Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels

The Maldives is likely to become submerged if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels. Photograph: Reinhard Krause/Reuters

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study “strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results“. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in Decemberthat projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

Siddall said that he did not know whether the retracted paper’s estimate of sea level rise was an overestimate or an underestimate.

Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall said: “It’s one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science.” He said there were two separate technical mistakes in the paper, which were pointed out by other scientists after it was published. A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study’s conclusion.

“Retraction is a regular part of the publication process,” he said. “Science is a complicated game and there are set procedures in place that act as checks and balances.”

Nature Publishing Group, which publishes Nature Geoscience, said this was the first paper retracted from the journal since it was launched in 2007.

The paper – entitled “Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change” – used fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements to reconstruct how sea level has fluctuated with temperature since the peak of the last ice age, and to project how it would rise with warming over the next few decades.

In a statement the authors of the paper said: “Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.

“One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes.”

In the Nature Geoscience retraction, in which Siddall and his colleagues explain their errors, Vermeer and Rahmstorf are thanked for “bringing these issues to our attention”.

Ref.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/21/sea-level-geoscience-retract-siddall

Comment: Why this sudden change of heart from the “scientist” and The Guardians? As real scientists always has known, – historical facts are no guarantee for  a future .. ANYTHING!

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Sea Level Manipulation

*Nils-AxelMörner

(Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm, Sweden) Corresponding Author: Nils-AxelMörner

Abstract: Sea level changes is a key issue in the global warming scenario. It has been widely claimed that sea is rising as a function of the late 20th’s warming pulse. Global tide gauge data sets may vary between +1.7 mm/yr to +0.25 mm/yr depending upon the choice of stations. At numerous individual sites, available tide gauges show variability around a stable zero level. Coastal morphology is a sharp tool in defining ongoing changes in sea level. A general stability has been defined in sites like the Maldives, Goa, Bangladesh and Fiji.
In contrast to all those observations, satellite altimetry claim there is a global mean rise in sea level of about 3.0 mm/yr. In this paper, it is claimed that the satellite altimetry values have been “manipulated”. In this situation, it is recommended that we return to the observational facts, which provides global sea level records varying between ±0.0 and +1.0 mm/yr; i.e. values that pose no problems in coastal protection. Keywords: Manipulation, observational facts, satellite altimetry, sea level change, tide gauges
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Date of Submission: 26-07-2017 Date of acceptance: 05-08-2017
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I. INTRODUCTION
The Mail recently had a benchmark article where Dr John Bates was allowed to present a remarkable documentation of the manipulation of NOAA’s temperature measurements in order to provide the impression that global temperature is keeping on rising over the last decades [1]. This manipulated record was forced to appear in time for the COP21 decision in Paris 2015. The true temperature record provide an 18 year long temperature pause, despite the fact that global atmospheric CO2 content has kept on rising [2]. This sheds serious doubts on the core notion of the COP21 decision claiming the CO2 is the cause of recent global warming. In a follow-up article [3], David Ross posed the core question: How can we trust them? The present paper will reveal another case of “manipulation”. It refers to the core issue in horror scenarios claiming that sea
level is in a very rapidly rising mode, and that low-lying coasts and islands will soon be flooded [4].

II. OBSERVATIONAL FACTS
In the period 2000-2005, I led an international sea level project in the Maldives. By observational facts collected along the shores of a large number of islands, we were able to demonstrate that, indeed, there is no flooding going on, rather the sea level has remained stable over the last 40 years [5-8]. Therefore, in 2007, I wrote a booklet entitled “The Greatest Lie Ever Told” [9].
The same absence of any present sea level rise has now been documented also in Bangladesh, Goa in southern India, Qatar, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Fiji, French Guiana and Venice. In all those places (and their surroundings) sea level has remained virtually stable over the last 40-50 years [10-13]. In Northwestern Europe with a very long history of recording local uplift and subsidence, we have
quite consistent records of a mean rate of sea level rose over the last 125 years of 1.0 ±0.1 mm/yr [11-12, 14]. A summary providing a congruent picture of observed sea level changes over the globe is given in [15-16]. It implies that global sea level changes vary between 0.0 mm/yr to +1.0 ±0.1 mm/yr, which is far less that what is proposed by satellite altimetry (below). Furthermore, such rates pose no problems in coastal management.

III. SATELLITE ALTIMETRY
The NOAA satellite altimetry records of the last 24 years is said to give a rise of 2.9 ±0.4 mm/yr [17].The record of University of Colorado (UC) gives a rise of 3.3 ±0.4 mm/yr [18]. There is something strange in the satellite altimetry documentation, however (which I have tried to point the finger on in numerous papers and lectures of the last two decades [6, 9, 10, 15, 19-21]). I will hereby return to this question. I illustrate the case in Fig. 1, and claim that we here have another case of “manipulation” of measured data.

More ..

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Do trend extraction approaches affect causality detection in climate change studies?

Abstract