Questionable "Scientific" Papers - 3

St. Vincent: "People turn the TV on,
it looks just like a window"

I. Background

All scientific papers by nature are questionable (Questionable "Scientific" Papers, 2).

It is the essence of scientific discovery to question.

Especially on issues that puzzle scientists.

Issues that are therefore ripe for additional inquiry, observation, and the production of data by competent means and methods.

II. "The Earth is Flat" Types of
Intuitive Feelings Can Lead Us Astray

Intuition is not a scientific tool even though, like other guesswork, sometimes it is used to plod along into a discovery.

Which all too often ends up being a discovery that the intuition was wrong, but on some occasions the intuition was a good guess.

But in all of that the data establishing the validity of a scientific issue is the crucial evidence.

Proper questioning of scientific papers is healthy science, but pure unadulterated ignorance is not (Inhofe's One Man Troofiness Crusade, Inhofe, Beavis, & Butthead Need Waders, Agnotology: The Surge - 17).

III. The Gravity of Ice Sheets Is Ultra Non-Intuitive

Even Though The Force Is With You

One issue that has confounded scientists for a century, even after it was supposedly demystified by Newton, is the gravity of SLC, the gravity of sea level change (The Gravity of Sea Level Change).

Gravity is an old concept, but, it is not dead yet:

"A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.

I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.

In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.

I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead."

(Isaac Asimov). The force is with us still (F = G (m₁ * m₂ / d²)) as explained by Dr. Mitrovica in the video below.

IV. "They Didn't Have A Clue" Is Not A Putdown, 

It Is An Accurate Observation

Dr. Mitrovica points out, in the video below, that for a long time sea level scientists did not have a clue about what was called, in their scientific papers, "the European problem."

That does not mean that they were not competent scientists, it just means that they were confused by an invisible essence, The Force, and did not have a clue that what "made tide gauges give bad readings" was the force of gravity.

I mentioned one tiny glimpse of that problem in Friday's post when I wrote:

To the contrary, the old Stockholm SLC records indicate that only about 25 years into the revolution the oceans were being impacted by global warming (induced by a maddening increase in coal burning).

In Sweden's case, the SLC was sea level fall (SLF) caused by the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and it is still ongoing (Proof of Concept - 5).

I may take a look at some of the other old records for more clues (PSMSL - Other Long Records).

(Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 54, emphasis in original). So, today let's take a look at what Eckman (1988, 2003) missed by not putting the word "gravity." or sea level fall (SLF), into his paperwork.

V. No, Sea Level Fall At Stockholm Is Not Caused By 

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)

Anyone who looks at over a thousand tide gauge station records around the world will

Fig. 1 Stockholm annually, "way back then"

notice the "sawtooth pattern" of ups and downs of sea level at any given station.

One year is higher or lower than another, but they fit into an observable trend (rising, falling, or unchanged) caused by dynamic forces acting upon the oceans.

In the case of Stockholm, and other tide gauge stations around it in Europe, some of the

Fig. 2 After all these years, it's still SLF

cases involve the approaching, the staying awhile, then the passing over of the hinge line across those tide gauge stations (The Evolution and Migration of Sea Level Hinge Points).

Conventional establishment science, until recently, attributed SLC to anything except what was actually causing it (New Type of SLC Detection Model - 10).

Fig. 3  Stockholm fingerprints

One of those scientists was Eckman, who evidently thought that the long Stockholm tide gauge record, showing SLF, was due to the dynamic North Atlantic Oscillation  (NAO):

"In a series of papers the author and others have shown that the Stockholm sea level observations ... contain a wealth of scientific information ... there should be a relation between the Stockholm sea level and the North Atlantic Oscillation ..."

(Eckman, 2003). Whether we use the 1988 data (Eckman 1988), the "improved version" for Excel (Eckman, 2003), or the most modern Dredd Blog "fingerprint" version, the patterns are the same (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3).

The "sawtooth pattern" flux and oscillation, from year to year or month to month, is a function of the interaction between non-polar Glacial ice melt, polar ice sheet melt in Greenland and Antarctica, and the subsequent relocation of the melt water and ice (Proof of Concept , 2, 3, 4, 5).

The ice sheet and ice berg remains, which flow and fall into the sea, are moved to other locations in the oceans of the Earth.

That movement is due to gravity-loss at those ice sources, due to the Earth's rotation, due to the Earth's gravity, due to the Earth's axial movement, and the like (see Mitrovica video).

VI. Conclusion

To some degree and extent our "knowledge" is governed by what others tell us (The Pillars of Knowledge: Faith and Trust?).

Some of our "knowledge" is nothing more than induced ignorance (Agnotology: The Surge, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17).

Our freedom from such constraints is ours for the taking.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Dr. Mitrovica: A discussion of, among other things, SLC as impacted by ice sheet mass and gravity:

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Dr. Rignot on ice sheet dynamics:

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