Projected Sea Level Rise in Santa Barbara

By Bruce

2100 looks a lot like 2007. In 2007, local environmental artists proposed to draw a “light blue line” showing the future (date unknown) impacts of climate change (map on the right).

Their story was based on the amount of sea level rise captured in the Greenland ice sheet. The City’s report figure 12, for 2100 (on the left), looks rather similar. 

We’ve learned a lot in 10 years. Unfortunately, we haven’t learned how to effectively reduce our global carbon footprint (although the City of Santa Barbara and the State of California are working hard at this) to prevent sea level rise. Kids born today in Santa Barbara will see their beaches disappear over the decades.

 

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Written by BruceC

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  1. Agree with you but it’s tough to do with an exponentially increasing population. You’ll know when enviornmentalists are serious about global warming when they put population growth (both locally and globally) as a top contributor to this. It’s politically incorrect to do just that so they concentrate on other issues.

  2. I doubt that anyone here can point to a reference for an actual peer-reviewed scientific study which shows a statistically significant measured sea level rise over the last 20 years in Santa Barbara. I’m not talking about some vague “action plan” or a numerically fragile GCM simulation projection, but actual science with measured results reported, statistical confidence limits, estimates of measurement noise, and enough history to show that the current sea level trends are statistically different from past eras.

  3. Spending good tax dollars on junk science is sheer folly. Funding more city staffer make-work and outside “consultants” must stop now. We are drowning it city employee pension debt right here and right now; not climate change is some indeterminate future.

  4. Our governments have lied to us since the beginnings of government. Why would they stop now? Call me a cynic, but those scientists are generally funded by government grants. And if I follow the money there appears to be significant profit in “reducing the carbon footprint”. Do I deny that the climate is changing? No, climate has always has been changing and always will. But man’s impact on the climate versus other variables in in doubt.

  5. it may not be a “list” but i can assure you that scientists communicate with each other. they publish their findings, they repeat experiments to test for validity (that’s literally what has to be done for findings to be considered valid), they travel all over the world to increase their knowledge. It is incomprehensible to believe that millions of highly educated people are all working in unison to do what, ruin our lives by making us stop ruining the earth? Hah

  6. you addressed nothing of what i said. there is not one good reason to not work on being better stewards of this planet. also, that is complete propaganda. there are very few extremely high paid scientists. the VAST majority who are actually doing the experiments and research on the ground are not

  7. also, there is not significant profit in reducing the amount of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere. by your own logic, follow the money. look at the billions and billions of dollars that are made each year on oil. There is a lot less money to be made on alternative energy because the time and resources that need to be devoted to developing and making them efficient enough to use instead of oil are a very effective barrier to entry.

  8. Look Horsegirl, we could do this all day but I’m busy. I’ll leave with one perspective: A carbon tax has the potential to be the largest transfer of wealth in the world’s history. And it won’t be corporations or politicians left with the tab. It will be little folks like you and me.

  9. Since the stated 95% confidence limits are -1.11 mm/year and +1.11 mm/year this range includes 0.0 mm/year. This means that the NOAA sea level rise is just as likely to be 0.0 mm/year as it is to be 1.07 mm/year. In other words the NOAA sea level rise is stitistically likely to be 0.0 mm/year.

  10. Learn about sea level change and its connection to CO2-induced global warming, and the falsehoods being put forth by deniers: =========================================================================== https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/02/26/global-sea-level-data-agency-formal-response-completely-unwarranted-attacks-climate-science-deniers =========================================================================== https://water.usgs.gov/edu/sealevel.html =========================================================================== http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/american-climate-change-deniers-all-at-sea/ =========================================================================== http://www.blotreport.com/science/deniers-sea-level/

  11. America’s carbon dioxide emissions last year fell to their lowest levels since 1994 and we are leading the world in carbon reduction even w/o the unsigned Paris treaty. We always hear about ice melting and the sea level rising. Fill a glass full of ice and then fill it with water. Let it melt and you will see the water level drop, NOT rise ! Everyone should google grand solar minimum and see what is about to happen to global temperatures. Some scientists say we are entering a super grand solar minimum. If that is true, you will not have to worry about global warming as long as you live, no matter how old you are !

  12. Climate change like most change is population driven. People are the cause of most issues. How many more people do environmentalists want in CA or the USA? From local photos, I see the same environmental activists wanting to end I.C.E., and pulling heart strings to allow millions more foreigners into our country and state. At meetings to discuss the 400,000 American homeless, or hundreds in Santa Barbara- the homeless numbers expected to morph into over 2 Million after the next financial adjustment -, I see some of the same people demanding open borders.
    Knowing people are the cause of climate change why do we want more? Why is only China concerned with population numbers? Why were we shipping our recyclables to China until China refused any more of our trash? Why is PITMIX the only post to introduce humans into the discussion? Why do we congratulate couples for families larger than a replacement child each? How do we get California’s population stabilized, and our country’s? We too often focus on the world but rarely locally. We need stable acculturated educated families to sustain the future unless the plan is to go to Mars.

  13. Are you asking others to simply “believe”? Are you asking us to simply “jump on the bandwagon” that’s leaving the train station? Americans pursue what is known and in the process of being discovered to consider the yet unknown, to think, to evaluate, to decide, and to innovate. The issue is not about being “convinced”. It’s about problem identification, causation and problem solving. Some of us may choose to be part of possible solution.

  14. Agree that most of my progressive/liberal/green friends have a hard time admitting that population growth is the problem. Big fight a few years ago in the Sierra Club internal movers and shakers about this. It became bad manners and even worse to note that immigration and high birth rate creates an almost insurmountable challenge to controlling the environment in a healthy manner. Look at the great state of European environmental effort UNTIL the pressure to facilitate unrestricted immigration has been pushing progress backwards. The immigration lobby is, by the way, mainly corporate/Wall Street pro-growth money folks who want cheap labor and a lot of customers without accountability for cleaning up the mess they make.

  15. I agree with the essence of your thoughts. I know that this discussion touches on the sensitive issues or racism and “nationalism” but hopefully people can debate the subject separate from those emotional claims. China has reaped monstrous benefits from its Draconian birth control efforts. It really is pretty simple.

  16. The bottom line, after reading the comments and going to several of the links, boils down to this: either you believe or you do not believe. Being a believer does not make one better/worse than someone who is not a believer (or to use a negative label, a “denier”). Some people believe in God, Heaven, and Hell (although not the Pope apparently), and some people think it’s s pile of BS. Who is right? Who knows!!! Just don’t get a “bee in your bonnet” if someone else does not hold your beliefs, and we’ll all make it though life much happier.

  17. The oceanservice.noaa link posted by Macpuzl is an excellent resource. However, you must navigate multiple links within it for balance. It leads with the statement that sea level is rising on an accelerating basis from the satellite measurements starting in 1992 at ~3mm/yr as stated by Macpuzl. However, the sea level rise as calculated from coastal gauges is 1.7-1.8 mm/yr with San Luis Obispo and SB ~0.9-1.1 mm/yr. In the coastal gauge section you can navigate to any gauge in the world, and the ones with the longest record history have lower uncertainty in the measurement. There is no reason to doubt the integrity of those numbers. Additionally none of the long term gauges show any acceleration in the rate of rise for the past few decades (there is a peer reviewed study on this). I do not doubt that the satellite measurement record calculates a ~3mm/yr rate of rise, but it is not consistent with other reliable records posted at the same website. The uncertainty standards for coastal measurements are +/- 3.0mm/yr for only 20 years of data and +/- 1.5mm/yr for 30 years of data. The satellite record is only 26 yrs. At some point the the satellite/coastal measurement discrepancy gap will be closed, but for now the coastal measurements are a vital data source for investigating sea level change. Therefore, Sea Dog and Macpuzl you are both correct on the data sets you’re relying upon, however the relationship between these data sets is not yet reconciled.

  18. We’ve been through this before. The Topex/Poseidon data that results in the 3.3mm and accelerating rate is *much* less noisy than the old tidal gauge data, but deniers like to go back to the old tidal gauge data which is especially subject to error to make their speculative data manipulations. The bottom line is that sea level is rising, and the rate of the rise is increasing. There is a lag in the feedback loop because the ocean acts as a temporary buffer on the effects of warming, but the acceleration rate will continue to rise for years even if we stopped emissions completely at this point.

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