Missing News: Sydney Sea Levels

ABC 702's Sydney new morning radio show presenter Linda Mottram who replaced eco-catastophist Deborah Cameron has continued the tradition of promoting alarm about climate change. This morning one of the topics focused on was sea level rise.

We have sent Linda a copy of a new paper by Alberto Boretti, (School of Science, Information technology and Engineering, University of Ballarat) just published (in press) at the journal; Coastal Engineering. It's titled Is there any support in the long term tide gauge data to the claims that parts of Sydney will be swamped by rising sea levels?


Here's the Abstract:
The government of Australia is supporting the statement that sea levels are rising faster than ever before as a result of increased carbon dioxide emissions. Consequent to this, low-lying coastal areas, where the majority of Australians are concentrated, have been declared at risk of sea level inundations. Maps with 0.5, 0.8 and 1.1 m sea level rise have been proposed for Sydney, the major Australian city. However, long term tide gauges, recording sea levels worldwide, as well as along the coastline of Australia, and within the bay of Sydney, do not show any sign of accelerating sea level rises at present time.

Fig. 1. Boretti, 2012. MSL measured in Sydney (data from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level, 2011c,d). 120 years of measurements (top) show the sea level is not accelerating on average.20 years of measurements (bottom) also show the sea level is not accelerating on average. All the data sets show a weakly rising sea level.

From the Conclusion:

The most likely rise of sea level in the bay of Sydney by 2100 is therefore more likely less than the 50 mm measured so far over the last 100 years rather than the metre predicted by some models.
Via Roger Pielke Snr