Sea level rate of change

Not at the rate we keep finding it,, (and wasting it!)

I just drove across the Bakkan in North Dakoata. The change in just one year is stunning, as the volume of activity is amazing from horizon to horizon. The really scary thing is the number of wasteful gas flares. Every mile or so, in every direction for hundreds of miles there are gas flares, burning off the methane that comes with the oil. So here is a case of getting all the negatives of burning fossil fuel with NONE of the benefits. I read somewhere (iirc) that the are 60,000+ gas flares in the Bakkan, burning enough gas to heat 600,000 homes, al going to waste, all contributing to GHGs!

It is just criminal that they are not forced to used that gas for some reasonable purpose, and invest in the infrastructure to either liquify it, or the pipelines to transport it, or even failing that, install gas fired, grid tie generators on each flare, to feed into the grid, just like the neighboring wind farms do. Each flare site has utility power, it would be a simple matter to install a 5-20 kw generator on each ( just a WAG as to the BTU waste of each flare) which would each add to the grid. 60,000 10 kw generators would be better than 6 gw if my feeble math is any good,, which it really isn't.

How dumb is this?

Icarus

 

Icarus,
that is quite off topic, and probably deserves a different thread. I appologize to others by adding to it.

North Dakota seems to lack proper laws about this, and its a state by state measure. I would propose Texas regulations which have been reducing flaring since the 50s, but these are currently being abused now also. The idea behind them is flaring should be illegal unless it is for safety reasons. The problem here is the law is administered by the railroad commission, and rapid growth of oil production increases state revenue, and more oil taxes mean fewer budget cuts or other tax increases. Permits have doubled in the last year, which means oil drilling is being expanded too fast to be at an environmentally safe level. The railroad commissioner has told environmental groups he is trying to get it under control, and has told oil companies that if he doesn't the epa may step in. The normal state group to police this here would be TCEQ, but its members have been appointed by a governor that does not believe in global warming and they are more a hindrance than a help. The Texas laws would probably work in North Dakota as long as a federal agency like the EPA made sure they were being followed.

 

You are right, it does deserve its own thread.

Is as merely pointing out that we keep finding fossil energy, and "cheap" ways to get it,, in fact faster than ever, with the requisite GHG emissions ever increasing.

Icarus

 

Is the flared gas subject to the same taxes or royalties as gas and oil actually delivered?

If not, maybe we should change that, to increase the incentive to capture and use it.

 

How do they quantify/meter what they burn? How do we know how much the burn? What seems criminal is that the gas is too cheap to collect, and yet we don't seem to be able to develope a market for Nat gas powered vehicles! Instead we burn gas to boil tar out of tar sands, turn it into liquid oil, refine it, to sell to power transport!

Further off topic, but why not avoid the middle man, invest in infrastructure to fuel vehicles with Nat gas instead?

Icarus

 

And then there are these genius'!

I guess th ey can repeal the law of gravity if you apply enough moronism to it:


"Sea level rise is a sensitive subject for some political conservatives, who say that global warming is a hoax and that sea levels are not in danger of rising precipitously. The USGS study is significant because it provides data showing that sea levels have risen over the past two decades along the Atlantic Coast, regardless of the cause.

This spring, Republicans in the North Carolina legislature introduced a bill that would require sea level rise forecasts to be based on past patterns and would all but outlaw projections based on climate change data.

Using climate change and other data, a science panel with the state Coastal Resources Commission said that sea levels along the North Carolina coast could rise an average of 39 inches by 2100. Coastal business and development interests complained to the Republican-controlled legislature, saying the projections could trigger regulations costing businesses and homeowners millions of dollars."

USGS: Sea level in Atlantic 'hot spot' rising faster than world's - latimes.com


Icarus

 

This is actually an easy one. Let us break up the two things Sea Level is rising in the area because 1) local land levels from center of the earth are getting lower and/or local Sea level from the center of the earth is higher. The answer in this region is both.

Let us first look at land level which should include erosion and plate tectonics. We can use gps to measure the level, but these measurements are recent. We therefore try to model how sea levels would rise based on current and gravity and find south of the are and north of the area sea levels have risen less than we would assume from this level. Therefore the land must be lower. Now the mechanism of erosion or plate movement is difficult to separate out. We can only measure well into the future not the past.

The second that sea level is getting higher is even higher, we do have a fairly good proxy record since the little ice age of warminging temperatures, melting glaciers, and rising sea levels. Here we must also unfortunately look at plate tectonics which says the earth is not greatly contracting, and sea level rise is not based on earth land mass getting smaller.

When we combine the best models to both, we find the land is getting lower faster than the water is getting higher, but both are occurring. Better models will provide data on how fast, but public policy should look at the best science of what is happening.

 

Don't take absence of earthquakes detectable on traditional seismographs as absence of geological activity. Barely a decade ago, 'slow' earthquakes were discovered here in the Pacific Northwest. These movements takes weeks, not seconds. Ours are periodic, repeating every fifteen months:
Slow Earthquakes, ETS, and Cascadia
Slow Fault Slip Investigations
I wouldn't be surprised if we later discover other not-yet-detected movements.

 

A quick glance at the literature seems to show that land effects are about 3x as large as sea level rise effects. Perhaps we have a geologist on the board that can tell us what is likely to happen in the future.

 

I second the request for geological expertise on coastal geodesy. For these processes I would be comfortable with linear extrapolations on the century time scale. More so than for ice melt rates.

I wonder the extent to which it could be done "by difference". All tide guage data combined gives the global average rate, individual station deviations reflect the local geological change. If most tide stations are +/- near the global average, then we might delimit the extent of large geological effects, without having to collect that pesky decade of high-tech leveling data. Or perhaps more specifically, we'd know where to invest such resources.

This would not take into account the regional effect of oceanic current (gyres) piling up water but maybe it is worth doing. Most times, when I think something is worth doing I find that it has (a) been done or (b) kinda a dumb idea because I missed some important consideration. Not always though

To what extent are coastal oil reservoirs still being depleted? Maybe they are mostly 'played'. But Long Beach, CA famously had local subsidence of up to 10 meters after the oil was extracted.

 

... and this was written more than two years before Hurricane Katrina.

Somewhere I saw discussion of post-hurricane subsistence measurements taken in far greater detail than before that disaster. It turned out that local rates varied far more than previously noticed, with the worst spots sinking about an inch per year.

This place is a disaster waiting to happen even without climate change.

 

This PNAS article is behind a paywall. They report their data/reconstruction supports a more rapid acceleration of sea level rise:

Abstract
The rate at which global mean sea level (GMSL) rose during the 20th century is uncertain, with little consensus between various reconstructions that indicate rates of rise ranging from 1.3 to 2 mm⋅y−1. Here we present a 20th-century GMSL reconstruction computed using an area-weighting technique for averaging tide gauge records that both incorporates up-to-date observations of vertical land motion (VLM) and corrections for local geoid changes resulting from ice melting and terrestrial freshwater storage and allows for the identification of possible differences compared with earlier attempts. Our reconstructed GMSL trend of 1.1 ± 0.3 mm⋅y−1 (1σ) before 1990 falls below previous estimates, whereas our estimate of 3.1 ± 1.4 mm⋅y−1 from 1993 to 2012 is consistent with independent estimates from satellite altimetry, leading to overall acceleration larger than previously suggested. This feature is geographically dominated by the Indian Ocean–Southern Pacific region, marking a transition from lower-than-average rates before 1990 toward unprecedented high rates in recent decades. We demonstrate that VLM corrections, area weighting, and our use of a common reference datum for tide gauges may explain the lower rates compared with earlier GMSL estimates in approximately equal proportion. The trends and multidecadal variability of our GMSL curve also compare well to the sum of individual contributions obtained from historical outputs of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. This, in turn, increases our confidence in process-based projections presented in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.​

Reassessment of 20th century global mean sea level rise

 

Some ares will also see slower to faster rises due to orbital mechanics.
Damn you moon, stop sloshing our water all over the place.

 

Land lowering is NOT sea level rise.Except in climate science.