Sunday, May 8, 2011

Sea level rise is accelerating...to the downside

Following a long delay and some controversial "adjustments," the University of Colorado sea level satellite data was recently released. A plot of the rate of sea level rise shows a stable rate between 2003 and 2007, and declining rates since 2007.
Rate of sea level rise in mm/year
Sea levels have been rising since the peak of the last ice age 22,000 years ago and have been decelerating over the past 8,000 years.
See also Inconvenient Truth: Sea Level Rise is Decelerating for evidence that the rate of sea level rise also decelerated in the 20th century:

h/t the Portuguese blog Ecotretas

3 comments:

  1. The last 8 years is too short a period to be used meaningfully to reflect a true long-term trend in sea-level rise. The warmists were using the 1994-2000 period for their claim of rocketing rises; this 2003-2011 period is the reverse part of the cyle. We need a few more years to see what the true, long-term rate is. I vote for a reduced rate from 1970-2000, but I'm a skeptic.

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  2. Doug,

    I'm the author of the graph. It uses all the satellite data available, since 1992. The trend for 2003 (~3.5mm/year) is thus the trend from 1992->2003! The same applies for the remaining data, like the value for 2011, which reflects the whole trend 1992->2011. That's why the ***rate*** is going down!

    Ecotretas

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  3. Thanks Ecotretas!

    BTW I enjoy reading your blog

    ReplyDelete