The measurements were being compared to “estimates produced by the usual scientific models.”
What the Financial Times didn’t say is that the estimates being used as the benchmark were made using faulty “scientific models” – garbage in, garbage out.
The Financial Times (“FT”) recently posted an article titled ‘Sea levels already ‘much higher’ than many scientists had estimated’, claiming that sea level rise is even more concerning than previously believed because modelled sea level estimates used in many climate change studies are generally lower than actual sea level measurements. The importance of the finding, however, is not what the story reports. The story notes that present sea levels are not catastrophic. Also, the present rate of sea level rise, whether based on satellite calculations or as measured by tide gauges, is very gradual. Seaside communities have the ability to overcome any threat from rising seas through normal civil engineering efforts.
FT reports on a recent study from the Netherlands’ Wageningen University, published in Nature. According to the authors of the study, most coastal planning, including planning for flooding and sea level rise, is based on “Geoid” model estimates of coastal sea-level height and land elevation. Yet, like general circulation models, the outputs of these models are only as good as the data and assumptions built into them. In this case, the authors of the study found that “actual sea levels are on average about 30cm higher globally than estimates produced by the usual scientific models,” with differences emerging particularly in Southeast Asia and Oceania. FT says that in those regions, “the ocean is one to 1.5 meters higher on some coastlines than most impact assessments have assumed.”
This is notable because it means that many climate impact assessments for coastal communities have been designed from the wrong starting point, projecting future sea levels and problems from them, in many instances at levels that already are the case. The problems they anticipate under future climate change-driven sea levels should already be evidenced, but they aren’t. Garbage in, Garbage out.
Because those coastal communities seriously miscalculated the sea level starting point, the study project’s leader, Philip Minderhoud, warned that this could mean that “the impacts from sea-level rise will happen sooner than projected before.” Yet, that seems wrong, since sea levels are already at where the coastal planning estimates they will be decades in the future. If these problems don’t exist now, the planning is wrong from the start about possible impacts. The study does not show that seas are rising faster than they have historically. Thus, planning should begin from where coastlines actually are.
That means, take them in relation to current sea levels, with future estimates based on rates of rise under recent climate change – not, as is done with this study, based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) estimates tied to unrealistic emissions scenarios....<<<Read More>>>...
