Sea level to accelerate more quickly prompts sea level rise denial at WUWT

There's a new paper out that has been picked up by Anthony Watts. Of course he doesn't like it because it's about one of his pet peeves - rising seas. There are few things he is more afraid of, judging by the frantic attempts he's made over the years to deny that seas will rise as the ice melts.

I don't have time to do the paper justice, so I'll point you to the paper and an article by John Abraham at the Guardian. The paper is by John Fasullo, R. S. Nerem & B. Hamlington and is in Nature's open access journal Scientific Reports. The gist of it is that the volcano, Pinatubo, suppressed sea level rise, and it could be about to jump back up again in the next ten years.

The thing I noticed at WUWT is that Anthony Watts will go to great efforts to hide the data. He put up a wonky chart that Willis Eschenbach drew a few years ago. His chart stops some time in 2010 - right before that big dip in sea level when all the water was shifted from the oceans to Australia, South America and Asia.
The reasoning of the scientists is best summed up from the abstract:

Here, a combined analysis of altimeter data and specially designed climate model simulations shows the 1991 eruption of Mt Pinatubo to likely have masked the acceleration that would have otherwise occurred. This masking arose largely from a recovery in ocean heat content through the mid to late 1990s subsequent to major heat content reductions in the years following the eruption. A consequence of this finding is that barring another major volcanic eruption, a detectable acceleration is likely to emerge from the noise of internal climate variability in the coming decade.

First, here is a chart with the latest data from the Sea Level Research Group at U Colorado Boulder:

Sea level Data Source: U Colorado

In case you are wondering why I put a polynomial fit to the chart, it's because Willis put one on his chart. Mine looks different! Here's the WUWT chart:

Anthony Watts resurrection of a chart missing five years of data. Source: WUWT

The polynomial R^2 on my chart shows a better fit than either the linear trend or Willis' R^2 :)

Anthony Watts hides the increase

Anthony wrote up the top of his copy and paste:

From the NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH/UNIVERSITY CORPORATION FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH, and the department of “let’s not show a graph of sea level rise in the press release” comes this real PR spin job.

I say, if he'd bothered to glance at the paper he'd have seen a lovely big chart of sea level rise. I'd also say that it's better to show a chart of the latest measurements than to show a wonky chart that's missing almost five years of data!

From the WUWT comments

The comments are entirely predictable, full of conspiracy theorising of nefarious intent etc.

Editor of the Fabius Maximus website  didn't bother with the paper or he'd have noticed they were comparing 1993–2002 and 2003–2012 decades, whereas since 2012 the seas have risen rather a lot. (2012 was just after that big dip in sea level.):

August 10, 2016 at 9:04 am
Got to admire the message discipline of the climate activists. Their story changes are handled as they were in Orwell’s 1984 — the past goes down the memory hole, replaced by a new truth.
Years of declarations that the rise in sea levels are accelerating — gone! Not a peep from activists about their confidently hysterical warnings about this.
That’s how society is changed: long-term lavishly financed efforts by well-organized professionals. Like a river eroding away bedrock, a grain at a time.

joelobryan  is one of the nuttier nuts at WUWT:

August 10, 2016 at 9:04 am
This is equivalent of:
We’re surrounded by invisible space aliens – trust me!

Resourceguy is a WUWT ice-age comether, despite all the "hottest evers" we've had lately:

August 10, 2016 at 9:06 am
There is a sense of urgency out there in scare land to make the big play for a permanent (all purpose) Waxman carbon tax before cyclical cooling sets in. You don’t have to be a genius to see the factual evidence of long cycle cooling coming back around in ARGO data sets for oceans and atmospheric cooling at least in the northern hemisphere with solar minimum and spotless sun coming up. That happens to be the same region where the money comes from if anyone is bean counting. Short term cooling from ENSO does not help either in the political calculus of courtroom win-the-day spin tactics. 

Bruce Cobb is planning for a pause. He will have to wait a bit the way things are going.

August 10, 2016 at 9:50 am
They are busy rehearsing for when the “Pause” returns. They are planning a really big shoe, with lots of songs and tap-dancing. It will be brilliant.

I wonder if dim denier Eric Slattery (@Technos_Eric) thinks he sounds clever?

August 10, 2016 at 10:06 am
After all that work…….these clowns need to be told that the typical Signal + Noise paradigm doesn’t work in a non-linear chaotic system for extraction of signals, especially in a system that you don’t really understand. We can extract/differentiate between a Baby and a Mother’s heart beats using EKG with non-linear signal extraction methods, but it helps that we know the dynamics of heart beats and know (with a high degree of certainty) what the EKG should look like. Chalk up another useless paper filling the pages (Journal) with misinformation. 

References and further reading

J. T. Fasullo , R. S. Nerem  & B. Hamlington. "Is the detection of accelerated sea level rise imminent?" Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 31245 (2016) doi:10.1038/srep31245 (open access)

Climate scientists make a bold prediction about sea level rise - article by John Abraham at The Guardian