Here's NC's longest, highest-quality sea-level record (Wilmington), plus the WRAL prediction. Wilmington is NC's only GLOSS LTT tide gauge. Sea-level there has been rising at about 2.3 mm/year for the last 82 years.
(click for larger version)
WRAL
is predicting that it will average 11.1 mm/year over the next 83 years
= nearly five times as fast as the real trend. That's despite the fact that,
other than spikes which coincide with strong El Ninos, there's been no
significant acceleration in sea-level rise coinciding with the steep
increase in CO2 levels.
Their prediction is based on superstition, not science.
The recent N&O Forum was at least as bad. This is the letter I handed out to folks who attended it:
I also wrote the N&O a Letter to the Editor, but they haven't printed it.
We
have only 82 years of sea-level measurements here in NC, but on the
other side of the pond, at Wismar, Germany, they've been measuring
sea-level for twice that long:
Sea-level there hasn't accelerated in 150 years.
At
some other locations there was a slight acceleration in sea-level rise
in the late 1800s or the early 1900s, but there's been no significant,
sustained acceleration in global sea-level rise in the last 85 years.
The only reason
that the alarmists have for predicting accelerated sea-level rise is
that CO2 levels are going up. But CO2 levels have been going up very
dramatically for 2/3 of a century and, as you can see, those rising CO2
levels are having no detectable effect on the rate of sea-level rise.
We've
done the experiment (by raising CO2 levels), and we've seen the effect
on sea-level (too little to detect). But the fringe "experts" that WRAL
relies upon refuse to believe what that evidence shows. Here's what the
great physicist, Richard Feynman would tell them:
“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.”
Dave