Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has considered, for a number of years, the vulnerability of world seaports to sea level change in terms of both sea level fall and sea level rise (e.g. "The artist's painting, above, shows that the major ports would be destroyed ultimately, but will be damaged well before they become useless", Will This Float Your Boat?, May 4, 2011; Seaports With Sea Level Change, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).
That reality is finding its way into the scientific literature:
"Ports are an important economic actor—at local, national, and international scales—that have been identified as being vulnerable to future changes to the climate. This paper details the findings from an international review of state‐of‐the‐art knowledge concerning climate risks, and adaptation responses, for ports and their supply chains. Evidence from both academic and gray literature indicates that there has already been major damage and disruption to ports across the world from climate‐related hazards and that such impacts are projected to increase in the years and decades to come. Findings indicate that while a substantial—and growing—body of scientific evidence on coastal risks and potential adaptation options is acting as a stimulus for port authorities to explicitly consider the risks for their assets and operations, only a notable few [port authorities] have actually made the next step toward implementing adaptation strategies. This paper concludes by putting forward constructive recommendations for the sector and suggestions for research to address remaining knowledge gaps. It emphasizes a call for collaboration between the research and practice communities, as well as the need to engage a broad range of stakeholders in the adaptation planning process."
The corporate media on the other hand doesn't cover this issue very much, if at all, which may be a factor in the ongoing negligence or denial by port authorities.
The graph data is presented by PSMSL "Coastline code" sequence only (when there are two graphs of the same Coastline Code, one is sea level fall, the other is sea level rise (the sea level fall and rise graphs are from different WOD zones in the same Coastline Code location ... see HTML appendices).
The HTML and graph beginning and ending years and amounts are not in strict syncronization because they are done by two different modules.
I am finishing up on a program that solves that, but remember that the graphs are for showing the trends in a coastal area, while the HTML files are to provide details of a different sort.
The HTML-format data is alphabetized by Country name first and Coastline code second.
The HTML table menu below gives you a one click trip to appendices which have the data laid out for your perusal.
The links are alphabetical (e.g. countries with names beginning with an "A" are in the "A-C" appendices, countries with names beginning with a "U" are in the "U-Z" appendices, etc.):
I wanted to quote from an article from Wikipedia (some emphasis added) on this occasion, while at the same time mentioning that Dredd Blog pointed out in its first year way back in 2009 that Global Warming induced Climate Change was considered to be a national security threat by the U.S. Military (Global Climate & Homeland Insecurity). Now on to the Wikipedia article:
More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before. David Dunning of Cornell University is another academic who studies the spread of ignorance. "Dunning warns that the internet is helping propagate ignorance – it is a place where everyone has a chance to be their own expert, he says, which makes them prey for powerful interests wishing to deliberately spread ignorance".[7]
In his 1999 book The Erotic Margin, Irvin C. Schick referred to unknowledge "to distinguish it from ignorance, and to denote socially constructed lack of knowledge, that is, a conscious absence of socially pertinent knowledge". As an example, he offered the labeling "terra incognita" in early maps, noting that "The reconstruction of parts of the globe as uncharted territory is ... the production of unknowledge, the transformation of those parts into potential objects of Western political and economic attention. It is the enabling of colonialism."[8]
There are many causes of culturally induced ignorance. These include the influence of the media, either through neglect or as a result of deliberate misrepresentation and manipulation. Corporations and governmental agencies can contribute to the subject matter studied by agnotology through secrecy and suppression of information, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.[9]
Another example is climate denial, as illustrated in the 2012 PBS Frontline documentary Climate of Doubt, which argues that oil companies have for at least the last decade, paid teams of scientists to downplay the effects of climate change.
Tribal resistance to science that contradicts medical or dental dogma heavily biases decision making, prompting vitriolic attacks that contributes the suppression of scientific knowledge in service of protecting a sanctioned narrative. [11]
Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not "come to be", or are ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was censored and delayed for at least a decade because some evidence remained classified military information related to undersea warfare.[6]"
It is, compared to the ocean depths, quite easy to find the heat in the atmosphere, the heat on land, and heat at the surface of the ocean.
However, that is not the case within the largest realm on Earth, the Pelagic Zone (Fig. 1).
In this Dredd Blog series it has been pointed out that ocean heat is difficult to follow as it radiates into the unexplored places of the oceans (In Search Of Ocean Heat, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).
Other planets have been scientifically studied more than most of these pelagic realms:
"Where do we start? I suggest by making the ocean visible. Although nothing lives there, Mars, the Moon and Venus are better mapped (at about 100m x 100m resolution) than the seafloor, which is home to many of the 90% of a possible two million species in the ocean yet to be described—and along with them valuable novel marine genetic resources. It is often said that you cannot manage what you cannot measure, but equally the case is that you do not measure what you do not value."
It is easy to follow the impact of global warming in the Arctic.
As it turns out, it is warming more than some other regions:
"Chelsea Wegner was shocked when she landed in Anchorage, Alaska, in July, on her way to a research cruise in the Bering Sea. Smoke from wildfires across the state had darkened the skies, and Anchorage was in the midst of a heatwave that saw temperatures soar past 32 °C [soar past 90°F] for the first time in recorded history. Wegner, a marine biologist at the University of Maryland in Solomons, also knew that the unusual warmth had melted away nearly all of the sea ice in the Bering Sea. 'It was a really surreal moment,' she says.
Later, while sailing aboard a Canadian icebreaker off the coast of Alaska, Wegner watched walruses swimming in open water — without the ice floes they normally use as a platform to rest, give birth and nurse their young during the Arctic summer."
(Arctic revolution). A lot of the sea animals are, like humans, dying of heat further south ... "not making it" (ABC, Reuters, CNN).
III. How The Ocean Heat Gets "Lost"
The two graphs above (Fig. 2, Fig. 3) detail the trail of Conservative Temperature (CT) and Potential Enthalpy (hO), otherwise known as Ocean Heat Content and/or Ocean Heat Flux.
One of the scientists who worked to bring the new standard forth and to replace the old IOS-80 standard has carefully pointed out the problem with current software models:
"The quest in this work is to derive a variable that is conservative, independent of adiabatic changes in pressure, and whose conservation equation is the oceanic version of the first law of thermodynamics. That is, we seek a variable whose advection and diffusion can be interpreted as the advection and diffusion of ‘heat.’ In other words, we seek to answer the question, ‘what is heat’ in the ocean? ... The variable that is currently used for this purpose in ocean models is potential temperature referenced to the sea surface, θ, but it does not accurately represent the conservation of heat because of (i) the variation of specific heat with salinity and (ii) the dependence of the total differential of enthalpy on variations of salinity. ... For example, an increase in pressure of 107 Pa (1000 dbar), without exchange of heat or salt, causes a change in enthalpy that is equivalent to about 2.5ЊC. We show in this paper that in contrast to enthalpy, potential enthalpy does have the desired properties to embody the meaning of the first law. ... Present treatment of oceanic heat fluxes is clearly inconsistent. Ocean models treat potential temperature as a conservative variable and calculate the heat flux across oceanic sections using a constant value of heat capacity. By contrast, heat flux through sections of observed data is often calculated using a variable specific heat multiplying the flux of potential temperature per unit area (Bryan 1962; Macdonald et al. 1994; Saunders 1995; Bacon and Fofonoff 1996). Here it is shown that the theoretical justification of this second approach is flawed on three counts. While the errors involved are small, it is clearly less than satisfactory to have conflicting practices in the observational and modeling parts of physical oceanography, particularly as an accurate and convenient solution can be found. ... it is perfectly valid to talk of potential enthalpy, h0, as the 'heat content' ...”
The two graphs in today's post (Fig. 2, Fig. 3) show that ocean heat is radiating all the way down to the deepest ocean depths.
The Hadopelagic is the deepest, but it is now on average globally, warmer than the Abyssopelagic layer above it (since circa 1952).
In the world of oceanography concerning the thermocline, it is said that "The temperature of the deep ocean drops gradually with depth (Wikipedia)," but in the world of thermodynamics this is not axiomatic, because hot flows to cold (The Ghost Photons, 2, 3).
Ocean heat is radiating to the cooler waters of the deeps, and has been warming them (contrary to pre-global warming textbooks).
V. Closing Comments
The ocean heat content is not lost to TEOS-10, it is hard at work melting the tidewater glaciers that are flowing from the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
They are melting below the water line at an accelerating rate of 6 to 8 fold (Science Daily, PNAS, cf. video below).
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
Even without considering sea level change (SLC) problems, seaports currently have a plethora of challenges.
Here are a few indications of the types of challenges they face today:
"Ports play a critical role in the development of many countries. They represent a country’s national heritage, culture, and local commercial attitudes. Simply put, ports are the gate ways for trade. Unfortunately, despite the rapid globalization and modernization, most ports are not as efficient as they should be and are becoming barriers to international trade. If you are a keen follower of emerging trends, you will note that most ports are plagued with problems like clearance delays, inadequate investments, captivity issues, increased freight rates, lack of effective strategies, and inappropriate international mandates. What is causing all these challenges?" (Challenges Facing Ports).
"Containerization has consequently become a fundamental function of global port operations and has changed the structure and configuration of port terminals that tend to occupy more space." ... "As terminals, ports handle the largest amounts of freight, more than any other types of terminals combined. To handle this freight, port infrastructures jointly have to accommodate transshipment activities both on ships and inland and thus facilitate convergence between land transport and maritime systems. In many parts of the world, ports are the points of convergence from which inland transport systems, particularly rail, were laid. Most ports, especially those that are ancient, owe their initial emergence to their site as the great majority of harbors are taking advantage of a natural coastline or a natural site along a river. Many port sites are constrained by: Maritime access, which refers to the physical capacity of the site to accommodate ship operations. It includes the tidal range, which is the difference between the high and low tide, as normal ship operations cannot handle variations [between high and low tide] of more than 3 meters. ... Maritime interface. Indicates the amount of space that is available to support maritime access, namely the amount of shoreline that has good maritime access. This attribute is very important since ports are linear entities. Even if a port site has an excellent maritime access, namely deep water waterways, there may not be enough land available to guarantee its future development and expansion. ... Infrastructures and equipment. The site, to be efficiently used, must have infrastructures such as piers, basins, stacking or storage areas, warehouses, and equipment such as cranes, all of which involving high levels of capital investment. In turn, these infrastructures consume land which must be available to insure port expansion. Keeping up with the investment requirements of modern port operations has become a challenge for many ports, particularly in light of containerization which requires substantial amounts of terminal space to operate. Modern container terminals rely on an unique array of infrastructure, including portainers, stacking yards serviced by gantry cranes and the vehicles used to move containers around the terminal, such as straddle carriers. ... Land access. Access from the port to industrial complexes and markets insure its growth and importance. This requires efficient inland distribution systems, such as fluvial, rail (mainly for containers) and road transportation. The land access to ports located in densely populated areas is facing increasing congestion." (The Geography of Transport Systems).
"The start of 2019 is sending signals that we may have slower trade growth than anticipated, presenting challenges to all. The National Retail Federation says it expects a decline in year-over-year growth, and the World Bank is sending signals that the global economy is slowing, with China leading the way. This isn’t great news for any sector of global trade. Carriers are already smarting from a less-than-spectacular 2018 and face increased capacity being delivered in 2019. Shippers, some of whom felt the sting of unusually high spot market rates during the last couple of months of 2018, face what could be increased tariffs after March 1 when the US and China end their trade talks. Carriers also are seeking increased rates and anticipate a jump in fuel costs related to the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO’s) low-sulfur fuel mandate that will take effect Jan. 1, 2020. Balancing these conditions will be a challenge to all involved in ocean shipping, with shippers and carriers working on plans to keep their economic equilibrium, trying to meet budgets most set months ago before the unfavorable news of recent events. Some of the drama started playing out in December as carriers met with larger shippers to begin the 2019-2020 contract negotiations. Carriers must get back on track to make money as they did in 2017 after six years of losses, having failed to do so in 2018 because of decisions made early in the year, decisions that will impact them through April. By managing capacity, they were able to recover a bit in the spot market late in 2018. Carriers also caught a break with oil prices declining in late 2018. But the larger shippers have a deal in hand lasting almost four more months, and while they recognize conditions better than most, they aren’t in a mood to just accept increases because carriers aren’t making money. So negotiations for the 2019-2020 contracts will be difficult. Carriers were able to get spot rates up by more than double some of the service contract levels. But facing the large service contract shippers who have low rates and asking for increases has never been an easy task for carriers; volumes available seem to bring out a gift-giving reaction." (Container challenges of 2019 to echo years past)
(emphasis added). The day to day economic, legal, contract negotiation, and geographical problems alone are substantial, but adding the existential problem of SLC is likely to be overwhelming.
The problems that arise when engineers contemplate elevating seaports several meters while trying to do business as usual is only exceeded by the problems that arise if they do not respond to the existential threat of SLC.
The scientific research has not been adequate enough to support robust engineering efforts or robust engineering solutions:
"This reality means society needs to think about climate change in different ways than the past, by focusing on reducing the risk of negative effects. And speaking as a climate scientist, I recognize that climate science research, too, has to change. Historically, climate science has been primarily curiosity-driven – scientists seeking fundamental understanding of the way our planet works because of the inherent interest in the problem. Now it’s time for the climate science research enterprise to adopt an expanded approach, one that focuses heavily on integrating fundamental science inquiry with risk management. ... This long-term, iterative process is a break with current practices. It requires sustained relationships that are not a good fit for much of the academic scientific enterprise, which is driven by curious individuals and funded by short-term grants. There are signs, though, that climate scientists are getting out of the ivory tower and taking a different approach to research."
Today, I am following up on the essence of a previous Dredd Blog Post series concerning the "fingerprints" and "DNA" of sea level change (SLC).
The sea level fingerprint analogy is not primarily focused on the attributes of sea water itself.
So, the focus in this series is on the definitive natural attributes (dna) rather than the "fingerprints" because "fingerprints" only applies to sea levels, not primarily to sea water's definitive natural attributes.
I am binding the "DNA" concept with the TEOS/Gibbs robust concept of Conservative Temperature (CT) as it is found in the eighteen layers of the World Ocean Database (WOD) scheme of global "zones" (Fig. 1).
II. Why Conservative Temperature?
Fig. 2 Conservative Temperature
is in thermodynamic proportion to Ocean Heat Content (hO)
The reason for using CT as a guide is that it is an indicator of the DNA of Ocean Heat Content (OHC) in the sense that it is in thermodynamic proportion to Potential Enthalpy (hO).
OHC currently is a hot topic with both Oceanographers and Climate Scientists.
WOD Layer 0
WOD Layer 1
WOD Layer 2
WOD Layer 3
WOD Layer 4
WOD Layer 5
WOD Layer 6
WOD Layer 7
WOD Layer 8
WOD Layer 9
WOD Layer 10
WOD Layer 11
WOD Layer 12
WOD Layer 13
WOD Layer 14
WOD Layer 15
WOD Layer 16
Since CT patterns (unlike "Potential Temperature" ... the old and problematic variable), match OHC patterns, the graphs today show not only the pattern of CT but also the pattern of OHC and ocean heat flux (OHF).
In other words these graphs of CT have the DNA pattern of the heat intake and distribution of atmospheric heat entering the ocean layers of the globe (Fig. 1).
Our science in general is only as robust as our in situ measurements and our bona fide observations.
These graphs are the result of processing billions of in situ measurements, then processing them with the TEOS-10 toolbox, which is a product of one of the more robust American scientists:
Some may wonder why it [the TEOS-10 toolkit] is called the "Gibbs-SeaWater (GSW) Oceanographic Toolbox", so, let me explain.
The formulas encapsulated in the TEOS-10 software come originally from the mind of an American scientist:
"Willard Gibbs was a mathematical physicist who made enormous contributions to science: he founded modern statistical mechanics, he founded chemical thermodynamics, and he invented vector analysis."
"J. Willard Gibbs, in full Josiah Willard Gibbs, (born February 11, 1839, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.—died April 28, 1903, New Haven), theoretical physicist and chemist who was one of the greatest scientists in the United States in the 19th century. His application of thermodynamic theory converted a large part of physical chemistry from an empirical into a deductive science."
(Encyclopedia Brittanica, emphasis added). Thus, the scientific work that Gibbs did is encapsulated in the software that Dredd Blog uses to analyze ocean water thermodynamics.
The better the scientific tools the better the science.
(The World According To Measurements - 12). That said, notice that the graphs go back over a century, about 119 years to be more exact, to a time when collecting temperature, salinity, and depth measurements was not as robust as it currently is.
But by and large, the practices were adequate enough to determine ocean temperature, depth, latitude, longitude, and conductivity (salinity) to a reasonable degree.
Some modern techniques (XBT anyone?) for example had some problematic episodes (I don't use XBT data).
The WOD data can be selected in a way that results in a database that is all we need in order to use the most robust thermodynamic algorithms available, which is the Thermodynamic Equation Of Seawater - 2010 (TEOS-10).
III. The Components And The Enhancements
The raw components of the CT DNA are three simple lines composed of the CT line, the high CT path, and the low CT path (see the graphs labeled "WOD Layer 0" - "WOD Layer 16").
Those components are enhanced by a blue fill-in that glues the visual concept together so as to enhance the picture of the span and scope of the thermodynamic flux taking place (see the graphs further down in this post labeled "CT DNA Layer 0" - "CT DNA Layer 16").
This exercise is meant to facilitate the visualization of the fundamental dynamics of ocean heat content and ocean heat flux over a robust span of time in any selected location.
The "WOD Zone" is the fundamental granularity (Fig. 1).
After all, that is how in situ measurements have been stored in the World Ocean Database since before most of us were even born.
I think that the WOD storage methodology is a cool way of handling massive amounts of measurements.
The WOD granularity is important because TEOS calculations can be made using "slices" of the ocean while calculating CT and other TEOS values.
It is better to calculate using in situ measurements from thirty-three depth level slices, then combine them AFTER CT has been established for each slice.
The remaining five pelagic composites made from the thirty-three WOD slices are useful for determining "where to dig" for further gold.
As regular readers know, I have done that in various and sundry ways using the WOD data in various and sundry WOD Zones; thereby I have discovered that the laws of thermodynamics are alive and well in the ocean deeps.
V. Laws of Thermodynamics
CT DNA Layer 0
CT DNA Layer 1
CT DNA Layer 2
CT DNA Layer 3
CT DNA Layer 4
CT DNA Layer 5
CT DNA Layer 6
CT DNA Layer 7
CT DNA Layer 8
CT DNA Layer 9
CT DNA Layer 10
CT DNA Layer 11
CT DNA Layer 12
CT DNA Layer 13
CT DNA Layer 14
CT DNA Layer 15
CT DNA Layer 16
That is, OHC flows to chillier or colder regions, which means that the infra-red ghost photons which compose the moles of energy represented by potential enthalpy (hO) in kilograms of sea water are on the move in the form of Ocean Heat Flux (OHF).
It is interesting that at the mole granularity level or at the photon granularity level, the pattern in graphs is the same as the CT DNA level (In Search Of Ocean Heat, 2, 3, 4, 5).
The simple reality is that CT can be used to get the OHC and OHF picture.
As I wrote above, the graphs today combine all in situ measurements from 33 depth levels into one mean average graph for each of 17 WOD layers (0-16, 17 is all land no water).
As a result these graphs show OHC and OHF latitude band by latitude band.
The "weakness" is that they don't show independent pictures of the differences at multiple depths.
It is as if the ocean has only one depth.
In the past I have done graphs that do show individual depths:
An article in a climate change oriented publication put it this way:
"Scientists predicted in the 1980s that a key fingerprint of anthropogenic climate change would be found in the ocean. If they were correct that increases in greenhouse gases were changing how much heat was coming into the system, then the component with the biggest heat capacity, the oceans, is where most of that heat would end up."
"We have now had almost two decades of attempts to characterize this change, but the path to confirming those predictions has been anything but smooth …" (The long story of constraining ocean heat content).
Some of the rough going has been because of instrument failure (XBT Corrections).
Some of the rough has been the result of using "Potential Temperature" instead of "Conservative Temperature" as a variable in computer models according to scientific teams:
"The quest in this work is to derive a variable that is conservative, independent of adiabatic changes in pressure, and whose conservation equation is the oceanic version of the first law of thermodynamics. That is, we seek a variable whose advection and diffusion can be interpreted as the advection and diffusion of 'heat.' In other words, we seek to answer the question, 'what is heat' in the ocean? The variable that is currently used for this purpose in ocean models is potential temperature referenced to the sea surface, θ, but it does not accurately represent the conservation of heat because of (i) the variation of specific heat with salinity and (ii) the dependence of the total differential of enthalpy on variations of salinity."
(McDougal 2003, emphasis added).
I had a conversation some time back with a software programmer who works on computer models.
I asked whether or not that team used the TEOS-10 toolbox or were going to.
The answer was "slowly" so I translated that as "not yet."
The current standard for oceanography in terms of the thermodynamics of sea water is TEOS-10:
"This site is the official source of information about the Thermodynamic Equation Of Seawater - 2010 (TEOS-10), and the way in which it should be used."
"TEOS-10 is based on a Gibbs function formulation from which all thermodynamic properties of seawater (density, enthalpy, entropy sound speed, etc.) can be derived in a thermodynamically consistent manner. TEOS-10 was adopted by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at its 25th Assembly in June 2009 to replace EOS-80 as the official description of seawater and ice properties in marine science" (Thermodynamic Equation Of Seawater - 2010).
I dare say that we are beyond the time to use that scientific standard.
It is a way to remove rough going and replace it with smoother sailing.
The global question is: "what is the difference between climate and weather?"
The answer is: "global climate" is a global climate system, and weather is a local production of that global climate system (The Damaged Global Climate System, 2, 3, 4).
So, when two people declare at the same time: "the weather is hot today in my local area" as the other says "the weather is cold today in my local area" ... who is correct?
Both are correct in the sense that weather is a local thing (All Weather Is Local, 2, 3, 4) while the global climate system is a global thing.
McClimate Change News
On the other hand, if one had said "my global climate is hot" as the other one had said "my global climate is cold," their error would be obvious.
So, one has to wonder sometimes why the news media, some scientists, and even the president, dwell on the senseless question "was this hot/cold weather event today the result of global warming?"
I have written often that the proper question is: "is all weather, now, the result of the damaged global climate system?"
There is only one answer to that: "yes."
At any given time, now, the damaged Global Climate System produces all weather, whether we think that the weather it produced at any given time is good weather, or whether we think that it is bad weather.
What would those same two people say if stormy weather passed over the west coast, bringing rain to drought stricken areas ("good weather"), contributed to severe flooding along the Mississippi River ("bad weather"), deadly tornadoes in Texas ("bad weather"), then finally caused -20 deg. F to -40 deg. F temperatures to warm up to 32 deg. F above zero at the North Pole ("good weather")?
That happened recently (and is still happening).
That ongoing weather event is still proceeding:
That same storm was creating tornadoes in the tornado alley area: "The vigorous low pressure system that helped spawn devastating tornadoes in the Dallas area on Saturday is forecast to explode into a monstrous storm over Iceland by Wednesday".
That stormy weather came from the Pacific Ocean area, impacted west coast drought areas favorably, then impacted other areas unfavorably with floods and tornadoes, and is still a large threat thousands of miles from where it began.
It was "local weather" at all of those locations but was produced by a global climate system which has been damaged by the heat engine we call civilization.
The Damaged Global Climate System produces all weather, and all of that weather now is all produced by a system damaged by global warming.
