Given the news media’s obsession with global warming lately, it’s amazing that not one bloody word was written in a single American newspaper about Dr. Simon J. Holgate’s latest study on rising sea levels.
Had it gotten even half the coverage the United Nations’ latest global warming report did last week, Americans would be so confused by now that they would have tuned the whole thing out.
The bottom line is that if ice doesn’t melt and sea levels don’t rise at increasing rates, human-induced global warming theory begins to fall apart.
That’s why it’s significant that in January, Holgate, a scientist with the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool, published a paper in an American Geophysical Union journal that concluded that 1) sea level rose slightly faster in the first half of the last century than the second half and 2) what initially appeared to scientists to be a faster rate of increase in sea level between 1993 and 2003 is actually average when compared to a century’s worth of data.
Neither of these findings were included in the United Nations’ global warming report, though they should have been, because this data isn’t new. Holgate’s study was merely the latest in a string of recent studies that arrived at similar conclusions using different methods.
If he’s read this far into this column, Holgate’s probably somewhere between gritting his teeth and coming unglued. Last week, when I contacted him, Holgate was clearly concerned that I would use his work to try to convince you that global warming is a bunch of bunk.
“Some people think/hope that my work ‘disproves’ ‘global warming’,” Holgate wrote in an e-mail. “I don’t think it actually proves anything. It’s just a contribution.”
Holgate didn’t defend global warming, either.
Holgate is a world-class scientist, one who has several firsts in his field to his credit and one among a few dozen in the world who are truly pioneering the study of sea level. I didn’t expect an answer to the e-mail I sent him, since his valuable time is probably better spent on something else. Instead, he sent answers to my questions that went on for screen after screen.
I initially contacted Holgate because the record shows he’s a stickler for accuracy, a real scientific buzz kill. He’s the guy a reporter doesn’t want to call, because odds are pretty good he’ll punch holes in the science behind it. Ditto for reporters looking to disprove global warming.
What Holgate wanted me to tell you is just how much he and his peers don’t know.
“For all the claims that are made about these things, there is relatively little data with which to reconstruct the time series of global sea level,” Holgate wrote. “We do our best, but there are significant error bars around the data.”
This is the part of the global warming story you never hear from either side of the debate.
Holgate says scientists generally agree that sea level has been steadily rising for at least 3,000 years as part of an ongoing adjustment to the last ice age. The few reconstructions from tide gauges that extend back to the 1880s suggest an overall acceleration of the rate of sea-level rise since then, but that’s not definite because the tide gauges scientists have to study are concentrated in northern Europe and the eastern United States. Since sea level at any given time varies wildly around the world, it’s hard to draw concrete global conclusions.
Meanwhile, over the last century, there have been decades with higher rates of sea-level rise (around 1939 and 1980) and lower sea-level rise (around 1964 and 1987). There’s little debate among scientists that sea level has definitely been rising over the last few decades, he says. But is the rate of sea-level rise increasing due to man-made factors — or at all — in the way Al Gore and others would like us to think it is?
“There is no doubt that sea level is rising, but acceleration is hard to prove against the ‘noise’ of the variability in the climate system,” says Holgate.
And that’s what struck me when I took the time to read Holgate’s work and that of others — what they don’t know. I’d assumed that sea-level science was far more advanced than it actually is, but in many ways, it appears to still be in its infancy. Most of the studies by Holgate and his peers are still focused on learning to read and interpret complex and spotty sea-level data, then verifying those readings.
Read those studies, and even a lay person can begin to see how fudged the United Nations’ report is, how it cherry-picks series of decades and draws conclusions, how it skirts the issue of whether there was an increased rate of sea-level rise between 1993 and 2003, calling it “unclear” when recent studies suggest otherwise.
This is perhaps why the U.N. report uses the word “likely,” italicized for extra emphasis, 66 times in just 13 pages. None of the statistics in the report had citations indicating which studies they came from.
In all the pages he wrote to me, Holgate was willing to make only one prediction. Science and technology is advancing, and every year, we have a new set of satellite data and a greater knowledge of how the sea and the atmosphere work.
“I have no doubt it will be clear within our lifetimes what is actually happening,” Holgate says.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2007.
I have a hard time understanding how ice caps melting due to global warming makes the sea level RISE.
As water freezes, it expands to take up more physical space.
Here’s a very non-scientific test:
Fill a glass with ice. Add water to the top of the glass. Wait until the ice melts. Measure the level of the liquid in the glass.
What am I missing?
yes…Tara Servatius causes global warming..in my pants!
The simple fact is that global climate models have thousands of input paramaters, of which CO2 concentration is only one.
Slight changes in any of these parameters affect the computed temperature. The sensitivity of temperature (expressed as the ratio of percent change in temperature to percent change in a given parameter) for many of these other parameters (e.g., cloud cover) is far greater than the sensitivity of temperature to CO2.
On top of that, the change in temperature attributable simply to the uncertainties on these other parameters exceeds the CO2 effect.
Bruno – for Greenland and Anarctica try this experiment: put the ice cube in a funnel and hold the funnel over the glass of water.
The meltwater leaves the land (funnel) and joins the ocean (glass), raising the water level in the qcean (glass).
There she goes again, tearing apart the lies that pass for the truth.
Accolades to Tara for the truth on many issues! Global warming is a hoax, as is the other environmental fears, like the ozone hole!
http://www.junkscience.com for the rest of the truth.
it is sorely refreshing to finally read something on global warming that was written by and about a seemingly objective person. it’s obvious that the hystero-lefties do not understand that it has been nigh unto impossible for scientists who do not a priori agree with the global warming hypothesis to obtain funding for objective research. so, what we get is what michael crichton, in an excellent online essay, calls “consensus science,” which isn’t science at all.
I could pretty much argue this article sentence by sentence because I feel it is one of the most biased, irresponsible articles I’ve read but I will stick to the main themes of the article. Of course there are several ‘main themes’ since it’s uneducated work written strictly to convince the reader that global warming is unreal.
Theme 1:
Tara states her personal, scientific opinion that sea Levels are a cause and not an effect of global warming.
She spends the bulk of the article on this. She found a scientist that considers it unproven whether, to date, sea levels have risen unnaturally. She states that the whole global warming science would fall apart if it was disproven. She’s incredulous that this relatively unknown scientist is not included in the IPCC’s findings. (Though she admits complete ignorance to the IPCC report when claims that the report of several years in the making is only 13 pages long and has no citations. Tara, spend five minutes on the news and you’ll discover that it is a SUMMARY REPORT released while they are finalizing the ACTUAL REPORT of 1400 pages riddled with citations.)
Tara obviously pulled up the report in Acrobat Reader and did a search on the word ‘likely,’ as well, and found that to be newsworthy. I did the same thing and also came up with 66 references. This included ‘likely,’ ‘very likely,’ ‘unlikely,’ etc., etc. It also included the probability keys, footnotes and data tables!
Newsflash – scientists do not use ‘proof’ in their methods. Mathmaticians do. They use probability to put an expert opinion to the likelyhood of any gived theory. There is absolutely no significance to how many time the word ‘likely’ entered the report.
Theme #2:
Tara feels that climate science is in its infancy
Again, she only states this in regard to sea-level science reinforcing Theme 1 (that she thinks sea levels cause global warming.) She quotes the scientist’s statement, “There is no doubt that sea level is rising, but acceleration is hard to prove against the ‘noise’ of the variability in the climate system,” and take a huge leap of faith to tell us (as if she understands the quote in the first place) that sea-level science is in its infancy. This implies that, even though the 2500 scientists of the IPCC report have stated a 90% (very likely) possibility that humans are causing warming, Tara feels that they’re staking their reputations on some type of kindergarten-grade evidence.
Bottom line:
Holbrook, himself stated that A) does not want her to try to disprove global warming theory based on his work and that B) he, in his own scientific opinion, DOES NOT FEEL THAT HIS WORK DISPROVES GLOBAL WARMING THEORY, yet Tara Servatius, in her scientific opinion DOES think his work tears global warming theory to bits. Any problems, here?
If scientists are as completely stupid as she portrays them, I hope she also will debunk other ‘very likely’ findings such as whether smoking causes lung cancer or over-eating is a health risk.