Jim Steele's "yellow journalism" at WUWT, and coastal erosion

Jim Steele is one of those science deniers who can't get his stuff published anywhere except climate conspiracy blogs like WUWT and in his own vanity-published denier book. Today, he wrote an article (archived here) about the collapse of cliffs in his home town Pacifica, in California. Jim could have just written a straight piece about what is contributing to coastal erosion and it might have been an informative article. However, as is usual for Jim Steele, he spoilt his article and further reduced his credibility by using it as a platform to tout his climate science denial. His article was a good example of the techniques of climate science denial. It was peppered with disinformation, twisting and misprepresenting others.

Jim Steele's yellow "journalism"

Jim's article seems to have been little more than a pretext so he could once again imply that climate science is a hoax. He accused two leading science journalists of being "yellow journalists". (Yellow journalism is where facts take a back seat to sensationalism.) Jim  wrote:

King tides, storm surges and rising seas are anathema to WUWT

WUWT has an article about a paper in Geophysical Research Letters last month (archived here). The paper was called: "Sea level anomalies exacerbate beach erosion", which is self evident, given that in most places (but not everywhere) sea levels are rising relative to the coastline. (In some places the land is rising more quickly than the sea, so effectively sea level can fall in some places even while globally seas are rising.)

The lead author was a PhD candidate, Ethan Theuerkauf from the Institute of Marine Sciences at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He's had quite a few papers published on similar topics. I don't know if he's been awarded his PhD yet, but he's been publishing for several years now.