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Comment by c-linkage | Hacker News Reader

The chart is good because it shows actual measurements, but I'm concerned about the baseline being 1970. It is possible that measurements prior to 1970 are higher and make the projected measurements look worse than they are, especially since many charts for mid-Atlantic sites were clearly on a downward trend shortly after 1970.

I'm not saying there is an intentional attempt to bamboozle readers. It's just hard to judge the report on such a short time scale.

EDIT: I'm not a climate denialist, but I have many people in my life who are. I was really looking forward to showing them this website but refrained knowing that they would come back with the argument I mentioned.

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I shouldn't be surprised that we still see this standard climate denial logic, but it's worth pointing out that your logic here is not particularly strong. The problem with this line of reasoning is it takes the assumption that all we have is measurements without any real understanding of the process that's happening to cause those measurements.

Sure, if we knew nothing about Earth's climate (and also didn't have plenty of other ways to measure historic sea level), only having 50 years of measurements might be misleading. But we know that sea level is rising and we know why it is rising. We have a very strong hypothesis as to what's happening and we see this hypothesis confirmed again and again across a very wide range of subjects that otherwise have no relation to one another.

On top of this, we do have plenty of other measurements for historical sea levels that all indicated yes, sea level is raising they just aren't perfectly apples-to-apples "actual measurements" so it wouldn't be perfectly honest to include them in this chart.

> just are perfectly apples-to-apples

aren’t?

Fixed, thanks!

This is an interesting podcast: https://corecursive.com/briffa-sep98-e/

"In this episode we explore the “Climategate” scandal that erupted from leaked emails and code snippets, fueling doubts about climate science. What starts as an investigation into accusations of fraud leads to an unexpected journey through the messy reality of data science, legacy code struggles, and the complex pressures scientists face every day."

He goes into the code/data that is seemingly the root-cause of a lot of "it's all a hoax." I found it pretty informative, as to how climate data is gathered and processed (by the scientists). And the limitations therein. He's simply trying to explain the cause of climategate, rather than advocate any view.

It's also a great example of a tech/dev investigation into root-cause analysis, of someone else's code. So it's interesting from that point of view, even if you're less interested the climate side of it.

> standard climate denial logic

This stinks of circular reasoning. It's bad logic because climate deniers use it and climate deniers are wrong because they only ise bad logic.

The reason the other measurements you mentioned can't be included are often that the measurements are or equal or greater distance between eachother than this entire set. Including this data in one of those sets would demonstrate that there are plenty of times in history where the sea level changed the amount it has in the last 50 years.

If we know so much about why it's rising, what's with all the measurements? We don't "know" nearly as much as you're implying. The reason we don't go around measuring healthy humans body temperature is because we know what it is. The entire purpose of the measurements is to increase understanding.

Current forecasts of Y temperature rise would lead to X sea level rise rely in a static model of all other variables. It should be obvious that the climate is anything but static, considering the entire argument is about climate change.

It's perfectly reasonable to criticize this kind of extrapolatory thinking without denying the fundamentals of climate change.

> Including this data in one of those sets would demonstrate that there are plenty of times in history where the sea level changed the amount it has in the last 50 years

In history? No. Sea levels have never been higher in the written record.

In geologic history? Of course. No serious scientist argues otherwise. The point is returning to those levels means abandoning Baltimore, Houston, much of Los Angeles and most of Miami and multi-trillion dollar projects to protect San Francisco, New York and Boston.

> The point is returning to those levels means abandoning Baltimore, Houston, much of Los Angeles and most of Miami and multi-trillion dollar projects to protect San Francisco, New York and Boston.

Here’s my problem with all this stuff. All the science says LA, NYC, etc. are going to be underwater. Not maybe, not in the worst case, no. All the reporting says this is pretty much a forgone conclusion, and has for many years.

So why have these cities not started working on erecting (say) 50ft tall “future-proof” sea walls? Even if they end up not being needed, it _seems_ like this is the type of climate change mitigation step that would be a prudent thing to do. Certainly more so than the whole lot of nothing currently being done. Surely LA and NYC politicians and voters, being so much more educated than all those dumb red state hicks would be in favor of that, wouldn’t they?

In short there's no actual will and people think short term.

A bit longer:

Good luck sourcing that from taxes. People vote, and those projects would A, fall to graft, B piss off many in your voter base both as a consequence of the graft and the general disagreement over their value.

The answer is you would see the people who greenlit the projects voted out and the projects would be scuttled.

People can say they know this is a problem but because its in the abstract most of your voter base just won't go for it and it's squarely in a "people don't actually vote in their best interest" type of problem.

It's a riot trying to get a few new MTA tunnels approved and needed repair and modernization for the NYC subways is always basically just out of the question.

So 50 ft sea walls? Yeah people would actually be under water and still doubting the need for them.

> why have these cities not started working on erecting (say) 50ft tall “future-proof” sea walls?

Because we don’t need to yet? Also, a sea wall doesn’t block, it deflects. Protecting Manhattan means deflecting those surges to e.g. Long Island and New Jersey. That’s a difficult conversation much easier had after a hurricane washes away some of the opposition (and/or generates urgency in the core).

> LA and NYC politicians and voters, being so much more educated than all those dumb red state hicks would be in favor of that, wouldn’t they?

Yes, but they’ll do what those states do with their own climate risks: wait for a catastrophic failure that ultimately costs more but unlocks federal funding and so costs less locally.

I'm not talking about height, I'm talking about rate if change.

The height is concerning regardless but the rate of change is the link to anthropomorphic climate change. If it's shown that this rate of change is not unprecedented, the link to human causes is less solid.

I'm not here to say CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas and that humans aren't likely responsible for current and future warming, I'm pointing out that there are plenty of people who believe the same as me but to a degree that is not supported scientifically.

The data fits the co2 hypothesis great but Baysian reasoning also must account for other models that fit the data as well and must even include the prospect that there are other unknown causes that could produce the effect, as there clearly are given the thoroughly precedented nature of our current situation.

> This stinks of circular reasoning. It's bad logic because climate deniers use it and climate deniers are wrong because they only ise bad logic.

That would be a good point, if that was what I was arguing but it's clearly not. I am pointing out that this is a common form of argument used by climate deniers, and then, independent of that fact, demonstrating why it's poor logic. My argument regarding why the logic is poor has nothing to do with the fact that's it's a commonly used line of reasoning in climate denial. However the classification of the logic as such is useful to help people quickly identify the common set of erroneous methods used that show up very frequently in online discussions (and sadly, very commonly on HN).

Climate denial arguments do tend to use faulty logic in a similar vein to the way creationists tend to use faulty logic, because the evidence in favor of the alternative hypothesis is so much greater the easiest way to "attack" that hypothesis is through poor use of logic. But clearly that does not imply that all logic employed by people in these camps is inherently faulty.

> It is possible that measurements prior to 1970 are higher

Except for all the evidence from trees and Antarctic ice cores, sure. We couldn’t forecast hurricanes at all until the 1950s, and even then barely until the age of satellites, so 1970 makes sense as a starting point for high-frequency data. But let’s not pretend the lower-frequency data don’t exist. To the extent there is bamboozling afoot, it’s from the climate deniers.

I was curious about this, so I looked for data from prior to 1970 [1] and it's all clearly trending in the same direction. So 1970 isn't special or misleading in this case, there does not appear to be any bamboozlement going on.

[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

Thank you for adding information in response to my comment. I've been to [Mer de Galce](https://montenversmerdeglace.montblancnaturalresort.com/en) and seen the effects of glacial melt, so no doubt it contributes to sea level rise.

If that is a risk, it is just as likely to cause an error the other way and then we are underestimating sea-level rise.

check out the Eocene geological period. invest in swimming gear...

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