By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, Fellow of the AMS

Joseph Romm, chief alarmist at Climate Progress and a former Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy in the Clinton Gore Administration is trying to save his former boss from further embarrassment. Recall that Gore in An Inconvenient Truth about 20 foot sea level rises this century using a huge crane in a large studio to show how high 20 feet was, when even with the IPCC forecast he could have saved a lot of expense and used a small step stool.

In this post on Grist, Romm notes that sea levels were accelerating upward using JPL satellite derived measurements. The apparent “jump” is a rate of change from 2mm/year from ~1880 to 1990 to 3.4mm/year from 1993 to the present.  Romm says “So sea levels are now rising about 1.3 inches a decade. This is not yet worrisome, but if current emissions trends continue and the rate of sea level rise merely continues the same relationship to global temperature rise that it has had in recent decades, then we could see a total rise of up to five feet by 2100, at which point the rate of sea level rise would exceed six inches a decade.”

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In the same post he plots this image we showed recently.

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We had noted that sea level rise has slowed dramatically as the oceans and the globe cooled (the oceans contract when they cool, expand when they warm). In fact the chart below shows the rate of increase has declined to 1.94mm/year over the past 223 months since the cooling began in 2002, a little less than the 1880 to 1990 average. They were flat or even declined this past year thanks to the La Nina accelerated ocean cooling.

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Romm gets one thing right. If the cooling which began continues as we believe it will, this new JPL site will be invaluable in showing the accelerating sea level rise indeed is no threat. The rate of sea level rise varies with time but it has been rising since the last ice age and there has been no significant alteration to the rate of sea level rise for about 10,000 years. 

Update: Romm who must be running for a position in the Obama Administratation also attacked Joel Achenbach who posted on Weather Extremes on the Washington Post. See how Roger Pielke Jr. viewed Achenbach and Romm in this post here. Romm who clearly knows nothing substantive about climate or weather, cites of all people, Ross Gelbspan a former equally vacuous newsman turned alarmist/opportunist as source and inpiration. Romm is no match for Roger Pielke Jr. who spent his whole career focused on extremes and impacts of weather. Who would you trust on this one?