Posted on 01/23/2003 2:11:40 PM PST by cogitator
Yes, yes, I know. (What we don't know is how much and how fast it's happening now.)
The researchers used the position of a nearby fossil shell bed to address this.
That's what happened with the Himalayas. The subcontinent of India plowed into Asia a few million years ago, and the Himalayan uplift resulted.
Very few people dispute that sea level has changed in Earth's paleohistory. The question of concern now as regards to climate change is how much it is changing and how much higher it might rise. As the storm-battered residents of Fiji and the Solomon Islands might tell us, a couple of centimeters means a lot when your island is only a couple of feet higher than the ocean.
Regardless of what mean sea level is/was the fact remains:
"What is so fascinating is that the mark appears to some to be 30 centimetres above the current mean sea level."or photographable at all after 160 yrs. of global warming....OH that's right, I forgot. Up untill the 1970's we were entering an ice age, the dyslexic sceintists suddenly changed that scare tactic to "global warming".
Short answer to the question posed above: No.
Regarding the mark, if the CSIRO research is accurate, then the position of the mark is consistent with an approximately 16 cm sea level rise around Australia since the late 1800s. If the mark was not placed at mean sea level then, its position now - above or below mean sea level - doesn't mean anything.
The global warming crowd tries to tie sealevels to climate. It's a scare tactic to make people think we will all drown if we drive suvs.
To believe that the measurement in this article are accurate one must believe that the rock in Port Arthur is the same distance from the center of the earth as it was in 1890, that because the sea is 16 centimeters higher in relation to the rock that the sea rose.
While most people believe that the ground we walk on is rock solid, the truth is it is nothing more than debris floating on a liquid core. GPS data shows that the Himalayas are still rising over an inch a year. But we don't have anything that could accurately measure the altitude of Port Arthur in 1890 to within 16 centimeters.
Climate does effect sea levels but erosion of the lands filling the seabeds with sediment probably increased sea levels more in the last century than melting glaciers. The big changes in sea level come from plate tectonics, the widening and narrowing and rising and lowering of the seabed has the greatest affect.
If the people of Fiji and the Solomon Islands check out what is happening along that fault line that is close to them, they may find something other than global warming could make them the next Atlantis.
I'll be very interested to see what Daly has to say about it. The thing is, we'll only get his side of the story from his Web site; and we already know where he's coming from, based on the caption of the picture at the top of the Web site.
"Media reports of sea level rise here are false as a tide gauge at this very site registered depths of 2ft at the very lowest of tides in the 1840s."
What we need are BOTH sides of the story, which means we also need the paper that was just published in International Hydrological Review. I decided over the weekend to see if I can get it by request from the authors. They may be able to either email a PDF version of it or send it to me by mail.
They also may be fielding a lot of similar requests, so I don't know if they'll be able to send me one or not. But it can't hurt to try.
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