The Australian reports a major new controversy after Britain’s Met Office denounced research from Stefan Rahmstorf suggesting that sea levels may increase by more than 1.8m by 2100.

Jason Lowe, a leading Met Office climate researcher, said: “We think such a big rise by 2100 is actually incredibly unlikely. The mathematical approach used to calculate the rise is completely unsatisfactory.”

Critic Simon Holgate, a sea-level expert at the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Merseyside, has written to Science magazine, attacking Professor Rahmstorf’s work as “simplistic”.

“Rahmstorf’s real skill seems to be in publishing extreme papers just before big conferences like Copenhagen, when they are guaranteed attention,” Dr Holgate said.

Seems like the concerns with work from the Clown of Climate Science that the blogosphere have been voicing for years are finally going mainstream. Interested readers might want to read:

Recent Climate Observations: Diagreement with Projections

Warning to the Garnaut Commission about the excessive reliance on the work of Rahmstorf and friends.

Also search Niche Modelling, and see ClimateAudit, the Blackboard, as well as many other posts from these and other statistical blog sites for examples of R’s statistical incompetence.

I don’t have a problem with academics being wrong. The problem is with the Federal Government and Penny Wong who are suckers for this charlatan offering the scientific reliability of an astrologer.

The report states one objection:

Based on the 17cm increase that occurred from 1881 to 2001, Professor Rahmstorf calculated that a predicted 5C increase in global temperature would raise sea levels by up to 188cm.

Its worse than that. It appears that the extrapolation in R’s model is actually based in a non-significant rate increase of sea level w.r.t. temperature, i.e. a tiny derivative of already problematic data.

It uses simple measurements of historic changes in the real world to show a direct relationship between temperature rise and sea level increase and it works stunningly well – Rahmstorf

But R cheerfully admits here:

How do we know that the relationship between temperature rise and sea level rate is linear, also for the several degrees to be expected, when the 20th century has only given us a foretaste of 0.7 degrees? The short answer is: we don’t.

Why then should anyone take any notice of predictions from a model when, as the author admits, the truth of the fundamental assumption is unknown? How do we know the stars affect human behaviour? The short answer is: we don’t.

Heed the fourth commandment of statistics: When using multivariate models, always get the most for the least.