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Earth

Rate of Sea Level Rise 'Has Doubled Since 1993,' Report Finds (yahoo.com) 116

One of the most alarming findings mentioned in the World Meteorological Organization's 2022 report, released Sunday, is that the "rate of sea level rise has doubled since 1993." They added: "The past two and a half years alone account for 10 percent of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements started nearly 30 years ago." From a report: One of the main causes of the accelerating pace of sea level rise is melting glaciers. According to the WMO, "2022 took an exceptionally heavy toll on glaciers in the European Alps, with initial indications of record-shattering melt. The Greenland ice sheet lost mass for the 26th consecutive year and it rained (rather than snowed) there for the first time in September." Last week, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued a report on endangered glaciers finding that one-third of the glaciers in UNESCO World Heritage sites are expected to disappear by 2050. The remaining two-thirds can be saved if greenhouse gas emissions are cut quickly and deeply enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the report concluded.

In 2022, the average global temperature is estimated to be about 1.15C above the 1850-1900 average. This actually could have been worse. For the first time in a century, La Nina, a weather pattern that causes cool water to rise to the surface in the Pacific Ocean -- leading to cooler-than-usual weather -- occurred for the third year in a row. The WMO estimates that this means 2022 will be the fifth- or sixth-hottest year on record, rather than the hottest ever. But the trend toward ever-higher temperatures remains clear.
"The latest State of the Global Climate report is a chronicle of climate chaos," said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in response to the report's release. "As the World Meteorological Organization shows so clearly, change is happening with catastrophic speed, devastating lives and livelihoods on every continent. Glacier melt records are themselves melting away, jeopardizing water security for whole continents. We must answer the planet's distress signal with action -- ambitious, credible climate action. COP27 must be the place, and now must be the time."
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Rate of Sea Level Rise 'Has Doubled Since 1993,' Report Finds

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  • Eureka (Score:2, Funny)

    by rcb1974 ( 654474 )
    The rate of sea level rise has doubled because so have the number of barges, shipping containers, and oil tankers. Duh!
  • COP27 must be the place, and now must be the time

    Then we're fucked, because every single COP to date has been a worthless fucking circle jerk of politicians pretending they give a fuck about humanity's future.

    • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      Agreed. On a positive note, I think most things never get as bad as the doomsday callers suggest.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I'd disagree COP27 must be the place, and I'd also disagree they're *totally* useless.

      The COPs have actually delivered something - not what many people think, or how they'd have liked to see it - but things have happened as a result of them. Before the Paris agreement, we were on track for something like a 4+C increase. That's currently somewhere around 2.7C - so progress has been made. I'd also say that even Trump wasn't able to "rid" the USA of the Paris agreement - a bunch of states and cities "stayed in

    • by Layzej ( 1976930 )
      Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years [wordpress.com] - https://andthentheresphysics.w... [wordpress.com]
  • Missing information: (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @06:33AM (#63034953)

    Read the summary three times looking for the claimed rate of sea level rise that has "doubled".

    I clicked so you don't have to.

    The link to the Yahoo News article says it is 10 millimetres apparently up from 5 millimetres circa 1993. That is about .4 vs.2 of an inch for the non-SI inclined. But wait! That 10mm rise is only measured from Jan 2020. I have to assume that it is an annual rate through implication. So Florida will drown sometime beyond my lifespan. Dammit.

      “The past two and a half years alone account for 10 percent of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements started nearly 30 years ago.”
    Interesting quote. From my lazy back of the head arithmetic, 2.5 years of 30 would be 8.3% approx? So the the actual rate increase? Um just got too hard because I don't have a figure for an actual (assumed average) "overall" rise which must fall between 300mm (over an inch) and something less than double that.

    Actually now I'm bored, so sorry for rambling. Just have to be content with the knowledge that in just a decade, (ymmv), Florida City will suffer from waves 4 inches higher than now! Run you bastards, run!!

    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @07:54AM (#63035109)

      I grew up next to a lake. Well, lake is maybe saying a bit much, it was more of a puddle. Lots of area but only about 2 meters deep (that's about 7 feet for you US people). At the deepest. In other words, one should think it's impossible to drown in a puddle like that.

      It is. Until you add the wind. It's really amazing how tall waves can get even in a puddle. Tall enough to kill you, even.

      Raising a water level by a centimeter means little, as long as the water is calm. It can quickly mean a damn lot as soon as you add some other forces.

      • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @08:03AM (#63035137) Homepage Journal

        Raising a water level by a centimeter means little, as long as the water is calm. It can quickly mean a damn lot as soon as you add some other forces.

        Yes, one of the grossly underappreciated things about sea level rise is that it means a massive increase in the distance inland traveled by storm surges, because the average beach slope is less than 1:1 (shocking, I know.) The places which occasionally flood mildly now are going to flood majorly soon...

        • Hey, spoiler alert! They have to find out themselves, how else are they gonna learn?

          • how else are they gonna learn?

            I presume by attempting to pull themselves out of the ocean by their bootstraps.

        • Yes, one of the grossly underappreciated things about sea level rise is that it means a massive increase in the distance inland traveled by storm surges, because the average beach slope is less than 1:1 (shocking, I know.) The places which occasionally flood mildly now are going to flood majorly soon...

          Look at it this way, all those third wordl shithole places such as Bangladesh, Haiti, or Florida, will be washed away at some point in the future so we won't have to worry about them.
          • Look at it this way, all those third wordl shithole places such as Bangladesh, Haiti, or Florida, will be washed away at some point in the future so we won't have to worry about them.

            Yeah, but if it happens gradually enough we will still have to worry about the refugees, namely whether or what to do to or for them, depending on who you ask.

    • by Entrope ( 68843 )

      That 10mm rise is only measured from Jan 2020. I have to assume that it is an annual rate through implication.

      Nope, it's 10 mm total since since Jan 2020. The "Sea Level Rise" chart shows a 4.4 mm/year trend over that window, and they emphasize that sea level rise isn't uniform. But if it was, Florida would see more like 1.7 inches of increase over a decade, not 4 inches. And that's for the water year-round, not only waves.

    • Read the summary three times looking for the claimed rate of sea level rise that has "doubled".

      You didn't have to read very far. The link was to the World Meteorological Organization's provisional 2022 report. The summary was linked: https://public.wmo.int/en/our-... [wmo.int]
      which has a link "read the whole report" on the right: https://library.wmo.int/index.... [wmo.int]

      • Read the summary three times looking for the claimed rate of sea level rise that has "doubled".

        You didn't have to read very far. The link was to the World Meteorological Organization's provisional 2022 report. The summary was linked: https://public.wmo.int/en/our-... [wmo.int]
        which has a link "read the whole report" on the right: https://library.wmo.int/index.... [wmo.int]

        Yeah and when you read the summary it says "The past two and a half years alone account for 10 percent of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements started nearly 30 years ago."

        That's 2.5 years out of "nearly 30". So 10% of the rise in nearly 10% of the time. Somehow that doesn't sound bad.
        I'm guessing the guys that wrote this aren't so good at math.

        • by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @10:31AM (#63035487) Homepage

          My response was to the anonymous coward claiming he had to read the summary three times to "look for" information... that was linked in the first sentence.

          As for rate of sea level rise, it is shown in figure 5 on page 10 of the report [wmo.int] in question. This shows sea level rise rate of 2.1 mm per year from January 1993 to December 2002, 2.9 mm per year from January 2003 to December 2012, and 4.4 mm per year from January 2013 to December 2022.

          That's doubling according to my calculator. If you don't believe it, tell it to the World Meteorological Association, not to me.

          • My response was to the anonymous coward claiming he had to read the summary three times to "look for" information... that was linked in the first sentence.

            As for rate of sea level rise, it is shown in figure 5 on page 10 of the report [wmo.int] in question. This shows sea level rise rate of 2.1 mm per year from January 1993 to December 2002, 2.9 mm per year from January 2003 to December 2012, and 4.4 mm per year from January 2013 to December 2022.

            That's doubling according to my calculator. If you don't believe it, tell it to the World Meteorological Association, not to me.

            Its a very weird graph. Visually it looks linear.
            It doesn't start at 0 (probably because the "uncertainty"?)
            The arrows visually overlap
            The ten year period from Jan 1993 to Dec 2002 says "2.1 mm/year", which would be 21 mm, but it looks closer to 30 on the graph.
            The first 10 years of the graph have the highest "uncertainty" range, so the rate could have been higher in the first ten years than the last.
            The middle ten has the lowest uncertainty range.

            It's not that the information is useless, but the conclusio

            • I agree, it would be nice to look at the data and graph it myself.

              The link at the bottom of figure 5 sources the data as https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr] . Looks like the details are here: https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr]

              I don't have time right now to go through it in detail at the moment, though.

              • I agree, it would be nice to look at the data and graph it myself.

                The link at the bottom of figure 5 sources the data as https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr] . Looks like the details are here: https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr]

                I don't have time right now to go through it in detail at the moment, though.

                Well this is interesting. The chart from your second link looks different from the one in the report:

                https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr]
                Look at the straight line they have drawn through it

                • Well this is interesting. The chart from your second link looks different from the one in the report:

                  https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr]
                  Look at the straight line they have drawn through it

                  Yep. But by drawing the line, we can also see the curvature more clearly.

                  • Well this is interesting. The chart from your second link looks different from the one in the report:

                    https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr]
                    Look at the straight line they have drawn through it

                    Yep. But by drawing the line, we can also see the curvature more clearly.

                    It does help, but I think it still doesn't show a doubling of the rate.

                    Also, did you read any of the text? This graph has a dotted line which depicts estimated corrections due to problems with instrument drift in the early years. The chart we saw earlier only shows the estimated corrected graph.

            • The ten year period from Jan 1993 to Dec 2002 says "2.1 mm/year", which would be 21 mm, but it looks closer to 30 on the graph.

              If you compute an average rise from a wriggly graph, you don't draw a straight line from the first to the last data point, you perform linear regression, i.e. you find the line that minimises the RMS of the distance from the data points to the corresponding points on the line.

              • The ten year period from Jan 1993 to Dec 2002 says "2.1 mm/year", which would be 21 mm, but it looks closer to 30 on the graph.

                If you compute an average rise from a wriggly graph, you don't draw a straight line from the first to the last data point, you perform linear regression, i.e. you find the line that minimises the RMS of the distance from the data points to the corresponding points on the line.

                Well, that could be, but the people who created the original chart drew a straight line through it:
                https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr]

                Read the text on the containing page https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr] , especially the explanation for the dashed lines in the first six years. Somehow the chart we've been shown changed the lines, and used the dashed ones instead.

                it seems clear that the scientists who created this data are not drawing the conclusions the guys who wrote this report did, and the report is fudg

                • by Layzej ( 1976930 )

                  The people who created the original chart drew a straight line through it: https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr]

                  That's fine. They're showing the linear trend.

                  Read the text on the containing page https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr... [altimetry.fr] , especially the explanation for the dashed lines in the first six years. Somehow the chart we've been shown changed the lines, and used the dashed ones instead.

                  Right. They used the corrected values rather than the values that are known to be wrong. The TOPEX-A instrumental drift led to overestimate the GMSL slope during the first 6 years of the altimetry record.

                  • by Layzej ( 1976930 )
                    Using the TOPEX-A data with the instrumental drift defect (which is known to exaggerate warming over the first six years) you get 3.27 mm/year for the first decade rather than 2.1mm/year. If you discard the first six years and take the slope of the linear trend from 1999 to 2009 you get 3.07 mm/year.
                • Well, that could be, but the people who created the original chart drew a straight line through it:

                  They drew a straight line, but not from the first data point (although there is a coincidental close match) to the highest data point (where you can clearly see the discrepancy). They ran a linear regression and came up with the best linear match for all the data points.

    • The link to the Yahoo News article says it is 10 millimetres apparently up from 5 millimetres circa 1993.

      And according to NOAA, the sea level graph from 1993 forward still fits to a straight line regression [climate.gov], putting the lie to the WMO's scaremongering.

      • by Layzej ( 1976930 )
        The fact that the start and end are above the linear trend and the middle is below indicates acceleration. This looks similar to the graph the WMO used [altimetry.fr], except the NOAA data seems to have preserved the TOPEX-A instrumental drift defect which leads to an overestimation of the GMSL during the first 6 years of the altimetry record.
    • Did they say which coastline was used to make this measurement?

  • Shocking numbers! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I mean, what has this world come to when 2.5 years out of 30 amount to approximately 10% of the (presumably-noisy) total?

    The real crime against humanity is creating a web page that has vast amounts of blank space to stimulate a multi-page site within a single page, like these hosers did in their "provisional" report.

    • I wonder why you got downvoted for pointing out math.

      About 10% of the increase happened in about 10% of the time. Is that wrong to point out?

      • I wonder why you got downvoted for pointing out math.

        About 10% of the increase happened in about 10% of the time. Is that wrong to point out?

        Oh stop trying to use "math" to refute a breathless headline.
        Next you'll be talking about hiding the decline

    • I mean, what has this world come to when 2.5 years out of 30 amount to approximately 10% of the (presumably-noisy) total?

      The real crime against humanity is creating a web page that has vast amounts of blank space to stimulate a multi-page site within a single page, like these hosers did in their "provisional" report.

      Seems about right to me too

  • by poptopdrop ( 6713596 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @07:34AM (#63035061)

    our new dolphin overlords.

  • I live on a hill but always wanted to have my own private island.

  • by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @08:22AM (#63035173)
    Oh no, it must be time to panic. Let's kill ourselves trying to achieve an unrealistic goal set by politicians with ulterior motives instead of taking a sane and measured approach to cleanup and remediation.

    The politicians pushing this are idiots with their own ends in mind. They will damn us all in order to promote socialist dictatorships they expect to run. Why else would the so-called activists all blame the Democratic-Capitalist political economy and insist we replace it with one that produced nothing but mass suffering and genocide every time it was tried?

    • A slowly boiled frog will eventually boil. Exponential change starts slow and stays slow for a very long time, but it's equally hard to reverse.

      All this talk about panic and unrealistic goals just attempts to set aside any rational thought and more realistic goals.

      Why else would the so-called activists all blame the Democratic-Capitalist political economy and insist we replace it with one that produced nothing but mass suffering and genocide every time it was tried?

      I think demonizing the entirety of an ideology prevents you from picking the good bits out and applying those (see also: response to climate change). Because capitalism is far from an ideal political system as it is.

      • by Njovich ( 553857 )

        Exponential change starts slow and stays slow for a very long time, but it's equally hard to reverse.

        Indeed, at this rate in 1000 years the sea level will reach the sun. In 2000 years the universe will be all water.

      • Welfare Capitalism has been shown for most of the 20th century to work for the U.S. and EU, but the far right wants to put an end to it. Democratic Socialism and mixed economies have also been demonstrated to work, but the far right in American pretend that bridges, hydroelectric dams, and highways sprouted out of nowhere.

    • by Nybler ( 830853 )

      I must have missed when the climate scientists predicted doom and gloom for 2022. I recall their being more concerned about 2122.

      What you should be concerned with is things are progressing faster than were anticipated in the 1990's. That starts pulling back that 2122 date. Now you may think this doesn't matter because I'll be dead by then - but here's the rub: we have to start mitigating these effects now so our offspring don't bear the brunt of our bad decisions today. It's no surprise to see our species s

    • Let's kill ourselves trying to achieve an unrealistic goal set by politicians with ulterior motives instead of taking a sane and measured approach to cleanup and remediation.

      What would a sane and measured approach be?

  • BS... (Score:1, Informative)

    I'm an avid eco guy, solar panels, drive an EV etc, but I live on the coast, and monitor feeds from people taking photos of their own coastal landmarks and high and low tide marks. No difference at all in decades. None. The flooding is inland from rainfall caused by increased hydration of the atmosphere. (Example, Pakiatan recently.) As evident in the UK too a few months ago when we had humidity off the charts. I have a digital humidity gauge and normally it's about 50-55%, but during the heat wave it read
  • With a local elevation of 207 feet (Nawth Ca'lina), I won't be enjoying beachfront property any time soon (although some friends of mine might want to start worrying: state coastlines are eroding away, and the state law forbidding any consideration of science in deciding how to deal with coastline erosion: https://abcnews.go.com/US/nort... [go.com]

    But I don't think dolphin overlords will be the problem. Good thing they're getting better at tracking great white travels :-)

    https://www.newsweek.com/great... [newsweek.com]
    https://w [newsweek.com]

  • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @01:07PM (#63035951) Journal

    ...GOP won't do anything. And if it does go under, maybe that will solve the bottleneck itself.

  • by zkiwi34 ( 974563 )
    Noting that there is a finite amount of water out there. What is the end case of everything melting? Inches? Feet? Miles? What?
  • I occasionally need to go one place where I can't escape (that television channel).

    Some morbidly curious streak in my nature lets an occasional phrase in for toxicity sampling.

    Someone actually said "green agenda" . . . something about converting people to EVs in order to distract the public from the price of gas . . .

    My peril-sensitive sunglasses went black looking at the toxicity test result.

    • there is indeed 'fake green agenda'

      people largely can't afford EV right now so that's all nonsense anyway, gotta love Buttegieg saying the poor can just buy electric cars. No, they can't. Neither can most working class. Maybe in 10 years.

      Fake green tries to outlaw or bog down with regulations the basic fuelds that power 80 percent civilization before there are alternatives. Sociopaths like that want people to freeze and starve.

      A real green would push for things like either nuclear power or massive colle

  • > They added: "The past two and a half years alone account for 10 percent of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements started nearly 30 years ago."

    The "past two and a half years" is pretty close to 10 percent of "started nearly 30 years ago", so this is surprising or alarming how?

  • Because the bullshit from the warm mongers is getting deep.

"Sometimes insanity is the only alternative" -- button at a Science Fiction convention.

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