On 27/07/2018 13:11, JGD wrote:
On 26/07/2018 18:45, N_Cook wrote:

They and other academics are still putting a linear "fit " to the curve.

Just to be clear, I do think the ice-melt, especially looking 30-50
years ahead, is potentially serious and absolutely needs careful
monitoring by academics and amateurs alike.

But I'd be pretty certain that the professionals are all too well aware
that sea level rise may be slowly but steadily accelerating beyond a
linear trend.

Their problem, however, is that of needing to stick to a simple (ie
linear) model until someone can suggest a credible alternative model
grounded in some physical processes. I dare say that there is a lot of
work going on to develop such a model as - presumably - recorded in the
recent literature (not something I've explored). But an arbitrary
mathematical fit, especially one involving some power terms, is just not
likely to give meaningful results, especially when used to extrapolate
several tens of years into the future.

I don't know your circumstances, but if you're interested and able, why
not go along to one of the sea level rise conferences. Looks like there
was one earlier this July in Liverpool, but others scheduled include:

https://waset.org/conference/2018/08/paris/ICSLRE/home

https://waset.org/conference/2018/08/amsterdam/ICSLRGC

Not looked in detail, but seems a little odd to have two highly related
meetings so close together. MAybe they're looking at different aspects
of the problem.


I'm in regular contact with 2 international repute academics at the NOC/
Southampton, concerning newspaper archives for the historical context
of storm-induced depths of marine flooding onto land locally as there
are no useable high-frequency tide-gauge records to get a handle on that
aspect . Original gauge plots tend not to have survived , eg Lymington
ones were lost ,ironically , in a marine flood of 1989 and Southampton
ones for some odd reason were stored at the Ordnance Survey and were
bombed out of existance in WW2.
I've only asked one of them about questionable linear global sea level
rise and he considers a linear "curve" fit perfectly proper and then
quote the IPCC spread of beyond-linear guesstimates for SLR this century.
So I go my own way on that.