Settled science update: 'Greenhouse gases' don't cause sea level rise

A paper published this week in The Journal of Climate finds the "settled" belief that warming due to 'radiative forcing' from 'greenhouse gases' is causing the seas to rise is not supported by observational data. The authors "find a relationship between sea level and temperature and find that temperature causally depends on the sea level, which can be understood as a consequence of the large heat capacity of the ocean." In other words, increase in surface temperature is caused by sea level rise rather than the "consensus" belief that temperature causes sea level rise. Furthermore, the authors attempt to find evidence that 'radiative forcing' from 'greenhouse gases' caused sea level rise in the latter 20th century, "but unexpectedly find that the sea level does not depend on the forcing." This is of no surprise to some skeptics who understand downwelling infrared from 'greenhouse gases' is incapable of heating the ocean due to a penetration depth of only a few microns.

Hansen's corrupted temperature anomalies in top graph, corrupted sea level in second graph, total 'radiative forcing' anomalies from greenhouse gases in third graph. Also note graphs stop in ~1998 during a record El Nino and that temperature and sea levels have declined since in some datasets.

Journal of Climate 2012 ; e-View

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00598.1

Statistical analysis of global surface temperature and sea level using cointegration methods

Torben Schmith¹

Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark

Søren Johansen

University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Peter Thejll

Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract

Global sea level rise is widely understood as a consequence of thermal expansion and melting of glaciers and land-based ice caps. Due to the lack of representation of ice-sheet dynamics in present-day physically-based climate models, semi-empirical models have been applied as an alternative for projecting of future sea levels. There are in this, however, potential pitfalls due to the trending nature of the time series. We apply a statistical method called cointegration analysis to observed global sea level and land-ocean surface temperature, capable of handling such peculiarities. We find a relationship between sea level and temperature and find that temperature causally depends on the sea level, which can be understood as a consequence of the large heat capacity of the ocean. We further find that the warming episode in the 1940s is exceptional in the sense that sea level and warming deviates from the expected relationship. This suggests that this warming episode is mainly due to internal dynamics of the ocean rather than external radiative forcing. On the other hand, the present warming follows the expected relationship, suggesting that it is mainly due to radiative forcing. In a second step, we use the total radiative forcing as an explanatory variable, but unexpectedly find that the sea level does not depend on the forcing. We hypothesize that this is due to a long adjustment time scale of the ocean and show that the number of years of data needed to build statistical models that have the relationship expected from physics exceeds what is currently available by a factor of almost ten.


Full paper here