Well oddly the other day NASA claimed that the climate change is also slowing down the rise that should have occurred because 3.2 trillion gallons have been soaked up by parched continents.
too be honest I am not sure who to believe and when anymore. Why do they always ratchet this stuff during US election cycles?
Still being in an interglacial time period we should expect warming, perhaps we are helping it along but cooling would likely be more devastating than warming. The odd thing about reading about glacier melt and such is that the effects are greater on your shoreline the further you are away from the affected glacier.
That linked article just leaves me in the dust at times, the connections made are just making me rethink how it all works. That we can look back at Roman actions and see that a lot of increase is recent is really cool.
(1) I work with the lead author of the study you mention (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6274/699.full). It is absurd to say that the timing of his work has to do with the election cycle. He's been working on establishing the size of the groundwater component of hydrological mass balance for at least the past year. I believe the take-away from that article is that groundwater storage has to be taken into account in the next IPCC report, or else we will see missing water and we won't know why.
(2) The study you cite found that some water, that would have otherwise appeared as a sea level rise, is being sequestered as groundwater. The study in the OP said that sea level rise is higher than expected, apparently due to anthropogenic warming. These do not conflict, it's just further information about what's going on. Note also that the OP vs. the article you cite have vastly different time scales (millennia vs. decade) and consequently different precision (cm vs mm).
(3) These studies show we're learning more, because we have a lot of new observational capabilities now (like GRACE, which for the first time measures groundwater mass by its effect on Earth's gravity field). We'll continue to see new studies that establish the sizes of the dominant mass flows as we're able to learn more.
The IPCC assessment reports[1] are really well researched and comprehensive reports of the current science, including measures of confidence in plain language. They aren't hard to read, and there's any number of summaries available, including on Wikipedia[2]. It's a great place to start (and, for most non-climate-scientists, end) your research.
If you (general 'you', not you specifically, parent) want to dismiss an aggregate report of almost all climate scientists across the planet who research this stuff day in and day out as political theater, then I suggest your view of reality may be skewed by some other factor. Science provides us with data as near to facts as it's possible to get; it's up to us how to interpret those facts.
"Science provides us with data as near to facts as it's possible to get; it's up to us how to interpret those facts."
What is your definition of the word "science" in this sentence? Seems an odd use of the word. "Science" does not provide us with data. Particular people and institutions provide us with data. Furthermore when it comes to climatology, the data is hardly clear cut. All the results and predictions you read about in the paper are based on, as the article says "elaborate statistical techniques." When I hear that, my alarm bells go off. Using "elaborate statistical techniques" one can prove pretty much whatever one wants to prove.
I disagree with your use of "prove" when you wrote
Using "elaborate statistical techniques" one can prove pretty much whatever one wants to prove.
One may be able to massage data and create a nice looking chart to give an incorrect impression to unsuspecting people. This does not constitute a proof and it certainly won't pass muster with others who look at the same data and do their own statistical analyses.
I agree that my words were poorly phrased. I wanted to communicate that the IPCC report is really the best information we have, and an incredible amount of effort went into ensuring the information in the report is solid.
> one can prove pretty much whatever one wants to prove
Yes, but everyone knows this and this has been gone over again and again and everyone who studies this stuff and understands the science agrees with the report. This isn't a couple yahoos with a copy of SimEarth, this is almost every single climate scientist on the planet.
too be honest I am not sure who to believe and when anymore. Why do they always ratchet this stuff during US election cycles?
Still being in an interglacial time period we should expect warming, perhaps we are helping it along but cooling would likely be more devastating than warming. The odd thing about reading about glacier melt and such is that the effects are greater on your shoreline the further you are away from the affected glacier.
http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/why-our-intuition-about...
That linked article just leaves me in the dust at times, the connections made are just making me rethink how it all works. That we can look back at Roman actions and see that a lot of increase is recent is really cool.