Readers may recall my story from April 6th where I asked:
What’s delaying UC sea level data from being updated?
As you can see in the graph above, the data has not been updated since mid 2010. I wrote then:
I sent a query from their web page asking why, and hope to hear back soon.
Actually I sent two email queries, one from the web page form, and one to this scientist, listed on the UC sealevel contact page
Dr. R. Steven Nerem
phone: 303.492.6721
fax: 303.492.2825
Over a week passed, hearing nothing. I decided to make a phone call today to Dr. Nerem. Here is what I learned.
First, I give the man points for answering his own phone, a true rarity these days in our voicemailed world.
I explained who I was, why I was calling, and that I had sent emails that had gone unanswered, and asked for an update.
His response was:
“We are updating our web page to a new design, and that is the reason for the delay.”
I replied with: “OK I understand, but the SL data hasn’t been updated since mid 2010, and people are asking questions about it.”
“Well we only update a couple times per year anyway. Sea level changes pretty slowly you know.”
I said: “Yes, but in looking at your previous release schedules, you would have been due for an update in February 2011, and that hasn’t happened. ”
To which he replied:
“This new website design won’t work with our current format, so if you can just be patient and wait a couple of weeks we’ll have it online.”
I thanked him for his time and ended the call.
So there you have it, the reason for a lack of update? Form before function.
Somehow, I don’t think anybody gives rat’s ass about how “prettied up” the web presentation of sea level data is. Just show us the data. I’ll take a table, CSV file, hell even a fax.
So in “couple of weeks” we’ll see if the wait for the new prettier web page was worth it. Somehow, I think it is going to end up looking a lot like this one with more web bling than substance:
Which ironically, has an even longer delayed update of sea level data:
I shall revisit this story in two weeks time, or upon a web page update of http://sealevel.colorado.edu/ whichever comes first.
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You guys are so caught up in this need to believe in a conspiracy, aren’t you? Everyone that doesn’t believe what you do is crooked right?
Everyone needs a club and a tribe I suppose – so much better if part of the creed is that you know better than everyone else.
Are you a bit concerned that you are being deprived of your opportunity to use the La Nina Cherry Pick?
I wonder if the new web page design will hide the decline?
As Im sure most of you know, Rattus Norwegicus was blamed on spreading the blck plague back then.
Now it seems Rattus Norwegicus is at it again spreading the plague….the AGW plague.
Plague, AGW….diseases….damned rats!
Gary says:
April 15, 2011 at 2:04 pm
Real reason (speculative): his graduate student was studying for his/her comps, teaching labs, grading papers, etc. and just couldn’t get to the update.
endquote
Ad to that the possibility that the grad assistant cannot explain it in English.
I meant to write “black plague”, not “blck plague”.
Rattus Norwegicus also reminds me of The Stranglers.
Would it be ALL that much ‘effort’ to simply mention the reason for the delay somewhere on the home page or perhaps in the “release notes”?
Sheesh – they’ve got to be hiding something. Their ‘reason’ cannot possibly be applied to updating a text file.
The data release is months late but I bet Dr. Nerem was never late getting to the airport for an
all expenses paid vacation to some exotic locationinternational climate change meeting.“As you can see in the graph above, the data has not been updated since mid 2010.”
Check out the following to see how much more than normal snow is on the ground in the northern hemisphere compared to other years: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/nhtime-4month.jpg
So with that being the case, how could the oceans possibly be higher than last summer? Are there other compensating factors that can make up for this?
The U of Colorado webpage…
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/results.php
contains links to the data in the form of text files as well as images of plots of the data. These files are easy to get to and easy to use.
It will not be good if the new site does not have the text files, or if access to this data is made difficult in some manner.
“Well we only update a couple times per year anyway. Sea level changes pretty slowly you know.”
=====================================================
Yet it’s moving fast enough for global panic !!!!!!!!
tommoriarty says:
April 16, 2011 at 8:05 am
The data at the link has NOT been updated, and stops at 2010.75.
The excuse of webpage update is not valid.
I would be more inclined to believe that they are a victim of budget cuts, as the data source appears to be shut down.
Probably working on a new ingenious format that allows them to “Hide the decline”!!
“The sea level changes very slowly, you know.” Indeed. Would he want ot be quotes on this?
They’re probably wondering why we’re making all this fuss, and inventing all these alternative explanations, when we’ve already noticed (twice) that basically the same data is updated and available elsewhere.
Obviously, it would be nice if every climate site on the internet was kept right up to date, but why does it matter, when we already have the data?
Rather than bootlessly speculating about whether they are trying to ‘hide the decline’, wouldn’t it be more interesting and effective to put up a plot of the decline they are actually ‘hiding’? Just curious.
Well I can predict from my interesting results that the sea level has remeained unchanged (for the past 35 years) as the average temperatures have not changed over the past 35 years.
So far I personally checked weather stations in 4 places from 1975-2010/11:
Pretoria (South Africa), Marion Island (in the southern Indian ocean) , La Paz (Bolivia) and Brisbane (Australia).
All 4 places show that mean temparature has remained unchanged, maxima rising and minima going down when I deliberately chose places and times where I expected more CO2 and warming. As far as the decline in minima is concerned, the results are:..
Pretoria -0.04
Marion Island -0.03
La Paz -0.04
Brisbane -0.06
in degrees C / annum
The average (so far) is -0.04.
I must assume that this average figure of mine is a reasonable estimator of the global average.
It proves that the theory of warming due to an increase in carbon dioxide or GHG’s is invalid. (because then you would expect minima to rise at least as fast as the means and the maxima).
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
I fail to see how it would take over 6 months to change a website design.
LOL
Its gone down, there just hiding it. Unfortunately we are going to see a lot more of this from these sites, that is, withholding data that does not fit the AGW scam.
A most serious situation for Global Trade if sea levels drop precipitously.
All those ports would need dredging, and in a hurry.
The major canals would likewise be imperiled, putting the big Super Cargo ships on the shelf.
Got drydock?
Maybe they are employing David Copperfield to try and make a few small pacific atolls disappear.
What’s a fax?
I noticed over at Cryosphere Today that they update sea ice averaging information with in a peculiar pattern — with a few exceptions, when the ice (say in the south) makes an upturn they’ll track it for a while then the updates stop until it has turned down again. So rarely does one visit the site and see that it is “currently” on the increase.
More tellingly, they published a time series of average ice cover for each of the four seasons, with one point per year. This stopped in 2007 for Autumn, Spring and Annual time series, but continued til 2008 for Summer and Winter.
I’m conjecturing that this results from the extreme low in 2007/2008, after which there was an upturn. Also, the transition seasons tend not to tell “the narrative” particularly well, which may be why they st0pped. You can’t just go on continuing the series for other seasons when two of them are stopped; so all have to be stopped. I don’t think the narrative would tell very well if a couple of seasons show a decline while a couple show an increase.
At one point I emailed the administrator as to why the Southern data was relegated to the bottom of the page, and he quite frankly replied that the design of the page was based upon the assumption that its primary user base was people concerned about climate change. I don’t presume this means that he did not think Southern data is relevant to climate change, only that it is not regarded as “useful” for advocacy. I feel this is quite revealing.
What’s a fax?
I dunno, but let’s not let fax get in the way of a good story.
🙂
sunsettommy says:
April 16, 2011 at 2:14 pm
I fail to see how it would take over 6 months to change a website design.
You’ve never had to do it then, I would guess. Planning, designing, writing, testing. It’s a long-winded and tedious process.
The sea-level update was only due in February, so is not six months late in any event.
Better to wait and see, rather than make wild guesses and half-cocked assumptions.
“Better to wait and see, rather than make wild guesses and half-cocked assumptions.”
… or just get the up-to-date data from the other site. 🙂
Of course, it only takes seconds to change a web-site design, because you continue to operate the old site in parallel while you’re writing the new one. And the only way it takes six months to write is if the writing is very part time, or you have to go through the extended bureaucracy of marketing and publicity committees some places throw up in an attempt to make sure they don’t lose reputation by publishing anything amateurish or wrong. Ironic.
No, it’s obviously an excuse, but I think it’s far more likely to be hiding the low level of resources and low priority they devote to it than any sort of ‘hide the decline’ shenanigans. The sceptics have already got the data, we already know about and can see the decline, (and know that it’s unimportant – sea level rise is noisy and often pauses for a while), so what would be the point in trying to hide it?
No, somebody forgot to update it, or has been busy with other things, or the person who originally did it has left and nobody else was interested. Nobody is funding it and it’s not anybody’s job. It’s not important, anyway, it’s just some web-site filler for the kiddies to put in school projects. Something like that.
I call BS. Updating to a new design A) doesn’t take that long and B) is essentially irrelevant in this fied. The only thing they have, which could take a while, is the interactive wizard. Everything else is links, texts and images. Yes, I call BS.