The big lie of the mainstream media narrative of climate science is that the issue is settled. This is one in a series of articles showing the rest of the story, which is slowly seeping through the cracks into public view. At the end are links to the FM reference pages about science, linking to a wide range of research, and other resources.
“Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told’“, The Telegraph, 28 March 2009 — “The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.”
About the author (from Wikipedia):
Mörner is the former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University, having retired in 2005. He was president of the International Union for Quaternary ResearchCommission on Neotectonics (1981-1989). He headed the INTAS (International Association for the promotion of cooperation with scientists from the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union) Project on Geomagnetism and Climate (1997-2003).
For more information about this, see these articles by Anthony Watts at Watts Up with That, including links and pictures:
- “Sea Level Graphs from UC and some perspectives“, 6 April 2009
- “Despite popular opinion and calls to action, the Maldives are not being overrun by sea level rise“, 19 March 2009
Links to some of Dr. Morner’s publications
- “Sea Level Changes in the Past, at Present and in the Near-Global Aspects Observations versus Models“, Final Conference for International Geoscience Programme (IGCP) Project 437, September 2003
- “Estimating future sea level changes from past records”, Global and Planetary Change, January 2004 — Abstract
Excerpt
“Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told’“, The Telegraph, 28 March 2009 — “The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.” Excerpt:
If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.
Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”.
When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.
Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.
One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”.
When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an “expert reviewer” on the IPCC’s last two reports, he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one”. Yet the results of all this “deliberate ignorance” and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.
Afterword
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For more information
To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar. Of esp relevance to this topic:
- About Science & Nature – my articles
- About Science & nature – studies & reports – note section 6, drivers of Earth’s climate
- About Science & Nature – the history of climate fears
- About Science & Nature – general media articles
Some of the posts on the FM site about climate change:
- An article giving strong evidence of global warming, 30 June 2008
- More forecasts of a global cooling cycle, 15 July 2008
- Two valuable perspectives on global warming, 4 August 2008
- Good news about global warming!, 21 October 2008 – More evidence of cooling.
- One of the most interesting sources of news about science and nature!, 27 October 2008
- Watching the world change before our eyes, 29 November 2008
- This week’s report on the news in climate science, 7 December 2008
- The Senate Minority report is out: “More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims”, 12 December 2008
- Weekend reading recommenations about climate change, 13 December 2008
- An important new article about climate change, 29 December 2008
- My “wish list” for the climate sciences in 2009, 2 January 2009
- Important new climate science articles, 11 January 2009
- Climate science articles which you might enjoy reading!, 18 January 2009
- How warm is the Earth? How do we measure it?, 28 January 2009
- Science in action, a confused and often nasty debate among scientists, 5 February 2009
- Richard Feynmann, one of the 20th centuries greatest scientists, talks to us about climate science, 12 February 2009