RISING OCEANS – NOT
The Climate Change hucksters require that you have no actual idea of what’s happening.
INTRO
Before we discuss ocean levels, it will help if you understand who Michael Mann is and what his “hockey stick” is about. Here are a couple of short videos to give you some context:
The Climate Change hucksters would have us believe that rising temperatures cause shorter winters, longer summers, and a corresponding melting of ice. Presumably, a “hockey stick” in temperatures is also causing a “hockey stick” in ocean levels. The use of the word “Profits” on the Y axis is apt, since profits are what the Climate Change hockey-stick graphs are really about:
THE DATA
Our most reliable source of historical ocean level information is in the “tide gauge” records maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Tide gauges are gauges attached to land masses near shorelines. They measure the relative height of the water surface (relative to the gauge itself). Their primary purpose is to assist ocean traffic by providing current information about the daily changes in water level due to tidal forces, but when their data is averaged over a long time period, tide gauges provide a historical record of average relative ocean levels.
Do you believe that our coastal cities will soon be underwater? Go here to find tide gauge data from all around North America: Water Levels – Station Selection
Try "The Battery" in New York for example. Once you pick a station, select the Tides/Water Levels tab and then select "Sea Level Trends" from the menu. You'll find that most stations on the eastern seaboard report approximately a 2.5mm linear rise per year for the past 150 years, with no apparent recent acceleration due to CO2 emissions.
Here's the historical data from The Battery in New York. Click this link to produce the graph below for yourself. Do you see a hockey-stick-shaped rise in the past 50 years? Strange. I don't either: Relative Sea Level Trend, The Battery, New York
Here's the data off of Key West, near Miami, which according to Al Gore actually has fish swimming in the streets. Strange - no hockey stick here either!! Relative Sea Level Trend, Key West, Florida
Really, I wasn't exaggerating about Al Gore and the fish in the streets: Al Gore Grilled Over Climate Predictions That Never Happened.
Like Barack Obama, Al Gore, Joe Biden, and John Kerry don’t seem to take their own climate spiels very seriously. The only major difference among them appears to be which oceans they’ve chosen to flood their respective mansions during the next few years:
Joe Biden’s Oceanfront Mansion (zoom out to see how close it is)
But back to the data. Adak Island is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Alaska and Russia. It's not in some bay or other formation that could have deceptive sea levels due to local surface phenomena (such as silt being deposited or emptied). Strangely Adak shows a DROP in sea level, as do various other gauges around the world. How is the sea level rising in one place and dropping in another? The rational explanation is that it's not; Adak sits atop a land mass that is being pushed upward by tectonic forces, producing the illusion of slightly dropping sea level, while southeastern North America is dropping due to tectonic forces, producing the illusion of slightly rising sea level: Relative Sea Level Trend, Adak Island, Alaska
Now let’s try Sitka, Alaska, on the western edge of North America: Relative Sea Level Trend, Sitka, Alaska
We cannot have consistently rising ocean levels in one part of the planet while ocean levels are dropping in another. The only rational explanation is that northwestern North America is being pressured slightly upwards by tectonic forces while the southeast is dropping slightly. The Rocky Mountains extend far into the northwestern part of the continent, and they are believed to be still rising slightly, lending credibility to the idea that the coastline to the west of the Rockies is also rising.
THE IMPLICATIONS
Considering the incredible size and weight of North America, the fact that its coastlines move upward or downward a mere 2.5mm per year is pretty astounding. If the land area of North America was circular, its diameter would be about 5,600 km. The vertical motion at its edges (averaging about 2.5mm) is roughly 5 / 10^10, or five hundred-millionths of one percent, of its diameter per year. It’s hard to imagine a continent that is so nearly vertically motionless with respect to its surrounding ocean.
So let’s put this into human terms. In the places where the relative height of the ocean’s surface is rising most dramatically (which includes the area near New York), we’re talking about 3mm per year. The climate hucksters would have us imagine that the Statue of Liberty will be underwater soon. The top of the statue stands 305 feet above the current land surface upon which the statue rests. Even if we assume zero feet of height for the wall surrounding the island, the top of the statue’s torch is about 93,000 millimeters above the ocean surface at high tide. At 3mm per year, we’re looking at about 31,000 years before Miss Liberty is submerged. Regardless of whether this apparent ocean rise is being caused by CO2 emissions, and obviously it isn’t, we’d have at least a thousand years to start worrying about getting our feet wet while walking around her island.
TEMPERATURES
Since the year 2000 NASA, NCAR, and other agencies have been grossly manipulating the raw temperature data stored in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network to fit their CO2 model predictions, and then presenting it to the public as if it were raw data. To understand this manipulation, watch this:
Unlike NOAA with its tide gauge data, these agencies provide no handy online tool that lets you study long term temperature trends, but fortunately there is such a tool here:
The tool itself: Real Climate Tools
A very brief tutorial on using the tool.
THE FUTURE
There is no legitimate way to become a trillionaire today; there is no real-world business that generates enough revenue to make its owners that rich. But the billionaires who are forcing Climate Change down our throats can become trillionaires by coercing the entire world to buy their products in the process of pointlessly and destructively replacing our entire worldwide energy infrastructure.
These people have essentially limitless funds to slander anyone who interferes with their propaganda. For example you may have noticed that the videos referenced in this article were produced by a guy named Tony Heller. Tony is quite brilliant, and he realized what was going on at our federal agencies only accidentally; in the mid 2000s he was working as a contractor for NCAR in Boulder, where he saw what was happening and started writing about it. The Climate Change hucksters don’t like him, so they have an army of propagandists whose job is to discredit him. This is their standard tactic: when they can’t shut someone up, they instead destroy that person’s reputation.
Tony got tired of being (ironically) accused of manipulating the data to suit his own purposes in his many commentaries (which you can find on Gab and YouTube), so he responded by making a web version of the tools that he was using to inspect the raw data in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. Now when someone accuses him of manipulating the data, he can simply refer them to his tool that lets you inspect the data directly.
At some point the authorities are going to have to remove public access to raw data that contradicts their propaganda. It amazes me that NOAA still publishes raw tide gauge data and further provides an online tool that lets the public inspect long-term ocean-level trends. The fraction of the population that could understand this tool is small, but it’s still large enough to cause trouble. Apparently not enough such people are aware of the data to be worth NOAA’s while to remove it.
Climate Change hucksters are limited in their lies so long as we have direct public access to the raw historical data. Fortunately, at this writing, those data are still available. Eventually the billionaires at the World Economic Forum and the International Panel on Climate Change will have to change that. But, for the moment, you are free to look for yourself.
==== ADDENDUM OF 9/22/2024
Recently Tony Heller posted this video, in which he shows graphs of tide gauge trend lines from around the world:
As within the USA, some of the trend lines go up while others go down, an impossibility in a globally connected ocean where tide gauge trend lines are presumed to be driven by the water content of our global super-ocean. Strangely, nobody seems to be talking about the seemingly obvious reason for inconsistencies in tide gauge trend-line directions around the world.
Tide gauges are attached to land masses, all of which sit on top of an ocean of magma.
In the long term, the tide gauges are probably measuring the rising and sinking of these land masses floating on the magma. This would explain how the ocean level seems to be dropping in some places (like Adak Island, which is probably being pushed up by tectonic and/or volcanic forces) while the level seems to rise in others. Think about it. The magma reshapes the land unevenly, pushing land up in some places and sinking it in others (with respect to the gravitational center of the Earth). The tide gauges, attached to this rising and sinking land, presume to measure ocean levels. But in the long term what they actually measure is the relative positions of their attached land masses to the water in which their buoys are floating.
Yes, the quantity of water in our global ocean changes. Oceans constantly exchange water vapor with the atmosphere, and variations in temperature do melt and re-freeze land-supported snow and ice. But even if our oceans had a 100% constant water content, the reshaping of the basin in which the water sits would cause fictitious and inconsistent long-term trends in perceived ocean levels. The only requirement in my constant-water-content model would be that the net trend lines of large numbers of evenly-distributed tide gauges across the world have a net change of zero. But we don’t have evenly-distributed tide gauges; the vast majority of recorded tide-gauge data is from North America, which is likely sinking, giving the false impression of a constant 2.5mm global ocean level rise. (Even if that rise were real, it would still be far below the preposterous “satellite data” claims of NASA and NOAA).
Considering how huge the magma ocean and the continents are, I find it amazing that the gauges aren't showing far more than a few millimeters' annual changes per year (in both directions) across the world. Even more incredible is the fact that nobody seems to be talking about this obvious explanation. Until someone can measure the heights of the tide gauges from the gravitational center of the earth within a millimeter or two, all this talk of ocean levels having to do with the quantity of water in the oceans is pure bunk.
==== ADDENDUM OF 11/27/2024
Here’s a thought experiment that further illustrates the absurdity of blaming ocean levels on “climate change” while ignoring the much more likely scenario of changes in continental height.
All of the world’s tide gauges (the mechanisms by which we measure ocean level) are affixed to land masses along various shorelines. These shorelines are at the edges of plateaus that sit at sea level by virtue of pressures in the magma beneath them (see the diagram in the previous addendum).
Suppose we could reverse all the pressures that keep the tops of the continents above water. All the plateaus would drop, while the ocean basins would rise, until we have a perfectly smooth ball of rock lying entirely beneath a perfectly uniform-depth ocean. Tide gauges everywhere would record over a one-mile rise in ocean level, but in fact almost all of what they measure would be the result of the flattening of the earth’s surface. Yes, there would now be more ocean water due to the immersion of the ice that was formerly sitting on land, but that would be insignificant compared to the evening of the earth’s surface by tectonic forces.
Isn’t that amazing:
a drowning scenario worse than the wildest predictions of climate alarmists,
achieved without any significant contribution from melting ice,
all due to changes in the shape of the ocean basin,
in turn due to tectonic forces that shape that basin.
When you think about it in these terms – isn’t it amazing that an enormous mountain the size of North America, sitting atop a largely molten 4,000-mile radius of rock, manages to seem to move vertically only by a matter of a couple of millimeters per year?
Excellent article. Irrefutable logic and facts.