Uh oh! It's not looking so good for Al's theory, is it?
;D
blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/40889NASA: Sea levels drop
August 25, 2011 by Don Surber
Cutline: A graphic from NASA shows sea levels have dropped 6 mm in the last 6 months, wiping out the rise over the past 2 years. Whoops!
Debunking Al Gore is getting to be too easy. That big doofus who stumbled through Harvard and used daddy’s money and political connections to make it into the Senate — Al Gore — has gotten so much wrong on Global Warming that to point out another failure on his part would be interpreted by some as piling on, to which I yell, “Cowabunga!” and flop on top of him like Calvin and Hobbes in a pile of raked leaves.
From Al Gore’s Journal on June 30, 2011:
“The sea-level is now rising faster along the U.S. Atlantic coast than at any time in the past 2,100 years, and this surge is linked to increasing global temperatures, an international research team reports.”
“Sea-level rise is a potentially disastrous outcome of climate change, as rising temperatures melt land-based ice and warm ocean waters,” said study co-author Benjamin Horton of the University of Pennsylvania. The study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
He cited USA Today.
Well, I will see his USA Today and raise him an Orange County Register:
Global sea-level dropped significantly over the past year, NASA satellite data show, bucking a long-term trend toward sea-levels driven higher by a changing climate. But the drop of about a quarter inch on average does not signal a reversal of global warming, said Josh Willis, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory climate scientist who reported the latest data this week.
“We expect that, within the next year or so, we’ll see sea-level rising again,” Willis said Wednesday. “And actually, the very latest data suggest that’s probably already started.”
The drop is the largest in the generally upward curve of sea level measured over the past 18 years, although there have been other downward bumps. Another big one occurred in 1998 and 1999, and both have been linked to La Niña, the periodic cooling of equatorial ocean waters in the eastern Pacific. The ocean region cycles back and forth between La Niña and El Niño, a periodic warming.
“It’s definitely happened before, and will definitely happen again,” Willis said.
So what is the moral to this story? All things on heaven and Earth are cyclical and mankind — a cork bobbing in the universal sea — is just getting around to understand a few of these cycles. It took us just 2,000 years to figure out that the planets circled the Sun and not the Earth.
NASA is blaming “one of the strongest La Niñas in recent memory.” If so, would “one of the strongest La Niñas in recent memory” not be caused by man? I mean if everything else is caused by man, why not “one of the strongest La Niñas in recent memory”?
I know. Quit using logic. It’s science!
The press release from NASA (note the obfuscation — oh wait, it’s a press release):
Like mercury in a thermometer, ocean waters expand as they warm. This, along with melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, drives sea levels higher over the long term. For the past 18 years, the U.S./French Jason-1, Jason-2 and Topex/Poseidon spacecraft have been monitoring the gradual rise of the world’s ocean in response to global warming.
While the rise of the global ocean has been remarkably steady for most of this time, every once in a while, sea level rise hits a speed bump. This past year, it’s been more like a pothole: between last summer and this one, global sea level actually fell by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter.
So what’s up with the down seas, and what does it mean? Climate scientist Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., says you can blame it on the cycle of El Niño and La Niña in the Pacific.
Willis said that while 2010 began with a sizable El Niño, by year’s end, it was replaced by one of the strongest La Niñas in recent memory. This sudden shift in the Pacific changed rainfall patterns all across the globe, bringing massive floods to places like Australia and the Amazon basin, and drought to the southern United States.
Data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) spacecraft provide a clear picture of how this extra rain piled onto the continents in the early parts of 2011. “By detecting where water is on the continents, Grace shows us how water moves around the planet,” says Steve Nerem, a sea level scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
So where does all that extra water in Brazil and Australia come from? You guessed it–the ocean. Each year, huge amounts of water are evaporated from the ocean. While most of it falls right back into the ocean as rain, some of it falls over land. “This year, the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year,” says Carmen Boening, a JPL oceanographer and climate scientist. Boening and colleagues presented these results recently at the annual Grace Science Team Meeting in Austin, Texas.
But for those who might argue that these data show us entering a long-term period of decline in global sea level, Willis cautions that sea level drops such as this one cannot last, and over the long-run, the trend remains solidly up. Water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again.
“We’re heating up the planet, and in the end that means more sea level rise,” says Willis. “But El Niño and La Niña always take us on a rainfall rollercoaster, and in years like this they give us sea-level whiplash.”