This is getting monotonous. It seems like every day, another article that takes a swipe at climate change science appears in the British press, right wing bloggers jump up & down in glee about the latest "scandal" about the climate change "hoax," and then it turns out that the story itself is irresponsibly misleading, at best, or wildly dishonest, at worst.
So, we've seen this movie before.
Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.
The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.
At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study "strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results". The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.
Which, for people like, oh, Althouse, goes to show that scientists are stupid.
Amusingly, the authors aren't disclosing whether they overestimated or underestimated the rise of seas. They'd said 0.75 to 1.9 meters by 2100. [My emphasis] The IPCC had said 18 to 59 centimeters. So, let's stay terrified.
Althouse is, characteristically, easily amused. She is also, characteristically, unable to read. The authors' estimate was actually 7cm and 82cm, a figure cleverly hidden in the article's second paragraph (quoted above).
This is typical Althousian sloppiness, but it gets better, or worse, depending on your point of view. Because if you look at the article, you know that the technical mistakes that forced the retraction were discovered -- shockingly, I know -- by other scientists, as opposed to kerning-expert conservative bloggers. Who would a thunk it. And you also know that these other scientists have a competing study showing the estimate is probably too low, and that they're the ones who are estimating 0.75 to 1.9 meters:
Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise 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 study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.
Which means that Althouse wants to snark about climate scientists engaging in fearmongering to further some sort of mysterious ghastly wicked secret plot... by citing evidence that they chose to use a conservative estimate of how much sea levels are projected to rise. If the IPCC is fearmongering on this, well, the worst they can be accused of is of doing it badly. Not that this will penetrate to up-is-downists like Althouse, someone incapable of reading a newspaper story correctly but perfectly confident about writing smugly dismissive posts of complex scientific studies.
Note by the way that you don't need anything but the text of the article and a bit of common sense to see why the Right Blogosphere has this story completely backwards. And it's not a bad story, at least by the standards current in the British media regarding climate change, even with the misleading headline. For the important context about why the retraction of the article matters see Brad Johnson, who reminds us that "Over the past twenty years, actual sea level rise has been at the top of estimated limits since the first IPCC report in 1990."
Which I suppose is proof that the real scaremongering going on right now is coming from the oceans, which I have always myself strongly suspected of harboring a radical socialist agenda.