Questionable Scientific Papers - 6

Fig. 1 The ghost of SLF?

This series is about scientific papers that exhibit the widespread ignoring of scientific realities now effectively lost in the old filing systems.

Lost because no retrieval work is done, which elitist scientists relegate to others.

Then, there are the hangovers in their college students, who seek Phd's, cut corners so they can make enough money to pay for booze and their crushing educational debt.

Or something like that.

Thus, they do not dust off some of the classic scientific papers and then digitize them.

One example is the paper Woodward (1888).

One professor does not accept that level of academic performance from his students:

To our knowledge, Woodward (1888) was the first to demonstrate that the rapid melting of an ice sheet would lead to a geographically variable sea level change. Woodward (1888) assumed a rigid, non-rotating Earth, and therefore self-gravitation of the surface load was the only contributor to the predicted departure from a geographically uniform (i.e. eustatic) sea level rise. This departure was large and counter-intuitive. Specifically, sea level was predicted to fall within ∼2000 km of a melting ice sheet, and to rise with progressively higher amplitude at greater distances. The physics governing this redistribution is straightforward.

(On The Origin of the Sea-level Seesaw). The Mitrovica team found a paper as important as some of Einstein's papers, which everyone else seems to have overlooked.

Especially this guy:

For the past couple of decades, the oceans have been steadily rising. Each year, sea-level increases by about 3 millimeters, a constant and ominous creep responding to climate warming.

Scientists have been measuring this rise from satellites since 1993, using instruments called altimeters. But for an 18-month period that began in the middle of 2010, something surprising happened. Instead of rising, sea levels fell.

"Every few months we check in on sea level and try to get some idea as to what's happening and why ..."
...
Fasullo, who was trying to balance out the Earth's "water budget," sought an explanation for where that water, normally ocean bound, might have ended up.

Now he believes he has one. His paper explaining the sea-level drop was recently accepted into the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Fasullo worked to determine where the water might be, if it wasn't contributing to sea-level rise. In an earlier paper, the researcher and other scientists concluded it had probably gotten stored on the land somewhere. They also thought La Niña might have something to do with this.

(A Scientist Explains the Mystery, emphasis added). The man is clueless about the sea level fall reality as well as what causes it and what doesn't (Proof of Concept , 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

This sea level fall and sea level rise dynamic is a reality that has been happening since circa 1775.

Nevertheless, he concludes: "I see lakes in Australia full of water."

Like Professor Mitrovica says, usage of the ill-advised "global mean average" has led us astray for 100 years" (The Ghost-Water Constant - 4).

The paper's author looks at that deceptive global mean average "every few months" and bases everything he thinks he knows on it.

A bad, but common, mistake, which endangers us all:

"Although more than 95% of active climate scientists attribute recent global warming to human causes and most of the general public accepts that climate change is occurring, only about half of U.S. adults believe that human activity is the predominant cause, which is the lowest among 20 nations polled in 2014. We examine how this societal debate affects science classrooms and find that, whereas most U.S. science teachers include climate science in their courses, their insufficient grasp of the science may hinder effective teaching. Mirroring some actors in the societal debate over climate change, many teachers repeat scientifically unsupported claims in class. Greater attention to teachers' knowledge, but also values, is critical."

(Science, 2/12/16, emphasis added). A new post in the Agnotology series is in order (Agnotology: The Surge, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17).

BTW, the graph @ Fig. 1 is from a new database I just acquired from NASA.

More on that later.

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