DOE 3 2025
---
---
// context
ggl 9 25
American Enterprise Institute
A Close Look at Australia’s New Climate Assessments
Today's is the first in a series of posts for THB Australia Week. Coming soon, an update on trends in Australian normalized disaster losses...
.9 hours ago
Media Matters for America
At Climate Week, The New York Times has an opportunity to hold Energy Secretary accountable for recent remarks downplaying climate change and disparaging renewable energy
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who recently called pledges to reduce greenhouse gases “silly” and said that climate change is “not...
.19 minutes ago
Science | AAAS
Contrarian climate assessment from U.S. government draws swift pushback
The report makes some points that mainstream climate scientists would acknowledge. It decries media hype and points out that global warming is...
.1 month ago
AGU Newsroom
AGU and AMS join forces on special collection to maintain momentum of research supporting the U.S. National Climate assessment
Congressionally mandated, the NCA draws on the latest scientific research to evaluate how climate change is affecting the United States.
.May 2, 2025
Washington State Department of Ecology (.gov)
Sept. 5 - Ecology debunks federal climate report, reaffirms commitment to real science
Today the Washington Department of Ecology issued an official rebuke of a draft report by the U.S. Department of Energy being used to...
.2 weeks ago
GlobeNewswire
NYAM and Yale Center on Climate Change and Health Partner to Address Sustainable Health Systems
Summit explores resilient healthcare systems that protect communities from climate-related health impacts...
.4 hours ago
NPR
White House dismisses authors of major climate report
The Trump administration dismissed all the scientists working on the next National Climate Assessment. The report is the most comprehensive...
.Apr 29, 2025
The New York Times
All Authors Working on Flagship U.S. Climate Report Are Dismissed
The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government's flagship report on how global...
.Jul 8, 2025
E&E News by POLITICO
Trump dismisses scientists writing the National Climate Assessment
The move was roundly criticized by climate scientists late Monday as the news spread. The assessments help Americans “understand how climate...
.Apr 29, 2025
Earth.Org
‘Maintain Momentum’: US Research Organizations to Keep National Climate Assessment Alive Amid Trump’s Cuts
Two major US research organizations have stepped up after the Trump administration dismissed all the scientists working on an assessment of climate change in...
.May 6, 2025
---
9 25 SEVERAL STORIES ON WATER IN FLIPBD I SCARD TO LOOK AT; fox jrnl fail on NC coast flood
Time and Tide Gauges wait for no Voortman
18 Sep 2025 by Gavin 31 Comments
Here we go again. An obscure, methodologically poor, paper published with little to no review makes a convenient point and gets elevated into supposedly ‘blockbusting’ science by the merchants of bullshit, sorry, doubt. Actual scientists drop everything to respond, but not before the (convenient) nonsense has spread widely. Rebuttals are written and submitted, but by the time they are published everyone has moved on.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it happens a lot. In climate science, one classic example was Soon and Baliunas (2003)which instantly made it’s way to the Senate floor (via Inhofe’s then aide Marc Morano). Other examples abound. So what is this week’s example?
As Dessler et al report laid out convincingly last week, and in multiple posts by Tamino/Grant Foster, the sea level chapter in the DOE climate science ‘critique’ was notably poor. They highlighted 5 specific US tide gauge records, showed only four of them, declared that no acceleration was visible, and concluded that no acceleration was present anywhere. Curiously the 5th record (that wasn’t shown) has a very clear acceleration. They then bungled the referencing of the projections and invented a NOAA projection that did not correspond to anything real. Notably, they did no actual analysis. Actual analyses of the tide gauge record show that acceleration is sea level rise is not only widespread, but it is increasingly clear:
*Analysis of US tide gauge records showing statistically significant acceleration in sea level rise on the East Coast all the way from the Gulf to Maine (via Tamino)
Conveniently, rather than defend the indefensible, one of the authors (Judith Curry) in response latched onto a new paper that apparently agreed with her prior vibes. The new paper is Voortman & de Vos (2025) (VdV25) which was published on Aug 27, and hit the contrary-sphere a few days later heavily boosted by Michael Shellenberger and a few others. This paper claims that acceleration in 243 global tide gauge records is only significant in 4% of them. This, to be clear, is rubbish. But as always in such papers, it takes a little work to figure out what has gone wrong.
Fortunately, a group of scientists led by Bob Kopp, have quickly put together a rebuttal and request for a retraction (that has been submitted to the journal): Kopp et al. (2025). In it, they point out that this analysis has in fact already been done properly (Wang et al, 2025, published before VdV25 was submitted), and then go on to explain the basic errors.
Apart from the basic lack of context that happens when you ignore the satellite record, the main issues are that the statistical model they use is overly complicated and not properly described, the statistical tests for significance are not applied properly, and the correction for multiple hypothesis testing (which assumes there is no correlation across tide gauge records) is just wrong and all but guarantees their erroneous result.
Curiously, almost all of these errors were also made in an earlier Voortman paper, and were raised by the commenters on that paper at the time (Le Bars et al., 2023)! Update:**They were also noted in a [blog postby Scott Simmons].
How will this all play out in the public discourse? The process of comments, replies, and retractions is relatively slow (multiple months to a year) and even with this preprint quickly available, none of the promoters of VdV25 will deal substantively with any of this (they have not done, and will not do, any analysis themselves). It may well be that VdV25 never gets raised again, having served its purpose as a momentary distraction from the critique of CWG report. Whether or not it gets retracted is not really relevant to that.
We have seen this playbook many times before. Judith Curry and Michael Shellenberger are following in the (late) Pat Michaels’ footsteps who continually championed many new ‘blockbusting’ papers that were always on the verge of undermining the climate consensus, but that (somehow!) never quite did. Once folks lose the ability to check these things for themselves, and start basing claims on vibes, their estrangement from the scientific community hardens and the seriousness with which their opinions are taken decreases.
This little episode thus tells us very little about sea level rise acceleration, but quite a lot about the seriousness of the people involved.
:{:{References...}:
---
---