The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cult has another beauty of an explanation as to why their calamitous predictions have not come true.
According to an this NPR story, the constant sea level rise stopped in 2010 and the sea level measurements actually went DOWN for a couple of years before resuming their upward climb.
“Global sea level has been rising as a result of global warming, but in 2010 and 2011, sea level actually fell by about a quarter of an inch.”
Well that is an inconvenient truth! CO2 levels continue to march upward and onward but just like global temperatures have done for the past 15 years, it appears sea levels ignored the AGW cult predictions in 2010 and 2011.
So what did the kids at Team AGW Cult say caused this sea level drop?
“Some years, rainfall pools up in the middle of the continent (Australia) and creates a temporary freshwater sea called Lake Eyre.”
“He and his colleagues are publishing a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that concludes that the reappearance of that inland sea — and similar features elsewhere — are enough to explain the drop in global sea level.”
“During that time, sea level dropped by a quarter of an inch, though normally it rises by an eighth of an inch per year.”
There you have it! Excessive rains in Australia in 2010 caused the sea level to drop 5/8” – Remember the normal 1/8” yearly increase was negated and the measurements actually dropped ¼” which leads to the 5/8” total delta.
I’m not even going to get into the long term trend of Sea Ice measurements but instead I’m going to take everything in the NPR story as fact and perform a back of the envelope calculation to see if the AGW cult scientist theory holds water – pun intended.
Let’s find out what volume of water is represented in a 5/8” decrease in sea level. The surface area of Earth’s oceans is 335,258,000 square kilometers or 129,443,784 square miles. Converting that number to square inches and then multiplying by 5/8” gives a volume of 1.94869 x 10^17 cubic inches.
So the oceans lost 1.95 x 10^17 cubic inches of water in 2010 and according to the new paper mentioned in the NPR article, all that water fell on Australia and wasn’t allowed to travel back to the ocean.
How many inches extra rain must Australia have received in 2010 to equal 1.95 x 10^17 cubic inches? That’s easy to figure out and for this calculation let’s assume that 100% of the rain that fell in Australia during 2010 was captured inside the continent and never returned to the sea. We know this isn’t true but this assumption will be biased toward the AGW scientists’ position here so we’re erring in their favor.
Australia’s surface area is 7,692,024 square kilometers or 2,969,905 square miles and converting to square inches gives us 1.19227 x 10^16 square inches. Dividing 1.95 x 10^17 cubic inches (the volume of water that disappeared from the oceans in 2010) by 1.19227 x 10^16 (the surface area of Australia) gives us 16.34 inches. So Australia would need over 16 EXTRA inches of water (when compared to their long term average) to account for the sea level drop in 2010.
Australia averages about 19 inches of water a year and they received 27.7 inches in 2010 so that meant the extra rainfall Australia really measured in 2010 was only about 8 inches above normal. Remember from the calculation above they’d need at least 16 inches to account for the sea level drop.
Missed it by a factor of two! And in reality it’s even worse because we know that some of the water that fell on Australia in 2010 ran back to the ocean.
Are the AGW cult scientists really that shut off from reality? Do they not think these crazy theories through or do they assume we’re too stupid to check their work using simple math?
cosmoscon 
They simply count on the ignorance of the average person who gets duped into buying the headline of the story. A “heretic” like you, Cosmo, is merely to be ignored as one who “doesn’t get it”….
The fact that you take THEIR data, give THEM the benefit of the doubt in several crucial areas and STILL debunk their claims is beautiful reading for a layman such as myself.
YIKES!
BTW: AWESOME post!
Average global temperature history since 1975 is like a hill. We went up the hill from 1975 to 2001 where the average global temperature trend reached a plateau (per the average of the five government agencies that publicly report average global temperature anomalies). The average global temperature trend since 2001 has been flat to slightly declining but is on the plateau at the top of the hill. Claiming that the hill is highest at its top is not very profound. The temperature trend has started to decline but the decline will be slow; about 0.1 K per decade for the planet, approximately twice that fast for land areas.
A licensed mechanical engineer (retired) who has been researching this issue (unfunded) for 6 years, and in the process discovered what actually caused global warming and why it ended, has four papers on the web that you may find of interest. They provide some eye-opening insight on the cause of change to average global temperature and why it has stopped warming. The papers are straight-forward calculations (not just theory) using readily available data up to May, 2013.
The first one is ‘Global warming made simple’ at http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com It shows, with simple thermal radiation calculations, how a tiny change in the amount of low-altitude clouds could account for half of the average global temperature change in the 20th century, and what could have caused that tiny cloud change. (The other half of the temperature change is from net average natural ocean oscillation which is dominated by the PDO)
The second paper is ‘Natural Climate change has been hiding in plain sight’ at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html . This paper presents a simple equation that, using a single external forcing, calculates average global temperatures since they have been accurately measured world wide (about 1895) with an accuracy of 90%, irrespective of whether the influence of CO2 is included or not. The equation uses a proxy which is the time-integral of sunspot numbers (the external forcing). A graph is included which shows the calculated trajectory overlaid on measurements.
Change to the level of atmospheric CO2 has had no significant effect on average global temperature.
The time-integral of sunspot numbers since 1610 which is shown at http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/01/blog-post_23.html corroborates the significance of this factor.
A third paper, ‘The End of Global Warming’ at http://endofgw.blogspot.com/ expands recent (since 1996) measurements and includes a graph showing the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising average global temperature.
The fourth paper http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com/ exposes some of the mistakes that have been made by the ‘Consensus’ and the IPCC
Cosmo….Please add Mr. Pangburn to the list of “heretics”…..LOL!
Dan…thank you for the links. I found them VERY informative and useful.
With a fist bump to Pgh, I enjoyed the links given by Dan.
Just wondering though, I remember reading about 4-5 years ago that many of the temp recorders had been located in places that, over time, changed. Some were now in the exhaust of air conditioners and other heat related areas! Just wondering if anyone has read that these things have been corrected? As an RN involved in quality of care, one of the first things you check is the quality of your data. Any current quality control of the temp sources?
Thanks Cosmocson. Another great post on the failure of jouralists to know enough to ask the real questions. Where does NPR get these people❗❓
I was initially concerned about heat island effects (HIE) which might introduce a bias. This is how I rationalized that issue:
The reporting agencies claim to compensate for HIE.
A graph of the 5 reporting agencies does not indicate a significant difference between satellite and surface measurements.
71% of earths area is covered by oceans so no HIE there.
Any residual HIE effect must find room in the 10% that the equation does not explain.