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2011-07-22 11:20:08 | The Australian provides a new denier talking point | |
Tom Curtis t.r.curtis@gmail... 112.213.153.224 |
with its report on Phil Watson's article, " Is There Evidence Yet of Acceleration in Mean Sea Level Rise around Mainland Australia?"
The answer, if you couldn't guess, is no. In fact, there has been a "Consistent trend of deceleration from 1940 to 2000". Buried deep in the arcticle you learn that there has been a high rate of sea level rise in the 1990's, which would actually mean that the recent record is of an accelerating sea level rise, but apparently we are not to think about that.
http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00141.1
In reading the Australian's article, I was waiting for a comment from John Church, or Neil White, Australia's obvious go to people for any questions about sea level. They would no doubt have pointed to their 2011 paper, whose abstract reads:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h2575k28311g5146/
Probably they would also have pointed to the satellite date.
Instead, the Australian went to (or was probably provided the original story by) Howard Brady, described as "Climate change researcher Howard Brady, at Macquarie University". The problem is that Howard Brady is not listed as a current faculty member at Macquarie University at all, and his previous association appears to have been with the Biology Department. A blurb for a talk he gave on climate change said that:
However, since undertaking that research, Brady has been CEO of Mosaic Oil, an oil exploration company.
http://www.petroleumnews.net/storyview.asp?storyid=23220§ionsource=s0 | |
2011-07-23 10:20:35 | ||
Tom Curtis t.r.curtis@gmail... 112.213.153.224 |
Just to follow up, Deltoid has an analysis of the Australian's coverage: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/07/the_australians_war_on_science_67.php#more
And Tamino critiques the statistical methods used in the peper, which turn out to not be very good, and materially affect the results: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/07/the_australians_war_on_science_67.php#more
For my own small contribution, it turns out the results are significantly effected by the inclusion of Newcastle data. Without that data it is quite clear that for all series used, the period of most rapid sea level rise is that between 1985 and the present. But during the period of more rapid rise at Newcastle between 1940 and 1960, the Newcastle coast may have been subsiding due to coal mining. |