No consensus on sea level for globo warmers

NY Times:

In its 2001 assessment, its third, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that in the next hundred years sea level would rise globally by at least a few inches and perhaps as much as three feet, a catastrophe for low-lying coastal areas and island nations.

In Paris today the panel will issue its fourth assessment, and people familiar with its deliberations say it will moderate its gloom on sea level rise, lowering its worst-case estimate.

In theory that is good news, because rising seas bring erosion and flooding to coastal areas. But a lower estimate has not been uniformly cheered.

In letters to and conversations with panel members, and in scientific journals, several climate experts said the estimate was almost certainly wrong because the panel was leaving out a growing body of data on melting glaciers and inland ice sheets, which are major contributors to sea level rise.

Those experts say that unless the finding is modified, the panel — widely cited as an authoritative voice on climate change — risks condemning itself to irrelevance.

Climate experts have “a great deal of confidence” in observations that sea level rise is accelerating, said Laury Miller, an oceanographer at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration who was a reviewer for part of the coming report.

Good satellite measurements date only from the last decade or so, he said, so it is hard to draw firm long-term conclusions from them. Also, he said, computer models of how glaciers and ice sheets melt cannot account for much of the observed melting, even though “presumably it is going into the ocean.”

...

Not necessarily. As temperatures heat up more evaporation takes place adding the water to the atmosphere. The report and the scientist do not discuss the phenomena, at least in a way that attracts reporters. But it clearly happens.

In the Gulf of Mexico clouds form up over the warm water in the evenings and then move inland during the day depositing rain over the hottest area of land. As the land cools at night the clouds that are still over land start rolling back to the Gulf and building again because the water is warmer than the land at night. The hotter it is the more it happens. It is one reason why there is always a 20 percent chance of rain along the coast in the summer.

You can also see evaporation inland in ponds and stock tanks, particularly if they are relatively shallow.