For over 100 years the North European cities of Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki have been steadily rising from the sea with no suggestion from observed evidence that local sea levels will not continue to drop by a few millimetres a year. That is until 2020, when the IPCC’s new AR6 Sea Level Projection Tool suddenly promoted substantial sea level rises all round. The discovery appears to baffle Ole Humlum, Emeritus Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Oslo. It seems that this tool was not produced to test the validity of a scientific idea. It was instead an attempt to “alarm the user”, he said.
Alarm it has. Since this Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) computer model was first made publicly available in 2020, there has been a rush of unchecked ‘flood’ stories in the mainstream media. The Daily Sceptic has reported on the activities of a US-based green agitprop operation called Climate Central that is backed by billionaire Foundations and uses the IPCC data to promote custom-made flood catastrophe stories in local media. Recently the Mirror reported that much of London could be gone within 80 years, while large area along the Humber and the Midlands could also disappear beneath the waves. Local politicians such as London mayor Sadiq Khan pick up on these fantastical stories and use them to justify harsh ‘climate’ polices, including an assault on private transport.
This is what Humlum found when he interrogated the IPCC’s new sea level change computer projection model for the coastal city of Oslo. The Norwegian capital, in common with other Scandinavian cities, was buried under a massive ice sheet that only started to lift 20,000 years ago. Even today, the area experiences an ongoing ‘isostatic’ land rise of several millimetres a year as it bounces back from underlying layers. The observed rate of sea level decline can be seen in the above graph in purple. If the 100-year plus observational trend continues, the sea level will fall by 28cm by the end of the century. The IPCC model forecasts a rise in sea level by 2100 of 17cm. Humlum found similar IPCC patterns and disconnects for the capitals of Sweden and Finland. Copenhagen was at the margin of the ice sheet, and a very small annual increase has become a substantial uplift of 45cm by 2100.
It is “extremely surprising”, observes Humlum, that this modelled change should first appear in 2020 as a rather marked step change in the relative sea level. Humlum suggests that if the modellers had produced data going back to 1950, “the conflict between measured and modelled data would immediately have become apparent”. In Humlum’s view, “it is highly disappointing that such a simple quality – or sanity check – was apparently never requested or performed by the IPCC”.
Humlum’s work features in the recently-published Clintel Report – The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC – and is part of a detailed and critical examination of the UN organisation’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). As we noted recently, the scientific authors are damning about much of the IPCC’s work. In addition to emphasising worst-case scenarios, it rewrites climate history, has a “huge” bias in favour of bad news, and keeps good news out of the widely-distributed Summary for Policy Makers. The worst case scenario is called SSP5-8.5 and it assumes temperatures will rise by up to 5°C within less than 80 years. Given that temperatures increased by barely 0.1°C in the first two decades of this century, almost nobody believe these scenarios are remotely plausible. Nevertheless, Clintel notes that 43% of IPCC predictions of drastic and damaging climate change, and around half the climate science literature, are based on these scenarios.
Humlum’s graph uses only a moderate SSP2-4.5 scenario. The more extreme scenarios are available to use on the IPCC Tool, a fact that might explain how, with the help of Climate Central, the Wilshire Times reported last year that by 2050 the waters could be lapping around Gloucester Cathedral, sited at an elevation of 19 metres. For its part, Climate Central notes that it provides “authoritative information to help the public and policymakers make sound decisions about climate change and energy”.
The level of the sea is very difficult to measure and despite recent advances in satellite altimetry, tidal gauges still offer a consistent record. Humlum has noted that these gauges located around the world suggest an average sea level rise of 1-2mm a year. Recent modelled attempts to incorporate satellite measurements produce a rise that that is said to be over 3mm. The IPCC is claiming a recent acceleration in sea level rise, but Humlum says the evidence for this is “thin”. The tide gauge records are said to show “remarkably linear behaviour for more than a century”.
Humlum says it is likely that the IPCC conflates what it sees as a recent “acceleration” in sea level with ocean multidecadal variability. “This should become clear in the next 10-20 years,” he writes. “Right now, it is very preliminary to claim there is an acceleration of the sea level rise.”
The starting point for the IPCC’s work is the assumption that all warming from about 1850 was caused by humans burning fossil fuel. Its 1988 founding principles told it to determine the “scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change”. Given this dogma, the IPPC has become uniquely unsuited to considering all aspects of climate change, whether arising from the activities of humans or due to natural causes. Since 1988, there is considerably more understanding about the natural forces that cause the climate to change. Humlum feels that the IPCC’s blinkered view may have led to its latest errors in sea level modelling. “The fundamental IPCC finding of no significant influence of natural variations since about 1850 should therefore be reconsidered,” he argues.
The more cynical might note that the IPCC’s primary purpose is to promote the idea that the sole cause of global warming since 1850 is human activity. Any deviation from this line will cause considerable financial hardship and widespread unemployment in the climate science community.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic Environment Editor.
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At least half the sheeple buy the quackery and snake oil. Brain dead. To Viking-land one can add the measurements at Rotterdam, Sydney, New York. Nothing going on, probably a decline. Recently in Catania Sicily and the sea levels are lower than in the medieval past. Go to any medieval English cinque port and the sea has receded in the past 500 years, no evidence of rising levels. We were in Rye which is 1.5 miles from any water, Pevensy bay is lower than in 1066 and Southampton’s port much lower than in 1815 when water washed its medieval walls. I stood in Ephesus and could scout the Med about 3 miles away – it was a major port in Paul’s time. Venice was bone dry this year, big drought – a few years back it was flooded to much hysteria (we went there and banners along the canals screaming about changey-thingy were a common sight).
How plant food a rounding error, causes the sea to rise and fall is for me a complete mystery. I would have thought 100 other factors were at work, but hey, I am not ‘the $cience’ just a maggot and eater. As Chris said, following the money usually leads to the $cience and tyranny.
I have a theory. There is simply more water in the atmosphere, keeping the temperature exactly regulated. So simple yet they want to build a water sequestration plant, to hide the pollutant somewhere!
Neil Oliver interviewed a Climate Change advocate on Saturday. He was ex Greenpeace (or possibly Friends of the Earth) had had acted as Adviser to 3 Environment Ministers.
He refused to discuss any of the evidence against his settled opinions on climate change. He and his side are right; anyone thinking otherwise is wrong.
Does anyone seriously think Government Ministers are getting objective, balanced information and both sides of the argument based on reliable data?
He also interviewed Alex Epstein, whose output sounded quite wise to me. You can look him up, and of course he’s selling his books etc, but it was the other side of the coin to the “climate change” scare factory.
Tom Burke bludgeoned Oiver and Tarrant, but mostly with stuff that isn’t true. He said “renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels”—-This is totally FALSE. Government policy punishes fossil fuels with heaps of regulation that forces up the price, while at the same time they give massive subsidy to renewables. In the real world without government favour no one would ever build a wind turbine because they are totally economical. So when Burke said “Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels” he is either a brainwashed dreamer or a LIAR
The clues in his name, Burke!
The Climate hyterics are now in the bind of having forecast greatly rising sea levels, but a shortage of water. You’d imagine that people would notice, but they don’t. They just let this nonsense continue. Where is all this extra water coming from, btw. It isn’t melting ice sheets.
And just to add to that, ice floats on water! It’s 9% less dense, so you would need a lot of ice melt to make any difference to the mass of sea level rise, scientists know this and so does the ipcc!
Just before the last big melt about 15000 years ago, there was a land between Britain and Europe called Doggerland, when the ice melted rapidly at the end of that ice age Doggerland was flooded by 30 meters (100ft) of water, its now the North Sea! To do this, the whole of the northern hemisphere ice sheet which was kilometres thick melted! So half a planet of ice was needed!!!
I think we’ll be ok🤔
Water is going to become rare because all the ice at the poles is going to melt! is one of my favorites. But consistency isn’t something these people need.
“The Climate hyterics are now in the bind of having forecast greatly rising sea levels, but a shortage of water.”
‘A new potable water reservoir hasn’t opened in the UK since 1992, when Severn Trent Water’s Carsington Reservoir in Derbyshire was completed. Portsmouth Water is currently building a reservoir in Havant, which is expected to open in 2029, while Anglian Water is pushing through plans for two more reservoirs, though they won’t be online until 2035 in a best-case scenario.’
In 1992 the official UK population figure was given as 57.88 million. Now it is quoted at almost 68 million although I would bet a few bob on it being over 70 million in reality and yet we haven’t built a single reservoir to look after the needs of an additional 10 million. Hmm…..
However, we can all rest easy because our various governments over the last thirty years really, really, really do care enormously about the health and safety of the people who pay their wages and thus enable their extremely comfortable lifestyles. Thank you very much.
According to known sea levels measured from the geological strata record we are living in one of the most stable sea level times for at least a thousand years!
As water finds its own level(allowing for tides) this must be a world wide stability!
Maybe the stability of the sea levels is naturally inversely proportional to the stability of most people’s minds.
Quick update, let’s not forget isostatic rebound which could account for some sea level loss especially in Scandinavia! unlike the raging climate nut jobs, sensible people like to have all of the facts!
Isostatic rebound also affects Alaska[1] which shows sea-level fall. I notice that in recent years NOAA have been told add in a disclaimer about graphs that show sea-level fall, along the lines of: “a negative trend does not mean the ocean surface is falling; It indicates the land is rising more quickly than the ocean in a particular area”.
[1] http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=9453220
Well said, that’s true for Scotland too! But it’s not a let off for the climate zealots and their constant BS over sea level rise it’s just a scientific fact that,unlike them, we take into consideration !
I wonder what the average sea-level-rise-fanatic would make if they actually were made to walk over a Scottish “beach” that nowadays is a hundred feet above the current sea level!
NOAA being an acronym of?
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Strange that they react more like Noah! Bring on the Arks.
a negative trend does not mean the ocean surface is falling; It indicates the land is rising more quickly than the ocean in a particular area
A brillliant formulation. Rising in reference to what? Heights are usually measured relative to sea-level. Hence, if height becomes greater, sea-level has fallen relative to the land or the land risen relative to sea-level. That’s the same.
Man Made Climate Change is the gift that keeps on giving; everyone can run around looking virtuous while berating other people for not doing enough. And at the same time, they know no-one will ever be able to prove they personally didn’t do enough to “save the planet”.
IPCC———-The world’s largest environmental activist group. Their remit is to encourage the solving of problems that do NOT exist for political purposes. Most people who visit Daily Sceptic already know this. The problem is that there may only be a fraction of 1% of the population who visit this site. (please correct me if I am wrong on that). Big Bureaucracies who get huge media attention and have the appearance of authority and knowledge from the “world’s top scientists” easily impress a general public with not much time to investigate things as they are too busy with work and family life. Ordinary people are reluctant to question anything they think is science. ———But when we hear all of the dangerous stuff that is allegedly going to occur 50 and 100 years from now, it is NOT SCIENCE. It is MODELLING. ————Models are NOT science. So all of us on Daily Sceptic are putting forward our comments and the rest of us all read them and give our little up votes, but what is really essential is that these points of view are somehow presented to the general public, and that can only happen via mainstream news, who quite simply refuse. Infact BBC and SKY are simply bought and paid for activists. GB News is the only channel who makes an attempt at impartiality on the issue of climate change and they do their best, but when watching them I realise that the presenters are limited in their knowledge and often let the alarmists of the hook. ———-People need to understand that this issue is not only a scientific one where the science is already clear, because it certainly is NOT. It is also a moral social and economic issue and if the general public are afraid to challenge the science then they MUST challenge the morality and the economics.
I keep getting reminded of the 1978 film Capricorn One. The plot is that for devious financial and political reasons NASA fakes a manned expedition to Mars, by launching an unmanned mission and simulating the mission with models of Martian landscapes and spacecraft, seemingly successfully landing on Mars and taking off again . Unfortunately the faulty model (or simulation) bumps into reality when the real, but un-Manned, craft returning spacecraft burns up on re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere. This sets the scene for the obligatory final chase sequence finale in which NASA increasingly desperately try to hide the real data (in the form of some very live astronauts) from the duped public at the “memorial service”. For me, the irony is in that it really was NASA, albeit NASA/GISS rather than NASA/JPL that are at the heart of this deliberate mis-modelling of climate and falsification of observations.
IIRC, 1978 was towards the end of the cooling period, so were were all being told that we were going to freeze to death if we didn’t pay more taxes to change the weather. Ten years later the UN set up the IPCC in order to create the global climate change industry in order to enact global wealth and power redistribution, so as to Make The World A Better Place. The UN Covid scare didn’t age well either when it burnt up in the atmosphere of real data!
I remember the end of that film – (as you say NASA as the fakers,) Elliott Gould was in it.
As an ex RAF Navigator crewing VC10s in the 70s I landed at RAF Gan in the Maldives on approximately 50 occasions, en-route to/from Hong Kong or Singapore. The runway was 6ft AMSL (above mean sea level). some 50 years later, and now, a civvy airport, it’s still 6ft AMSL.
Perhaps the Maldives Cabinet will not have to meet underwater after all!
Humlum’s chart is misleading because he has smoothed over such a long period (121 months). If you take a moving average over something more reasonable such as 4 years you can see that the sea level fall in Oslo has pretty much stopped in recent years and so it is not such a shock if it now starts to rise.
In the context of sea level changes, why is 4 years a more “reasonable” period than 121?
(I presume you meant 121 years rather than months).
121 months (i.e. 10 years) as it says on the chart (121 years would not be possible as the whole sequence is only 105 years long).
Choosing an interval for a moving average to show up trends is a trade off. Too small and you can’t see the trend for noise. Too large and you fail to detect all but the crudest trends. An interval which amounts to 10% of the total period is almost bound to show little more than a straight line whatever the subtleties within that. Among other things you lose 10% of data. I went for 48 months because I found that any smaller than that the noise hid the signal. But it is easy to experiment for yourself if you have Excel.
Short version: 121 months show what Hulum believes to be the true state of affairs, 48 months show what MTF believes to be the true state of affairs. Both are abitrary political choices.
Yes I think you’re probably right – unless anyone has convincing prior historical data that tells us what interval to use to maximise accuracy of predictions regarding sea level changes in Oslo…
It seems to me to go back to the debate we were having a couple of days ago where MTF was using the human body as an example of a complex system about which we could often make reasonably accurate predictions. It doesn’t seem like a good analogy to me given that billions of humans have lived and died since the dawn of time. We don’t have the example of billions of planet Earths we can draw conclusions from, and the Earth isn’t dead yet. We have no idea what the end state might be or how we will get there, other than perhaps the very end dictated by changes in the Sun. Also we have no control group of planet Earths to compare to.
I don’t see the relevance of the differences between the human body and the earth’s climate. I think perhaps I mislead you by mentioning predictability. That’s not the main point. The main point is very simple:
It is a fallacy to argue:
A system is highly complicated
to
There are no forces which will influence the general characteristics of that system
However, if you want some other examples of complicated systems that can be subject to forces that influence their general direction:
A large corporation will tend to lower prices if cut-price competitors enter the market
A national economy will tend to slow down if interest rates are raised
An urban road system will tend to increase journey times if there is more traffic
And so on …
“There are no forces which will influence the general characteristics of that system”
I’ve never argued that. Your examples all feature some degree predictability.
Of course you do realise that averaging of whatever lengthy cannot change the slope unless there is a point of inflection? Maths should never be left to Excel!
One reason I am sceptical of the JASON/TOPEX sea-level rise “measurements” based on satellite altimetry is that they seem to be based on “adjustments” which are rooted in assuming the truth of the hypothesis that is being tested, creating a circularity. For example, in splicing JASON-1,2 and 3 and TOPEX data they assume that there is a linear and continuous trend (reasonable) but that the trend in the raw data is attributable mainly to sea-level rise, and not by water vapour change (or other change) in the atmosphere over the decades, which they assume to be insignificant. Such atmospheric effects are tiny and difficult to model accurately, but are significant if they are trying to measure changes of sea level of the order of millimetre per year.
I see that the new BBC fact checkers (BBC verify) haven’t started to check the BBC reporting of “climate change / emergency” yet. That should bve very interesting to read, but of course it won’t happen!
Thanks, Chris, for your work on this. I would substitute the word intelligent for the third word in your last paragraph.
It is clear that the movement of tectonic plates is causing the oceans to boil as it runs into the gaps’ How can we mitigate this. I suggest following the monks of old who purified themselves of their sins by self flagellation, or as the government would have it, a big whip round so that we can all pay for them to fly of to the Pacific to observe it for themselves.