Hot, Warm, & Cold Thermal Facts: Tidewater-Glaciers - 4

ELEPHANT AND THE BLIND MEN

After focusing on one paper from a peer reviewed journal cited in a previous Dredd Blog post (On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction - 33), I read other relevant papers that had also been cited in that peer reviewed paper.

I went through those published papers in other scientific journals (papers that had been cited to support the hypotheses concerning thermal expansion as 'a' or 'the' major factor in sea level rise).

What I found out isn't pretty.

The oldest of that peer reviewed paper trail says:

"We present estimates of the component of this sea level rise caused by thermal expansion of the ocean ... We estimate the component of sea level rise that is caused by thermal expansion ..." - Abstract

"The estimate of sea level rise caused by the melt water from nonpolar glaciers is [negligible] ... it is thought ... that the combined contribution from the melting of ice from Antarctia and Greenland to sea level rise is small; thus a major component of sea level rise must be caused by thermal expansion of the ocean." - Introduction

(Church et al., 1991, emphasis added). Their logic was that it "must be caused by thermal expansion" because Greenland and Antarctica melt is "small."

We know that is not the case, not even close to the case.

They must not have known that Greenland had been melting for at least a century at the time they wrote their paper (Proof of Concept - 5).

They must not have known that a scientist had published a paper over a hundred years prior to theirs, declaring that sea level would fall near large ice sheets (Greenland & Antarctica) as the ice sheet melted:

To our knowledge, Woodward (1888) was the first to demonstrate that the rapid melting of an ice sheet would lead to a geographically variable sea level change. Woodward (1888) assumed a rigid, non-rotating Earth, and therefore self-gravitation of the surface load was the only contributor to the predicted departure from a geographically uniform (i.e. eustatic) sea level rise. This departure was large and counter-intuitive. Specifically, sea level was predicted to fall within ∼2000 km of a melting ice sheet, and to rise with progressively higher amplitude at greater distances. The physics governing this redistribution is straightforward.

(The World According To Measurements - 5). Thus, they were clueless that Greenland began melting and causing sea level fall near it, while at the same time causing sea level rise at the location where the Greenland seawater was eventually relocated to (The Gravity of Sea Level Change, 2, 3, 4).

All of the papers were based on models, all ignoring the Woodward paper:

"Estimates of sea level rise during the period 1856-1991 due to thermal expansion are presented. The estimates are based on an ocean model ... " - Abstract

(De Wolde et al., 1995, emphasis added). There is no valid reason for declaring that thermal expansion is 'a' or 'the' major cause without competent evidence.

Another paper quoted as original source material for the thermal expansion hypotheses was "Warrick, R. A., et al., Changes in sea level, in Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change, edited by J. T. Houghton et al., pp. 359–405, Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1996".

I could not find the paper itself, but I found this comment about it in another paper:

"Observational estimates of interior temperature changes in the ocean reported by Warrick et al. (1996) were limited, and estimates of thermal expansion were made from simple ocean models.

(Changes in Sea Level - IPCC, at 643, emphasis added). The implication is that there was no prior work to give them clues.

That is not true.

There was a scientific paper (Woodward 1888 linked to above) that had been published a century before they estimated with models, explaining that if the sea level is falling near an ice sheet that ice sheet is melting.

They ignored that science.

The final paper cited did not use a model, it used two models coupled together (Stouffer and Manabe, 1999).

And so here we are after an 1888 paper indicated we should look for sea level fall to find evidence for ice sheet melting.

The graphs at Fig. 3 - Fig. 19, here, show that sea level fall was also well known for over a hundred years prior to all of those papers guesstimating thermal expansion.

"None so deaf as those that will not hear. None so blind as those that will not see." - Matthew Henry

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.