With his usual restrain and subtlety, James Delingpole’s latest column at (neo-Nazi-ideology-laundering) Breitbart alleges that climate scientists have been “caught red-handed” manipulating data “in order to exaggerate sea level rise.” The headline dubs this supposed scandal “Tidalgate.” In an argument that sounds a lot like his similar (baseless) attacks on adjusted temperature records, Delingpole asserts that when sea level scientists “make precisely the same sort of dishonest adjustments in order to accord with the same global warming narrative, it starts to look like a conspiracy.”
This big if true (it’s not) global conspiracy stems from a paper that looks at a single tidal gauge in Yemen and claims that there’s no justification for adjustments made by researchers at the UK’s Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level. The crux of the paper is that the changes made to the century-old record are “arbitrary,” and that sea levels aren’t rising in any particularly worrisome way.
Now we don’t know exactly why the tidal gauge in Aden, Yemen was adjusted the way that it was. What we do know, however, is that the authors of this paper are hardly credible experts, and the paper itself (published in a brand new journal) is likely not going to hold up well to any scrutiny by actual experts. While we wait for the slow scientific process to take its course, we did a little googling of the paper’s authors.
The first author is Albert Parker, who changed his name at some point in the last few years from Albert Boretti, according to a detailed debunking of a similar paper he wrote in 2012 by two researchers from Monash University and the University of Tasmania. That paper misrepresented observed and modeled sea level rise surrounding Sydney, Australia in a way that the researchers determined was “without foundation.” In 2016 he continued his obsession with turning back the rising tide, authoring a post at WUWT that was also definitively debunked, this time by paleoecologist Richard Telford.
Albert’s co-author is Cliff Ollier, and together the pair have a history of subpar science. Ollier has written for the Lavasior Group, an Australian climate denial shop founded by a mining executive, so he doesn’t exactly get the benefit of the doubt. Nor should he, as Ollier’s work denying sea level rise is just as defensible as Parker’s--which is to say, not at all, according to this Skeptical Science debunking of an op-ed by Ollier.
One last indicator that Parker and Ollier’s new paper isn’t going to stand up to scrutiny is the fact that it heavily cites another long-debunked sea level rise denier, Nils-Axel Mörner. Not exactly a good sign.
If you’re curious as to why we’re not getting into the scientific specifics here of this paper or past debunkings, it’s because you’ve heard this story before with the temperature adjustment storyline Delingpole propagates.
What’s more, exactly what these guys are saying about the rate of sea level rise at individual locations doesn’t really matter when the big picture is so clear. Their nitpicking of specific records when there is such an abundance of records all telling the same story is a classic denier tactic. Try and find tiny errors in individual measurements, then pretend those single cases are illustrative of all the data and the science as a whole.
The fact that sea levels are rising is easy enough to prove outside the realm of scientific journals and papers. Just look at Miami, where rising tides have already begun flooding the city on a regular basis. Miami’s Republican mayor recently pushed for, and got voter approval of, $200 million in bonds to protect the city from the warming-induced sea level rise.
If a Republican is raising money for the government to act on climate impacts, it’s hard to believe he’s doing so as part of a communist conspiracy. But Delingpole isn’t exactly known for shrewd, unbiased and/or reality-based analysis.
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