Since April the sea around Scotland has risen by an average of 43 centimeters, reports the Sunday Herald, a rate of rise that far exceeds even the worst-case projections of climate scientists. Caught by surprise, the government is preparing emergency evacuation plans for residents of coastal areas and other low-lying areas threatened by the encroaching seas. They urge the public to stay calm but to be ready to move on short notice should the situation deteriorate further.
The Sunday Herald, of course, never published any such report, although one suspects it would have liked to, and certainly the government never prepared any evacuation plans. But the fact remains that in the eight months between April and December 2015 the seas around Scotland rose by an average of 43 centimeters – exceeding the 20-40 centimeter rise predicted for Edinburgh over the next 73 years in the Sunday Herald article that was the subject of Euan Mearns’ recent terrifying risk post.
And no one noticed.
Why did no one notice? Because the 43-centimeter rise in 2015 was a result of seasonal sea level variations that have been going on in Scotland for centuries and which, so far as I know, have yet to have any significant impact on anything. A ~40cm rise and fall in sea level in a single year in Scotland is in fact by no means unusual.
And I myself didn’t notice this until just recently because I hadn’t looked at the monthly tide gauge data (the tide gauge graphs Euan featured in his post plotted annual means). Here I rectify this omission by presenting plots of Scottish tide gauge monthly data. First Aberdeen, the only long-term record in the country. (Sea levels in this and following graphs are given in centimeters so they can be compared directly with the Sunday Herald’s prediction of 20-40 cm of sea level rise by 2090. The data are from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL)):
