Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Thoughts on Climate Change - Part 12: What is driving sea level rise?

According to this graph, based on evidence compiled by the Hadley Center, NASA and NOAA, we see little to no sign of global temperature rise from 1850 through 1910, a period of 60 years: 









Oceanic temperatures also did not begin to rise until roughly the same time:


Yet sea levels began to rise steadily from at least 1880 and probably sooner: 







If this evidence is correct, then it’s difficult to see how sea level rise could have been a response to a rise in global temperatures that began at least 30 years later. It's difficult also to claim sea level rise is driven by warming produced by CO2 emissions when the rate of rise has remained relatively stable from 1880 through the present, while both global land and sea temperatures have risen and fallen at varying rates during this same period.

I’m wondering, therefore, whether it's possible the rise in sea levels has little or nothing to do with climate.

According to a recent study, 

. . . the rapidly retreating Thwaites and Pope glaciers in particular are underlain by areas of largely elevated geothermal heat flow, which relates to the tectonic and magmatic history of the West Antarctic Rift System in this region. Our results imply that the behavior of this vulnerable sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is strongly coupled to the dynamics of the underlying lithosphere.” (High geothermal heat flow beneath Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica inferred from aeromagnetic data )

A similar dynamic has been reported for Greenland (High geothermal heat flux in close proximity to the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream )

Could the steady sea level rise since the late 19th century be linked primarily to a gradual geothermally-induced melting of ice sheets in both Antarctica and Greenland? Such a notion  seems more consistent with the evidence than the effects of climate change.


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