First, sea level has been increasing at 1 to 3 mms per year every year since the end of the ice age. More precisely, the sea level has been rising at 1 to 3 mms per year since the bulk of the ice age glaciers disappeared about 6,000 years ago. Before that, sea level was rising as fast as 5 cms (2 inches) per year at the the heighth of ice age melting.
It is natural in an interglacial like we are in for the sea level to rise very slowly even after the bulk of the ice age glaciers have melted.
Other satellite measures show that Greenland and Antarctica are increasing in ice mass.
So as usual, the study is data selection and not telling the complete story, so that the general public is mislead.
The authors, however, will now be invited to all the great global warming parties and they will have their grant applications approved.
So as usual, the study is data selection and not telling the complete story, so that the general public is mislead
This is SO true, and all you have to do to witness the deception is read the recent SPM AR4 (Summary for Policy Makers, 4th Assessment Report) released by the IPCC in February. In it, they have a section claiming to present sea level rise evidence as further proof of global warming. Here is a link to the report.
Fourth Assessment Report SPM
In this report, there is a graph (Fig. SPM-3, page 6) of sea level rise over the 20th century up to the present, with the last 10 years highlighted in red. A little bit further down the report is a table (Table SPM-1, page 7). This table presents the observed sea level rise over the period from
1961-2003, for a reported average of 1.8 mm/year. They then compare this against the years 1993-2003, which they calculate to be a rate of 3.1 mm/year.
The objective is to present an alarming increase rate which changed from 1.8 to 3.1 mm/year, presumably a result of global warming.
But is this fair?? Or is it data cherry picking? One might fairly ask... Why choose 1961 as the first year in a long range???Choosing the year 1961 as the starting point of a longer range seems a bit peculiar. What is so special about 1961? If you look at the graph, you will see why they decided to use that as the reference rate. That is because if they went further back in time, they would get a steeper rate to compare against the more recent rate, and they didn't want that. You see, there was another steep rate rise from 1925 to 1961 which they didn't want to include in their calculations. Wonder why?? I'll tell you why. If they had chosen a starting date of, say, 1925 to the present, they would have had a reference rate closer to 2.2 mm/year. They decided it was more emphatic to use a reference of 1.8 instead of 2.2. This is TYPICAL of the IPCC's unscientific proclivity to cherry-pick data for their conclusions.
A final point I would like to make is the use in this case of data from a short time period. If global warming skeptics tried to use data over a short period of time to disprove the IPCC's theories, they would argue that short periods are not reliable. For instance, skeptics often point out that temperatures have been nearly flat over the last 6 or 7 years, suggesting a leveling off of recent temperature rise. IPCC defenders argue back that you can't use short time periods for argument. Yet the IPCC in their report chooses the last 10 years of observed sea-level rise to use as a comparison against longer-term rise rates.
THIS IS SCIENTIFIC AND INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY IN IT'S MOST DESPICABLE FORM AND SHOULD BE THROWN IN THE FACE OF THE IPCC!! \