How does rising atmospheric CO2 affect marine organisms?

Click to locate material archived on our website by topic


Global Sea Level: 1950-2000
Reference
Church, J.A., White, N.J., Coleman, R., Lambeck, K. and Mitrovica, J.X.  2004.  Estimates of the regional distribution of sea level rise over the 1950-2000 period.  Journal of Climate 17: 2609-2625.

What was done
Building on the work of Chambers et al. (2002), the authors used TOPEX/Poseidon satellite altimeter data to estimate global empirical orthogonal functions, which they combined with historical tide gauge data to estimate monthly distributions of large-scale sea level variability and change over the period 1950-2000.

What was learned
Church et al.'s "best estimate" of the rate of globally-averaged sea level rise over the last half of the 20th century is 1.8 ± 0.3 mm yr-1.  They further note that "decadal variability in sea level is observed, but to date there is no detectable secular increase in the rate of sea level rise over the period 1950-2000."  They also report that no increase in the rate of sea level rise has been detected for the entire 20th century, citing the work of Woodworth (1990) and Douglas (1992)."

What it means
In spite of the fact that the most significant segment of the historical increase in the air's CO2 concentration took place over the last half of the 20th century, and the climate-alarmist claim that the global warming of the latter half of this period was unprecedented over the past two millennia, there was no discernable increase in the rate of sea level rise over either of these periods or even the entire 20th century.  These observations pretty much prove that either the climate alarmists' claim of unprecedented global warming is bogus or that their claim about such a warming greatly accelerating sea level rise is false or that both of these claims are wrong.

References
Chambers, D.P., Melhaff, C.A., Urban, T.J., Fuji, D. and Nerem, R.S.  2002.  Low-frequency variations in global mean sea level: 1950-2000.  Journal of Geophysical Research 107: 10.1029/2001JC001089.

Douglas, B.C.  1992.  Global sea level acceleration.  Journal of Geophysical Research 97: 12,699-12,706.

Woodworth, P.L.  1990.  A search for accelerations in records of European mean sea level.  International Journal of Climatology 10: 129-143.

Reviewed 20 April 2005