Rewriting Science -- Or At Least The Science I Was Taught

I thought I was taught that in the earth's water cycle, terrestrial rainfall eventually found itself in rivers which ran to the oceans. But I guess that's not necessarily true; apparently a lot of that river water ends up as ...  river water.

Reuters is reporting:

Heavy rains from the Amazon to Australia have curbed sea level rise so far this century by shifting water from the oceans to land, according to a study that rejects theories that the slowdown is tied to a pause in global warming.

Sea level rise has been one of the clearest signs of climate change - water expands as it warms and parts of Greenland and Antarctica are thawing, along with glaciers from the Himalayas to the Alps.

But in a puzzle to climate scientists, the rate slowed to 2.4 millimeters (0.09 inch) a year from 2003 to 2011 from 3.4 mm from 1994-2002, heartening skeptics who doubt that deep cuts are needed in mankind's rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday, experts said the rate from 2003-2011 would have been 3.3 mm a year when excluding natural shifts led by an unusually high number of La Nina weather events that cool the surface of the Pacific Ocean and cause more rain over land.

"There is no slowing in the rate of sea level rise" after accounting for the natural variations, lead author Anny Cazenave of the Laboratory for Studies in Geophysics and Spatial Oceanography in Toulouse, France, told Reuters.

A couple of notes: that part about Antarctica thawing is more than just a bit debatable. Everything I've read for quite some time suggests Antarctica is actually growing.

But this is what I find astonishing, how the scientists spin the facts. The warmists/scientists agree that the rate of the rise in sea levels has slowed to 2.4 millimeters (0.09 inches a year from 3.4 millimeters per year. The spin: if one accounts for all that river water that hasn't made it to the oceans, the oceans have still been rising at the same rate. Talk about ... circular reasoning? Obfuscation? Lying? Lost in translation (from the French)?

The instrumentation must be incredibly sensitive: sea level rising 0.09 inches a year. In ten years, 0.9-inch rise. As I've said before, I put a Popsicle stick in the beach a few years ago with millimeter-markings and I didn't notice anything different. Maybe I was measuring the wrong ocean.

Regardless, this says all I need to know why Americans have grown tired of global warming hyperbole. The National Geographic probably did the most to discredit the movement with its photo-shopped depiction of the Statue of Liberty underwater, an insult to its readers.