Despite the gloom-and-doom predictions often made by pundits associated with the environmental lobby, several recent studies show that there is no evidence to indicate that global warming caused by human activity has contributed to the rise of sea levels.
A September 14 report from CNS News compiled citations from “four peer-reviewed studies,” as well as other reports concluding that there was “no observable sea-level effect of anthropogenic global warming.”
The first report, cited by CNS was posted on September 1 by NoTricksZone, a website specializing in climate-related topics. Written by environmental specialist Kenneth Richard, the report cited a paper published last year in the journal Geology by a team of geologists led by Dr. Paul S. Kench, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
“It is widely assumed that sea levels have been rising in recent decades largely in response to anthropogenic global warming,” wrote Richard. “However, due to the inherently large contribution of natural oscillatory influences on sea level fluctuations, this assumption lacks substantiation.”
Richard then cited a more recent study, noting:
A few days ago, 6 scientists (Donchyts et al., 2016) published a paper online for the journal Nature confirming that the curious phenomenon in the tropical Pacific — coastal land growth exceeding recent sea level rise — has also been occurring across the world, or on a net global scale, since the mid-1980s.
Richard also cited Dr. Nils-Axel M√∂rner, whom he described as “a renowned sea-level expert who has authored over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications during his career,” who “recently confirmed there has been a lack of climate-related sea level rise in areas of the world where disastrous climate-related sea level rise has been assumed to already be occurring: the Maldives and along the coasts of Bangladesh.”
Among Richard’s conclusions, after studying the papers from the above-noted scientists and several others:
Furthermore, even in the regions of the world where sea levels are indeed rising, and rising rapidly (i.e., the tropical Pacific), scientists have acknowledged that an anthropogenic fingerprint cannot even be detected in the sea level rise trends. Natural oscillations related to internal ocean processes are predominantly what drive sea level changes, not anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Another study cited by CNS was a paper (“Present day sea level: global and regional variations”) published on May 18 at the Laboratoire d’Etudes en Geophysique et Oceanograhie Spatiales (LEGOS) in Toulouse, France. The paper was authored by a team led by Dr. Hindumathi Palanisamy (who specializes in Hydrology, Meteorology, and Climatology). Palanisamy and her co-authors explained that “sea level is an integrated climate parameter that involves interactions of all components of the climate system (oceans, ice sheets, glaciers, atmosphere, and land water reservoirs) on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.”
CNS reported that Palanisamy’s team compared sea level changes between 1950 and 2009 in the Indian Ocean and the South China and Caribbean Seas, and found that the “tropical Pacific displays the highest magnitude of sea level variations.”
However, they noted, by studying “sea level spatial trend patterns in the tropical Pacific and attempting to eliminate signal corresponding to the main internal climate mode, we show that the remaining residual sea level trend pattern does not correspond to externally forced anthropogenic sea level signal.” (Emphasis added.)
Another study cited by CNS was published in April by a group of scientists led by Mohammad Hadi Bordbar from the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany. Those scientists also concluded that the recent sea level trends in the tropical Pacific “are still within the range of long-term internal decadal variability.”
“Further, such variability strengthens in response to enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations, which may further hinder detection of anthropogenic climate signals in that region,” the study found.
While all of these studies necessarily are written in esoteric scientific language, another paper cited by CNS published online in January in the Journal of Coastal Research expressed its conclusion in language readily understood by the non-scientific layman.
In that paper, lead author Jens Morten Hansen of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and his co-authors studied sea level patterns from the eastern North Sea to the central Baltic Sea over a 160-year period (1849-2009).
“Identification of oscillators and general trends over 160 years would be of great importance for distinguishing long-term, natural developments from possible, more recent anthropogenic sea-level changes,” the researchers note.
“However, we found that a possible candidate for such anthropogenic development, i.e. the large sea-level rise after 1970, is completely contained by the found small residuals, long-term oscillators, and general trend. Thus, we found that there is (yet) no observable sea-level effect of anthropogenic global warming in the world’s best recorded region.”(Emphasis added.)
In addition, noted CNS, the Earth’s coasts actually gained land over the past 30 years, according to another study published August 25 in Nature Climate Change.
The final study mentioned in the CNS report was made by a team of researchers led by Gennadii Donchyts from the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands, They found that the Earth’s surface gained a total of 22,393 square miles of land during the past 30 years, including 13,000 square miles in coastal areas — areas where rising sea levels would be expected to decrease land area.
“We expected that the coast would start to retreat due to sea level rise, but the most surprising thing is that the coasts are growing all over the world,” the study’s co-author Fedor Baart told the BBC.
