Hiding The Sea Level Decline

May 2011 - SLR = 3.1 mm/yr

Portuguese skeptic website Ecotretas sent me the following story about rising sea levels awhile back. Seems the more sea level rise slows down, the more the alarmists claim it is accelerating (Sorry about the poor visual quality of graphics).

More hiding the decline
by Ecotretas

The University of Colorado has done it again! Despite the fact that sea level has been going down for the last year, they are saying that sea level rise rate is going up! You can see it with your own eyes in the graphics below.

In the first graph above, was generated last May and shows sea level going up 3.1 mm/year (sorry about the fuzzy quality). I debunked that at the time, because the University of Colorado introduced an artificial correction of 0.3 mm/year.

The second graph that follows was produced in July, just 2 months later, and they have applied more adjustments corrections. Note that all the newly introduced points are below the trend-line, so it should be diminishing… But no! It went up from 3.1 mm/year to 3.2 mm/year!

July 2011 SLR= 3.2 mm/yr

They give a reason for the correction: Although the latest Jason-2 GMSL estimates (cycles 95-102) are well below the trend line, most likely due to the recent La Nina (we plan to add a sea level/ENSO comparison page shortly), the rate increased slightly from 3.1 to 3.2 mm/yr due to the improvements to the TOPEX SSB model and replacement of the classical IB correction with the improved DAC correction, as noted above.

So, once again it’s about the models, and not the real data! To figure out this nasty science, I’ve graphed the difference between the two first graphs.

Plot of the difference

Clearly, all data points are pushed up. Big differences appear until 2002, which get below 10 mm between 2002 and 2005, and get even bigger after 2005.

The black line, which is a linear regression trend for all the data points, clearly shows that the correction introduces a rising trend!

The sea level rate measured by satellite should now be somewhere near 2.8 mm/year, and that is still clearly above what is being measured by tide gauge stations. One more example of hiding the decline!