As my Third Law of the Media says, When an article claims, ‘science says…’ or a ‘new study shows…’, assume that it doesn’t until proven otherwise.
Especially when it’s telling you something you want to hear. As Richard Feynman warned, “You must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” Remember the Royal Society’s motto (even if the New Zealand Royal Society doesn’t): nullius in verba, ‘Take nobody’s word for it’.
The more sensationalist the claim, the higher you should have your bullshit filters set. That doesn’t mean that sensational scientific claims are wrong, just that you should be wary.
So, I was very wary of this claim.
Global sea levels have not continued to rise at the rates predicted by many scientists – and there is no evidence that climate change has contributed to any such acceleration, a new first-of-its-kind study has claimed.
Now, that is an extremely sensational claim. Depending on their bias, readers would most likely jump to two opposite conclusions: the study is completely bunkum denialism, or the study proves that the entire climate change narrative is a hoax.
Neither are true. Once again, the media are pushing over-sensationalised claims in the lede, which is a pity, because what the study finds is significant. More pointedly, it challenges a key plank of the climate alarmist platform: that sea levels are rising dramatically because of climate change.
The research found that the average sea level rise in 2020 was only around 1.5mm per year, or six inches per century, according to the paper’s authors, Dutch engineering consultant Hessel Voortman and independent researcher Rob de Vos.
“This is significantly lower than the three to four mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media,” Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.
This is the important takeaway of Voortman’s research: that computer models aren’t being properly compared to real-world data. More importantly, much of the data is being biased by selection. The selection bias is two-fold: sampling locations are not truly global, but clustered in relatively few locations, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. The other bias is in the time frame selected by researchers.
The vast majority of mainstream scientific studies have pointed to a dramatic acceleration in sea level rise over the past three decades following the introduction of satellite imagery.
But Voortman claims that sea levels were in fact in a “trough” in 1993 and a “peak” in 2020, and that once these fluctuations are taken into account, there is no detectable rise in sea level.
Some locations did show a notable acceleration in sea level rise – which should immediately induce scepticism. When there are such outliers, local phenomena rather than a global process should be suspected.
Of the stations Voortman studied that did point to a notable rise in sea level, most were located near others that showed negligible changes in recent decades, “making it unlikely that a global phenomenon like CO2-driven global warming is the cause,” Voortman reportedly said.
Instead, the study attributed such rises to local factors such as earthquakes, extensive construction, or post-glacial effects.
But, as I caution, with Third Law of the Media, don’t take the media’s word for it. Find the study and read if for yourself, if you can.
That is what I did. Apart from the over-hyped lede, the Post’s story generally covers the report fairly.
In both datasets, approximately 95 per cent of the suitable locations show no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea level rise. The investigation suggests that local, non-climatic phenomena are a plausible cause of the accelerated sea level rise observed at the remaining five per cent of the suitable locations. On average, the rate of rise projected by the IPCC is biased upward with approximately two mm per year in comparison with the observed rate.
The statistical procedure detects accelerating sea level rise in a few isolated locations. This pattern is inconsistent with sea level acceleration driven by global phenomena.
Further investigation of a subset of locations revealed that local phenomena are often a plausible explanation for the locally observed pattern of sea level rise. The majority of the local causes of rapid sea level rise (or drop) appear to be geologic. Tectonic motion explains sudden changes of sea level rise found in a few places. More gradual but rapid rise (or fall) of sea level is mostly caused by glacial isostatic adjustment and in a few isolated cases by an excessive sediment load. In a few cases, water extraction and loading of soft sediments by buildings explains the (changes of) the observed rate of sea level rise.
[Emphasis added.]
The latter is especially the case for the poster boys of supposed ‘catastrophic sea level rise’ – island chains, such as Tuvalu. Rather than melting glaciers and ice caps, intensive groundwater extraction and subsequent dry land subsistence are the greatest threats to those minority of islands that are ‘shrinking’ (the vast majority – 89 per cent – of the world’s islands are either static or growing).
This is indeed a startling new peer-reviewed paper, which didn’t need to be over-sensationalised. Even a straight report of its findings is a sensational enough rebuttal to the Climate Cult’s unhinged doom-mongering.
We’re not gonna fry, we’re not gonna burn – and now we know we’re not gonna drown.
