Read here. Imagine you're a scientist studying sea levels, and your career and research funding depends on proving that global warming is causing accelerating sea level increases. Now imagine the satellites and mother nature don't cooperate with your agenda, and the seas stop rising and actually produce a significant and visible satellite record that the oceans' levels declined. In your mind you're probably thinking, "I'm screwed."
So what do you do? Are you tempted to not publish the new data hoping for a miraculous sea level increase, like really, really soon? Is that why American scientists are not releasing the latest satellite results, taking a clue from their corrupted Climategate friends across the pond - sort of a "hide the decline" of satellite measurements mentality? (Hey, maybe the delay is really the lame excuse they have been providing to WUWT - who knows.)
Not all scientists are of the same ilk, though. The researchers at AVISO have kept on publishing the inconvenient satellite measurements, much to their credit. Not only are the AVISO researchers more timely (more honest?), they also deliver a better product than their U.S. counterparts.
Their research (graphs below) also include the data from the EU's Envisat satellite:
"Launched in 2002, Envisat is the largest Earth Observation spacecraft ever built. It carries ten sophisticated optical and radar instruments to provide continuous observation and monitoring of the Earth’s land, atmosphere, oceans and ice caps. Envisat data collectively provide a wealth of information on the workings of the Earth system, including insights into factors contributing to climate change."
As this first graph depicts, the Envisat data have the seas partly rebounding after a rather large drop. Since 2004, this satellite has the seas rising at only a 5 inches per century rate, very similar to tide gauge study results and well below the Jason satellite measurements that the U.S. scientists only report on. (click on images to enlarge) (source of graphs)
This next graph is a combination of various satellite measurements.
Again, all the satellites show the recent rather large drop. These combined measures have a trend since 1993 of only 12 inches per century, well below any of the recent alarmist non-scientific claims and predictions.
As can be seen, the Envisat (yellow line) reveals a larger drop than its Jason counterparts, which the U.S. scientists seemingly don't want the American taxpayers and policymakers to know about.
Additional sea-level postings.