Rising Ocean Levels

by C. W. Andreasen— rev 8.5.24

We have all heard about the Earth’s melting ice cap at the North Pole. We see pictures of Polar Bears swimming as if that is bad, but never mind that they are great swimmers and have always swum between ice flows and can swim great distances with ease. We are warned of rising sea levels and sometimes even quoted how much it has risen already.

The BBC is especially bad pushing the climate change issues. It tells the reader that the “Thwaites Glacier is the scariest place on Earth, that Thwaites is currently disappearing eight times as fast as it was in the 1990s, dumping 80 billion tons of ice into the ocean every year and accounting for 4% of the planet's annual sea level rise.” This is another example of fake news.

I am hit with the question of how does one measure the level of the ocean? Sea level IS the standard. Every elevation on Earth is measured against sea level, above, below, or at sea level. How does one measure sea level itself?

How and where is Sea Level measured? Consider that at any given time the sea level at any given point, is affected by the gravity of the Moon as it goes through it’s 29 day cycle and is different distances at various points in it’s orbit. We have tides, high and low tides.

The Earth is spinning at 1,000 miles per hour and because of this the Earth is not a perfect sphere, it is wider at the equator as the poles pull in, making the Earth slightly oval in shape, thus sea level is slightly higher at the equator than at the poles.

Wind and storms affect the depth as wind pushes water in some direction (storm surge).

The surface of the ocean is never stable with ‘waves’ at some level all of the time, everywhere. There is no place that is a stable and a reliable location to measure... and measure against what? The bottom? which is different and shifting at any given point?

I have read reports where it is claimed that during the past year the ocean level has increased by some fraction of an inch. That is fake news.

The melting ice caps, assuming it were true, is supposed to be the time to panic, but what is normal? The Earth swings back and forth from ice age to desert, there is never a point where it is stable. Humans are short-lived enough that the change during a lifetime is very minor, but the Earth is always changing, always has, always will. In the Summer the ice cap shrinks, in the Winter it grows.

Another issue is the fact that water is not new, nor can it go away. We must look at a global view. All water comes from the ocean. The Arctic (North Pole) is entirely ice, made from water from the sea. It floats and displaces the same amount amount of water as it occupied before freezing. This has not changed anything but the temperature of the water. When it melts it goes back to the liquid state. Melting ice is not new water. It is impossible for melting ice to raise the sea level as the water all came from the ocean and is just returning to the ocean. Another point is that we neither create nor consume water, we just use it (and pollute it) while it is on it’s way back to the sea. Take water out of a river, clean it up, drink it, pass it and flush it and send it on it’s way back towards the sea. There is no way to add ‘new’ water, where could it come from? There is a fixed amount of water on the Earth and man can neither add nor subtract from it. All water comes from the ocean and all water returns to the ocean. Mankind does not ‘consume’ water, we just use it and return it to the ecosystem.

Indeed, we should do our best to protect the environment. We, as humans are polluting the world, we are filling our oceans with trash, filling the air with poison, and if we cannot get it under control, Nature has a way of bringing things back into balance as population would decrease, thus reduced pollution.

We really need to recycle everything, and use renewable resources. We need to clean up the mess but we do not need knee-jerk reactions by self-proclaimed experts. Government control is not the entire answer, it is up to each person to modify how they live, and that takes time and education. Pollution is generated and between not generating the pollution in the first place, and recycling, this is the only way to reduce the pollution.

The question remains, where is the evidence that the ocean level is rising?

Fifty years ago experts said we were heading into another Ice Age, and the ‘experts’ once said the Earth is flat. Now the ‘experts’ talk of “Global Warming” and that is not working, so now we say “Climate Change”. People predict high temperatures, severe weather, rising ocean, but nothing happens beyond what is normal. Anything strong is blamed on climate change.

100 years ago, the water looked exactly the same as now, no further up the beach than then.

A few years ago we were supposed to not use paper bags and they were pretty much forced out of existence… save the trees was the cry, so the plastic bag was invented. Now the world is over-run with plastic bags that won’t break down and are a major source of the worlds pollution and we are having to go back to paper bags which are environmentally safe and are made from recycled paper mostly. The “experts” have a very poor record.

What this is all really about is government control using fear as a motivator.

The next time you hear “save the environment for our grand-children”, remind the speaker that “WE” are all grand-children ourselves. We need to be ‘faithful stewards’ of the Earth and not greedy plunders.

One final note, the Great Lakes freeze over every Winter and the level of the lake does not go up or down. When the warm weather returns, the ice melts, and the level of the lakes remain the same. The entire North Pole is just floating sea ice, there is no land, and if it actually entirely melted, the level of the ocean would remain unchanged.

Another point being the fact glaciers move from the weight of newly formed ice at the head of the glacier pushing the glacier toward the sea. As the ice breaks away, new ice is forming at the head and replaces it.