This just in: a CNN headline reads “Scientists find sea levels are already much higher than we thought. That could spell trouble for the future”. How the Dickens, you might reasonably cry, could they be higher than we thought? As in “more than 3 feet in some regions”? How could you be wrong about whether the water was up to your ankles or your chest? The New York Times likewise insists that “Sea Levels Are Already Higher Than Many Scientists Think, New Study Shows/ Researchers found that a majority of studies on coastal sea levels underestimated how high water levels are, and hundreds of millions of people are closer to peril than previously thought.” So why didn’t they notice? And the answer turns out to be worse than the question. See, the vast majority of studies of sea levels were based not on measurements but on models that were wildly inaccurate. Leading to the conclusion, CNN, would have us believe, that the science is settled, and worse than we thought, “raising alarms that the world is underestimating the extent of the threat and how quickly coastlines could disappear” but this time they’ve got it right, for sure.

If you had just discovered that something you had firmly believed to be fact was pretty much just made up, surely the appropriate response would be a pause for reflection on all manner of topics including, painfully, your own gullibility and dogmatism. But no. Rather, the piece immediately shrills:

“Sea level rise is one of the most visible and alarming impacts of the human-driven climate crisis, threatening hundreds of millions of people who live along global coastlines. Scientists estimate we’re already locked into around 6 inches of global sea level rise by 2050.”

Now this passage is tosh. First because the scientists who estimate say no such thing. NOAA, for instance, makes the possibly overheated claim that:

“The rate of global sea level rise is accelerating: it has more than doubled from 0.06 inches (1.4 millimeters) per year throughout most of the twentieth century to 0.14 inches (3.6 millimeters) per year from 2006-2015.”

But even if it is so, 0.14 inches per year is only 1.4 inches per decade. And since we have less than 2.5 decades between now and 2050, we get less than … uh, can anyone in the newsroom do math even with a computer? Yup, it’d be 1.4 times 2.5 which is… hang on… 3.5 inches. Not six. Dang.

Oh well. Math am hard. But what makes that statement really insolent rubbish is that it’s exactly what journalists have been saying scientists were saying for decades now. And what’s the point of a dramatic new finding if it changes nothing, not even the verbiage?

OK, what also makes it insolent rubbish is the insinuation anyone might plausibly be off by three feet about the water level in their local harbour, beach etc. until some expert comes along and informs them that secretly their dock is under water. But there’s more.

Where the story gets interesting, while remaining insolent rubbish, is that in paragraph six it explains that:

“The report authors analyzed 385 peer-reviewed studies published over the past 15 years on sea level rise and the hazards it poses to coastlines. They found 90% relied only on assumptions from models rather than real, measured observations.”

What? You mean the whole field is conducted inside a computer in brazen disregard of actual measurements? Surely that’s the lead. That’s the headline. That’s a staggering thing to discover and, as noted above, an even more staggering thing to discover and go right on believing everything else you believed about the climate crisis including its sea-level-rise aspect.

And its always-worse-than-we-thought aspect, since the article goes on immediately that:

“It’s a ‘methodological blind spot’ that has resulted in widespread underestimations of coastal sea levels and people’s exposure to their related hazards, [study co-author Philip] Minderhoud said.”

So isn’t it serious that the people who’ve been doing all this stuff and fueling the panic for a decade and a half had this “methodological blind spot” of not caring about facts? Yes, but only in the usual way:

“The findings suggest that if sea level rises by around 3 feet, it would put 37% more land under water than currently assumed, affecting up to 132 million people across the world.”

No no no no no no no, we cry. Stop. Just stop. The only way that claim can be true is if a bunch more land is already under water than people believed just by looking at it. And there cannot be millions of fools out there who think something that’s under water is above water until some academic wags a pencil at them.

Or maybe there can, if people still believe this kind of journalism. Certainly there are far too many fools in newsrooms and, it seems, climate computer labs.