Over at Real Climate, quite a few of the comments that they post continue to incorrectly interpret the observed behavior of the global average upper ocean heat content changes and sea level rise over the last 5 years (see the misinformation in the comments on the Real Climate weblog
More bubkes).
The authors of Real Climate, unfortunately, are permitting this erroneous information (and personal insults) to be posted without their comments and correction. Apparently, the balance provided by Gavin Schmidt that I reported on in my weblog
Gavin Schmidt's Interview On Media Hype On Climate Science Issues was just a fluke.
In this weblog, I will correct two of the major errors made in a number of the comments on the Real Climate website.
One of the commentators on Real Climate list three papers that purportedly refute the finding of no recent upper ocean warming and that the sea level rise has flattened since 2006 . These papers are
Levitus S. et al. (2009) Global ocean heat content 1955 - 2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems
Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608
Cazenave A. et al. (2009) Sea level budget over 2003-2008: A reevaluation from GRACE space gravimetry, satellite altimetry and Argo Glob. Planet. Change 65, 83-88
Leuliette E.W. and Miller L. (2009) Closing the sea level rise budget with altimetry, Argo, and GRACE
Geophys Res. Lett. 36, art # L0406
Comment: A bit of spin, not necessarily for global warming per se, but for diverting attention from the opposite of "regularity and occasional abruptness of global warming", that is a new Ice Age. Nicely done.
The fact is, Earth's climate is in a constant state of flux, of which we can observe only a small part: What everyone avoids saying is that the climate can switch back equally fast. Just think about flash-frozen mammoths.