People who really really worry that we are in the midst of a climate crisis can’t understand why a growing number of people are rolling their eyes. I have tried to explain it to them, for example in this post in which I list 11 reasons the general public does not generally share GWH. Tonight, I ran across two more stories that illustrate why the credibility of dire warming predictions is in tatters. First, scientists admitted they have added about 1 inch of sea level rise to the actual rise experienced on the coasts. From the Fox story:
The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided in May to add 0.3 millimeters — or about the thickness of a fingernail — every year to its actual measurements of sea levels, sparking criticism from experts who called it an attempt to exaggerate the effects of global warming. “Gatekeepers of our sea level data are manufacturing a fictitious sea level rise that is not occurring,” said James M. Taylor, a lawyer who focuses on environmental issues for the Heartland Institute. Steve Nerem, the director of the widely relied-upon research center, told FoxNews.com that his group added the 0.3 millimeters per year to the actual sea level measurements because land masses, still rebounding from the ice age, are rising and increasing the amount of water that oceans can hold. “We have to account for the fact that the ocean basins are actually getting slightly bigger... water volume is expanding,” he said, a phenomenon they call glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA)....Climate scientist John Christy, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that the amount of water in the ocean and sea level were two different things. “To me… sea level rise is what’s measured against the actual coast,” he told FoxNews.com. “That’s what tells us the impact of rising oceans.”
Somehow, such “adjustments usually seem to go in one direction. Besides, even if this is a dispute about definitions, given the hyper controversial nature of the issue, the scientists should have prominently disclosed what they did, and why, when the data was released—in order to prevent the very credibility problem that not doing so has now created. (Read the article further for an interesting back and forth between the sea level measurer and the skeptics about the relative importance of the added inch, the sea level expert claiming it is negligible compared to the IPCC’s “expected” amount of sea level rise this century—2-4 feet—and the skeptic noting it is about 20% of the actual small amount of rise in the last century—7 inches—with no acceleration in recent years.)
Second, the IPCC has apparently returned to its old bad ways of issuing reports with data from political sources as if they were objective scientific findings. From a National Post column by Lorne Gunter:
[W]ho could have imagined that the IPCC would have emerged from these setbacks so cocksure that it would return to its old ways of conflating environmentalist propaganda with scientific investigation? But it has. Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre discovered earlier this week that the IPCC’s recent report on alternative energy — which asserted that it was possible to convert the world to 80% green energy by 2050 if politicians would simply tax conventional sources and spend billions on alternative sources — was lifted largely from Greenpeace reports. The lead author of the IPCC report turns out to be Sven Teske, a Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner, who the IPCC does not identify as such in either the report or its media releases. Mr. Teske is also the author of much of the Greenpeace material on which the IPCC report is based, in effect making him a peer reviewer of the validity of his own material.
Good grief. The alarmists keep shooting themselves in the foot and wonder why their credibility is bleeding out.
