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Originally Posted by rampant_jwalker
You know the world just wouldn't be the same without conspiracy theories. I'm all for it  |
Conspiracy Theories Huh?
Scientists Retract Paper on Rising Sea Levels Due to Errors
Scientists have been forced to retract a paper that claimed sea level were rising thanks to the effects of global warming, after mistakes were discovered that undermined the results.
NASA
In a NASA "what-if" animation, light-blue areas in southern Florida and Louisiana indicate regions that may be underwater should sea levels rise dramatically -- which may not be as likely as scientists once thought.
Scientists have been forced to retract a paper that claimed sea level were rising thanks to the effects of global warming, after mistakes were discovered that undermined the results.
The study was published in Nature Geoscience and predicted that sea levels would rise by as much as 2.7 feet by the end of the twenty-first century.
The paper also highlighted that it reinforced the conclusions of the U.N.'s controversial Fourth Assessment report, which warned of the dangerous of man-made climate change.
However, mistakes in time intervals and inaccurately applied statistics have forced the authors to retract their paper -- the first official retraction ever for the three-year-old journal, notes the Guardian. In an officially published retraction of their paper, the authors acknowledged these mistakes as factors that compromised the results.
"We no longer have confidence in our projections for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and for this reason the authors retract the results pertaining to sea-level rise after 1900," wrote authors Mark Siddall, Thomas Stocker and Peter Clark.
Since the leak of e-mails from the U.K.'s top global warming scientists in early December, many other errors and sloppy mistakes have been uncovered in leading report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Flaws in weather stations have led some to question claims of rising temperatures, sloppy math led to holes in postulates that the Himalayas were rapidly melting and fears of a man-made food shortage in Africa seem unsubstantiated as well.
Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall told the Guardian,, "It's one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science." A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study's conclusion.
"Retraction is a regular part of the publication process," he said. "Science is a complicated game and there are set procedures in place that act as checks and balances."
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/...s.opinionPrint
ANOTHER ARTICLE:
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science...urce=r_science
REDORBIT NEWS
Rising Sea Level Claims Retracted
A 2009 claim that sea levels would rise up to 32 inches by the end of the century, is being retracted, as the original report’s author says the real estimate is still not known.
Scientists have discovered mistakes that undermine the projected sea level increase that would be affected by global warming. The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, confirmed the conclusions of a 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The 2009 study collected data from the previous 22,000 years to predict that sea levels would rise by between 3 and 33 inches by the year 2100.
The IPCC said their estimates placed the sea level to rise to be between 7 and 23 inches, but stressed this was based on incomplete information and that the true rise in sea levels could be even higher.
Scientists have criticized the IPCC for being too conservative in their approach. Several papers have been published suggesting that the sea could rise even more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a paper in December that predicted a rise of up to 75 inches by the end of the century.
Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said: “It's one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science.” There are two separate mistakes in the paper, which were pointed out by scientists after it had been published. A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the conclusion of the study.
“Science is a complicated game and there are set procedures in place that act as checks and balances,” Siddall told the Guardian, adding that retraction is a regular part of the whole publishing process.
It was the first retraction from the Nature Geoscience journal since it was first published in 2007, said publisher Nature Publishing Group.
The paper used fossil coral data and temperature records taken from ice-core measurements to reconstruct how the sea levels have changed with temperature since the last ice age. The paper also projected how much it could rise with the warming conditions over the several decades. However, the mistakes caused a huge impact on the reliability of the estimates. Authors of the paper said they can no longer draw a sturdy conclusion regarding sea levels in the next 90 years without further research.
The mistakes that undermined the study were miscalculation and not allowing fully for temperature changes over the past 2,000 years. “Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes,” the authors said.
Vermeer and Rahmstorf are thanked for bringing to light the issues and errors regarding the paper on rising sea levels, Said Siddall and his colleagues in the Nature Geoscience retraction.
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On the Net:
* Nature Geoscience
* Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Story from REDORBIT NEWS:
http://www.redorbit.com/news/display/?id=1826384
Published: 2010/02/22 15:45:00 CST
© RedOrbit 2005
New Climate Agency Head Tried to Suppress Data, Critics Charge
By Ed Barnes
- FOXNews.com
Thomas Karl, the head of Obama's new Climate Change office has been criticized for trying to suppress contradictory scientific data on climate change.
NOAA
Thomas Karl, the newly appointed head of the National Climatic Data Center.
The scientist who has been put in charge of the Commerce Department's new climate change office is coming under attack from both sides of the global warming debate over his handling of what they say is contradictory scientific data related to the subject.
Thomas Karl, 58, was appointed to oversee the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, an ambitious new office that will collect climate change data and disseminate it to businesses and communities.
According to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, the office will "help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change. In the process, we'll discover new technologies, build new businesses and create new jobs."
Karl, who has played a pivotal role in key climate decisions over the past decade, has kept a low profile as director of National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) since 1998, and he has led all of the NOAA climate services since 2009. His name surfaced numerous times in leaked "climate-gate" e-mails from the University of East Anglia, but there was little in the e-mails that tied him to playing politics with climate data. Mostly, the e-mails show he was in the center of the politics of climate change decisions
According to a school biography published by Northern Illinois University, Karl shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and other leading scientists based on his work at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and he was "one of the 10 most influential researchers of the 1990s who have formed or changed the course of research in a given area."
related links
*
Top U.N. Climate Official Yvo de Boer Resigning
*
Global Warming in Last 15 Years Insignificant, U.K.'s Top Climate Scientist Admits
*
Global Warming Skeptics Lambaste Plan to Increase Funding for Climate Change Research
His appointment was hailed by both the Sierra Club and Duke Energy Company of North Carolina. Sierra Club President Carl Pope said, "As polluters and their allies continue to try to muddy the waters around climate science, the Climate Service will provide easy, direct access to the valuable scientific research undertaken by government scientists and others." And Duke Energy CEO Jin Rogers said the new office, under Karl, will "spark the consensus we need to move forward."
But Roger Pielke Sr., a climatologist affiliated with the University of Colorado who has crossed horns with Karl in the past, says his appointment was a mistake. He accused Karl of suppressing data he submitted for the IPCC's most recent report on climate change and having a very narrow view of its causes.
The IPCC is charged with reviewing scientific data on climate change and providing policy makers and others with an assessment of current knowledge.
Pielke said he agrees that global warming is happening and that man plays a significant role in it, but he said there are many factors in addition to the release of carbon into the atmosphere that need to be studied to fully understand the phenomenon. He said he resigned from the IPCC in August 2005 because his data, and the work of numerous other scientists, were not included in its most recent report.
In his resignation letter, Pielke wrote that he had completed the assessment of current knowledge for his chapter of the report, when Karl abruptly took control of the final draft. He said the chapter he had nearly completed was then rewritten with a too-narrow focus.
One of the key areas of dispute, he said, was in describing "recent regional trends in surface and tropospheric temperatures," and the impact of land use on temperatures. It is the interpretation of this data on which the intellectual basis of the idea of global warming hangs.
In an interview, Pielke reiterated that Karl "has actively opposed views different from his own." And on his Web site last week, he said Karl's appointment "assures that policy makers will continue to receive an inappropriately narrow view of our actual knowledge with respect to climate science."
He said the people who run the agencies in charge of climate monitoring are too narrowly focused, and he worries that the creation of the new office "would give the same small group of people the chance to speak on the issue and exclude others" whose views might diverge from theirs.
Responding to the criticism, Karl told the Washington Post, "the literature doesn't show [Pielke's] ideas about the importance of land use are correct."
Calls to The Commerce Department and to Karl's office went unanswered.
The IPCC in recent weeks has come under severe criticism after e-mails, hacked from a prestigious climate center, revealed some of the political infighting that occurred as its assessments were being put together and called into question its impartiality.
Climate change skeptics, meanwhile, say Karl's appointment was unnecessary and pulls scarce resources from more pressing needs.
"The unconstitutional global warming office and its new Web site climate.gov would be charged with propagandizing Americans with eco-alarmism," wrote Alex Newman of the Liberty Sentinel of Gainesville, Fla.
On the popular skeptic site "Watts Up With That," Anthony Watts called the climate.gov site a "waste of more taxpayer money" and charged that it is nothing more than a "fast track press release service." He wrote that putting Karl in charge was an issue, because he had fabricated photos of "floods that didn't happen" in an earlier NOAA report.
In the famous words of my hero dave chappelle: IN YO FACE! 
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