{"id":381742,"date":"2025-06-06T10:17:40","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T08:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=381742"},"modified":"2025-06-06T10:17:41","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T08:17:41","slug":"sea-level-rise-less-alarmism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=381742","title":{"rendered":"Sea Level Rise: Less Alarmism?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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ChatGPT<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Master Resource<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Kennedy Maize<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201c\u2026 model-observation discrepancies can arise from three causes: the observations could be wrong (unrealized biases etc.), the models are wrong (which can encompass errors in forcings as well as physics), or the comparison could be inappropriate\u2026. [I]t may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of \u2018normal\u2019 model development \u2026 Or not\u2026.\u201d \u2013 Gavin Schmidt, Real Science<\/a>, May 31, 2025.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

One of the most enduring themes of the popular discussion of a man-made warming globe has been sea level rise as a result of the melting of ice from the planet\u2019s two frigid poles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former Vice President Al Gore\u2019s 2006 film \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth<\/a>\u201d featured images of icebergs calving off the Antarctic continent. He proclaimed that if the world proceeded to warm at its current rate, worldwide sea levels would rise \u201c20 feet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Oct. 16, 2009, then Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and later presidential candidate and secretary of state, proclaimed, \u201cScientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, an Antarctic iceberg named A23a<\/a>, floating in the southern ocean since 1986, the size of the state of Rhode Island and weighing a trillion tons, threatened to smash into South Georgia Island (site of explorer Ernest Shackleton\u2019s grave) before it harmlessly spun away and melted. Catastrophe avoided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New Data, Research<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the apocalyptic scenario an unavoidable future? Two new scientific studies have found that melting ice in Antarctica has reversed and slowed in the Northern Hemisphere\u2019s Arctic. It\u2019s too soon to reach any overarching lessons from this new data, but worthwhile acknowledging that few scientific \u201cfacts\u201d are immutable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the South Pole, a team of Chinese researchers led by Wei Wang of Tongji University of Shanghai found that ice on the Antarctic ice sheet increased from 2021 to 2023, following 19 years of decrease starting in 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published March 19 in the peer reviewed Springer Nature journal\u00a0Science China Earth Sciences<\/a>, the research team found that Antarctica\u2019s melting glaciers caused the \u201cglobal mean sea level\u201d (GMSL) to rise by \u201c5.99\u00b10,52 mm ( milllimeteres) by\u00a0February 2020. Then the ice began accumulating in the following three years, \u201cultimately resulting in a total GMSL contribution of 5.10\u00b10.52 mm by the end of 2023.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving to the North Pole, a March 29 analysis by four researchers led by Mark England from the University of Bristol, published in the\u00a0ESS Open Archive research platform<\/a>\u00a0wrote, \u201cOver the past two decades, Arctic Sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September Sea ice area since 2005. This pause is robust across observational datasets, metrics, and seasons.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What to make of these surprising findings that contradict the popular notion of the impact of climate change, long promoted by some researchers who appear to have more interest in advancing policy positions than science? Researcher England titles his team\u2019s research paper as \u201cSurprising, but not unexpected, multi-decadal pause in Arctic sea ice loss.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Arctic paper, in typical low-key scientific language, says, \u201cThe modelling evidence suggests that internal variability has substantially offset anthropogenically forced sea ice loss in recent decades, although possible contributions from changes in the forced response remain uncertain. Overall, this observed pause in Arctic Sea ice decline is consistent with simulated internal variability superimposed on the long-term trend according to the bulk of the climate modelling evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wang Antarctic paper concludes modestly, \u201cOverall, the study presents the mass change characteristics of the [Antarctic Ice Sheet] over the past 22 years, highlights the instability of four important glacier basins in the [East Antarctic Ice Sheet], and provides valuable scientific insights for related polar research.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pielke View<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., wrote in an op-ed in the New York Post<\/a>, \u201cWhen it comes to climate change, to invoke one of Al Gore\u2019s favorite sayings, the biggest challenge is not what we don\u2019t know, but what we know for sure but just isn\u2019t so.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taken together, says Pielke, \u201cthe two studies remind us that the global climate system remains unpredictable, defying simplistic expectations that change moves only in one direction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing in The Honest Broker<\/a>, Pielke observes that \u201cclimate research is not a scoreboard in a Manichean debate, but instead offers certainties, uncertainties, and even areas of total ignorance that establish a nuanced context for developing robust mitigation and adaptation policies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He adds, \u201cHumans affect the climate system in many ways, including greenhouse gas emissions, but also through land management, air pollution, and vegetation dynamics. At a planetary scale the net effect of these changes \u2013 driven by carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil \u2013 is a warming of the planetary system. Anticipating regional and local consequences is far more challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pielke recalls the lament of the late, great climate scientist Steve Schneider<\/a> (1945-2010) in 2002: \u201cI readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is supposed to be<\/em> in the world of unsettled climate science cannot substitute for data. And climate models cannot rescue theory or data. Climate modeling is hope-in-process. Gavin Schmidt states<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

models are always wrong, but the degree to which they can be useful needs to be addressed \u2013 by variable or by model generation or by model completeness etc\u2026. an accumulation of improvements \u2013 in physics, resolution, completeness, forcings \u2013 have led to a gradual improvement in skill (not just in the sea ice trends!)\u2026. The history of Arctic sea ice comparisons shows that it might be premature to conclude that any specific discrepancies imply that something is fundamentally wrong, or that climate modeling is in a \u2018crisis\u2019 (Shaw and Stevens, 2025)<\/a>, it may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of \u2018normal\u2019 model development (and as the observed signals become clearer). Or not ;-).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Only the future will tell\u2026. or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2026\u00a0model-observation discrepancies can arise from three causes: the observations could be wrong (unrealized biases etc.), the models are wrong (which can encompass errors in forcings as well as physics), or the comparison could be inappropriate\u2026. [I]t may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of \u2018normal\u2019 model development \u2026 Or not\u2026.\u201d \u2013 Gavin Schmidt,\u00a0Real Science, May 31, 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":381745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691818328,691835635,691818990,691818056,691818153,691835636,691826569],"class_list":{"0":"post-381742","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-antarctic","9":"tag-apocalyptic-scenario","10":"tag-arctic-sea-ice","11":"tag-climate-change","12":"tag-climate-models","13":"tag-global-mean-sea-level","14":"tag-observations","16":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/0ChatGPT-Image-6.-Juni-2025-10_16_07.png?fit=1536%2C1024&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1Bj8","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":303584,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=303584","url_meta":{"origin":381742,"position":0},"title":"New 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