INTERESTING SEA LEVEL DISCUSSION

 Clearing up some misconceptions about the DoE report - Climate Etc.

I do recommend reading the comments to this article. Here is a bit of it:

Hi David,

You wrote, “Mentioning the fact that US tidal gauges showed no acceleration of sea level rise, when the committee knew full well that European satellite data did was at best a half truth.”

I disagree. Relying on tide gauge data instead of satellite altimetry is justified by the fact that sea-level measurements from the best tide gauges are vastly superior in quality to the satellite altimetry data.

(Also, satellite altimeters measure sea-level in the wrong places. It only matters near the coasts, which is where tide gauges measure it. But satellite altimeters can only measure it in the open ocean, far from the coasts.)

Honolulu has one of the very best sea-level measurement records in the world. Unlike many other locations, is not much affected by vertical land motion, sedimentation, or erosion. It has 121 years of continuous measurements, with a very typical trend, and without even a single missing month. It’s at a nearly ideal measurement site, near the middle of the world’s largest ocean, on a tectonically stable island with near-zero vertical land motion, small tides, and little ENSO distortion. Data just doesn’t get much better than this:

Annotated:
https://sealevel.info/1612340_Honolulu_thru_2025-11_vs_CO2_annot1.png

Interactive:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=honolulu

As you can see, rising CO2 levels have had no detectable effect on the sea-level trend there.

In fact, most of the best long coastal sea-level measurement records show little or no acceleration in sea-level trend over the last 80 years, despite CO2 levels rising from about 310 ppmv to 427 ppmv.

Careful analyses using data from many measurement sites show a barely detectable average acceleration of only about 0.01 mm/yr². That is negligible. An acceleration of 0.01 mm/yr², were it to continue for 150 years, would increase sea-level by just 4.4 inches:

https://www.google.com/search?q=(0.01+%2F+2)+*+(150%5E2)+%2F+25.4+%3D