Regarding climate and sea levels
The earth's climate is cyclical - and probably always has been. If I look out of my window, the hillside opposite has a stepped profile caused by repeated cycles of rock types, consisting of a base of marine limestone, overlain by marine shale coarsening upwards to siltstone, a sandstone usually with a fossil soil on top and sometimes a coal seam. then the cycle repeats.
Those cycles of sediment are from the Carboniferous period, and are about 300,000,000 years old.
They correspond to fluctuating sea levels, due to glacial and interglacial periods that were taking place far away on a southern polar continent that comprised modern day Antarctica, Africa, Oz and bits of South America.
Some of the marine critters were evolving very rapidly at that time (especially goniatites - one of the fore runners of ammonites) , and each of the periods of marine inundation, brought a seperate and distinct fauna with it, and those can be used to give time correlations right through the Carboniferous coal fields of Europe, Asia, North America and the northern part of South America, demonstrating that the sea level changes were global - and were not just due to local rise and fall of the land.
Even for times when there was no continent over a pole, and no ice caps, for example the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, there is a cyclicity recorded in sediments.
on a more local scale, if I go ten miles away, there is something like a five kilometer (over 15,000 feet) change in the thickness of carboniferous sediments - during sedimentation, subsidence was faster on one side of a basin margin fault, than it was on the other
Places like Venice, some parts of the Greek islands, and the Nile delta are actively subsiding today, and will continue to subside, regardless of what we humans do or do not do.
I hope I have established that climate change is an ongoing thing? that has been going on cyclically since before there were even dinosaurs
The charges of the Warmerists are:
That the current warming is unprecedented,
That it is catasptophic
and that it is man made
There is also a re-brand away from "global warming", which hasn't been seen in the instrumental record for almost 20 years - to the much looser claim of "climate change"
that change avoids the claims and counter claims of what unusual weather events constituted "climate" and which were "just weather"
First un precedented - that is refuted by the far faster changes at the end of the roman period and at either end of the medieval warm period (the MWP has variously been denied and down played by the warmerists)
We also only have a little over a century of reliable instrumental records for most parts of the world - but "unprecedented in the past 100 years" is hardly a powerful claim.
The famous hockey stick graph (with the hidden decline) combines several carefully cherry picked data sets and variously super imposes an instrumental measurement line
Such a trick of using different sample types would not be permissable in for example a mineral exploration project seeking to be floated on a stock exchange
I can highly recommend Anthony Montford's book "The Hockey Stick Illusion" as an accessible introduction to the problems with the evidence. The book actually came into the shops just as the "climategate" hack became public - so that is a whole seperate and sorry scandal.
Second claim, Catastrophic
In East Anglia, there are reddened fossil clay soils from the Hoxnian interglacial period. these are associated with a fauna in Britain, similar to the current critters in the African savannahs - lions, elephants, hippos hyenas...
In our current interglacial, We are actually past the warmest point, and to find climates warm enough to cause reddening of clay soils, we need to go to the very south of Europe. Britain just isn't warm enough.
Even in the Roman and high medievel period, the records of vinyards and of wine and olive growing, go far further nort than olives and grapes will ripen today. There is also the issue of sea ports and sea gates to castles, that are now well above the tidal reach (in one example, Harlech castle) the exposed dry ground is solid rock - so "silting" cannot be blamed.
Sea level is lower now than it was in the high medieval period.
So - we have precedent warmer climates and these were not catastrophic - on the contrary, they were times of greater plenty.
Third claim
it's Man made
The hockey stick graphs suggest that the time correllation between the industrial revolution and the warming, shows a causal relationship
I'm a little rusty on dates, because honestly this subject bores the tits off me and has done since about 2011. so I might be a few years out on the date that the hockey stick graphs all start, it's something like about 1873
The important point is, if you move the starting point about 3 years either way, the warming trend disappears
something which requires such careful cherry picking to show a correllation - really is not a sound or a robust basis for claiming to demonstrate a causal relationship.
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I've a longer and very much more boring and complicated argument for why lower sea levels would run the risk of triggering big submarine slope failures and cause some enormous tsunamis - and I'm talking much bigger than the new years day 2005 tsunami or the recent Japanese tsunami, some of those tsunami would likely be hundreds of feet high.
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I've got a friend who is very much into Mark Beckoff's work, and was corresponding with Beckoff.
