Global Warming: Long term observations yield unsurprising results

[popeyespappy]

A 10 foot rise in sea level (predicted by 2200) would inundate more than 28,000 square miles of the US alone. That land is currently valued at $900 billion. It is home to 13 million people. The property rights libertarian crowd should be screaming at the top of their lungs.

Sea level rise is not directly caused or influenced by climate change.

This statement is unadulterated bullshit. Back it up with something besides your opinion if you can. Warming oceans and sea level changes are part of climate change. If you go back to the OP you’ll see that our planet is warming because of an energy imbalance. It is receiving more energy than it is radiating back into space. That is simple physics. The data says the energy imbalance is caused by human activity. Mostly in the form of the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Most of the excess energy is going into the oceans. Causing them to warm even faster than surface temperature. The oceans are warming because of people. Not as a result of natural cycles.

Sea level change is the result of deep ocean temperature, not surface temperature. When the deep ocean heats up water expands, when it cools it condenses (until it freezes in which case it then expands again).

Yes, sea level change is affected by the temperature of the oceans. Most of the increased rate of sea level rise we have observed in the last 200 years has been the result of warmer water. Once again, water that is warming due to human activity. Temperature is not the only thing that affects sea level. The chart you posted clearly shows that the volume of water also affects sea level. It shows that most of the increase in sea level over the last 20 thousand years was due to melt water.
Greenland and Antarctica currently have about 30 million cubic kilometers of ice covering them. According to experts that is enough water to raise global sea levels more than more than 200 feet just in volume alone. No one is expecting all that ice to melt any time soon. In fact about 25 million cubic kilometers of it is in the East Antarctic and most believe that ice is going to remain relatively stable for the foreseeable future. The other 5 million cubic kilometers in the Greenland and West Antarctica is subject to melt due to global warming, and that is enough ice to raise sea levels more than 40 feet.

Sea levels have been rising for the past 20,000 years:

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If that was really correlated to climate change then it would mean the earth has been in a constant state of global warming for the past 20,000 years.

That is not what the chart you posted shows. According to your chart sea levels have remained relatively stable for the last 8000 years. If you look at the data at a finer scale…



You can see that for most of the last 2000 years sea levels were actually decreasing. It wasn’t until the start of the industrial revolution that sea levels began increasing again. It hasn’t been a linear increase either. Sea level has been increasing at a geometric rate, and that does correlate with observations of recent global warming. So please Aractus, if you have another explanation for the cause of the recent increase in the rate of change in sea levels that doesn’t include human influence on our environment then let’s hear it.