I did a double-take when I saw this, and at first I thought this must be coming from a fake Twitter account. So, I checked. And yes, it is from the official Nobel Twitter account:

Unfortunately, it’s all too real. We’ve known for a long time (ever since Al Gore and sex-crazed IPPC Director Rajenda Pachauri got the Nobel Prize jointly in 2007) that the Nobel governing body has become little more than a political tool, but you’d think they’d at least bother to check what they are Tweeting.

The part about Arrhenius is correct, the SIX METER sea level rise, not so much.

Borrowing from their buddy Pauchari and the IPCC, in AR5 they said in Chapter 13:

For the period 2081–2100, compared to 1986–2005, global mean sea level rise is likely (medium confidence) to be in the 5 to 95% range of projections from process based models, which give 0.26 to 0.55 m for RCP2.6, 0.32 to 0.63 m for RCP4.5, 0.33 to 0.63 m for RCP6.0, and 0.45 to 0.82 m for RCP8.5. For RCP8.5, the rise by 2100 is 0.52 to 0.98 m with a rate during 2081–2100 of 8 to 16 mm yr–1. We have considered the evidence for higher projections and have concluded that there is currently insufficient evidence to evaluate the probability of specific levels above the assessed likely range. Based on current understanding, only the collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet, if initiated, could cause global mean sea level to rise substantially above the likely range during the 21st century. This potential additional contribution cannot be precisely quantified but there is medium confidence that it would not exceed several tenths of a meter of sea level rise during the 21st century.

Even if we take the worst case scenario from the overly-hot favorite son of climate alarmists worldwide, the RCP 8.5 model, of 16mm per year (current rate is about 3.1-3.3mm/year according to satellite measurements) it will take quite a long time to get to six meter of sea level rise:

6 meters = 6000mm ( 19.7 feet)

6000mm ÷ 16mm/year = 375 years

At the [recent] rate of sea level rise, which shows no signs of acceleration, Wikipedia says:

Based on tide gauge data, the rate of global average sea level rise during the 20th century lies in the range 0.8 to 3.3 mm/yr, with an average rate of 1.8 mm/yr.

Satellite: 3.3mm/year

6000mm ÷ 3.3mm/year = 1818 years

Tide gauges: 1.8mm/year

6000mm ÷ 1.8mm/year = 3333 years

In any of the above three scenarios, civilization will have likely moved on to other power sources beyond fossil fuels. So what’s the worry?

The claim of six meters of sea level rise traces back to this Aug. 26, 2015 article from NASA where Josh Willis is quoted:

“A lot of the major uncertainty in future sea level rise is in the Greenland Ice Sheet,” said OMG principal investigator Josh Willis, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. At about 660,000 square miles (1.7 million square kilometers), the ice sheet is three times the size of Texas. It’s about a mile deep on average and contains enough water to raise global sea levels about 20 feet (6 meters), if it were all to melt. “The question is how fast it’s melting,” Willis said.

From “A lot of the major uncertainty in future sea level rise is in the Greenland Ice Sheet” and the ” The question is how fast it’s melting,” we get enough certainty that clueless organizations like the Nobel, retweet it as if it were fact. Yet, even in the worst, worst-case scenario, we’ll never reach six meters of sea-level rise because mankind will have moved to other power sources by then.

The Nobel committee deserves an award for thoughtless alarmism. Maybe a Darwin award.

Sad!

UPDATE: The curious thing about that image purporting to be from NASA showing 6 meters of global sea level rise is that I can only find one original source for it. It’s from the Wikipedia page on sea level rise, but their source isn’t NASA, but a Flickr account.

The reference image in Wikipedia says:

NASA – https://www.flickr.com/photos/11304375@N07/6863515730/ additional source http://www.livescience.com/19212-sea-level-rise-ancient-future.html (Live Science)

And it says it was created: 23 March 2012, but I can find no NASA reference to this image anywhere during that time period. Further, article references in that LiveScience link to that image suggest it was created to demonstrate sea level over 3 million years ago, not the future:

About three million years ago — at a time when climate conditions paralleled those of modern times — sea levels stood about 66 feet (20 meters) higher, indicates new research.

It seems the image isn’t what some people think it is, including Nobel and Wikipedia.

If anybody can find the source of this image, NASA or not, please leave a comment and link to the source.

UPDATE2:

WUWT commenter “Joe” found it on an old, declared defunct NASA web page that is being kept up for archival purposes.

Anthony, I found a similar image (though with 1 meter rise) on nasa.gov: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/tipping_points_hiresmulti.html

The page, note the yellow highlight:

The image at NASA:

It also explains why I couldn’t find the image, because I was looking for one tagged with 6 meters of SLR, not 1 meter.

Joe adds:

Not sure if this helps you get any closer to the true source, but this NOAA FTP site has the layers to generate the mystery image for 0-6 meters of sea level rise in 1 m increments. ftp://public.sos.noaa.gov/oceans/6m_sea_level_rise/red/

I checked the layers on the FTP page under the “4096” folder, and found them from 1 to 6 meters.

So here’s what it looks like at 1 meter (combining base map and the 1 meter layer), which is still very high, but withing the realm of plausibility in the next century if model projections are to be believed.

Doesn’t look all that scary, does it?

Here’s the same base map with the 6 meter layer from the FTP folder applied: (4K images, click to enlarge)

The image shown by Wikipedia, and NASA:

They still don’t match. Go figure. People are welcome to check my work using overlays at the FTP site: ftp://public.sos.noaa.gov/oceans/6m_sea_level_rise/red/

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