By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

From the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab

The red line in this image shows the long-term increase in global sea level since satellite altimeters began measuring it in the early 1990s. Since then, sea level has risen by a little more than an inch each decade, or about 3 millimeters per year. While most years have recorded a rise in global sea level, the recent drop of nearly a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter, is attributable to the switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific. The insets show sea level changes in the Pacific Ocean caused by the recent El Nino and La Nina (see for more information on these images). Image credit: S. Nerem, University of Colorado

NASA Satellites Detect Pothole on Road to Higher Seas

An Update from NASA’s Sea Level Sentinels:

Like mercury in a thermometer, ocean waters expand as they warm. This, along with melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, drives sea levels higher over the long term. For the past 18 years, the U.S./French Jason-1, Jason-2 and Topex/Poseidon spacecraft have been monitoring the gradual rise of the world’s ocean in response to global warming.

While the rise of the global ocean has been remarkably steady for most of this time, every once in a while, sea level rise hits a speed bump. This past year, it’s been more like a pothole: between last summer and this one, global sea level actually fell by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter.

So what’s up with the down seas, and what does it mean? Climate scientist Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., says you can blame it on the cycle of El Nino and La Nina in the Pacific.

Willis said that while 2010 began with a sizable El Nino, by year’s end, it was replaced by one of the strongest La Ninas in recent memory. This sudden shift in the Pacific changed rainfall patterns all across the globe, bringing massive floods to places like Australia and the Amazon basin, and drought to the southern United States.

Data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) spacecraft provide a clear picture of how this extra rain piled onto the continents in the early parts of 2011. “By detecting where water is on the continents, Grace shows us how water moves around the planet,” says Steve Nerem, a sea level scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

So where does all that extra water in Brazil and Australia come from? You guessed it - the ocean. Each year, huge amounts of water are evaporated from the ocean. While most of it falls right back into the ocean as rain, some of it falls over land. “This year, the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year,” says Carmen Boening, a JPL oceanographer and climate scientist. Boening and colleagues presented these results recently at the annual Grace Science Team Meeting in Austin, Texas.

But for those who might argue that these data show us entering a long-term period of decline in global sea level, Willis cautions that sea level drops such as this one cannot last, and over the long-run, the trend remains solidly up. Water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again.

“We’re heating up the planet, and in the end that means more sea level rise,” says Willis. “But El Nino and La Nina always take us on a rainfall rollercoaster, and in years like this they give us sea-level whiplash.”

For more information on NASA’s sea level monitoring satellites, visit: http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/ , http://sealevel.colorado.edu , http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/ and http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

h/t to WUWT reader “Pete”

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[UPDATE by willis]

I trust that Anthony won’t mind if I expand a bit on this question. NASA adduces the following map (Figure 2) showing where they claim the water went.

Figure 2. GRACE satellite changes in land water. Note that for all of the screaming about Greenland melting… it gained ice over the period of the year. In any case, red and blue areas are somewhere near equal, as would be more apparent if they didn’t use a Mercator projection that exaggerates the blue area in the Northern hemisphere.

The sea level was going up at about 3 mm per year. In the last year it fell about 6 mm. So that’s a change of about a centimetre of water that NASA says has fallen on land and been absorbed rather than returned to the ocean. But of course, the land is much smaller than the ocean...so for the ocean to change by a centimetre, the land has to change about 2.3 cm.

To do that, the above map would have to average a medium blue well up the scale… and it’s obvious from the map that there’s no way that’s happening. So I hate to say this, but their explanation doesn’t...hold water…

I suspected I’d find this when I looked, because in the original press release the authors just said:

“This year, the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year,” says Carmen Boening.

When people make claims like that, with no numbers attached, my Urban Legend Detector™ goes off like crazy...and in this case, it was right.

Best to all, thanks to Anthony.

w.

By Christopher C. Horner, Washington ExaminerBy Christopher C. Horner, Washington Examiner

Former University of Virginia Professor Michael Mann.The University of Virginia has joined a list of institutions claiming that there has been an actual inquiry into, and even ‘exoneration’ of, scientists exposed by the November 2009 “ClimateGate” leak, while simultaneously through its actions making a mockery of the idea.

UVa’s August 23 release under court order of 3,800 pages of emails - records that UVa previously denied existed - was its second since the American Tradition Institute (ATI) sought judicial assistance in bringing the school into compliance with the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA).

The school has spent approximately $500,000 to date keeping these records from the taxpayer, who paid for their production to begin with.

The university again labored to avoid releasing correspondence directly addressing the now discredited “Hockey Stick” graph produced while former assistant research professor Michael Mann worked there.

At least 126 of those emails were sent to or from Mann at UVa and were central to ClimateGate, which exposed a purported, now disavowed temperature record, as well as the Hockey Stick and related activities by scientists to keep dissenting work from publication. The emails showed scientists circling the wagons to protect their claims, funding and careers.

Each of these 126 UVa ClimateGate emails, as with other related Mann correspondence with third parties of which we are aware, is covered by our VFOI request. Not one of them made it into UVa’s releases.

UVa acknowledges withholding between 3,500 and 4,000 more pages. This likely represents around ten times the original number of UVa emails revealed in “ClimateGate.”

Even before ATI was able to review these emails, Mann described the release to Science Magazine, indicating a collaborative effort with the university in what amounts to hiding from the taxpayer efforts to derail exposure of the “Hockey Stick.”

We certainly appreciate that he is worried. But no argument exists that these records belong to Mann. Further, the VFOIA protects the taxpayers’ interests and, secondarily, the university’s. Not former faculty whose actions, once revealed, created a dense cloud of suspicion over their work.

These records are inarguably the property of the University of Virginia and therefore, barring a legitimate exemption under VFOI, the Virginia taxpayer.

A useful example of complying with the Virginia Freedom of Information Act is George Mason University’s prompt release to the media of correspondence from Professor Edward Wegman.

In one of life’s coincidences, these involved Wegman’s work exposing the dubious methods involved in creating the “Hockey Stick.”

ClimateGate emails sent or received by Mann’s UVa email address include certain now-notorious, often nasty missives, many highly questionable from a legal or ethics perspective and most reflecting wagon-circling by alarmists discussing how to defeat substantive challenge and even requests for transparency involving an already published paper.

It is reasonable to surmise that these are among the 9,000 pages UVa finally identified as responsive to ATI. If so, each of them is being withheld on the remarkable claim that they are “Data, records or information of a proprietary nature produced or collected by or for faculty ... in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issues.” Really.

Excerpts of apparently scholarly research of commercial intent and value presumably include the ClimateGate gems “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”, and one gleefully noting the death of a skeptic who had dared correspond with them.

This is the sort of Top Secret “proprietary” emails UVa will risk fortune, reputation and sanction to keep from producing. A UVa official informed us on no less than three occasions that the school was, in effect, ignoring the law’s mandate to interpret exemptions narrowly.

Clearly he wasn’t kidding. But will the court will find this funny?

The university’s legal argument remains hazy but, if it is indeed grounded in the such correspondence being somehow “proprietary,” this latest act in UVa’s deeply troubling history on this matter threatens to permanently tar a name built over many years, if by the achievements of others who surely weep in their graves over the ongoing spectacle.

This is a school that prides itself on its honor code. Yet instead of acting forthrightly like its fellow ward of the taxpayer, George Mason University, UVa exacerbates the scandal and the increasingly warranted public distrust of Big Science, particularly “climate” science, an edifice built upon hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars annually and dedicated to keeping that gravy train rolling.

Why does this matter, outside of basic principles embedded in the law such as the taxpayers’ right to know how their resources are being used, particularly when so much question exists about certain, well-funded activities?

Consider the UK High Court opinion about—per the judge—the global warming movement’s “alarmist” claims, as featured in the film “An Inconvenient Truth:”

“[Claimant attorney] has established his case that the views in the film are political by submitting that Mr. Gore promotes an apocalyptic vision, which would be used to influence a vast array of political policies, which he illustrates in paragraph 30 of his skeleton argument:

“(i) Fiscal policy and the way that a whole variety of activities are taxed, including fuel consumption, travel and manufacturing ... (ii) Investment policy and the way that governments encourage directly and indirectly various forms of activity. (iii) Energy policy and the fuels (in particular nuclear) employed for the future. (iv) Foreign policy and the relationship held with nations that consume and/or produce carbon-based fuels.”

This cannot be attended by such trifling by a public institution with its transparency obligations under the law. That the University of Virginia has chosen to persist in a campaign diminishing its stature and credibility changes nothing under that law. The taxpayers have rights, and we are exercising them.

Christopher C. Horner is director of litigation for the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, which is suing the University of Virginia.

"I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we’re seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climates change. They’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed. But I do not buy into, that a group of scientists, who in some cases were found to be manipulating this data.”

Not much to quibble with Texas Governor Rick Perry about there. Except if you’re the Washington Post which, like Politico, cannot countenance Perry’s refusal to bow at the altar of what has been decided. So for his apostasy WaPo gives Perry a whopping “four Pinocchios” in a sneering, nasty and intellectually dishonest piece, “Rick Perry’s made-up ‘facts’ about climate change”, rife with straw men, heavy on double standards, and otherwise mixing and matching errors of omission and commission.”

First, an editorial note. WaPo reveals its delirium on the issue by citing polls as its apparent evidence for man-made climate change, concluding with “After all, it was first established in 1896 that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could help create a ‘greenhouse effect.”’ Apple, meet orange.

This non-sequitor misreads WaPo’s own cited source and is more confused than the ritual confusion of climate change with man-made climate change, then conflated with the alleged catastrophic climate change (which WaPo also then offers). So, Mr. Kessler, the greenhouse effect, in existence somewhat longer than man, enables life on earth. Man does not help create it. It’s here with us, or without us. On WaPo’s relative scale, this scolding of another for supposed ignorance, clueless about that of which it scolds, merits at least five Pinocchios.

Perry’s camp referred ‘something called’ the Washington Post to “something called the Petition Project, which claims to have collected the signatures of 31,487 ‘American scientists’ on a petition that says there is ‘no convincing scientific evidence’ that human release of greenhouse gasses will ‘cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate’. The petition is a bit old, having been started in opposition to the 1997 Kyoto agreement on global warming.”

WaPo, using a week’s worth of sneer quotes if still citing ‘no convincing evidence’ of catastrophic heating, just polls of other people not addressing ‘catastrophic climate change’, didn’t like that.

“Only 9,000 of the signers actually have PhDs, and the list of signers’ qualifications shows only a relatively small percentage with expertise on climate research.”

Remember, WaPo cites no evidence at all or even the ritual appeal to authority for man-made climate change (catastrophic or otherwise), but just assumes it without even the courtesy of an ‘arguendo’.

So let’s turn to the evidence WaPo generally cites, in its coverage, as supporting its faith, ‘something called’ the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Now, the IPCC ‘is a bit old’, having been started expressly to ‘support a possible future climate treaty’ in 1988. And seek to support such a thing, it does. If with increasing hilarity.

Who are these people, regularly cited either as “2,500” or “2,000” of the “world’s leading climate scientists” (later downgraded to 400 after a little scrutiny)? Are they that? Do The Four Hundred hold up against thirty-plus thousand including 9,000 PhDs? (and why does WaPo need to distinguish PhDs from the rest, as more credible? The man running the federal government’s climate effort has long claimed a PhD, even in a CV submitted to get a federal grant many years ago, but it turns out he only possesses an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from a different university than the one he used to claim an academic PhD from? Is he unqualified? Sort of like, well, WaPo’s writer. President Obama. Al Gore. And the rest? Again with the flexible standards).

No. The IPCC’s ‘chief climate expert’ is a railroad engineer. The 2,000 are anthropology teaching assistants, transport policy instructors, socialist economists and other climate luminaries.

And the IPCC’s Dr. William Schlesinger admitted that only 20% of UN IPCC scientists deal with climate: “Something on the order of 20 percent [of UN scientists] have had some dealing with climate.” Meaning by his own admission, 80% of the UN IPCC membership has no dealing with the climate as part of their academic studies.

Then there was this odd example of diligence. “Judging from news reports, the number of signers has barely budged from 2008, further undercutting Perry’s claim of a groundswell of opposition.”

Sure, on a relative scale the pace slowed from the original 19,000. And, well, a few other things have emerged since 2008 (if not evidence to support WaPo’s assumed theory). Speaking of ClimateGate, WaPo then goes on to dismiss the affirmations from that leak by an apparent internal whistleblower with “five investigations have since been conducted into the allegations - and each one exonerated the half-dozen or so scientists involved.” (I say affirmations as they weren’t revelations to some of us; I wrote a book detailing what was affirmed in those emails, naming names and explaining what was known about, e.g., their ‘trick to hide the decline’, a year prior).

This merits a handful of Pinocchios, principally because these panels did not actually inquire in any sense into wrongdoing, and when they edged near the subject they largely limited their pursuit to asking the accused and people who know them, who (surprise!) concluded there was none. As Steve McIntyre, Bishop Hill and others - including one non-cheerleader who was interviewed, and ignored in strange fashion - have separately noted.

WaPo has sniveled about me, personally, for daring to look a little deeper than these supposed investigations did. Apparently anxious, transparency for thee, not for me is the order of the day at this FOIA-using enterprise outraged that others would use FOIA.

Political candidates choose the path of least resistance, seeking to avoid the noise machine dedicated to intimidating debate on an issue they then disingenuously waive as away with ‘the debate is over’. When did we have it? What won it? I don’t know. And you won’t know from reading WaPo.

But this has gotten us where we are. WaPo knows this, and is trying to make an object lesson out of Rick Perry, after Iowa voters and nationwide poll-respondents made one of former climate activist Tim Pawlenty. Someone needs to have Perry’s back on this or the alarmists who seek to cow the brave into submission will win.