From Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Those who read my work may recall my post called “Munging the Sea Level Data“. In it, I showed that the apparent acceleration in the satellite sea level was merely an artifact of the combining of the four satellite records, viz:

Original Caption: NOAA sea level data, showing the trend of each of the full individual satellite records and the overall trend. SOURCE: NOAA Excel Spreadsheet

Despite the obvious differences between the first and last halves of the record, scientists merely spliced them together and obscured the splice. My conclusion in that post was:

There’s no evidence of any acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise in either the tide gauge or the shabbily-spliced satellite records.

So today I stumbled across a paper published in Nature magazine entitled A revised acceleration rate from the altimetry-derived global mean sea level record. Care to guess what the paper says?

Yep. You’re right. They conclude that once they took a hard look at the satellite records, the problem was disagreement between the satellites … and once they applied their correction methods to the TOPEX satellite records, they found:

Based on four different weighting methods used in a tide-gauge comparison it is determined that TOPEX is drifting and not ERS. Therefore, we suggest to calibrate the TOPEX GMSL record with the crossover of ERS1&2 after the removal of cal-1. The calibration reduces the observed acceleration in GMSL, so that it becomes statistically equivalent to zero at the 95%-confidence level.

The observed acceleration in satellite-observed GMSL (global mean sea level) is “statistically equivalent to zero” … go figure.

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Here where I live on the northern California coast, we’re getting the blessing of an “atmospheric river”, which is a phenomenon where lots of moisture comes from the tropics up to the west coast in a narrow band. It used to be called the “Pineapple Express”, but I suppose that was determined to be racist against pineapples or something …

Given the several years of the recent drought, this is more than welcome. We got 3-1/2 inches (9 cm) of rain yesterday, with more expected tonight.

So, wet blessings to all.

w.