Proof that that is the reason quantity of hurricanes goes down?
Alan, Science is all about observations, it all starts there. The fact that their
frequency of occurrence is going down is an observation, although the relatively few hurricanes cause the statistics to have broader ranges of likelihood (standard deviation is larger with small population sample sizes), making their predictions to have larger error margins.
The reason for the number going down can be multifold (like changing sea and air currents at various depths/heights). I've not studied the literature as for all the possible reasons, but I'd not be surprised that when the preceding hurricane more violently stirs up the water surface, it will mix more cooler water from larger depths with the surface water, thus robbing the surface from even more temperature needed for the next hurricane. So it's not just the building hurricane itself that extracts heat, but also more and cooler deep water being added to the surface water mix.
As an aside, how do we know that earthquakes under the ocean where the plates shift one on top of the other isn't causing the sea level to rise?
Because there is too much water to be impacted by the SLOOOW moving plates, the effect will be very small. In the case of e.g. Mexico, I believe we're talking about sliding, locking and releasing tension and grinding/breaking-off, by something like 6-8 cm/year in the horizontal direction. A vertical displacement, under gravity and with large mass/pressure/liquifying is probably much less, and plates move down (called subduction)
and up when they silde under/over each other.
Maybe you are thinking about e.g. the Himalayas which were pushed up by the colliding tectonic plates of India (pushed down into the earth's mantle) and Eurasia (pushed/crumbled up). But also do not forget that the Geologically relatively fast movement (10 cm/year) towards each other, took 120 million years, and nowadays has slowed down to 2 cm/year. The current sea level rise that can be observed is very
much faster and is almost fully explained by adding the volume of land-ice meltwater and thermal expansion. These measurable/known quantities fit the observations and are considered to be the two main driving forces.
Is sea level rising?Yes, sea level is rising at an increasing rate.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sealevel.htmlThe two major causes of global sea level rise are thermal expansion caused by warming of the ocean (since water expands as it warms) and increased melting of land-based ice, such as glaciers and ice sheets. The oceans are absorbing more than 90 percent of the increased atmospheric heat associated with emissions from human activity.
and
Sea level rise at specific locations may be more or less than the global average due to local factors such as land subsidence from natural processes and withdrawal of groundwater and fossil fuels, changes in regional ocean currents, and whether the land is still rebounding from the compressive weight of Ice Age glaciers.
Cheers,
Bart
