Guest essay by Albert Parker*
Hopefully everybody remember Sallenger’s “hot spots” of sea level acceleration along the East Coast of the US.
Asbury H. Sallenger Jr, Kara S. Doran & Peter A. Howd, Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America, Nature Climate Change 2, 884–888 (2012), doi:10.1038/nclimate1597
This was one of the many examples of bad science misinterpreting the sea level oscillations by cherry picking the time window.
As 6 more years of data have been collected, let see if the hotspots are now the “hottest on record” or if they have cooled down.
The logic of Sallenger & co. was based on the comparison of the rate of rise of sea levels over the first and second half of time windows of 60, 50 and 40 years, i.e. the comparison of the rate of rise over the first and the last 30, 25 and 20 years respectively of these 60, 50 and 40 years windows.
This did not make any sense to me, as if you do have sinusoidal oscillations of periodicity 60 years, positive and negative phases of 30 years, and you select the end of the time widows at the end of one positive phase, this way you will always have “positive acceleration” even if there is none, and everybody knew about periods and phasing of the natural oscillations.
The logic was clearly flawed, but obviously Nature did not accepted any comment. The science is settled, and can’t be discussed.
So, let see the data, for example for Washington DC and The Battery NY, to check if the hotspots have produced huge sea level rises since December 2009.
The figure below presents the MSL (monthly average mean sea levels) and the SLR computed with 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 years’ time windows for Washington DC and The Battery NY.
Is there any one able to spot any sign or acceleration or simply oscillations? With the data up to December 2009 and with the data up to April 2016, not a chance. There are only oscillations about same longer term trend.
Which is then the novelty of the last 6 years of data? Since December 2009, the sea levels have declined in both Washington DC and The Battery NY, -3.3 mm/year in Washington DC and -10.7 mm/year in The Battery NY.
It seems that immediately after December 2009, the last month of data considered by Sallenger & co. in their June 2012 paper, corrected online June 2013 with the publishing in the supplementary of the actual numbers, a positive phase of the oscillations has been replaced by a negative phase.
*Note: Originally this story was submitted under a pseudonym “Giordano Bruno”. The author, Albert Parker has consented to it being changed to his real name. – Anthony Watts
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There is an old, old book or sometimes questioned provenance. The Travels by one Marco Polo. There is a small section, and I use the spelling here of some translators, called “The Provence of Irak”. What you will find is same old, same old = same new, same new.
Ah, another sign of global warming.
The progressives thought that they had the perfect sky-is-falling paradigm in the pseudoscience climate change/earth warming fraud. Finally real science is catching up. The fraud is unraveling faster than the progressives can lie to keep it alive. Fraud of this magnitude should be a capital crime.
Anthony Watts is associated with the Heartland Institute which is a front for the fossil fuel industry and has zero credibility. They would never be invited to court of law to testify as expert witnesses. Like supporters of Trump, the site is selling snake-oil.
Gery Katona–lurked under many bridges recently? Calling anyone who disputes you religion a vendido is nothing more than name calling.
Speaking of name-calling, what do you think referring to AGW as a religion says about you? I know exactly why conservatives think they way they do and can name over 3 dozen of their traits and entire “ideology” and they all have a common denominator. No name-calling or trash talking required.
gery,
Environmentalism is a religion:
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe.
(source)
gery katona
If $25,000.00 in a one-time grant for related research forever taints a skeptic …
How many government-paid, self-selected, so-called “scientists” can you buy for 92 billion dollars in climate change money from government bureaucrats government politicians who want 1.3 trillion in new carbon taxes and international government agencies and bankers who want their share of Enron’s 31 trillion in carbon trading futures?
Can you identify the source of the $25K? The Heartland Institute is just a front operation for the fossil fuel industry. It does not disclose its source of revenue because it would blow their cover. Like I said, they would never be invited to testify in a court of law as an expert witness because they have no credibility.
[??? .mod]
gery,
You do not know what you are talking about.
I have been following Watts Up With That since 2006. I spent 20 years as a fiduciary in the investment industry. I was held to the highest level of accountability under the law. Anthony Watts has credibility, honor and ethics. Your comments demonstrate ignorance in my opinion.
Bud
I am telling you that anyone associated with the Heartland Institute immediately raises a red flag. There is a reason they do not disclose their funding sources. Further, you are a smart guy as are many AGW deniers. But being smart and paranoid are not mutually exclusive. We were all born with fear in our DNA from evolution and it is on a continuum, we all have different amounts. And the more you have, the further right on the political spectrum until you reach a point where healthy fear begins to resemble symptoms of paranoia. The most common symptom is the sense that everyone is out to get you. Conservatives clearly think government is out to get them. THAT is the root cause of their AGW denial, it is sub-conscious and has nothing to do with the science. They just make stuff up when evidence crosses paths with an inherited fear – it is how the brain works.
Here is an example: Take a group of people from a cross-section of the political spectrum. Put them in a room with a NASA scientist who explains that we have a rover on Mars and the only evidence is an image on a monitor which can easily be computer generated. Everyone in the room believes the story to be true despite the minimal evidence. Take the same group in a room with another NASA scientist and have him/her present the avalanche of evidence that we have been clobbered over the head with every month for the past few decades about AGW. The conservatives are the only ones in the room to deny the science. Does that make sense? Of course not. What is different? Sub-conscious fear.
This same fear/paranoia is why 85% of conservatives live in the suburbs and rural areas, are into the gun culture, homophobic, xenophobic, vote more readily, are disproportionately wealthy, always want to shrink government and if you want I can name 3 dozen more traits and their entire ideology and they all have the same common denominator.
I don’t hold it against them, actually some of the traits are admirable. They can’t help it they were born with the fear any more than we can blame gays for being born the way they were. The source of the fear is clearly from evolution. If you survived 100,000 years as a species, you had to had a ton of fear. Remember, human knowledge increases exponentially over time. If you heard a sound in the woods back in the day, you would freak out because you didn’t understand anything and your mind would make stuff up in response. But much of that old fear is no longer required to survive today. It is obsolete.
And yes, it is worldwide. Vladimir Putin? No doubt. Militants in the middle-east? For sure. Iranian hard-liners? Absolutely. And the shinning example has to be the North Korean regime whose entire country is structured around the false sense that everyone is out to get them, yet nobody is! Bizarre.
Ever wonder why a group of highly intelligent, highly educated Supreme court justices could think so differently? Now you know. Some of these guys like Trump, you can see the fear in their faces.
In some of these extreme cases, they should not be in positions of public policy. Why? They sub-consciously prioritize irrational fear over the well-being of the people, their countries and even the planet. In the international cases I cited, are the people better off in any of those regimes? Are we better off with a gigantic military and crumbling infrastructure?
It is all the result of evolution and is sub-conscious, those affected aren’t even aware of it. Pretty simple.
I have always had a problem with the concept that (global) sea level rise can have local variations in rates. There are only two theoretical explanations for local variability for sea level rise: either the earth’s gravity is exhibiting local time variations in strength (in violation of General Relativity) or there are local time variations in the height of the land (as well-documented around the world).
Somehow slow seismic effects are not a scary as a re-enactment of Noah’s Flood, so it gets roundly ignored.
Are you accusing the authors of cherry-picking their data?
The real science for a mechanism that explained what the Earth’s surface will eventually do was postulated by Newton. Gravity level the surface of the Earth. Erosion will be quite a help. Until then we should all wake up to the ideological nonsense of non-scientists, politicians and Al Gore and use what finite energy sources we have wisely and efficiently. That means stop wasting energy on dreamtime stuff like perpetual motion cars and windmills making electricity.
Well if that’s what the observations are doing then I feel an algorithmic adjustment coming on.
The adjusters would also have to get the “C4G” of each state to agree to “adjust” all the CORS stations’ output and databases.
However since they’re in real time use by surveyors on the fly, plus a boatload of them plus universities subscribe to the service (which I’ll bet is true on every state) plus a whole bunch of other state & federal agencies are plugged in and using the the networks …. Well what will several dozens herds of shorthairs look like now that they’ve been out of the bag for about 10 years??? Enough chickens have flown that coop(s) to keep folks like Hansen corralling strays for the rest of heritage days!
“And as they thundered by him their hot breath he could feel …..”
Mrw,
“There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.”
Uh yeah because Saddam already had 550 tons, worth millions. Btw, it was Richard armitage who leaked plumes name. (He opposed the war.) Had nothing to do with the Bush admin. More mind control…
Richard Armitage was US Deputy Secretary of State from 2001-2005 under the Bush administration. The Plame event happened in 2003.
It’s public record that Dick Armitage was an opponent of the war and leaked Plame’s name inadvertently. A simple google search will verify it. It also means nobody in the Bush admin. intentionally released Plame’s covered status as punishment for her husbands findings, especially when Saddam already had 550 tons of concentrated yellow cake that he wouldn’t allow inspectors to inspect. Any guesses what he’d be doing with it today were he in power?