Gordian Knot of Nonsense – Part 5. Resulting sea-level rise rates
November 20, 2011As usual, I will refer to ”Climate related sea-level variations over the past two millennia” (Andrew C. Kemp, Benjamin P. Horton, Jeffrey P. Donnelly, Michael E. Mann, Martin Vermeer, and Stefan Rahmstorf, PNAS, 2011) as KMVR2011.
Please see this index of my posts concerning KMVR2011. Check back occasionally because the list of posts is slowly growing.
I will keep things almost entirely graphical this time around (no equations, YEAH!).
Figure 1. Figure 4c from KMVR2011. Global EIV land and ocean temperature and KMVR2011 equilibrium temperature.
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Figure 2. Same as figure 1 from digitized data.
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Figure 3. Same as figure 2 overlaid with GISS temperature (raw and smoothed) and with five hypothetical temperature scenarios starting around 1950
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Figure 4. Same as figure 3, zoomed in to 20th century
Consider the temperature scenarios shown in figure 4. Which one do you think would lead to higher sea-level rise rates, γ=0.9 or γ=1.1? Take a look at figure 5, and you may be surprised!
Figure 5. Resulting Sea-Level rise rates when the KMVR20011 model is applied to my hypothetical temperature scenarios compared to the results when the model is applied to GISS temperature.
No Mistake
This not a result of some outrageous error in my calculations. This is a direct consequence of the KMVR2011 model. Like VR2009, this bizarre result comes from choosing b to be negative (their choice, not mine).
Some may argue that KMVR2011 uses a wide range of values for the variables in their Bayesian updating. True enough. But they kept b negative. ALL combinations of variables that they used would give qualitatively the same results that I have shown.
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