The sea levels are now reducing in the “hotspots of acceleration” of Washington and New York
Hopefully everybody remember Sallenger’s “hot spots” of sea level acceleration along the East Coast of the US.
Asbury H. Sallenger Jr, Kara S. Doran & Peter A. Howd, Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America, Nature Climate Change 2, 884–888 (2012), doi:10.1038/nclimate1597
This was one of the many examples of bad science misinterpreting the sea level oscillations by cherry picking the time window.
As 6 more years of data have been collected, let see if the hotspots are now the “hottest on record” or if they have cooled down.
The logic of Sallenger & co. was based on the comparison of the rate of rise of sea levels over the first and second half of time windows of 60, 50 and 40 years, i.e. the comparison of the rate of rise over the first and the last 30, 25 and 20 years respectively of these 60, 50 and 40 years windows.
This did not make any sense to me, as if you do have sinusoidal oscillations of periodicity 60 years, positive and negative phases of 30 years, and you select the end of the time widows at the end of one positive phase, this way you will always have “positive acceleration” even if there is none, and everybody knew about periods and phasing of the natural oscillations.
The logic was clearly flawed, but obviously Nature did not accepted any comment. The science is settled, and can’t be discussed.
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