Wannabe pseudo-scientist Anthony Watts makes a flawed assessment of coastal research

A rather ordinary pseudo-scientist (prominent in climate science denying circles) claims that the observations taken by a team of scientists at Delaware Bay must be in error. Anthony Watts, whose sole qualification in science is that he owns a "climate hoax" conspiracy blog (wattsupwiththat.com), claims (wrongly of course) that a paper published in Nature's Scientific Reports is fundamentally flawed (archived here).

Xiaolong Geng and Michel Boufadel,
researchers at NJIT's Center for
Natural Resources Development,
examine salinity gradients
on the Delaware Bay shore. Source: NJIT

The authors of the new paper are Xiaolong Geng, Michel C. Boufadel & Nancy L. Jackson from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (engineering and chemistry departments). They were studying subsurface water and salinity in the section of a Delaware Bay sandy beach between the low and high tide marks, known as the inter-tidal zone.

In this zone, water is trapped between the grains of sediment. This water, known as pore water, has its source from a combination of sea water washed in by the tide and groundwater. Because of the diluting effect of groundwater, it would be expected that the salinity levels of this pore water would be lower than sea water if the only mechanism operating were mixing of the water. That's not what the scientists found.