Letter from Phillip Williamson

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
http://ift.tt/16C5B6P

By Paul Homewood

TheTelegraph have published the following letter today from Phillip Williamson, in response to Booker’s column last week:

SIR – Christopher Booker is right to question whether busy airports provide suitable locations for weather stations, particularly for temperature extremes (“Nice heatwave, but June 1878 was hotter”, June 25).

However, his historical analysis fails to mention that 57 per cent of worldwide highs were recorded since 2000, causing many thousands of fatalities. More than half the global population is likely to be at risk from deadly heat in the decades ahead.

Reliable records of ocean warming have existed since the Sixties. These show that the seas are warming from surface to sea floor, soaking up almost all of the extra heat retained by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Furthermore, the rate of the rise in the sea level is, unfortunately, accelerating – even if Mr Booker says it isn’t.

Dr Phillip Williamson
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia, Norwich

Unfortunately the letter is highly misleading.

I will deal with the first section later, but first let’s examine his claim that sea level rise is accelerating.

As I pointed out in my post last week, a recent paper found that the GMSL rose with the rate of 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr during 1993–2003 and started decelerating since 2004 to a rate of 1.8 ± 0.9 mm/yr in 2012.

http://ift.tt/2s6o1Is

In other words, sea level rise is back to the 20thC average and has actually been decelerating, if you want to cherry pick such short periods.

We also know from the IPCC that sea levels between 1920 & 1950 were rising at a similar rate to 1993-2010

It is clear these things go in cycles, and it is grossly misleading to draw trends from the upward part. For instance, New York: