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.

To Anthony Watts, the Nature paper is about ecosystem sensitivity not climate sensitivity in a temperature sense

I see that Anthony Watts is mixing up his sensitivities and satellite instruments (archived here). He copied and pasted a press release about a new paper in Nature. The researchers analysed ecosystem responses to changing climates, looking just at the last 14 years (from 2000 to 2013), using a vegetation index based on data from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS). Anthony seems to have only got as far as the headline to the press release. Either didn't read the press release itself or if he did he didn't understand it. (I very much doubt that he bothered to read the paper that the press release was about.) I say that because he introduced the press release with the following headline and his own words:

Satellites – “not good enough to tell us global temperature”, but apparently good enough to tell us global climate sensitivity
Remember that video produced a few weeks ago from the usual suspects that says satellite data is no good for climate data? Others in science don’t seem to think so.

First of all, the paper is about ecosystem sensitivity not climate sensitivity in the temperature sense. That is, how the different ecosystems around the world are responding to climate variability and change, not how much temperature will increase with a doubling of CO2.

Figure 1 | Global map of the Vegetation Sensitivity Index (VSI), a new indicator of vegetation sensitivity to climate variability using satellite data. Red colour shows higher ecosystem sensitivity, whereas green indicates lower ecosystem sensitivity. Grey areas are barren land or ice covered. Inland water bodies are mapped in blue. Source: U Bergen

Secondly, the satellite-derived data is from the imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS), and shows vegetation changes. It's not from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) or other microwave scanning instrument, used to measure "brightness temperature" or the radiance of the microwave radiation of the atmosphere, from which air temperature in different layers of the air is estimated).