Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Anthony has pointed out the further inanities of that well-known vanity press, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This time it is Michael Mann (of Hockeystick fame) and company claiming an increase in the rate of sea level rise (complete paper here, by Kemp et al., hereinafter Kemp 2011). A number of commenters have pointed out significant shortcomings in the paper. AMac has noted at ClimateAudit that Mann’s oft-noted mistake of the upside-down Tiljander series lives on in Kemp 2011, thus presumably saving the CO2 required to generate new and unique errors. Steve McIntyre has pointed out that, as is all too common with the mainstream AGW folks and particularly true of anything touched by Michael Mann, the information provided is far, far, far from enough to reproduce their results. Judith Curry is also hosting a discussion of the issues.
I was interested in a couple of problems that haven’t been touched on by other researchers. The first is that you can put together your whiz-bang model that uses a transfer function to relate the “formaminiferal assemblages” to “paleomarsh elevation” (PME) and then subtract the PME from measured sample altitudes to estimate sea levels, as they say they have done. But how do you then verify whether your magic math is any good? The paper claims that
Agreement of geological records with trends in regional and global tide-gauge data (Figs. 2B and 3) validates the salt-marsh proxy approach and justifies its application to older sediments. Despite differences in accumulation history and being more than 100 km apart, Sand Point and Tump Point recorded near identical RSL variations.
Hmmm, sez I … so I digitized the recent data in their Figure 2B. This was hard to do, because the authors have hidden part of the data in their graph through their use of solid blocks to indicate errors, rather than whiskers as are commonly used. This makes it hard to see what they actually found. However, their results can be determined by careful measurement and digitization. Figure 1 shows those results, along with observations from the two nearest long-term tidal gauges and the TOPEX satellite record for the area.
Figure 1. The sea-level results from Kemp 2011, along with the nearest long-term tide gauge records (Wilmington and Hampton Roads) and the TOPEX satellite sea level records for that area. Blue and orange transparent bands indicate the uncertainties in the Kemp 2011 results. Their uncertainties are shown for both the sea level and the year. SOURCES: Wilmington, Hampton Roads, TOPEX
My conclusions from this are a bit different from theirs.
The first conclusion is that as is not uncommon with sea level records, nearby tide gauges give very different changes in sea level. In this case, the Wilmington rise is 2.0 mm per year, while the Hampton Roads rise is more than twice that, 4.5 mm per year. In addition, the much shorter satellite records show only half a mm per year average rise for the last twenty years.
As a result, the claim that the “agreement” of the two Kemp 2011 reconstructions are “validated” by the tidal records is meaningless, because we don’t have observations accurate enough to validate anything. We don’t have good observations to compare with their results, so virtually any reconstruction could be claimed to be “validated” by the nearby tidal gauges. In addition, since the Tump Point sea level rise is nearly 50% larger than the Sand Point rise, how can the two be described as “near identical”?
As I mentioned above, there is a second issue with the paper that has received little attention. This is the nature of the area where the study was done. It is all flatland river delta, with rivers that have created low-lying sedimentary islands and constantly changing border islands, and swirling currents and variable conditions. Figure 2 shows what the turf looks like from the seaward side:
Figure 2. Location of the study areas (Tump Point and Sand Point, purple) for the Kemp 2011 sea level study. Location of the nearest long-term tidal gauges (Wilmington and Hampton Roads) are shown by yellow pushpins.
Why is this important? It is critical because these kinds of river mouth areas are never stable. Islands change, rivers cut new channels, currents shift their locations, sand bars are created and eaten away. Figure 3 shows the currents near Tump Point:
Figure 3. Eddying currents around Tump Point. Note how they are currently eroding the island, leading to channels eaten back into the land.
Now, given the obviously sedimentary nature of the Tump Point area, and the changing, swirling nature of the currents … what are the odds that the ocean conditions (average temperature, salinity, sedimentation rate, turbidity, etc.) are the same now at Tump Point as they were a thousand years ago?
And since the temperature and salinity and turbidity and mineral content a thousand years ago may very well have been significantly different from their current values, wouldn’t the “formaminiferal assemblages” have also been different then regardless of any changes in sea level?
Because for the foraminifera proxy to be valid over time, we have to be able to say that the only change that might affect the “foraminiferal assemblages” is the sea level … and given the geology of the study area, we can almost guarantee that is not true.
So those are my issues with the paper, that there are no accurate observations to compare with their reconstruction, and that important local marine variables undoubtedly have changed in the last thousand years. Of course, those are in addition to the problems discussed by others, involving the irreproducibility due to the lack of data and code … and the use of the Tiljander upside-down datasets … and the claim that we can tell the global sea level rise from a reconstruction in one solitary location … and the shabby pal-review by PNAS … and the use of the Mann 2008 temperature reconstruction … and …
In short, I fear all we have is another pathetic attempt by Michael Mann, Stefan Rahmstorf, and others to shore up their pathetic claims, even to the point of repeating their exact same previous pathetic mistakes … and folks wonder why we don’t trust mainstream AGW scientists?
Because they keep trying, over and over, to pass off this kind of high-school-level investigation as though it were real science.
My advice to the authors? Same advice my high school science teacher drilled into our heads, to show our work. PUBLISH YOUR CODE AND DATA, FOOLS! Have you been asleep for the last couple years? These days nobody will believe you unless your work is replicable, and you just look stupid for trying this same ‘I won’t mention the code and data, maybe nobody will notice’ trick again and again. You can do all the hand-waving you want about your “extended semiempirical modeling approach”, but until you publish the data and the code for that approach and for the other parts of your method, along with the observational data used to validate your approach, your credibility will be zero and folks will just point and laugh.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 23, 2011 at 3:27 am
John Silver says:
June 23, 2011 at 2:41 am
“Why is the satellite (red) curve grafted at the top of the others?
It’s no more “grafted” than any of the other datasets. It is simply included.
Surely the satellite numbers are relative and only relates to themselves.
The satellite curve could be placed anywhere vertically in the graph but actually do not belong there at all.
I don’t understand why the satellite data is “relative and only relates to themselves”. The satellite data actually agrees rather well with the tidal gauge data over the common period (1992-2011). It is included because it is another source of information about the sea level changes in the region.”
The exchange quoted above is very important. Mann and crew always take two series of numbers and slap them together with no justification whatsoever. In this case, Mann and crew took some proxy numbers and some tidal gauge numbers, slapped them together, and provided no explanation or justification for doing so. Real science requires explanations of the behavior of the proxies and the tidal gauges which can justify comparing them. Mann and crew’s work is no less lacking in context than the satellite record.
It is imperative that everyone understand the circularity (question begging) of Mann and crew’s method. He takes two sets of numbers whose names suggest that they go together, tidal gauge and local proxy, slaps them together, and assumes that there is a context for the comparison. Sadly, most people who report on Mann and crew buy this circular reasoning. This ridiculous method was obvious in Hockey Stick One when Briffa’s tree ring data began to decline and had to be hidden. They had slapped together tree ring data and temperature data with no explanation whatsoever of the physical factors that connect the two and make the “slapping together” useful for science. After discovering that the necessary context did not exist, they did not have scientific instinct enough to investigate what physical factors caused the now infamous “decline” that had to be hidden.
The rising sea level scare tactic is just another grant money grabber to continue funding for science quacks. It is a diversion from the tree ring fiasco as well as the emailgate. Only thing they continue to do (as Willis so points out) is produce trash for the paper shredder.
Hey, they picked a relatively sedate area (geologically)… that data should be consistent right?
Well.. there’s the rivers… and barrier islands. Okay, and it’s on a large sedimentary region, something to compact over time. And we are have lithospheric rebound going on from that Ice thing a few thousand years ago… but other than that, things are cool right? Nothing can mess up the consistency of the data or change the biology of the area (growth rates etc)
What about hurricanes?
Track data for storms passing this location.
http://i52.tinypic.com/zlchzl.png
From http://csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes/#app=1834&3e3d-selectedIndex=0
I visited Horton’s papers webpage
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/earth/benhorton_p.htm
and there’s a lot of papers showing that a lot of real work went into the microfossil analysis – see for e.g., here :
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/earth/bph/Res2009/Kemp%20et%20al%20Marine%20Micropaleotology_2009.pdf
To me it seems that they just put a reference to IPCC2007 and the necessity to know how much the sea will rise to the Introduction as the reason for their analyses and then they just continue their research.
I really don’t know, why they felt that a co-work with Mann is necessary. Their research looked quite reasonable…
Dave Springer says:
June 23, 2011 at 6:37 am
Dave, given that they have not revealed either their data or their code, how on earth can you say it was “pretty solid work”? For all any of us know, they may have made the numbers up in their basements. Nor is this some idle fantasy, as Michael Mann has proven he is not above playing fast and loose with the data and its interpretation..
So at present we cannot tell if the work has any foundation at all, much less if it is solid.
w.
On the point of the aquifer in the Chesapeake Bay-Hampton Roads area, interesting information is provided by environmental historian Dr. Kent Mountford in the Chesapeake Bay Journal from May 2003, in his article “Not all is well with overconsumption of water from aquifers”. I am not sure if the return of wet weather has partially turned things around since his article was written, but it seems pretty clear that it would take a long time (many decades at the least) to restore the aquifer to its previous levels:
“As the Chesapeake region’s population increased, demands on deeper aquifers increased dramatically. At the same time, unwise land use practices were destroying the quickly renewable water resources near the surface. One man filled in a valley to build a road to the water, causing an artesian spring to go dry. In a developed area near Solomons, homeowners sunk wells into the groundwater aquifer and in dry years, one after another found their wells going dry, and paid to have still deeper wells drilled.
Deep aquifers are not inexhaustible. In the early 1980s, our 310-foot well into the Nanjemoy began to fail as dozens of new homeowners, and former shallow well users, began withdrawing from this source. We had to pay $3,000–$4,000 to have a deeper well drilled.
….
In the 2001–02 drought, the artesian spring at Old Spout—which had run in all weather for more than 200 years—failed, and the owners drilled a well into the Aquia.
…
At the same time, the Maryland Department of Environment’s frequently issued water withdrawal permit announcements show that millions of gallons per month of new water consumption is permitted from the state’s underground resources. This cannot go on at present rates.
It might look like recent rains have wiped away the specter of drought, but that’s simply not the case. Public records show that deeper aquifers have been falling about 3 feet a year. In recent years, this accelerated to 7 feet a year, and last year in one key aquifer, the drop was an astounding 21 feet!”
http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=1140
However, he does not discuss subsidence. It seems to me, though, as if the issues with the aquifer could indeed be contributing factors.
rbateman says:
June 23, 2011 at 6:47 am
Not true at all. We’re looking for a difference over time of inches, in a context where tides are often six feet and a single wave can easily be that or more. In that context, we can tell absolutely nothing from old photographs. A minor difference in the tides or a single wave can make a huge difference in the photos, and we’re looking for tiny difference in long-term-average sea levels.
w.
“The first conclusion is that as is not uncommon with sea level records, nearby tide gauges give very different changes in sea level. In this case, the Wilmington rise is 2.0 mm per year, while the Hampton Roads rise is more than twice that, 4.5 mm per year. In addition, the much shorter satellite records show only half a mm per year average rise for the last twenty years.”
And why are they using the Wilmington GIA anyway? If I look at the GIA data accessible via PMSL, I find gauges at Duck Pier — a few miles North of Sand Point and Morehead City about half way between the two sites. Seem like better choices to me. I don’t recall that they explained their choice, but I’ve only read the Kemp paper once.
Reference to ferd berple–you have the US mapping agencies in error… USGS maps the US & it’s territories on the land, the US Defense Mapping Agency (it changes it’s name every 5 yrs or so) maps the land masses for the rest of the world, the former Coast & Geodetic Survey (I think it is NOA–part of the Interior Dept) maps the waters off the US Coasts and the World’s coasts.
I reading the MM articles, he obviously missed either his Earth Science, Physical Geography or Geology classes. I also would refere to an excellent article the was previously published by WUWT on Nov 26, 2010….NYT”s sort of clarity on Norfolk sinking aka “sea level rise” & an inconvenient map. I know the University of MD profs personally, they are excellent.
Their other hockey stick was broken, so now they are trying to “fix” another one in order to continue playing.
Jimbo says:
June 23, 2011 at 6:54 am
Great find, Jimbo. A couple of interesting quotes from the paper, which studied an area very near to that studied by Kemp 2011 (emphasis mine):
Check. Regarding the other confounding variables, they say:
Check. And from the Abstract:
Check. Of course this means that if you are using this method for paleo work, you have to show that all the environmental variables except sea level height have remained constant for the last thousand years … which in this case is extremely doubtful.
w.
all of this carbon swapping going on is wiped out by every new volcano.
“…the authors have hidden part of the data in their graph through their use of solid blocks to indicate errors, rather than whiskers as are commonly used”
That’s actually appropriate, since both the sea level and time point have uncertainties.
“…what are the odds that the ocean conditions (average temperature, salinity, sedimentation rate, turbidity, etc.) are the same now at Tump Point as they were a thousand years ago?”
Sedimentation rate can be directly determined from the dating of the cores – more sediment, more sediment before a new time point. Foraminifera species ratios are driven by depth, not temperature – there are estimates of water temperature from foraminifera Mg/Ca ratios that have been done elsewhere, but Kemp et al did not use that technique – they estimated just depth from the species ratios. This is not a valid objection on your part.
Foraminifera growth rates also average out any tidal or wave influence – you don’t get species ratio differences over the course of a tidal cycle.
The isostatic rebound estimates used to correct for coastal level changes are quite certain – unless you’re claiming that GIA rates have mysteriously changed up and down by a factor of x2 in the last couple of hundred years in ways that just happen to match the MWP and LIA, which clearly show up as rate changes in the Kemp et al data (assuming, as should be fairly reasonable, that the rate of sea level rise since the last glacial period is driven by ice melt and thermal expansion, i.e. temperature).
The rest of your objections appear to be “how can they know this stuff, the measurements are inexact…”. Kemp et al gave estimates of uncertainty – even if those estimates were undershoots by a factor of 5 or more, their “hockey stick” for sea level is still present.
“…given that they have not revealed either their data or their code, how on earth can you say it was “pretty solid work”?”
I suggest you take a look at the paper (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/13/1015619108.full.pdf+html) and the supporting information (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/13/1015619108.full.pdf+html) – both public – and reconsider that. There’s plenty of information, more than enough for anyone in the field to replicate this work.
Don K says:
June 23, 2011 at 9:21 am
Don, the choice to compare with Wilmington and Hampton Roads was mine. I looked at the two nearer gauges (Duck Pier and Morehead City) and both of them had quite short records, one of which (from memory) didn’t go to the present. That made Wilmington and Hampton Roads the nearest sites with long-term (>50 years) records, so I used them.
w.
This paper was published under the PNAS heading “Sustainability Science”. What’s that? It also notes: “The authors declare no conflict of interest.” As if.
This is another example of the blatant gaming of the peer review process. The journal referees and reviewers who hand-waved Mann’s paper through peer review should have their names made public, maybe one year after publication. The disinfectant of daylight needs to shine on this disgraceful promotion of the self-serving propaganda produced by Mann’s pseudo-science climate clique.
My apologies, cut and paste error: the supplemental information for Kemp et al is at http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2011/06/14/1015619108.DCSupplemental/pnas.1015619108_SI.pdf
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 23, 2011 at 9:39 am
Jimbo says:
June 23, 2011 at 6:54 am
“Check. Regarding the other confounding variables, they say:
The five variables [salinity, loss on ignition (LOI), clay fraction, vegetation cover, and pH) account for 57% of the explained variance in the foraminiferal data (Figure 11). Partial CCAs show that the total explained variance is composed primarily of elevation (16%), with other significant influences from salinity (11%), LOI (10%), clay fraction (10%), vegetation cover (9%), and pH (7%). The associated Monte Carlo permutation tests (p 0.02; 499 permutations under reduced model) in- dicate that all these variables except for pH are highly sig- nificant. Therefore, each of these gradients accounts for a sig- nificant proportion of the total variance in the foraminiferal data.
Check. And from the Abstract:
Partial canonical correspondence analyses and Monte Carlo permutation tests suggest that all available environmental variables except pH play a significant role in understanding the variations in foraminiferal data.
Check. Of course this means that if you are using this method for paleo work, you have to show that all the environmental variables except sea level height have remained constant for the last thousand years … which in this case is extremely doubtful.”
Now this looks like real science.
TomB said: “I’m no longer skeptical, I’m convinced it’s a hoax.”
I didn’t really let on, early on, but my actual skepticism was extremely tentative, even through the days of Climategate. Now? Pffft!
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 23, 2011 at 9:39 am
Check. Of course this means that if you are using this method for paleo work, you have to show that all the environmental variables except sea level height have remained constant for the last thousand years … which in this case is extremely doubtful.
===================================================
Willis, 403 documented hurricanes have made land fall……
It’s impossible……….
Some music for Mann to face:
“Castles made of sand
Fall into the sea
Eventually.”
——— Jimi Hendrix
At the very least, it should be still stuck in peer review, and reviewers should be screaming for more explanation. But as McIntyre said, PNAS stonewalled work by an atmospheric physicist who has published in PNAS before because his paper couldn’t include detail, but a graduate student gets his past review with major obvious questions.
I wonder if the next tactic will be saying “Consensus exists, thousands of graduate students agree…”
Willis:
“Hmmm, sez I … so I digitized the recent data in their Figure 2B. This was hard to do, because the authors have hidden part of the data in their graph through their use of solid blocks to indicate errors, rather than whiskers as are commonly used. This makes it hard to see what they actually found. ”
I’m a computer guy and i wouldn’t accept such fancy graphics for publication without the according data in a plain old CSV file, ASCII-encoded and made available for download. There is no excuse for omitting that in the internet age. When you publicize, you must make the data available that produced your charts, period. No soup for Mann and Rahmstorf.
It is no surprise that sea level rise accelerated in the twentieth century due to warming. Lets move on to the twenty first century. It is clear that it is now decelerating and will likely fall back to the late Holocene 1 mm/yr mean. There appears to be a rush to produce papers before the deceleration, global temperature decline, and arctic sea ice volume increase becomes apparent. From 2000 forward it will be all about hiding the decline.
One may wonder why Mann would blatently use upside down Tiljander data 3 times. Why would Mann and the rest of the hockey team use bad Graybill data and bad Yamal data again and again and again – even when there is much better data available. The answer is clearly that they have an outcome in mind and real data will not give them that outcome.
NikFromNYC says:
June 23, 2011 at 9:51 am
TomB said: “I’m no longer skeptical, I’m convinced it’s a hoax.”
“I didn’t really let on, early on, but my actual skepticism was extremely tentative, even through the days of Climategate. Now? Pffft!”
Yep. This paper by Mann and crew is clearly nothing more than a Gorish attempt to amplify the Warmista drumbeat that the sea levels are rising and doom approaches quickly. In this case, it is clearly propaganda.