Four Takeaways From The New NOAA Sea Level Report

 These are the four key takeaways from the 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Oceans Warming Nearly Twice As Fast As Expected

(Photo is from oceanservice.noaa.gov.)

The following article is by Samantha Page at Think Progress:

Apparently, research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) isn’t all a sham.

A new study confirms that when NOAA scientists recalculated the ocean’s warming — finding that over the past 18 years, ocean temperatures have increased 0.22°F (0.12° C) increase per decade, rather than the previously thought .13°F (0.07° C) per decade — they were right.

The original findings, published in Science in 2015, came under intense scrutiny — not from other scientists, but from politicians. Specifically, the scientists involved in the study were targeted in a House Science, Space, and Technology Committee investigation, headed by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). . . .

In fact, not only is there no evidence of a conspiracy to produce politically popular data, the earth’s oceans are, in fact, warming nearly twice as fast as previously thought. . . .

The new study confirming NOAA’s conclusion, published in Science on Wednesday by independent scientists based at the University of California Berkeley, broke out the data in a different way, allowing researchers to more clearly identify temperature changes.

Specifically, they found that data from ships wasn’t accurately reflecting the change in ocean temperatures.

The problem with NOAA’s pre-2015 conclusion came from the fact that the ocean’s temperature is recorded in several different ways. There are research buoys, satellite readings, special devices known as Argo floats, which sit slightly below the water’s surface, emerging every 10 days with new data, and ship records, which generally are read at intake valves in ship engine rooms.

But different data collection methods come up with different readings, Zeke Hausfather, the study’s lead author, told ThinkProgress.

For years, NOAA used a formula that weighted boat and buoy data the same (until 2014’s infamous recalculation). But because boats have changed — cargo ships are bigger, for starters — it seems that the data coming from the boats wasn’t accurately capturing the change in water temperatures.

“A lot of this [apparent global warming] pause seems to be caused by the change in our data collection in ships,” he said. In fact, many scientists agree that NOAA’s work was instrumental in disproving the “global warming pause” theory that had attracted the attention of climate science deniers.

Think of NOAA data collection like using a tree to calculate wind speeds. If you use 10-foot trees for 30 years, then slowly start including data from 50-foot trees, your data set will not be as accurate as it would be if you had used the same height tree the whole time. In fact, you might see a big uptick in wind speeds, even when no change in wind took place. (Wind speeds at the tops of 50-foot trees will be significantly higher than at the tops of 10-foot trees.)

Meanwhile, though, you have kites that fly at a consistent 40-foot height, all the time, everywhere. That data is consistently collected and more easily comparable across locations and time.

Wouldn’t it make sense to only compare kite data to kite data?

That’s exactly what Hausfather and his colleagues did. They analyzed NOAA’s data in chunks: buoy data, satellite data, and Argo data.

“We looked at three independent, separate sets of data,” Hausfather said. “They all agree with the new NOAA record.”

Arctic Sea Ice Is Rapidly Disappearing

American politicians don't seem to be in any rush to do anything about the global climate change that scientists have been warning us about (at least 95% of scientists, and even more climate scientists). The congressional Republicans think the whole thing is a hoax, and most Democrats act like there is plenty of time in the future to deal with the approaching crisis. But they both may be wrong.

Look at the chart above, compiled from the latest data from the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington. It shows the minimum volume of the Arctic sea ice in all the years from 1979 through 2012, and the results are pretty shocking. Note that the volume in 2012 (just this last summer) was half of what it was in 2009 -- just three years ago. And it was more than five times less than it was in 1979.

And the process seems to be accelerating. Michael Mann, one of the world's leading climate scientists, says the world's ice sheets are melting much faster than was expected. Scientists had expected it to take several decades for the rise in ocean level caused by the melting to seriously affect islands and low-lying coastal areas. They now believe it will happen much faster, perhaps in the next 10 years. Mann told The Guardian newspaper:

We know Arctic sea ice is declining faster than the models predict. When you look at the major Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheets, which are critical from the standpoint of sea level rise, once they begin to melt we really start to see sea level rises accelerate.

The models have typically predicted that will not happen for decades but the measurements that are coming in tell us it is already happening so once again we are decades ahead of schedule.

Island nations that have considered the possibility of evacuation at some point, like Tuvalu, may have to be contending those sort of decisions within the matter of a decade or so.

It seems that we are already running out of time. Have we already reached the tipping point (beyond which the disastrous effects can be averted)? If not, it sounds like we are approaching that point much faster than was expected. This means something must be done now. Our politicians (and those of other nations) must quit squabbling and delaying, and take some action. Otherwise we may hand our grandchildren a world much less inhabitable than the one we inherited, and that would be inexcusable.

Killing Off The Oceans

There has been a lot of talk in the last few years about global climate change and how it will affect the world's land masses. But a story that has largely been ignored by most people is that the world's oceans are also being negatively affected by mankind, and the oceans are fast reaching a critical point -- much faster than previously thought.

Some people think the oceans are too vast (covering about 71% of the Earth's surface at an average depth of 12,430 feet and a volume of 310 million cubic miles) to be affected by mankind. That is simply not true. The oceans are being affected by over-fishing, pollution, and global climate change.

In the past these three factors have been considered by themselves in how they are hurting the oceans. But a recent meeting of scientists says the factors are working together and are destroying the oceans at a much faster rate than realized even as recently as a couple of years ago. The panel of scientists, from many different scientific disciplines, met at the request of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO).

Alex Rogers, IPSO scientific director and professor of biology at Oxford University, said, "The findings are shocking. As we considered the cumulative effect of what mankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realized. We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, from the University of Queensland, agreed saying, "The rate of change is vastly exceeding what we were expecting even a couple of years ago. So if you look at almost everything, whether it's fisheries in temperate zones or coral reefs or Arctic sea ice, all of this is undergoing changes, but at a much faster rate than we had thought."

The scientists believe we are facing a "globally significant extinction event" in the oceans. The last one was 55 million years ago, and was caused by a disturbance of the carbon cycle, acidification, and the depletion of oxygen in the seawater. We are facing the same things now (only caused by man this time and at an accelerated rate), and the level of CO2 being absorbed by the oceans is already greater than in that last extinction event.

IPSO will be issuing a report and making a presentation to the United Nations later this week. But they have already made three recommendations which they believe should be immediately implemented. They are:
* Stop exploitative fishing, with special emphasis on the high seas where there is currently little effective regulation.
* Map and then reduce the input of pollutants including plastics, agricultural fertilizers, and human waste.
* Make sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (with a goal of bringing CO2 emissions to zero within 20 years).

This is a serious problem that could have drastic negative effects for all of mankind. I wish I could say that the world's leaders will see this as that serious and begin to take action. But I don't believe they will. Just look at all the procrastination that has already taken place in dealing with global climate change, even with over 90% of the world's scientists agreeing that action must be immediately taken.

Last year's climate conference in Mexico ended with no real action taken, and another climate conference has just ended in Germany, again with no action agreed to. And the United States is one of the biggest impediments to getting anything done. The corporate interests are making far too much money, and passing new rules that would stave off global climate change (including oceanic changes) might cut into their profits -- and that is something they and their Republican lackeys are not about to let happen.

And as long as the United States refuses to agree to changes to protect the climate and the oceans, there is very little chance that the rest of the world will do so. Poet T.S. Eliot once said the world will end with a whimper and not a bang. He was close. That whimper will actually be the sound of dollar bills as corporate profits are counted and the world slowly dies.