Oops! Sea Levels Dropping Everywhere, According to NASA

The climate clowns are excited about this:

The problem with climate change denier clowns is they have no memory (or no shame), otherwise they might recall this:

The period the clowns are gleeful about (a period of not quite two years) looks like this in the context of over two decades of data:

Astute readers may notice that sea level has "dropped" twice since Bjorn Lomborg stepped on his big clown toes, but notice that the long term trend is upwards.

Our latest climate change clown wonders:

Oddly enough, or not, NASA provides no explanation on its page about what is happening, only allowing for information about “sea level rise… from melting ice sheets and glaciers and the expansion of sea water as it warms.” But if that’s true, where is all the water going?

Probably, as in previous periods where sea level has "dropped", it's gone onto the land, in the form of precipitation, ie rain, caused by short term variations in regional weather.

This rain of course eventually runs back into the ocean, and this short term effect has no long term influence on the trend.

But pointing this out in the past doesn't stop the climate change clowns from falling over their feet again as if it's funny.

Addendum: Snopes have done a story on this. Verdict (unsurprisingly) FALSE.

Global temperatures have plummeted!

Back in 2008, this meme was going round the internet. Google it and you'll find in in many places. I can't work out where it was first posted.

The coveted .7 degree rise in temperatures over the last 100 years has been wiped out with last years below “normal” temperatures

This is the period referred to. (The original reference was to HadCrut3- I've used HadCrut4 because HadCrut3 is now defunct.)

Temperatures had indeed fallen. Whether or not global warming had been wiped out, time would tell.

This year, it's deja vu all over again in denial land, with this claim from David Rose:

Global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C since the middle of this year – their biggest and steepest fall on record. 

He was referring to Satellite temperatures over land, but lets look at global HadCrut4 temperatures to compare to the previous graph.

Temperatures have indeed fallen again.

But almost a decade has passed since the last "falling temperatures have wiped out AGW" meme. What has happened since then?

Temperatures recovered a bit, dropped a bit (but not as much as 2008) Then rose rapidly, then dropped again (but not as low as 2008).

Temperatures this year fell from a much higher starting point, and fell to a much higher low (so far).

The reason that temperatures fell of course is that an El Nino warmed the planet's surface for a while, and when it finished, temperatures cooled.

The climate clown's act looks even less convincing the second time around.

No, the world ISN'T getting warmer

Sometimes you have to go back an re-examine claims made by global warming bozos to prove just how stupid they were.

The bozos this time are David Rose and the Daily Mail. Exactly three years ago the Mail published a story with the headline

The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along

With the claims that

No, the world ISN'T getting warmer

and

The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases

and

But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely. The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. 

Based on a graph they had "borrowed" (uncredited) from Ed Hawkins.

Three years later, this is what global temperatures look like:

The graph shows projected global temperature with 75% and 95% certainty.

And the legend reads

...and this heavy black line is the official world average temperature- which is about to crash out of them both.

Or not.

Actual temperatures for 2014 and 2015 from the Met Office.

Observed and likely temperatures for 2016 from Berkeley Earth.

Of course the fact that temperatures are now at the top of the range does not mean that global warming has speeded up, any more than the fact that they were at the bottom of the range three years ago did not mean global warming had stopped.

It's just natural variability.

Which is in the models.

But time has proved David Rose and the Mail's claims to be clownish.

Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth'

The clown this time is... Roger Harrabin.

If you want a good report of the title story, read Carbon Brief.

If you want a bad one, read Roger Harrabin.

You'll notice that the authors of the report concerned anticipate that their findings will be seized upon by the climate change sceptics, and go to pains to show that their arguments are invalid.

So what does Roger Harrabin do? He goes to the climate change sceptics and relays their arguments in the third sentence.

The despite the warning from the scientist the BBC asked to assess its science coverage:

"Science turns on evidence. Balance in science is not the same as balance in politics where politicians can have a voice however barmy their ideas are. They're not taking this on board. Why, I don't know."

 theguardian.com

So what barmy things do the "sceptics" say?

(Well first let's point out the irony of climate sceptics touting a study based on the output of computer models that demonstrates that human activity has an observable effect on the climate.)

"The magnitude of the increase in vegetation appears to be considerably larger than suggested by previous studies. This suggests that projected atmospheric CO2 levels in IPCC scenarios are significantly too high, which implies that global temperature rises projected by IPCC models are also too high, even if the climate is as sensitive to CO2 increases as the models imply."

Says one.

Well empirically, CO2 concentration isn't observed to be diverging (significantly) from IPCC projections, but this sceptic is obviously more interested in the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models), and what may happen in the future.

 Source: IPCC

Another says:

"It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values [?!] and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models).

Well the greening of the earth due to an increase in CO2 the atmosphere was predicted by science. (See quote above.) The fact that prediction is now an empirical observation ("although the magnitude appears to be considerably larger than suggested by previous studies") should make us doubt "the hypothetical predictions of climate models"?

Maybe they are an underestimate too?

One prefers the hypothetical over the empirical and the other the empirical over the hypothetical.

Barmy.

This is not balance Roger, it's letting the clowns rung around the ring tripping over their comically large shoes.

Who leant on Roger Harrabin?

I read an article on the BBC website this week about the pope's comments on global warming, which included this quote from one of his bishops:

“But Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sondoro, who heads the Academy, told BBC News that Christians were obliged to be stewards of the Earth and protect the poor – which meant taking action to safeguard the climate. He said the oil industry was fomenting distrust of science in the US because it did not want society to change.”

I went back to try to find the story again later but found that the quote above had gone, and this one had appeared:

Meanwhile, a small group funded by a US climate contrarian body in Chicago has been in Rome rallying against the Vatican's climate drive. One of the participants, Christopher Monckton, said the Pope "should listen to both sides of the scientific argument... not only people of one, narrow, poisonous political and scientific viewpoint".

So the claim that the oil industry is "fomenting distrust of science in the US because it [does] not want society to change" is replaced by one from a fossil fuel funded crank trying to foment distrust of science because he does not want society to change.

The original story disappeared but but was recorded here; the story was replaced without any indication that it had been edited here.

The BBC has been criticised before for false balance in its reporting of global warming by its own independent advisers, (see here) using crank conspiracy theory bloggers to comment of the latest IPCC report.

So who is the AGW "sceptic" at the BBC with the power to lean on Roger Harrabin?

Who is it who insists that uncertainty is mentioned whenever anybody states that there is enough evidence to make action necessary, whether it be the IPCC or the pope?

Who is it with the power to censor the truth that many of the claims that doubt and uncertainty in climate science mean there is not enough evidence to justify action come from fossil fuel funded sources and replace it with just such a claim from just such a source?

Edit 20/3/2023

Now we know:

Complaining, even overcomplaining, often works, as a small band of climate-denier activists have proved over the years with their incessant complaints to the BBC. These attacks through the editorial complaints unit devour editorial time, so some editors prefer to appease the complainant by altering an online story, perhaps, rather than standing firm and facing possible rebuke from the unit. 

The BBC, in fact, is generally susceptible to bullying through attrition. In a 2011 report, I mentioned the vast carbon emissions caused by HS2. An editor told me to tone it down. I complied, but he insisted that my revised version was still not neutral enough. The firm responsible for HS2 (with its army of PRs) always complained, he said – and he simply didn’t have the time to deal with it.

Stop kicking the BBC on bias. A right turn was needed, but now it’s gone too far,Roger Harrabin writing in the Guardian.

The oceans aren't acidifying

Or ocean acidification is a pHraud! (Geddit?)

My latest heap of clowns are Thomas Lifson, James Delingpole, Anthony Watts and Marita Noon for claiming that ocean pH data do not show a decline in pH. (Hide the decline? Where have I heard that before.)

If the facts won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts.

Human activity has added a couple of trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, about 30-40% of that has dissolved in the oceans, and dissolving CO2 in water causes acidification, so if the facts of ocean pH observations don't show acidification, it is most likely because there is some complicating factor, not because basic chemistry is wrong.

Unless you are a climate change clown, where it's evidence of a conspiracy by scientists, and never mind the implications. OK, billions of tons of CO2 have dissolved in the oceans: exactly how did that not change the pH?

The explanation I think lies in something that is commented on but passed over in the original article: "[pH] levels coincide with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation".

CO2 does dissolve in water, but more in cold water and less in warm, and ocean cycles like the PDO can bring warmer or cooler water to the surface. They also transport water from the surface to the ocean depths or vice versa. All of which mean that CO2 concentrations in the ocean water (and therefore pH) are not going to change uniformly.

Therefore pH measurements are going to vary depending on when and where they were taken, and without taking into account this complicating factor, you are not going to get an accurate picture of global ocean pH.

Which I suspect is why the scientist doing the work on pH was using a model, a reason for ridicule from the clowns: "models that don’t line up with real-world data..."

Well, that's the point. Models take into account complicating factors, to give a more accurate picture of what is really happening. In fact, they explain why the data don't match the theory.

Whereas rejecting the data without addressing the fact that this would mean overturning a very basic theory is spectacularly unintelligent.

Update: Richard Telford has an excellent analysis.

I Heart Climate Scientists

I Heart Climate Scientists