Some of the statements regarding sea levels from the global warming crowd have been silly. The conservative increases predicted were minimal, and more importantly, within the error range and thus meaningless.
Surely that makes sense too. We have had a forty year temperature rise of less than a degree, now ended that is within the temperature channel associated with the Holocene for which we have zero evidence of significant convincing sea level variation.
Now we have Dr Morner who with meticulous work is able to demonstrate zero variation over the last fifty years. You can also be sure that the error factor has been thoroughly minimized. Bluntly put, our best possible measurements leave no wiggle room. The sea is not rising.
There is no newly minted Amazon flowing out of Greenland and Antarctica.
In the past, I have chosen to simply dismiss the more outrageous claims put out, expecting others would laugh them out. That has not happened. We have press coverage that panders to and promotes mindless ignorance in scientific topics and the claims are rarely addressed by anyone. In fact, the scientific community has jumped on the band wagon and is linking every grant application however tenuous to global warming. It has become as bad as the silliness surrounding cancer research in which thousands of single chemical variable have been proclaimed associated with greater cancer risk. Almost none of these ever passed beyond a grad student’s thesis and were swiftly forgotten.
Any objective thinking about sea levels would inform anyone that the likelihood of significant melt water having reached the Ocean unnoticed for the past fifty years is zero. That there is no current risk was also obvious even with the warmer summer of 2007.
the real shock in this article is the last bit about the Hong Kong guage. This is fraud in its finest hour.
Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'
The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html
Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 6:31PM GMT 28 Mar 2009
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.
•For more information, see Dr Mörner on YouTube (Google Mörner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview "Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud"; or email him – morner@pog.nu – to buy a copy of his booklet 'The Greatest Lie Ever Told'
Why is it that amateur skeptics always make the false assumption that climate change is based on nothing more than computer climate models? Do they not keep up with the latest science anymore? Must be a generational thing.
ReplyDeleteThat Antarctica and Greenland are melting faster than the computer models had ever predicted is confirmed by direct observation by climatologists from around the world working independently of each other in the past two years. It is therefore based on real world data: not on some "computer climate model." (Straw Man).
The geologist in the article obviously doesn't know what he is talking about. So I'll be happy to school you:
Sea level could rise more than a metre by 2100, say experts.
Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/11/sea-level-rises-clima
http://www.moyak.com/papers/fig11-12.gif
IPCC 2007 conclusions:
Tuvalu is currently experiencing sea fall in some areas and sea rise in many others. "Taking all 35 SRES scenarios into consideration, the scientists projected a sea level rise of 9 cm to 88 cm for 1990 to 2100, with a central value of 48 cm." (IPCC, 2007). These conclusions, as we know, are now considered obsolete by most scientists since the IPCC panelists in 2007 had underestimated their projections and excluded Antarctic and Greenland ice melt altogether from their climate projections. When accounting for sea rise from Antarctic and Greenland ice melt, the newer projections add at least one meter to sea rise by 2100--not the few millimeters or centimeters reported by the IPCC in 2007.
Signs of accelerated sea rise by the local inhabitants:
The people of Tuvalu don't need to read scientific reports or have researchers and government officials explain their predicament to them. They can see and feel it for themselves, especially when the ocean crashes into their bedrooms more and more nights every year. Here are some of the changes they have noticed over the last few years.
1. Salt water is flooding the shores and killing coconut palms. Many large parcels of land used for palm plantations are no longer of any value, greatly affecting the local subsistence economy. The nation's chief export of dried coconut meat is threatened.
2. Pulaka is the staple diet of the people of Tuvalu. Salt water has seeped into the island's pulaka pits, which are used to grow the food crop, making the pits unfit for further cultivation. In some places, three-quarters of the plants have died, leaving people reliant on imported foods. Fruit trees and pandanas are also suffering. Salt-water intrusion has already affected communal crop gardens on six of Tuvalu's eight islands.
3. In general, the people of Tuvalu are having difficulties growing their crops because of salination of the soil.
4. Areas of the island are flooding that would not have flooded ten or fifteen years ago.
5. Spring tides have steadily gotten higher. King tides have also grown over the last years with the increase of the average atmosphere temperatures; sea water is now bubbling up through the porous coral landscape.
6. Groundwater is increasingly becoming undrinkable due to sea-water intrusion. It is brackish and salty. Islanders are relying on rain water catchment because saltwater intrusion into their aquifers is adversely affecting drinking water.
7. Several months of the year planes have difficulty landing because the airport's runway is partly underwater. That is something new.
8. Some Tuvalu residents have been forced to evacuate parts of the country because of rising sea levels. The New Zealand government established an immigration program called the Pacific Access Category to help qualifying Tuvaluans start over in a safer environment.
9. Family burial plots are sinking into the ocean or being moved to higher ground.
10. Water levels on the island are often ankle-deep. Ponds of seawater can appear anywhere and do. Severe lowland flooding is regularly seen on Tuvalu.
11. Floods used to occur twice a year. Now it is every month. One of the smallest islands, called Te Pukasavilivili actually disappeared in 1997.
12. New houses are all currently built on 10-foot-tall stilts, something never before seen in the traditional architecture of the island groupings. Nightclubs, restaurants and hotels are also being raised.
13. Fisherpeople have noticed rising sea levels and eroding shorelines as the island atolls shrink, some to half their original size.
14. Encroachment from the sea has claimed at least one percent of the 10 square miles of land that make up the archipelago. What used to be a sandy beach north of the wharf is now stony foreshore below the hotel where a retaining wall has been built to temporarily stave off the inevitable.
15. Tepuka Savilivili, a small island on the rim of Funafuti atoll, was washed over by waves a few years ago and its vegetation destroyed. It simply vanished in 1997.
16. The roots of coconut trees are rotted by the ocean, as every year sees more trees get swallowed up and replaced by beach. On the nearby islet of Vasafua, the coconut trees are dying. Entire atolls covered with trees have been stripped bare.
Hope that helps.
I don't see flaws in Dr Morner's (extensive and lifelong) work after going through your anecdotal and second hand references. Read a few of his papers to see that they make excellent points overlooked by most others. Geologists have further insights not to be dismissed. Please dig into it more and more objectively. Salt water replacing fresh water can be explained and stories by people wanting handout are subject to exaggeration. Some land areas are subsiding and give incorrect tidal readings.
ReplyDeleteBarbiplease- Are you, then, a professional warmist, then? I have to say that anybody who provides evidence from the Guardian rather announces their prejudices.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Tuvalu is concerned are you really saying Dr Morner has fabricated data. , I, for one, recognise that his data is supported by the Canadian Air Force, who have had a meteorological station on Tuvula since 1947, and who state that there has been no sea level rise at all. What has happened,is that excessive water has been extracted causing, as stated, the coast to crumble away due to poisoning of plants by sea water. Perhaps you consider The CAF another one of the army of skeptics growing by the day?