Climate Data Information

In days of yore, coal miners would take a caged canary into the mine with them as the birds were more sensitive to poisonous gases than humans; if the canary died then the miners got out – alive. ‘Climate sceptics’ have long accused ‘climate activists’ of (to continue the metaphor) breeding highly sensitive canaries and looking for dangerous coal mines. Up to now I’ve studiously respected this site's motto as being a place where ‘numbers count’ and stayed out of debate. After a recent paper on ‘vanishing islands’ in the Solomon Islands archipelago I felt I had to comment. I was partly spurred on to do this by a guest post by David Middleton on the wattsupwiththat.com web site. The paper in question is “Interactions between sea-level rise and wave exposure on reef island dynamics in the Solomon Islands” (Albert et al, Environmental Research Letters, Volume 11, Number 5). The headline message of the paper was “..we present the first analysis of coastal dynamics from a

GLOBAL SEA LEVEL RISE Summary The average rate of sea level rise from 1880 to 2013 is 1.6 mm/year The rate of sea level rise is not constant. It is increasing at 0.014 mm/year/year. Superimposed on the rising sea levels is a cyclical component with a periodicity of about 50 years which is synchronous with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. CSIRO Estimate Sea levels have risen more than 100 m since the end of the last ice age and they are still rising. This post looks at the rate of rise over the last century or so and, based on sea level data, and answers the question "Is the rate of level rise increasing?", The CSIRO provide one of the main estimate of global mean sea levels (Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2011), Sea-level rise from the late 19th to the early 21st Century. Surveys in Geophysics, doi:10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1.). The data run from 1880 to 2013. They are available as monthly or annual values. The annual values have been analysed here. This chart shows the CS