying all those climate taxes, but I'm not putting any money on it!

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  3. John, I see from a google search you've been pasting this piece of yours on quite a few blogs. No matter - question:

    Let's assume this is correct - there's a background level of 7 inches per century sea level rise. The next question is: OK, will climate change add any more to that? You don't offer an answer.

    It's a common argument I come across: there's natural variability, so climate change doesn't matter. In this case, it's very much the reverse: if you're correct about the background changes, what then? Do you believe the science on sea-level change is wrong?

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  4. All I can say to that, Dan, is that global warming has supposed to have been going on for the past 60 years, and , so far, it has made no difference to the rate of sea-level rise. In fact for the past few years sea-level rise appears to have slowed, as has global warming.

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