Sea level rate of change

Sometimes disjointed facts are commingled to ill effect:

• Tsunami sources - typically earth movement that can include landslides (notably LaPalma)
• Sea level rise - combination of land ice melt and surface water heating
• Loss of land - what happens when sea level rise

This is not a defense of Mo Brooks as much as initial diagnosis of how such deniers gasp at straws. The sea level rise 'removes' land lost to the higher surface level. The effect was labeled the cause.

Bob Wilson

 

That is fine, let's see the sources.

The earth's orbit changes per the100,000 year Milankovitch cycle and it was expected to be seen in 1970. However, Nobel Prize winning, Svante August Arrhemius " in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth's surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. These calculations led him to conclude that human-caused CO2 emissions, from fossil-fuel burning and other combustion processes, are large enough to cause global warming."

Subsequent studies have shown Arrhemius was right and anyone claiming global cooling in 1970 was ignorant or wrong.

Key to the scientific method is to review studies and papers. Christy and Spencer along with the NASA RSS team have made 'adjustments' over the years to correct for software errors in their code but that happens in any study. The problem is Christy, Spencer, and RSS are lagging ground, sea, and ice observations. In particular the Berkeley Earth studies that show global warming is real and most recently,"2017 - 3rd Hottest Year on Record."

Actually there are significant scientific studies supporting man made, global warming as the primary reason for sea level rise. What you claimed in the hearing is orders of magnitude smaller than global warming.

The U.S. Geological Survey reports there "321,003,271 cubic miles is in the ocean." This is 5 orders of magnitude greater than your claimed,"thousands of cubic miles of eroded material." In percentage terms, we'll use 9,999 cubic miles for your claim:

9,999 / 321,003,271 = 0.003% of the ocean volume

This goes beyond a rounding error into insignificance.

This has been studied but recent hurricanes have all but washed out the Mississippi delta. The others are shrinking as the sea level rises. It is the charge in sea level, the incursion into formerly dry land that is important, not the existence of an insignificant addition to the ocean basins.

Actually paleo geography studies have show during the Ice Ages, the sea level fell only to rise between the ice ages. This has led to sea shells and fossils found significantly higher than the local oceans. Darwin noted this in his journals.

Actually Arctic sea ice has little effect on sea level BUT serves a useful metric for global warming. Since 2012, the Arctic has opened to navigation each year. Cruise liners take tourists on cruises through the melted, formerly frozen, sea ice.

Antarctica has seen melting and break-up of the sea ice that often blocks glaciers from reaching the oceans. It is removal of these glacial blockages that increases the rate of sea level rise from the glaciers flowing to the sea.

No problem as the Larson and other ice shelfs breaking up is well documented as well as faster movement of glaciers to the sea. Satellite measurements are showing a decrease in Antartica and Greenland ice.

Yes, more moisture results in deposits of snow that compacts to ice. But gravity studies show this effect is falling behind the loss of Antarctic ice to the sea. The numbers count.

At last, something we can almost agree. Floating ice has no significant effect on sea level because of the 2000 year old, Archimedes effect that a floating object displaces the same weight of water. However, this is not "8 times." In contrast, land based ice that melts or reaches the sea displaces and adds the same amount of weight.

If only you would follow your own advice.

Bob Wilson

ps. I nominate Mo Brooks to be our Mojo replacement.

 

I started a Google search to find papers discussing the effect and found this at the top:

FACT CHECK: Do Rocks Falling Into the Ocean Contribute to Global Sea Level Rise?

<The metrics>
. . . on geologic time scales (tens of millions of years) such an amount material added to the oceans would, in theory, become meaningful. That would be true if not for the fact that — also on geologic time scales — the ocean floor actively recycles old seafloor at rates comparable to the mass added by sediment each year. On these timescales the major factors driving global sea level variability are much larger-scale processes like the subduction of continents, the rise and fall of ocean ridges, and the volcanic processes that create new rocks.

Tim Herbert, a professor of oceanography at Brown University, told us that Brooks’ argument — if looked at on these timescales — is akin to focusing on one side of a cyclic process while ignoring the processes that go the other direction. On relevant timescales, Herbert told us, the most important point is that current rate of sea level rise is substantially higher than what geologists believe to be a normal background rate:

[There is] very clear evidence that for thousands of years in the Holocene, sea level rose very modestly. Sea level began to rise at a much steeper rate ~1850 (time of the first measurable sea level response to the input of CO2 that began with the Industrial revolution) and then has been steeply rising over the past few decades in parallel with the steep rise in CO2 and global temperatures. Every good study I know shows that current rates of sea level rise are 3-4 times the natural background rate.​

While Brooks is correct both in his understanding of Archimedes’ principle and in his statement that tons of sediment flow into the oceans each year, his assertion that this sediment flow is in any way a measurable contributor to the sea level rise scientists are discussing in the context of anthropogenic global warming is false.​

Going back to look for credible reports on the 'rock heads sea level displacement' claim. I may have found one:
http://www.geol.lsu.edu/pclift/pclift/Publications_files/2015_Ferrier_etal_2015.pdf

Scanning this report looks to account for a lot of factors from " . . . we use a gravitationally self-consistent global model to explore how sediment erosion and deposition affected sea level during the most recent glacial–interglacial cycle in the northeastern Arabian Sea and the Indus River basin, where fluvial sediment fluxes are among the highest on Earth."

This is likely to be the root source of Mo Brooks claim because it includes delta basins in the description.

NASA public web site: NASA Sea Level Change Portal: Causes

Does not include sediment effects. Still it showed how the loss of Greenland ice mass has changed the gravitational field, weakening it. This causes a local loss of sea level because the gravity attraction is reduced. The same mechanism should occur with sediment moving from land where its gravitational attraction would pull the sea water higher to depressing the sea water height by pulling the sea lower towards the deposits.

Bob Wilson