Atmospheric temperature is rising at less than half the rate predicted by the computer models. Even the predicted rate isn’t particularly disturbing so far as its effects on ecosystems or human wellbeing are concerned. That’s because, as the models predict, most of the increase is toward the poles, in winter, at night, little toward the equator, in summer, in daytime. I.e., it serves mostly to raise the coldest temperatures and does little to the warmest temperatures. The main results are lengthened growing seasons, expanded arable land, better crop yields, more food for people and animals, and fewer deaths from cold snaps.

So what’s an alarmist, a provocateur for big government, a devotee of replacing the global economic order (largely free trade) with a more socialist/centrally planned world order, a lover of avian toasters (aka concentrated solar plants) and Cuisinarts of the sky (wind turbines) to do?

Gotta give people some excuse for surrendering their liberty and prosperity!

So you make something up. It’s the fear that such global warming as does occur (because … mostly toward the poles, in winter, at night, where all that ice is and where an increase in temperature from -25F to -20F won’t melt it anyway) will cause acceleration in the long-term rate of sea-level rise, swamping coastal cities that house hundreds of millions of people.

The truth is that sea level has been rising ever since the Ice Age—over the last century at an average rate of about 1–2 mm per year (4–8 inches per century). Indeed:

Nearly all sea-level records show either a steady state of rise or a deceleration during the twentieth century, both at individual locations and for the global average. Though it is only an inadequate 20 years long, the satellite radar altimeter record also displays a recent deceleration of sea-level rise.

But fear not. The climatistas have a solution: create accelerated sea-level rise out of thin air (or water, as the case may be) by fiddling with the raw data. (Same method used to erase the nasty pause in global warming.)

That’s what sea-level experts Albert Parker and Clifford Ollier showed in “Is the Sea Level Stable at Aden, Yemen?” in this month’s issue of Earth Systems and Environment the managers of the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level have done with data from the Indian Ocean. By arbitrary adjustments to inconvenient data, the PSMSL folks turned stable sea level into rising sea level.

Here’s Kenneth Richard’s summary introduction to their technical paper:

In a new paper published in Earth Systems and Environment this month, Australian scientists Dr. Albert Parker and Dr. Clifford Ollier uncover evidence that Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) overseers appear to have been engaging in the “highly questionable” and “suspicious” practice of adjusting historical tide gauge data to show recent accelerated sea level rise where no such acceleration (or rise) exists.

Extensive evidence from “tide gauges, coastal morphology, stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, archaeological remains, and historical documentation” all suggest that sea levels in the Indian Ocean have effectively been stable in recent decades.

The authors expose how PSMSL  data-adjusters make it appear that stable sea levels can be rendered to look like they are nonetheless rising at an accelerated pace.

The data-adjusters take misaligned and incomplete sea level data from tide gauges that show no sea level rise (or even a falling trend).  Then, they subjectively and arbitrarily cobble them together, or realign them.   In each case assessed, PSMSL data-adjusters lower the earlier misaligned rates and raise the more recent measurements.  By doing so, they concoct a new linearly-rising trend.

This adjustment of tide gauge data to yield a rising sea level trend where none exists is not occasional or episodic.  Instead, for every adjustment of raw data analyzed, “the adjustments are always in the direction to produce a large rise in sea level.”

The suspicious perpetuity of this pattern strongly suggests that there is an agenda driving these arbitrary and subjective realignments.

From all appearances, the data-adjusters at PSMSL are attempting to “correct” the sea level rise data that do not support the conceptualization of a rapidly-rising sea level trend in response to rising human CO2 emissions.

As Drs. Parker and Ollier conclude: “It is always highly questionable to shift data collected in the far past without any proven new supporting material.”

Apparently not even tide gauge measurements can be spared from those who tendentiously fiddle with raw data to satisfy an agenda. [Read the rest.]

Alas, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” as Mark Twain is (almost surely mistakenly) alleged to have said. Give this truth a little shove, and maybe it’ll catch and slay the lie.