Sea Level Rise: What the Data Actually Shows

Someone recently pointed to a post by Norman G. Purves at “Climategate Country Club” about sea level rise.

Regression

It sometimes happens that we have only limited access to direct measurements of some variable of interest, but we have abundant data on some other, related variable. In such cases we can use the “other” variable as a proxy for our target variable. We attempt to determine the relationship between them, then use the measurement of one as input to that relationship in order to estimate the other. Voila! Of course such indirect estimates will be imperfect, but at least they’re an approximation, we hope a useful one. Why, such practice has even been applied to climate science.

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Goddard’s Folly

As many of you are already aware, Steve Goddard contributed a post to WUWT about the planet Venus. The theme was that the extreme temperatures on our neighbor planet aren’t due to the greenhouse effect, but due to the extremely high pressure of the Venusian atmosphere. He followed it up with another post in order to add “a few ideas which should make the concepts clear to almost everybody.”