Sea Level and Global Warming (continued)

Stefan Rahmstorf posted a clarification of the IPCC AR4 sea level projections on the Real Climate blog this Tuesday. There are 95 comments at this writing (Thursday morning), only a few of which show much insight or real grasp of his data and model results. As the above graph from Rahmstorf (2007) shows, tide gage readings are showing a recent rapid sea level rise which appears to represent an abrupt change from the "stabilized" very slow rise which has prevailed for the past 5,000 years or so^{1, 2}. For the long term perspective on postglacial sea level rise, I suggest the excellent post by Greg Laden which appeared on the same day.

¹Rahmstorf, Stefan, 2007, A semi-empirical approach to projecting future sea-level rise, Science 315(5810): 368-370.

²Church, J. A., and N. J. White, 2006, A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise, Geophysical Research Letters 33: L01602.