Note added 8:10 pm PDT - I was clearly wrong about Warren's voice. Sorry. But I still think Trump would clean her clock too.
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Here we go again: Oregon senate Republicans are preparing to leave the state to avoid a quorum on the second cap-and-trade bill to be entered by senate Democrats, even though this bill has some changes to appease them. They're being secretive about where they're going, but you can be sure it's someplace where there's no human-produced CO2, so they can continue to ignore the fact that a big problem exists. I hope the towns & counties they represent never come asking for aid of any sort due to problems from climate change.And, Oregon Democrats (including the governor) could make history by putting forth a carbon tax and dividend plan. It's so bleeding obvious. Many of people in Oregon's red districts (basically, those east of the peaks of the Cascade Mountains) would get back more money than they paid out. But politicians just can't keep their hands off the money a carbon tax would bring in.
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The IRI's forecast for ENSO is warm-neutral sea surface temperatures for spring, and neutral SSTs for summer (viz, ~0 SST anomalies).
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Boston is going to spend $30 million per year to deal with their sea level rise. And, yes, they have serious SLR. Here are the sea level data for Boston. (Main page.) I find the same overall trend as NOAA in the figure below. According to my calculations, the linear trend shows 8.3 inches of sea level rise from 1921 to 2000, and 4.4 inches since 2000. So I believe the numbers in the article. (Even though these two numbers don't prove it -- why should they? -- the acceleration of the overall data since 1921 is exactly zero.)
5 comments:
OK. So I don't buy the claim that there has been no acceleration since 1920. I'd say there was deceleration in the 1940s and acceleration circa 2000. A nonlinear model suggests fairly rapid rise from 1920-1945 (~5 mm/yr), then much slower rise from 1945-2000, and more rapid rise after 2000 (5.7 mm/yr). The rate over the past two decades is approximately twice the linear rate over the full period. My guess is that part of the post-1990s increase has to do with ocean circulation and slowdown of the Gulf Stream but that's just an uninformed speculation.
Also, worth noting that the NOAA data you link to are *relative* sea level, uncorrected for vertical land motion. Which is entirely appropriate for local planning purposes - if the land is rising or subsiding, that will be part of the future projected sea level rise locally. In Boston's case, I think there is a slight subsidence occurring (Zervas et al. 2013 say it's -0.8 mm/yr). I don't completely understand this because overall Boston has experienced about 100 m of (upward) postglacial isostatic rebound since the LGM (Oakley & Boothroyd 2012) but maybe there are some complicated crustal dynamics whereby the uplift tapered off earlier and there's now local subsidence while uplift continues further north/inland.
Anyway, taking account of the -0.8 mm/yr VLM, that still leaves approx +5 mm/yr absolute SLR at Boston since 2000, significantly faster than the global mean over the same time period. As I said above, I think that's due primarily to changes in ocean circulation.
Tamino at Open Mind addressed this same issue. Take a look at his analysis of acceleration.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/boston-sea-level/
Forgot the html:
Open Mind- Boston Sea Level
Huh. That's basically *exactly* what I did. Should have figured that Tamino would have already covered it.
Thanks!
Ned (#1): My calculation that acceleration=0 starts at the earliest point in the dataset, which is Jan 1921. I'll try to get to calculating the acceleration since any month.
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