This becomes an interesting thread.
I find a bit of amusement at the quote that scientists were surprised by how fast sea level is rising in the face of global warming.
The main reason they are surprised, is that scientists do not read each others work, especially if it falls outside their discipline.
I live, work, and study in the Bahamas. The Bahamas is a reef limestone archipelago nation, a chain of 700 islands, cays and rocks with no volcanic core. All of the larger islands are riddled with caves at every depth. I have explored a bit of these underwater caves on the island where I live and can tell you about beautiful limestone cave formations at many depths, in both fresh and salt water.
A few years ago I went to a lecture by a geologist who was studying these caves. Since stals cannot form in water, the presumption is that these were air caves at some point and for some time. Since some are in salt water, some in fresh, there is a presumption that relative sea level has changed. According to this geologist, the Bahamas are as close to a datum as we have on earth. He claims that we can assume that sea level rises and falls and the caves maintain a constant height.
By sawing and polishing a stalactite from a known depth, scientists could study the rings, made by growth in air, and different stains and decomposition in either fresh or salt water. This geologist claims to have very accurate measurements of sea level going back about one million years.
The ice ages are noticeable, when ice is locked up in the polar caps, sea level drops and the stals grow. When the caps melt, sea level rises and the stals are first bathed in fresh water, then salt as the sea gets higher. By taking many measurements he learned some interesting things.
One point he made repeatedly, the polar caps do not melt, they collapse. Antarctica seems to have a trigger point and like a row of dominos, when that point is reached, sea level jumps up. From low to high in 70 years. Previously, it was believed to take hundreds if not thousands of years for the caps to melt.
He claimed that we are very close to the collapse point, apparently, some other scientists are realizing it too.
As to other points in this thread;
Yes, there are warming and cooling trends, and these things are cyclical. As of 1979 or 80, the sun began a cooling phase. This was discovered by physicists who were measuring quarks given off by the suns thermonuclear energy. Without humans, the earth should be entering an ice age, maybe a small one, maybe slowly.
Instead of a start of a cooling period, every set of measurements has shown warming, everywhere on earth.
There are many different measures of warming, frost dates, average temperatures, glaciers receding, bloom dates of flowers, disease spread to altitude and so on and so on.
It was just mentioned that the ozone layer was damaged, thinned, and has a hole in it, that this was human caused is almost universally accepted. This means more solar radiation gets to the surface. Someone mentioned how much oil has been burned in the past 100 years, they forgot to include coal, and deforestation.
So much CO2 is entering the atmosphere that the pH of the ocean is dropping. If you are worried about coral, that will kill it faster than heat.
As to the ocean level rising, the surf line in front of the house I used to live in, is now over thirty feet closer to the house in the past twenty years
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