THE PSYCHOLOGIST : The latest Greenie "rising sea-level" scare debunked

The latest Greenie "rising sea-level" scare debunked

Benny Peiser has recently had a correspondence with some of the people at "Nature" magazine over the way their online site ignored an article (by Raper and Braithwaite). in their own magazine about sea-levels NOT rising as much as was once thought and promoted another article (by Church & White) in another journal that said the opposite. Below is a fairly devastating excerpt from one of Benny's emails to "Nature" staffers. Benny points out, among other things, that the alarmist paper even contradicts what the IPCC (the world HQ of the global warming religion) says:

"But let's forget for a moment how this editorial accident happened and why Nature editors selected an alarmist paper on sea level rise for the spotlight instead of an anti-alarmist paper published by Nature on the same day. Is there really "no real contradiction between the two papers in any case," as you claim?

For a start, the paper by Raper and Braithwaite is a fundamental critique of the 2001 IPCC model that assumes "that glaciers melt away completely for any warming rather than approaching a new equilibrium." Instead, the two new models used by Raper and Braithwaite estimate a sea level rise due to the melting of glaciers and icecaps of ~0.05 m by 2100, "about half of previous projections." [Note for those of us who still cannot hack metric: 5 centimetres is about 2 inches -- a tiny rise]

Now, the irony of the latest Nature affair is that the lead-author of the "previous projections" criticised by Raper and Braithwaite, is none other than John Church himself, the star of your news story. Given that Church's IPCC chapter on sea level rise is questioned and his high estimates essentially halved, it does look a bit dodgy to provide him - on the same day that his high estimate is debunked - a platform to announce that his latest finding "matches up nicely with (IPCC) model predictions."

What is more, you didn't even mention that the contentious claims by Church and White are more alarmist than (and in fact contradict) the current IPCC TAR "consensus" which states: "No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected." It will be interesting to monitor whether Nature's media promotion given to a 'consensus-breaking' paper will be able to overturn the 2001 IPCC stance. Perhaps we are even seeing the beginnings of another "hockey stick" controversy. After all, Church and White haven't provided any new sea level data - they've only applied a different statistical method to the same data set, data that previously didn't show any significant acceleration.

In fact, Cabanes et al. (2001) who analysed sea level trends between 1950-1998 suggest that the very limited coverage of historical tide gauges cannot provide a meaningful estimate of the average global sea level rise for the past century. And since most historical tide gauges were located in regions of substantial ocean warming, they suggest that the estimates of 20th century sea level rise from tide gauge records may have been overestimated by a factor of 2.

Finally, a recent paper by Volkov and van Aken (2005; see abstract below) suggests that "the recently reported local trends of sea level are not necessarily related to the global sea level rise, but may be part of interdecadal fluctuations."

These any many other papers confirm the existance of huge uncertainties. What this means is that the jury is still out whether or not there is any significant acceleration of global sea level. Nature editors would be well advised to provide more balanced and a less alarmist coverage of climate change research and debates. But after years of complaints, I'm not holding my breath. Nature's apparent addiction to worst-case scenarios and prophecies of fire and brimestone are difficult to kick".

SEA-LEVEL RISES AND FALLS CAN BE REGIONAL RATHER THAN GLOBAL

(New paper in GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, 2005 L14611 (2005) by Denis L. Volkov, Hendrik M. van Aken. Abstract only).

Climate-related change of sea level in the extratropical North Atlantic and North Pacific in 1993-2003

Abstract:

Climate-related change of sea level is one of the most challenging concerns for humankind. Here we present a comparative analysis of the interannual variability of sea level in the extratropical North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans based on the high-accuracy TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1 and ERS-1/2 measurements from November 1992 to June 2003. We found indications of the interdecadal variability of the sea level in the North Pacific possibly related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and suggested that the observed decadal rise of sea level in the subpolar and eastern North Atlantic may have been related to the interdecadal change. While the North Atlantic subtropical and subpolar gyres decelerated, the opposite occurred in the North Pacific. The year-to-year variations of sea level showed coherence between the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Ni¤o/La Ni¤a and Pacific Decadal Oscillation events and respective gyre-scale changes.

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

The latest Greenie "rising sea-level" scare debunked

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