Climate Disruption.

[AtomKraft]

Alison, for goodness' sake! As board owner and grand potentate, you shouldn't have an ignore list!

[Rwy in Sight]

Alison, for goodness' sake! As board owner and grand potentate, you shouldn't have an ignore list!

That's a forum I enjoy being a member of.

[Boac]

No, Atom, you are right - that will not help.

Sise - I cannot see any words where you were 'accused' of that - please quote them again here in case I missed them. I saw "unless you were the cnut with the match." which I'm sure all the rest of us took as a joke, to which you have 'reacted'. Would it help if Alison acknowledged it as such?

I am still waiting for our 'experts on climate change' here to tell me whether the NASA findings of sea-level change of an average 3.3mm per year and the results from the Male station are fiction or not, based on their expert knowledge?

For the record, I do not live in the Maldives, nor have I visited them for over 50 years, so I have only scientific data to go on (which for Male shows an increase of about 10 cm since 1990 - deny it if you choose?). I do hope UP gives us another instalment at least, and I'm sure he will confirm that there are many factors affecting LOCAL MSL change, as he has explained for the Med.

So - let's hear the opinions - are NASA and the Male PSMSL station part of the conspiracy and fabricating results? It is a simple question that no-one appears to be brave enough to answer.

[barkingmad]

May I dip my paw into this rising tide of invective, irritability and mudslinging?

It is irrefutable that glaciers have permanently lost significant mass, so where has it gone?

With rising temperatures the atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture, not necessarily visible as cloud.

So is it reasonable to conjecture that when it does REALLY rain as the pregnant atmosphere finally yields up it’s load then we’re all going to be googling ‘Noah’ and ‘ark’ in a belated attempt to save our skins?

Just a thought as I ponder whether I actually have rabies or is it just a touch of lemonade virus.......

[Slasher]

Sise - the Admin didn’t use your true legal name so there’s no real cause for concern. Those of us who know you well take you at your word.

BTW mate I recall the Toodyay Fires of 2009. Very nasty indeed. Made big news but was headlined in ASEAN media as the Northam fires. I knew though where it actually was. The Yays must’ve pissed some idiot Reuters reporter off.

[Mrs Ex-Ascot]

Apologies for using the Daily Wail, but I did find this article interesting and well written; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech ... lapse.html

Personally I feel that this is a very difficult topic to discuss as there are so many variables involved in how the Planet Earth is changing and also WHY There is a real danger IMO of people trying to see everything in black and white instead of appreciating that it is all extremely complex. I do not doubt that the climate is changing, but I'm not convinced that it is TOTALLY due to mankind I'm also not sure that a lot of the solutions that the Greenies have proposed would actually have any real impact.either. That is why IMO we need scientific research to continue so that hopefully scientific solutions can be found to minimise or even eliminate the HUMAN factors involved.

[AtomKraft]

Look boac.
Let's just say that NASA are right with their 3.3mm a year (you mean 3.3 every ten, right?) so what?

Do we insist it stay the same? On what grounds?

Those bloody islands used to be under the sea- are we complaining that they've emerged? Surely that event is also due to sea levels falling- or is it plate tectonics pushing the land up locally?

It's time the World as a whole took a deep breath.........and........relax

Sea levels may rise, but it will happen very slowly. There will time to step into a boat and safely sail away to somewhere drier.

Try not to worry, have a beer and put your feet up. There really is, ZERO cause for alarm.

[Rwy in Sight]

I do not doubt that the climate is changing, but I'm not convinced that it is TOTALLY due to mankind I'm also not sure that a lot of the solutions that the Greenies have proposed would actually have any real impact.either. That is why IMO we need scientific research to continue so that hopefully scientific solutions can be found to minimise or even eliminate the HUMAN factors involved.

Can we all agreed on that? And also add that we can make an environmental protection good and profitable for all rather a polarised system where governments impose taxes, environmentalist earn good money and people pay the taxes and suffer?

[Sisemen]

Sise - I cannot see any words where you were 'accused' of that - please quote them again here in case I missed them. I saw "unless you were the cnut with the match." which I'm sure all the rest of us took as a joke, to which you have 'reacted'. Would it help if Alison acknowledged it as such?

Yes. As a resident of Australia Alison knows full well the impact of any kind of accusation that someone might be a fire setter, let alone a firey. I don’t have anything particular against Alison but, as I and others have done when we know we’ve crossed the line, pen a quick apology either on the page or via a PM. It’s all sorted quickly and amicably. The offer was made but Alison chose to ignore it. In my book that’s not acting with good grace or basic manners. And, as you say, for an Admin to allegedly have an ignore list is unbelievable.

[Boac]

Look boac.
Let's just say that NASA are right with their 3.3mm a year (you mean 3.3 every ten, right?)

Look, AtomKraft - no! You dismally fail to understand the NASA findings. So, here they are https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/

I will repeat - and will get the decimal point right this time - 3.3cm/10 years (but you will note that based on the current rate, 4cm - it may be the rate is increasing). Not 'drama queen' stuff - not 'break out the Ark' stuff, but it cannot be ignored. The world NEEDS to look at the future in terms of planning for population displacement through loss of land and start making plans to cope with it - but most certainly to acknowledge it. I do not think it will be significant in our lifetime since we are mostly 'old fogeys', but surely common-sense dictates that someone should look ahead? The history of the planet shows that large areas WILL be inundated as they have been over the millenia, in between tracts of time where the seas recede again - that is the way it works. Right now we are increasing and will probably be for 1000's of years. Low-lying areas NEED to look ahead as the Maldives are doing. Eventually Venice will
be uninhabitable.

All this 'sea-level' stuff is additional to the population displacement that will occur as 'wet' areas become arid and vice-versa due to the inevitably changing climate (again evidenced throughout the history of the earth). Sadly there are those who refuse to accept this.

[Slasher]

Sise - different outrages in different countries. In Australia it’s paedophilia, in Indonesia and Malaysia its poofterism, in the ME it’s adultery or shagging without a license. I’m talking about what incenses the locals most. Honest mate I can’t see anything that could become serious from an aggrieved administrator of a small and limited membership’d website who is obviously shooting its mouth off.

I say that as one Aussie to another (which you’ve proven yourself to be at heart). Just let it go mate. Not for the Admin’s sake of course but yours.

Enough said. I’ll await Plum’s next installment.

[AtomKraft]

Alright boac.
I think we've got a difference of viewpoint here.

You care, I don't.

I doubt either of us, or NASA will make any difference. I say if it changes, adapt.
Others say "let's try and prevent it changing".

As you say, we'll probably be mostly deed and gone before anything happens.

If I was inclined to action, I'd do something about malaria, drought, poverty, ill health, warmongering etc. These would all bring tangible and undisputed benefits for people now.

Buy hey, what do I know?

Back to the spraying tomorrow.....

[BenThere]

Most of my life I've lived alongside the Great Lakes, mostly shared between the US and Canada, with my state of Michigan having a huge chunk of the shoreline. My family owned a cottage along a beautiful beach in Saginaw Bay near Caseville, Michigan for about 50 years. I grew up there, spending my summers with my teacher mother, who had summers off, and my sister, 5 years older than me. Dad still worked in Detroit, but made the 80 mile trek north on the weekends to our Lake Huron retreat. That was where I learned to operate a wooden boat with a small (10 HP) motor out 3 or so miles onto Lake Huron and catch copious amounts of Perch, occasional bass and catfish, and learn the risk and art of small boating in a large body of water that you can't see across.

The reason I only went out 3 or so miles is that I never wanted to lose sight of the shore. When storms arose quickly, as they tend to do on the Great Lakes, I immediately started up and drove to the shelter of our dock. At around 9 years of age, when my Dad signed me off to take the boat out and fish, I started learning how to read the clouds, sense barometrics without instruments, and perceive the weather threats when Lake Huron got angry. I fondly recall those days as my coming of age and the acquiring of nautical, meteorological and piloting skills that proved to serve me later as I embarked on my aviation career. A side benefit is that I remain a master of scaling, gutting, fillleting, preserving, and preparing just about any fish you put in front of me. In my prime, at 12 years old or so, I was bringing in 100 or so Perch every time I went out, and at the end of the day they were either on the cooking bench or processed for preservation with a special method my father developed, and which worked so marvelously that we could pull Perch from the freezer and they could be prepared to taste as fresh as the day they were caught. The cool thing is our whole family loved Great Lakes, fresh water Perch. We lived mostly off our catch, accompanied by the bounty of our large garden in season (fertilized largely with the entrails of the fish I had caught), majestic tomatoes, homegrown onions, peppers, lettuce, carrots, celery - we grew virtually everything we needed for a self-sufficient feast. All we needed to buy was the mayonnaise, relish and Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco to make a suitable tartar sauce.

After dinner the family gathered round the table and played Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, Parcheesi and other board and card games people like us used to gather around the table for. Looking back, longingly, I'd love the opportunity to do it all again.

But to the point: Our beach on Lake Huron has always, my whole life time, been on a 5 to 7 year cycle of rising and ebbing sea levels. Our beach would go from very little beach at all to a wide strand of sand and shallow waters close to shore. We all observed this cycle, and adapted to it. Common wisdom was when you wanted to sell your beachfront home you did it during the wide strand period. In all that time climate change hasn't affected the cycle or the state of our beach. I think the climate change movement is yet one more fraud that threatens to cost everyone a whole lot of money somehow. I just came back from our annual trip to South Australia. The climate change hysteria had caused them to shut down their fossil and nuclear resources in favor of wind and solar. Two years later their electricity rates are the highest anywhere and to add to the insult the unreliability of their new grid caused a total state wide shutdown, tripping the entire system. I wish people would think things through and not leap aboard the first lefty idea that sounds good.

[Undried Plum]

In this piece I'll try to describe how we measure height. It's not quite as easy as you might think and there's lots of scope for ****. In the UK the national mapping agency and the Hydrographic Office are the best in the world, though the Noggies, the Cloggies and the Canuckians may disagree. Nevertheless, the Ordnance Survey datum is not as good as it should be. I've found errors of up to half a metre in Ordnance Datum in the coastal areas of North East Scotland. It should be good to a millimetre.

Here's the history of how that came about.

In the Victorian era Ordnance Survey chose Liverpool as the tide gauge of reference. It seemed a good idea at the time as Liverpool was a major port and was quite central within the British mainland. They averaged a dozen or so years of tidal readings and set a brass bolt into bedrock and declared that to be Zero height. Survey parties then fanned out across the country setting out Ordnance Datum benchmarks, usually a cut line chiselled into the walls of major buildings. There are thousands of them all over the British Isles. Their OD is published to millimetric precision.

Within a few years it became apparent that there was something wrong with the datum. That tide gauge appeared to indicate a rising sealevel which was not corroborated with anywhere else in the UK. Liverpuddle is an estuarine location and the subsurface strata are mostly riparian deposits which are geologically squidgy. The whole area around the tide gauge was sinking slowly, giving a false indication of sea level rise. As a definitive vertical datum for the entire country it was a bit crap.

The Ordnance Survey scrapped that datum and started all over again. They chose the tide gauge at Newlyn as it sits on very solid granite to a great depth and was thought to be pretty much stable. They averaged a number of years worth of tidal height data and defined that as being the new Ordnance Datum. In 1921 they once again sent survey parties all over the country measuring level to millimetric precision and published those heights for every one of thousands of benchmarks. Inevitably the accumulated errors grew with distance from Newlyn, but there's a way of eliminating those errors. The biggest potential source of major errors is a complicated thing which I'll try to describe later in this piece or perhaps in another.

In the 1920s the phemomenon of Earth Tides was known about, but was a pig to identify and quantify. Nowadays with modern satellite techniques it can be observed in real time. For reasons which are too complicated to explain simply here, Newlyn turns out to be just about the worst place in Britain to put a primary reference tide gauge as it has greatest amplitude of Earth Tides. It bounces up and down like a cork in a storm, distorting the tide readings as Earth Tides and sea tides are completely out of sync with eachother.

I should mention that the word "benchmark" has different meanings on each side of the Atlantic. To us Brits a benchmark records vertical datum only. Its coordinates are published to metric precision and appear solely as a way of finding the thing. To the Septics a benchmark is what we call a trigpoint. Its coordinates are recorded to great precision (not accuracy as Septic surveyors are crap) in all three axes.

Something which a lot of laymen have great difficulty in understanding is that any point on Earth can have any number of different Latitudes/Longitudes/Heights. Coordinates have to be expressed in relation to a named Spheroid and a Geodetic Datum. The UK National Grid, for example is on the Airy Spheroid and a geodetic datum at Herstmonceau. In Europe the geodetic datum is in Potsdam. In the US, which geodetically speaking is a total **** because Septic surveyors are crap, the datum is on land at Meade's Ranch in Kansas.

Take a close look at the manual or menu pages of most GPS units and you'll see a choice of scores of Datums, from Adindan to Zanderji. Any Lat/Long/Height input on one, say WGS84, will produce completely different co-ords and height on any of the other datums, sometimes by as much as a hundred metres or more. Same place; same height, but the co-ords and height is totally different.

The British vertical datum is a bit of an oddball. It's an arbitrary line in space which is projected from a quaint fishing village in Cornwall. Working in places like Wick or Peterhead shows the inadequacy of Ordnance Datum. There are pages in the Admiralty Tide Tables which itemise the difference between OD and local Mean tide level. The differences are non-trivial.

Can a tide gauge lie? Hell yes! I got badly bitten by that many years ago, to my professional shame. I've got to see a man about the dog right now, but I'll write a post about that case another day. I'll also try to explain the significance of 'Deviation of the Prime Vertical'. I'll also try to explain why your GPS shows the Longitude Zero meridian 105 metres out of position when you stand on that physical line on the North side of the Greenwich Observatory and why so many of the US State lines are such a pile of pants.

[AtomKraft]

You put your point very nicely there, Ben.

[AtomKraft]

btw, plum.
you mention height as if it was important.
it's not really.

Sure, unfortunate events may happen if sea level rises.

So what?

[Undried Plum]

Sea level rise is not an "if".

It is rising, globally, albeit at different rates locally.

Height is hugely important to Homo Sapiens as so many of our cities and nuclear power stations etc are at a height which is very little above sea level.

Something else which is important about sea level height is the fact that not only is it increasing, but it is doing so at an increasing rate of change. Even worse than that is the fact the rate of change of the rate of change is also accelerating. It's risen 8 inches in the last 140 years. 3 of those inches have been in the last 25 years and the rate of growth just keeps getting worse.

Have a look at the NOOA website data for yourself.

[Undried Plum]

I wish people would think things through and not leap aboard the first lefty idea that sounds good.

Ben's idea that scientific data has some kind of political chirality, "Left" or "Right", is just nuts.

Nature doesn't give a toss about human religion or politics.

The principal reason why Nazi Germany failed to produce a nuclear weapon was that Hitler regarded nuclear physics as what he called "jew science". He therefore starved the tiny research project of funds and other resources. Bloody good job for mankind that he thought the same way that Ben does about Science.

[ribrash]

Most of my life I've lived alongside the Great Lakes, mostly shared between the US and Canada, with my state of Michigan having a huge chunk of the shoreline. My family owned a cottage along a beautiful beach in Saginaw Bay near Caseville, Michigan for about 50 years. I grew up there, spending my summers with my teacher mother, who had summers off, and my sister, 5 years older than me. Dad still worked in Detroit, but made the 80 mile trek north on the weekends to our Lake Huron retreat. That was where I learned to operate a wooden boat with a small (10 HP) motor out 3 or so miles onto Lake Huron and catch copious amounts of Perch, occasional bass and catfish, and learn the risk and art of small boating in a large body of water that you can't see across.

The reason I only went out 3 or so miles is that I never wanted to lose sight of the shore. When storms arose quickly, as they tend to do on the Great Lakes, I immediately started up and drove to the shelter of our dock. At around 9 years of age, when my Dad signed me off to take the boat out and fish, I started learning how to read the clouds, sense barometrics without instruments, and perceive the weather threats when Lake Huron got angry. I fondly recall those days as my coming of age and the acquiring of nautical, meteorological and piloting skills that proved to serve me later as I embarked on my aviation career. A side benefit is that I remain a master of scaling, gutting, fillleting, preserving, and preparing just about any fish you put in front of me. In my prime, at 12 years old or so, I was bringing in 100 or so Perch every time I went out, and at the end of the day they were either on the cooking bench or processed for preservation with a special method my father developed, and which worked so marvelously that we could pull Perch from the freezer and they could be prepared to taste as fresh as the day they were caught. The cool thing is our whole family loved Great Lakes, fresh water Perch. We lived mostly off our catch, accompanied by the bounty of our large garden in season (fertilized largely with the entrails of the fish I had caught), majestic tomatoes, homegrown onions, peppers, lettuce, carrots, celery - we grew virtually everything we needed for a self-sufficient feast. All we needed to buy was the mayonnaise, relish and Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco to make a suitable tartar sauce.

After dinner the family gathered round the table and played Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, Parcheesi and other board and card games people like us used to gather around the table for. Looking back, longingly, I'd love the opportunity to do it all again.

But to the point: Our beach on Lake Huron has always, my whole life time, been on a 5 to 7 year cycle of rising and ebbing sea levels. Our beach would go from very little beach at all to a wide strand of sand and shallow waters close to shore. We all observed this cycle, and adapted to it. Common wisdom was when you wanted to sell your beachfront home you did it during the wide strand period. In all that time climate change hasn't affected the cycle or the state of our beach. I think the climate change movement is yet one more fraud that threatens to cost everyone a whole lot of money somehow. I just came back from our annual trip to South Australia. The climate change hysteria had caused them to shut down their fossil and nuclear resources in favor of wind and solar. Two years later their electricity rates are the highest anywhere and to add to the insult the unreliability of their new grid caused a total state wide shutdown, tripping the entire system. I wish people would think things through and not leap aboard the first lefty idea that sounds good.

+10

[CremeEgg]

Many thanks to those who spend ages teaching me about all manner of things. Now I know Liverpool is squishy. Was almost a Scouser but my folks moved south. Must research more on my new found knowledge that there are different references for Sat Navs. Thanks to all those who are massively generous with their knowledge and time.