Despite President Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric about climate change (a.k.a. man made global warming), calling it a “hoax,” and the obvious sign the President has sent by nominating Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to take over the EPA, the leadership and scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have decided to ignore the President’s signals and in effect thumb their nose at him with their latest sea level rise prediction.

The report put out this January 2017(NOAA Technical report NOC CO-OPS 083),was issued under the signature of the departing Department of Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and NOAA Administrator Dr. Kathryn Sullivan. The report title is “GLOBAL AND REGIONAL SEA LEVEL RISE SCENARIOS FOR THE UNITED STATES.”

The 75 page report has as a primary purpose, to continue the climate scare tactics of the Obama administration with a new prediction of worsening global sea level rise of up to 2.5 meters(8 feet 2in.) by the year 2100, an increase from their previous estimate of 2.0 meters(6 feet 7 in).

    

Dr. Morner and I have reviewed the report and concluded that the NOAA report predictions for sea level increases are “preposterous!” We further believe this report should be immediately condemned by President Trump, his nominee for Department of Commerce Wilbur Ross, and whoever he is looking to as a needed replacement for Dr. Sullivan.

The report is so confounded by significant errors in science and methodology, that it should simply be discarded. It is apparently, another going away present for President Obama from NOAA,the once revered science agency that has come under repeated attack for data manipulation and pursuit of politically correct climate science at the expense of scientific integrity.

Dr. Morner and I believe this latest report if nothing, but reinforces that perception of NOAA.

For those of us who study climate change,and in particular the effects of climate and other forces on sea level rise, it is deeply disconcerting that our government continues to push such contrived reports of this type out the door of NOAA, creating an utterly false understanding of why sea levels rise and fall, much less the true status of sea level today and in the future.

Though time and print space does not permit us a more thorough analysis of the report and its included research, here are just a few of the obvious flaws we saw in this particular report:

1. NOAA makes it clear that it remains one of the US government’s primary supporters of the failed greenhouse gas theory linked to mankind’s industrial gas emissions,as they summarize this report:”…scientists expect that GMSL (global mean sea level) will continue to rise throughout the 21st century and beyond, because of global warming that has already occurred and warming that is yet to occur due to the still-uncertain level of future emissions.” This persistent politically motivated climate science flies in the face of far more reliable climate models based on natural and Sun-driven climate cycles (e.g. the Relational Cycle Theory). Further, those like us who oppose the man made global warming theory, do so in large part because it routinely fails to deliver on its predictions for global temperature predictions which in turn determine sea level increases. It just doesn’t work!

2. The rate of sea level rise predicted by NOAA is far in excess by at least 200%,of some of the worst case sea level rise our planet has ever seen. The NOAA report forecasts the planet’s sea levels will continue to rise at 3mm/year and more,reaching 2.5m by 2100. This is an astounding forecast given that the largest sea level rise observed during the rapid rise out of the last global ice age some 11,000 years ago saw only 10 mm/year. Even using this past worst case sea level rise under the extreme climate forcings of that epoch that clearly do not exist today, the rise by the year 2100 will be no more than 20 cm (or 5cm with a deviation of +/-15cm). This realistic prediction is nowhere near the 2.5 m (~ 8 feet) predicted by NOAA scientists. Dr. Morner’s previous review of this level of sea level prediction for other similar reports is:

“Even a rise in the order of 2 to 5 m by year 2100 has been claimed. We may ask what such figures really imply with respect to proper scientific knowledge, facts recorded in nature and physical laws. The answer is simple; such an enormous rate of sea level changes and any amount exceeding 1 m in a century, represent nothing but unscientific nonsense that does not concur with observational facts, accumulated knowledge through centuries and physical laws.”

3. The NOAA report still uses un-validated and inaccurate satellite measurements of sea level rise which have been shown to be widely divergent from the ‘gold standard’ tidal gauges around the world. Dr. Morner’s compilation of 184 tidal gauge measurements spread across the planet, since the year 1900,shows the real rate of sea level rise throughout the period of mankind’s industrial activity of the 20thcentury has been a meager GMSL rise of only +/-0.0 and 1.0 mm/yr, or zero to 10 cm (4 inches per century)!

Despite this real gold standard rate for sea level rise,the NOAA satellite rate used in the report for their year 2100 projections of 3mm/yr, or a minimum 0.3 m per century is an amazing 300 percent faster rate of sea level rise from what actually been measured by tidal gauges throughout the industrial age!

The satellite measurements show an average of 3mm per year since the satellite era began in 1979, yet NOAA has failed to explain why the satellite measurements are used for their predictions and the more reliable tidal gauges records are not. Could it be that these elevated satellite numbers provide more support for the failed greenhouse gas theory and man made global warming programs of the past eight years? We think so.

4.The NOAA sea level rise report ignores the obvious historical records of the cyclical nature of global sea level rise. It prefers to do simple extrapolations of unjustifiable high rates of sea level rise to the year 2100,while ignoring the proven variability of sea levels over thousands of years. Sea levels have been demonstrated by many researchers to have distinct rise and fall cycles that would affect any projection of future levels. Only one example is needed to prove this assertion has reasonable validity. For example,Dr. Morner has found that in Goa, India:

“…sea level in Goa over the last 500 years… is an oscillation record: a low level in the early 16th century, a 50-cm high level in the 17th century, a level below present sea level in the 18th century, a 20-cm high level in the 19th and early 20th centuries, an ~20-cm fall in 1955 – 1962, and a virtually stable level over the last 50 years.”

This natural cycle is reflected in many other tidal gauge sites around the world. Again, it mimics the natural cycles for global temperatures.

5.The NOAA report like many other US government reports, relies on the output of the CMIP5 atmospheric and oceanic global climate model (AOGCM) and its many variants. This should be a sufficient indictment of the NOAA report by itself to warrant trashing it. A past review of the 73 most used AOGCM by the US government and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN-IPCC) done by Dr. John Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer, showed they were horribly in error when compared to actual global temperature measurements.

My calculations of their model comparisons showed the average error rate of all 73 models was 200%,and some as were bad as 600%!If the temperature predictions are so worthless,why should we believe the sea level predictions that are driven by these same unreliable models? Still, this NOAA reports cites these same failed climate models as their base line for calculation of future sea level rise.

6.Unbelievably, NOAA has come up with its own, almost identical version of the ‘hockey stick chart’ made infamous by Dr. Michael Mann and Al Gore which they used to give a patently incorrect version of global temperature trends over the past 1,000 years. It’s as if NOAA has learned nothing whatsoever from that debacle. NOAA’s new version of the ‘hockey stick’ is just as incorrect as that of Mann and Gore.This NOAA chart, copied below, is shocking in its sameness to that made by Dr. Michael Mann.

    

The figure is labeled in the NOAA report with the following comment:

“Figure 3.a) GMSL rise from -500 to 1900 CE from Kopp et al. (2016a)’s geological and tide gauge-based reconstruction [black line with blue error estimates], from 1900 to 2010 from Hay et al. (2015)’s tide gauge-based reconstruction [black], and from 1992 to 2015 from the satellite-based reconstruction updated from Nerem et al. (2010) [magenta]…”

Dr. Morner believes this curve has almost no backing up by observational facts in nature itself.

Again like flaws of the Gore-Mann hockey stick chart this new sea level hockey stick or ‘minotaur chart’ has foundational errors:

a. The foremost error is the implication that the world’s sea levels operated within a relatively narrow range for the past 2,500 years until the late 20th century when mankind began to produce large amounts of industrial CO2. At which point during the satellite era, shown in magenta color on the far right of the chart, the world’s oceans took off on a high rate of sea level growth that NOAA’s says will swamp mankind’s largest coastal cities by 2100. Mann’s hockey stick chart had the identical false premise. Al Gore may not get his previously predicted 21 feet of sea level rise but NOAA’s 8 feet can still do a lot of damage, providing him some vindication, right? Wrong!

b. This chart, which grafts on recent satellite measurements onto the extensive tidal gauge measurements covering hundreds of years,is a patently false picture of global sea level rise trends. It improperly combines two disparate data sets using vastly different measurement methods with substantially different sea level rise rates in an attempt to portray an accurate and coherent sea level rise trend. This latest ‘hockey stick’ chart put together by NOAA is yet another wholesale and historical embarrassment to the scientific community. It is without question, unrepresentative of what sea level rise has been and in no way should be relied upon for future sea level height projections.

Work done by me and others using highly reliable solar driven climate models along with Dr. Morner’s historical measurements over the eons of sea level rise and fall,suggest a more accurate picture of the next seven or eight decades of sea level rise. He and I announced as much during an August 2014 news conference in Miami:

1. As the next cold climate descends with potentially deadly force over the next two 11 year solar cycles (approximately 30 years), the oceans will start to cool and then shrink. The North Atlantic Ocean, for example is already in the midst of the fastest drop in temperatures we have ever directly measured. I believe that by 2031 we may well experience sea level declines bringing us back to the level we had during the early 1800’s. My calculations suggest that no later than 2020,the start of a global drop in sea levels measured by tidal gauges will be observed.

2. The solar cycles that drive climate variation on Earth will continue their natural course providing only a modest warm period again,starting in the 2040’s thru the 2080’s and concurrent new rise in sea levels, though not reaching current levels. This natural warm period will be somewhat colder and nowhere near the degree of warming we have just been through since 1998. The peak of global warming is now behind us,possibly for the next 400 years. It is now time for globally colder weather into the distant future. In summary, the NOAA January 2017 report on the next seven decades of rising sea levels should be thrown out like so many past US government reports based on bad science, bad climate models and put together by politically correct science organizations. President Trump should deal swiftly with this insulting report from the Department of Commerce and NOAA – yet another sign of how deep the spread of the fraud of man made global warming has been within the US government and how corrupting it has become for our scientific community.