28 thoughts on “Satellite Sea Levels”

  1. Does the study detail the technical flaws with the sensor that lead to the poor measurements or is this just based on an assumption?

    1. Not an assumption.

      They cannot get the data to work unless they discover a mysterious and previously unknown error in calibration.

  2. I’ve crunched numbers on the cost of pumping water 100 meters up onto vast polar areas (Antarctica, Canada, Siberia) at 0.10 cents per kWh to lower the sea level by 1 mm/year. Not accounting for 85% centrifugal pump efficiency, it’s about $10 billion a year per mm/yr rise abated.

    *** calculation ***

    Ocean area: 3.6E14 square meters.
    Flow rate for 1mm/year change in SL: 11,407,712 kg/sec (11,403 m^3/sec)
    power required to pump 100 meters (328 feet): 11,186 MW (which is 28 400 MW power plants).
    cost/hour at 0.10/kWh: $1,118,640
    cost/year: $9.81 billion per mm/year change.

    ******
    I went with something near the market price of electricity because that already has all sorts of economic calculations worked in.

    If the world splits up the cost according to GDP, a reasonable measure for CO2 output, the US share would be about $2.5 billion a year. So for $25 billion we could bring a -10mm/year change to whatever the guess the sea level is, and not a dime of it need go to alarmists. It would all go to construction and power plant folks, plus the energy sector to run the plants. I would recommend running them on coal, just because it’s cheap and would piss off the alarmists.

    1. George, you sound serious ….

      Now do the math to see how cold it would need to be to actually freeze that much sea water.

      Did you know that brine spills are treated more seriously than oil spills by the oil industry?

      1. Seawater freezes at about 28.4 F. but most of the salt is expelled by freezing, creating a saltier brine that could be returned to the ocean. The whole floating arctic is frozen former seawater.

        Pretty much all water that lands near the poles ends up as ice. In Alaskan ice climbers use diesel pumps to create ice towers over a hundred feet tall. The height limit is at least 4 kilometers.

        But my main point is look at the numbers. The costs of controlling sea level via a power plant and a pump are pretty trivial, less than we’re probably spending fretting about the sea level. Dropping it by 4 or 5 mm/year could be done with about 2 years of new Chinese coal plant construction.

        But alarmists don’t want a simple solution, they want emotional outrage and acknowledgement. They want validation. They want to restructure the terms of your marriage. It’s an issue they can leverage, and if you just wade in with a bucket and solve tbe bathroom overflow problem caused by your fish cooler, then how does that help them viz-a-viz taking her mother on vacation to the Virgin Islands?

        As I see it, the problem is bone dead simple. We know how to solve it. We know how to put hard numbers on the cost of solving it. It’s a problem we would just go ahead and solve because it’s a solvable problem, and that’s what we do. Opposed are people who would be outraged that we took away THEIR PROBLEM. They were relying on the problem to make you behave and gain a bunch of concessions and power. They were betting their future on you not solving that problem, but doing whatever they told you to do because there was this PROBLEM.

        Screw ’em. They’re going to bitch anyway, and they can just chew their fingernails while you get credit for being the solver of THE PROBLEM.

        1. In the face of cheap energy, just about all economic, environmental, etc. problems are shallow.

        2. As I see it, the problem is bone dead simple. We know how to solve it. We know how to put hard numbers on the cost of solving it. It’s a problem we would just go ahead and solve because it’s a solvable problem, and that’s what we do. Opposed are people who would be outraged that we took away THEIR PROBLEM. They were relying on the problem to make you behave and gain a bunch of concessions and power. They were betting their future on you not solving that problem, but doing whatever they told you to do because there was this PROBLEM.

          Yup. There have been no suggestions from politicians or environmental groups to adapt, only to “stop climate from changing” as if you can stop the climate from changing. There are no useful metrics to judge success and predictions don’t matter.

          With your not so modest proposal, we could adjust the amount of water pumped to meet the yearly increase. We wouldn’t need to wait a hundred years to know if the policy worked. It is also cheaper than what we spend now on climate junk.

  3. George, I am seeing desalination costs quoted at $2,000/acre-ft, compared to $33,578/acre-ft pumped 100m with your assumptions, so adding in desalination should only increase your costs by 6%.

    We might as well refill the Aral Sea while we are at it.

    1. We could also refill Pleistocene Lake Bonneville and Pleistocene Lake Lahontan, too.

      1. We could also refill Pleistocene Lake Bonneville

        Only if the new dam works better than the last one…

        1. Most of those lakes can be refilled merely by recreating the dam. But they would displace a lot of people.

  4. Speaking of rising sea level, there’s this BBC documentary about the remains of a forest found about 10 miles off of the coast of Alabama. The wood is estimated to be over 50,000 years old. The forest was consumed by the Gulf of Mexico when the sea level rose hundreds of feet. Imaging that, sea level rising and falling while ice ages come and go, all before humans had cars or factories to pollute the air. Now what could possibly cause the climate to change over time if it wasn’t the fault of humans?

    1. But cars and factories are only a problem because they make Mother Earth angry, so the real question is what humans did 50,000 years ago to make her upset.

    2. That’s the first time I’ve heard of swampland in the Gulf of Mexico. Is it for sale?

  5. Another reason not to worry about sea level is that although sea level is rising, the additional water is massless. If the water had mass, it would cause a measurable change in day length because mass would shift from the poles to the equator. Astronomers can’t find the change.

    From the comments at WUWT: pnas.org 20th Century Sea Level: an Enigma

    It’s only an enigma till you realize the sea level measurements are fraudulent.

  6. Yep….. See previous comment…… Cute trick that mass less glacial ice melt. Maybe we can get inertial drives out of that special ice. What shall we call it? How about Ice-9?

  7. This is probably a bad question to ask, but I don’t know much about weather satellites: I assume that the orbits of all satellites decay to some extent, and decay rates diminish when the orbits are further from the earth’s surface…how does data analysis from a weather satellite distinguish between a 1-4 millimeter rise in ocean levels and a 1-4 millimeter decay in the orbit?

    1. I am guessing the same way GPS satellites work, with really accurate clocks and communicating with other several other devices with really accurate clocks, taking into account the theory of relativity, and combined with an estimated rate of orbital decay. But 1-4mm would require a lot of precision.

      I bet one of the commenters here has actually worked on something like this or could just do the math in their head. I am just some guy who sometimes listens to things.

  8. We might as well refill the Aral Sea while we are at it.

    That’s not an insignificant volume by itself. Over 1,000 km^3 translates to 3mm sea level change.

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