SeaLevel.info

Here's another list of peer-reviewed papers reporting the lack of measurable acceleration in rate of sea level rise:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html#Sea

Note: Among the most extreme predictions of accelerated sea level rise are those from German climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf.

How long should an LTT^† sea level record be?

Multidecadal oscillations in regional sea levels mean that a minimum of 50-60 years of sea level data is required to establish a robust  ^†Long Term Trend (LTT). See:

1. Schlesinger, M. & Ramankutty, N. (1994), An oscillation in the global climate system of period 65-70 years. Nature, Vol. 367, pp. 723-726 (24 February 1994), doi:10.1038/367723a0 (p.1 is here)
2. Douglas, B. (1995). Global sea level change: Determination and interpretation. Reviews of Geophysics 33(S1): doi:10.1029/95RG00355. issn: 8755-1209.
3. Douglas B (1997). Global Sea Rise: a Redetermination, Surveys in Geophysics, Vol. 18, No. 2-3 (1997), 279-292, doi:10.1023/A:1006544227856.
   Excerpt: "It is well established that sea level trends obtained from tide gauge records shorter than about 50-60 years are corrupted by interdecadal sea level variation..."
4. Mitchell W, Chittleborough J, Ronai B, and Lennon G W (2000), Sea Level Rise in Australia and the Pacific, in the Proceedings of the Pacific Islands Conference on Climate Change, Climate Variability and Sea Level Rise, Australian National Tidal Facility (NTF), 3-7 April 2000.
   (See p.2; excerpt: "...it is scientifically unreasonable to consider historic records less than several decades to yield realistic estimates of sea level trends.")
5. Klyashtorin, L. (2001), UN FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 410: Climate Change and Long-Term Fluctuations of Commercial Catches - The Possibility of Forecasting, ISBN 92‑5‑104695‑6, ISSN 0429‑9345, 86 pp. (see p. 5)
6. AMSAT Pacific Country Report on Sea Level & Climate: Their Present State, Kiribati, June 2002, National Tidal Facility - Australia. See especially p.8. See also Willis Eschenbach's related analysis (of Tuvalu) here or here.
7. Knight, J.R., et al (2005), A signature of persistent natural thermohaline circulation cycles in observed climate, Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L20708. doi:10.1029/2005GL024233. (Discusses the approximately 65-year Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation [AMO].)
8. Klyashtorin, L., and Lyubushin, A. (2007), Cyclic Climate Changes and Fish Productivity, VNIRO Publishing, 2007. 224 p. ISBN 978-5-85382-339-6.
9. Jevrejeva, S., J. C. Moore, A. Grinsted, and P. L. Woodworth (2008), Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago? Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08715, doi:10.1029/2008GL033611 (see p. 3).
10. Zervas, C. (2009), NOAA Technical Report NOS CO-OPS 053, Sea Level Variations of the United States, 1854 - 2006 (see p. xiii). This report is also a great resource with in-depth information about determination of sea-level trends from tide gauge measurement records.
11. Frolov, I., et al (2010), Climate Change in Eurasian Arctic Shelf Seas: Centennial Ice Cover Observations. Springer Science & Business Media, 2010. ISBN: 354085875X, 9783540858751. (The abstract notes an evident 60 year cycle, and Section 2.4 discusses it.)
12. Knudsen, N.F., et al (2011), Tracking the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation through the last 8,000 years. Nature Communications 2, Article number: 178 (2011), doi: 10.1038/ncomms1186.
13. Scafetta, N. (2012), "...an interval of just 30 years is the worst that can be chosen because it is half 60-year cycle, and it happened that for SLR the period 1975-2005 had this 60-year cycle during its warming phase (the temperature warming phase was about 1970-2000). So, if you fit the last 30-40 years you get an overestimation of the real trend." [private communication]
14. Chambers, D., Merrifield, M.A., and Nerem, R.S. (2012). Is there a 60-year oscillation in global mean sea level? Geophys. Res. Lett., doi:10.1029/2012GL052885 (and two related articles)
15. Baart, F., et al (2012). The Effect of the 18.6-Year Lunar Nodal Cycle on Regional Sea-Level Rise Estimates. Journal of Coastal Research Volume 28, Issue 2: pp. 511-516. doi: 10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-11-00169.1.
16. Woodworth, P.L. (2012). A Note on the Nodal Tide in Sea Level Records. Journal of Coastal Research Volume 28, Issue 2: pp. 316-323. doi: 10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-11A-00023.1.
17. Lüdecke H-J, Hempelmann A, & Weiss C O (2013). Multi-periodic climate dynamics: spectral analysis of long-term instrumental and proxy temperature records, Clim. Past, 9, 447-452, 2013, doi:10.5194/cp-9-447-2013, and related article.
18. Scafetta, N (2013b). Discussion on climate oscillations: CMIP5 general circulation models versus a semi-empirical harmonic model based on astronomical cycles. Earth-Science Reviews. 126, 321-357. (pdf) doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2013.08.008.
19. Scafetta, N (2013c). Solar and planetary oscillation control on climate change: hind-cast, forecast and a comparison with the CMIP5 GCMs. Energy & Environment. 24(3-4), 455-496. (pdf) doi:10.1260/0958-305X.24.3-4.455.
20. IPCC AR5 Chapter 3 (2013), Rhein, M., et al: Observations: Ocean. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107415324.010. Excerpt (3.7.4): "A long time-scale is needed because significant multi-decadal variability appears in numerous tide gauge records during the 20th century. The multidecadal variability is marked by an increasing trend starting in 1910-1920, a downward trend (i.e., leveling of sea level if a long-term trend is not removed) starting around 1950, and an increasing trend starting around 1980."
21. Parker, A (2014). Minimum 60 years of recording are needed to compute the sea level rate of rise in the Western South Pacific. Nonlinear Engineering, ISSN (Online) 2192-8010, ISSN (Print) 2192-8029, doi:10.1515/nleng-2013-0011.
22. Wenzel & Schröter (2014). Global and regional sea level change during the 20th century. J. Geophys. Res. Oceans. (See the Concluding remarks.) doi:10.1002/2014JC009900.
23. Also, Scafetta N (2014), above.
24. Gervais, F. (2016). Anthropogenic CO₂ warming challenged by 60-year cycle. Earth-Science Reviews, Volume 155, April 2016, 129-135. doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2016.02.005.
25. WUWT/Javier (2018). The 60-year oscillation revisited. (Internet)

Also, Alan Cheetham has an informative web page about various apparent climate-related cycles of approx. 55 to 65 years duration.

Science

“What passes for science includes opinion, arguments-from-authority, dramatic press releases, and fuzzy notions of consensus generated by preselected groups. This is not science.”  Climatologist John Christy, Sept. 20, 2012

What a mess!

The Scientific Method is what distinguishes “science” from other types of study. It is an algorithm or process for investigating the physical world. Here's how it is supposed to work, in seven steps: ↑

1. The scientist observes the available data.
2. He or she formulates a hypothesis (or perhaps several plausible tentative hypotheses) to explain the observations.
3. He derives testable predictions from the hypothesis.
4. He devises experiments or observations to test the predictions.
5. He does the experiments or makes the observations.
6. If the test results match the predictions, he cries “eureka!” and publishes. He can now properly call his hypothesis a scientific theory or theoretical model. He publishes it along with his data and detailed calculations, so that other scientists can reproduce and verify his work.
7. If the test results fail to match the predictions, the hypothesis is said to be “falsified,” so he discards or revises it and starts over at step 2, with the new observations or experimental results added to the body of available data.

Step 7 is a test of a scientist's integrity. If, instead of discarding or revising falsified theories or models, a disappointed researcher revises the data, to make it fit his predictions, or if he skips testing his hypothesis altogether, he's no scientist worthy of the name.

Unfortunately, much of what passes for “science” these days fails that test. Here is some recommended reading:

1. What is Science?, by Richard Feynman, 1966.
2. Cargo Cult Science, by Richard Feynman, 1974. (This part is especially relevant to climatology.) (h/t Simon)
3. Getting Along Without Doomsday, by Bryan Magee, 1975. (h/t Prof. Thayer Watkins)
4. Dickersin K, et al (1987) found that pharmaceutical trials with positive results were more likely to be published than trials with negative results. That's just one example of a much broader “publication bias” problem: when researchers find the results they're hoping for, they publish; otherwise, they often don't. For example, when climatologists Church & White examined three sets of tide-gauge records of sea-level measurements for evidence of acceleration (2006, 2009 & 2011), they found evidence of slight post-1900 acceleration in two of them (2006 & 2011), but slight deceleration in the third (2009). Guess which one did not have a paper published about it?
5. The Earth Is Round (p < .05), by Jacob Cohen, December 2004, American Psychologist Vol. 49, No. 12, 997-1003.
   This paper is also included as Chapter 2 of the book, What If There Were No Significance Tests, edited by Lisa L. Harlow, Stanley A. Mulaik & James H. Steige.
6. Aliens Cause Global Warming, by Michael Crichton, 2003.
7. The Peer Review System: Is Climate Science Politically Corrupt? by John L. Daly, 2004.
8. Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, by John P. A. Ioannidis, 2005. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124. (And article.) ↑
9. A Junk Science Christmas Carol, by Steven Milloy of JunkScience.com, Fox News, 22 December 2005.
10. The Wegman Report, 2006, highlights, and an article.
11. Revisiting Chamberlin: Multiple Working Hypotheses for the 21st Century, by Louis P. Elliott and Barry W. Brook, 2007. BioScience, Volume 57, Issue 7, 608–614. (“Chamberlin: Multiple Working Hypothesis” is a reference to this 1890 paper.) doi:10.1641/B570708.
12. Cereal-induced gender selection? Most likely a multiple testing false positive, by Stan Young, Heejung Bang & Kutluk Oktay, 2008.
13. A Dirty Dozen: Twelve P-Value Misconceptions, by Steven Goodman, Seminars in Hematology, 2008 Jul;45(3):135-140. doi:10.1053/j.seminhematol.2008.04.003. Erratum in Semin Hematol 2011 Oct;48(4):302.
14. Tricking Yourself Into Cherry-Picking, by Lucia Liljegren, 2009. ↑
15. How Science Will Get Rid Of The AGW Dogma, by Maurizio Morabito, 2009.
16. Short Circuiting the Scientific Process — a Serious Problem in the Climate Science Community, by Roger Pielke Sr., June 8, 2009
17. Climate Science: Is it Currently Designed to Answer Questions? by Prof. Richard S. Lindzen, Global Research, 30 November, 2009.
18. Towards understanding the paleocean, by Carl Wunsch, 2010, Quat. Sci Rev. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.05.020 See also the discussions here: The perils of ‘near-tabloid science’, and on WUWT. ↑
19. Deming, data and observational studies: A process out of control and needing fixing, by Stan Young & Alan Karr, 2011.
20. Scientific Heresy, RSA 2011 Angus Millar lecture, by Matt Ridley.
21. Trust Your Science? Open Your Data and Code, Victoria Stodden, Amstat News, American Statistical Association, July 2011 (or pdf).
22. Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets?, by Prinz, Schlange & Asadullah, Bayer HealthCare. Nat Rev Drug Discov 10, 712 (31 August 2011), doi:10.1038/nrd3439-c1.
23. Science publishing: The trouble with retractions, Nature 478, 26-28 (2011), doi:10.1038/478026a (or pdf), and blog discussion.
24. What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe, a TED Talk by Dr. Ben Goldacre, April 2012.
25. Replication studies: Bad copy, Ed Yong, Nature Vol. 485, pp. 298-300 (17 May 2012), doi:10.1038/485298a. This was one of the articles featured in Nature's 2013 Special Report: Challenges in Irreproducible Research (was here, then here).
26. Open Your Minds and Share Your Results (editorial), Nature 486, 441 (28 June 2012) doi:10.1038/486441a, and discussion.
27. Trust-me science, by Stan Young, 2012.
28. A textbook example of groupthink, by Paul MacRae, 2012.
29. Statistical Follies and Epidemiology, a lecture by William Matthew ("Matt") Briggs, Ph.D., 2012.
30. Do That Again, by Nina Bai. TheScientist, Aug 15, 2012.
31. How a scientist becomes a con man, by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, NY Times Magazine, 2013, and commentary by Bruce Webster, Geoff Brown, and Janet Stemwedel (and part two).
32. Redefine misconduct as distorted reporting (how to cope with an epidemic of scientific misconduct), Daniele Fanelli, Nature Vol. 494, p. 149 (14 February 2013), doi:10.1038/494149a.
33. Opinion: A Wolf in Sheeps Clothing, Edward Archer, The Scientist, Oct. 22, 2013. (Discussion here.)
34. Revised standards for statistical evidence, Valen E. Johnson, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, Oct. 9, 2013 (print Nov. 11, 2013), doi:10.1073/pnas.1313476110. (See also the discussion at WUWT, esp. Prof. Robert G. Brown's comment here, and the article in Nature here.)
35. Unreliable research: Trouble at the lab, The Economist, Oct. 19, 2013 (or here).
36. Scientific Groupthink and Gay Parenting, Richard E. Redding, adapted from Politicized Science, Society, Vol. 50, Issue 5, pp. 439-446 (October 2013), doi:10.1007/s12115-013-9686-5.
37. The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age, Timothy H. Vines, et al, Current Biology, Dec. 19, 2013, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.11.014. Discussions here and here.
38. The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness, The Guardian, 18 January, 2014.
39. A Finger On the Scales, by Kevin W. Glass, Townhall.com, Jan. 25, 2014.
40. Modelling the effects of subjective and objective decision making in scientific peer review, Park, Peacey & Munafò, Nature Vol. 506, pp. 93-96 (6 February 2014), doi:10.1038/nature12786. The paper is paywalled, but I contacted one of the authors, and he kindly sent me a copy. Here are a few quotes.
41. To make science better, watch out for statistical flaws, by Tom Siegfried, ScienceNews, 7 February 2014. (See also the discussion at WUWT.)
42. Scientific method: Statistical errors, Regina Nuzzo, Nature Vol. 506, pp. 150-152 (13 February 2014), doi:10.1038/506150a. "P values, the 'gold standard' of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume."
43. AAAS on reproducibility — 'a cornerstone of science', by Anthony Watts, WattsUpWithThat blog, 10 June, 2014
44. Not all science is created equal, by John Ioannidis, Chemistry World, 16 October 2014.
45. Offline: What is medicine's 5 sigma? by Richard Horton, The Lancet, Volume 385, No. 9976, p.1380, 11 April 2015. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60696-1. “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
46. Science is often flawed; It's time we embraced that, by Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman, Vox, 13 May 2015. (See also a related story about how the biggest news in Social Science in 2014 turned out to be fraudulent.)
47. Science publication is hopelessly compromised, say journal editors, American Council on Science and Health, 19 May 2015, and related video.
48. I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How. by John Bohannon, io9, 27 May, 2015. There's some discussion and background information on WUWT here & here, and on RetractionWatch here & here, and similar hoaxes.
49. Types of Bias and How To Avoid Bias In Data Science. By Enda Ridge, on his guerrilla-analytics.net blog, 15 July, 2015.
50. Peer Review: Definitive Truth or Suboptimal Standard? Four Views. By Tom Birkland, Barbara Oakley, Joann Keyton and John Staddon, Pope Center Commentaries, 29 July, 2015.
51. Registered clinical trials make positive findings vanish, by Chris Woolston, Nature 524, 269 (20 August 2015), doi:10.1038/524269f. “The launch of the clinicaltrials.gov registry in 2000 seems to have had a striking impact on reported trial results, according to a PLoS ONE study…” [doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0132382, 5 August 2015].
52. Let's just try that again, The Economist, 6 February 2016. “Reproducibility should be at science's heart. It isn't. But that may soon change.”
53. Cleaning up bad science, The National, CBC News, April 18, 2016 (13:20 news documentary). “Beall's List” of apparently predatory scholarly journals and publishers (mentioned in the documentary) is here: https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/
54. Climate Alarmism and the Muzzling of Independent Science, by Leo Goldstein (a/k/a Ari Halperin), American Thinker, April 21, 2016.↑
55. Climate science might become the most important casualty of the replication crisis, by Larry Kummer, WattsUpWithThat, April 22, 2016.↑
56. Scientific Regress, by William A. Wilson, First Things, May 2016.
57. Presenting One of the Most Humiliating Academic Mistakes Ever, by David French, National Review, 9 June, 2016. Also, Epic Correction of the Decade, by Steven Hayward, PowerLine Blog, 8 June, 2016. Their topic is this erratum: doi:10.1111/ajps.12216 in the American Journal of Political Science.
58. From the August 2016 University of Virginia Board of Visitors Retreat comes The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists, by Julia Belluz, Brad Plumer, and Brian Resnick, 14 July 2016 (or here).
59. Science in the age of selfies, by Donald & Stuart Geman, PNAS, 23 August 2016, Vol. 113, No. 34, 9384-9387. doi:10.1073/pnas.1609793113
60. The natural selection of bad science, by Paul E. Smaldino & Richard McElreath, Royal Society Open Science, 21 September 2016. doi:10.1098/rsos.160384. The Guardian has a surprisingly good article about it, and there's a good discussion on WUWT.
61. In January, 2017, Science and Nature reported that multi-million dollar effort, by “The Reproducibility Project” at the University of Virginia's Center for Open Science, to reproduce five major cancer biology studies, found that only two of them were reproducible. (The BBC had a typically garbled article about it.) ↑
62. Nine Causes of Scientific Decline in American Academia, by Leo Goldstein, American Thinker, February 25, 2017. ↑
63. Beware of spurious correlations, such as the Secret of Climate.
64. RetractionWatch.com has a seemingly endless stream of cautionary tales about science gone wrong.
65. Australians Jo Diong and Marty Héroux have created (in 2016) a useful web site called ScientificallySound.org, with resources for scientists interested in doing scientifically sound research.
66. Physicist Richard Muller discussed scientific objectivity in his answer to a Quora question.↑
67. The Brussels declaration on ethics & principles for science & society policy-making, a “Twenty-point plan for science policy,” was announced on January 19, 2017 in Nature 541, 289. doi:10.1038/541289a. The authors also released an accompanying “policy-making manifesto,” which Judith Curry discusses here. ↑
68. Seven Costs of the Money Chase: How Academia's Focus on Funding Influences Scientific Progress, by Scott Lilienfeld, Association for Psychological Science, Oct. 2017. ↑
69. Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science (or here), (pdf here or here), a report of the National Association of Scholars, by David Randall and Christopher Welser, April 2018. See also several related reports & documents here, and discussions here & here.↑
70. The Ideological Corruption of Science[2], by Wesley J. Smith, National Review, July 13, 2020. ↑
71. Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones, by Serra-Garcia, M, and Gneezy, U (2021). Science Advances, 7(21), doi:10.1126/sciadv.abd1705. There was quite a bit of media coverage of this paper, including articles from UCSD (where the study was done), the San Diego Times, Science (ironically), and, my favorite, Jo Nova. ↑
    Excerpt:

    “When it comes to scientific truths, even in top journals like Science and Nature, the more wrong it is, the more it gets cited. Even after other researchers have failed to repeat it, and been published saying so, the citations dont slow down. Almost 9 out of 10 of the new citations keep citing it as if it were still correct. Who said science was self-correcting?
    “It's so bad that the junkier articles in Nature and Science that couldn't be replicated were cited 300 times as often as the more boring papers that could be replicated. In other words, the supposedly best two science journals, and the industry that reads them, have become a filter for eye-candy-science-junk.
    “And it was all so predictable — with the fixation on ‘counting citations’ as an inane substitute for analysis: we got what we didn't think about. The drive to get citations and media headlines means the modern industry of science has become a filter to amplify sensationalism, not science. ... The more interesting and surprising a science paper is, the more it is likely to be published and cited. [But] the more likely it is that no one will be able to replicate the results [and it] is often political activism.”

72. Wapner, J. (2024). The rise of the science sleuths. Undark, Sept. 11, 2024.
73. Sadly, after about six decades in print, the venerable Journal of Irreproducible Results seems to be defunct. ↑

Here's another excellent list of articles about the troubled state of what passes for "science" these days: http://skepticalswedishscientists.wordpress.com/scientific-method/

Other

1. U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Republican Staff has issued several very informative Reports on Climate Change, the Climategate scandal, and related topics.
2. Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics to the UK Parliament. The IOP concluded that the Climategate emails "provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law."
3. GAO Report: Climate Monitoring - NOAA Can Improve Management of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network, GAO-11-800, Aug. 2011 (or here)
4. Why has there been no global warming for the past decade? - a lecture by Princeton Prof. Wm Happer at UNC, Chapel Hill, NC, Sept. 8, 2014, about the physics of atmospheric greenhouse warming from carbon dioxide (slides, audio recording & supplemental information).
5. Measurement of sea-level by satellite altimetry is unreliable. Physicist Willie Soon explains the problems starting at 17:37 in this very informative hour-long lecture.
6. The "97% consensus" myth: Do 97% of experts really agree with the IPCC that human CO₂ emissions are causing dangerous global warming? (Not even close!)
7. Andrew at PopularTechnology.net has compiled a list of over 1300 peer-reviewed papers supporting skeptic arguments against climate alarmism.
8. Pierre Gosselin at the “No Tricks Zone” blog, and Kenneth Richard, have compiled lists totaling 1526 peer-reviewed “skeptical” climate papers published in 2014, 2015, 2016 & 2017 (parts 1, 2 & 3), plus many in 2018 (parts 1, 2 & 3).
9. For information on the 2010-2012 North Carolina Sea-Level Rise political fight, see the sealevel.info Resources page.

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