4.4 What About Rising Sea Level, Isn't that Proof of Global Warming?
Climate alarmists warn that the sea level will rise and drown our cities. They show us graphs of rapidly increasing rates of sea level rise. They tell us that this is happening because of global warming causes by people burning fossil fuels. But is what they are showing us true? To answer this question we could look at recorded data from tide gauges. Tide gauges measure the height of water. The old kind worked with a float on the water that moved a wire that turned a gauge. Newer versions use sound or microwaves to determine how high the water has risen. They are all enclosed in a house that extends over the water. A picture of a tide gauge near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is shown below.
What would happen to the measurement of the height of the water if the housing sank a little? What if it rose a little? In the video below Tony Heller tells us what the tide gauges tell us. To better understand the video below we need to understand what a graph of increasing sea level would look like. If every year the sea level was going up by the same amount the graph would be a straight line. If carbon dioxide is causing sea level rise and if the amount of carbon of dioxide in the air wasn't changing than we'd expect the sea level to rise the same amount every year and we'd expect the graph to be a straight line. If the amount of carbon dioxide in the air was going up every year then we'd expect the amount of sea level rise to go up every year.
Here is a graph of sealevel measured over the years in San Francisco, California. The straight lines are sea level and the green line is the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. If carbon dioxide is causing sea level rise than the curve of sea level rise should be very similar to the curve of carbon dioxide rise. Instead carbon dioxide increase is a straight line.
As long as tide gauges aren't sinking they should show the same results anywhere in the world. The sea level at the other side of the United States, next to Manhattan is shown below. Again the sea level is increasing as a straight line.
We can see from the above video that sea level isn't rising faster and faster but even the above video shows that the sea level is rising. Is that because man burns fossil fuels? If that were true it would rise faster the more carbon dioxide is in the air but we can see that it is rising at a steady rate regardless of the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. That still doesn't answer the question of why is it rising. We can find the answer to the question by looking for more data. Here is a graph of sea level from 24,000 years ago.
We can see from this graph that sea level has been rising since the last ice age. We can also see that the rate of sea level rise has slowed down and leveled off. The person who graphed this wrote in the graph that "all evidence is that we are at another such point, perhaps even more abrupt than in the past". He means that all evidence predicts that sea level will rise rapidly again. The graph doesn't show any evidence of that. The graph looks like it's at the top of a peak that might go down. How can we figure out what is probably going to happen? We can look at more data. Hundreds of millions of years more of data.
What we see over hundreds of millions of years of earth history is many peaks of sea level going up and down.
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What about data that shows increasing temperature? Isn't that proof of global warming?
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