Eli recently wondered over to Jen's place where she was celebrating New Year's 2272 in Tuvalu with a close friend. Don't ask and Eli won't tell. Tuvalu, of course, is a bunch of reefs and small islands with a maximum height above sea level of about 5 m today. It is a small place and getting smaller as seal levels rise. Tuvalu is really up against it, being in an area of the South Pacific that is experiencing rapid sea level rise as shown in the map to the right from the University of Colorado Sea Level Change site. The data is from the Topex/Poseidon satellite. The green circle is ~Tuvalu
This is an important issue in Australia and New Zealand as the islanders are looking to get off to somewhere else in the neighborhood, and there are lots of the usual suspects furiously blaming the Tuvaluans for Tuvalu's problems. Well suffice it to say that there are barrels of red herrings in the sea, and strawmen on land, but one in particular attracted Eli's attention the claim originating with the dynamic duo of Baliunas and Soon in Pacific Magazine (2002) and trotted out by Janama.
Check the ScienceNow that looks fairly strong oh bunnies, but, as Eli tells you RTFR and look at the continuation where this riddle will be answered by the Interactive Sea Level Wizard.
Well, rather than rely on Brown's "sense" of sea level rise, let's check the instruments. As it turns out, estimates of globally averaged sea level rise in the 20th century are irrelevant since Tuvalu's local sea level change is very different from the globally averaged change. There are three estimates of sea level changes for Tuvalu. The first is a satellite record showing that the sea level has actually fallen four inches around Tuvalu since 1993 when the hundred-million dollar international TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite project record began. Second comes from the modern instruments recording tide gauge data since 1978. There the record for Tuvalu shows ups and downs of many inches over periods of years. For example, the strong El Nino of 1997-98 caused the sea level surrounding Tuvalu to drop just over one foot.
The data for Tuvalu, 179 Longitude 8S Latitude, shows that
the 1998 El Nino caused the sea height to fall by lots of centimeters. Eli thought it would be fun to calculate linear fits for different periods starting in 1993. Take a look to the right. The rise is a fall from 1999 to 2002, but after that rapidly settles in at a constant +0.75 cm/yr. Writing in 2002, with a short 8 year record with a huge drop in 1998/99 one could say that the satellite record showed a net drop in sea level. Many have done the same thing with global temperature, starting fits in the extremely warm year of 1998. As tamino says, garbage is forever and Sally delivers nice steaming packages.