Dr Morner on Sea Level Nonsense

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'

Gallup Discovers Rising Skepticism on Global Warming

This item comes by way of Marc Morano, who has the thankless task of throwing facts in the face of global warming fanatics from the US Senate.

It appears that the phrase ‘the public is an ass’ has been turned on its head. The public clearly is beginning to think that the pro global warming crowd is an ass.

As I have posted in the past, extraordinary theories require extraordinary proof. Instead Mother Nature has blandly reversed direction and destroyed the necessary trend line. We simply no longer have the supporting data to reasonably make the extraordinary claim. In the meantime the fanatics are making asses of themselves with over the top declarations.

This steady deterioration has happened in the face of unrelenting pro global warming press coverage in support of the position. Obviously the public can look out the window and see vigorous and sustained counter evidence cramping their lives as has not happened for many years.

BREAKING: Gallup Poll: 'Record-High 41% of Americans 'now say global warming is exaggerated!' - 'Highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting' in more than a decade – March 11, 2009

[Marc Morano Note on Gallup Poll: These dramatic polling results are not unexpected as prominent scientists from around the world continue to speak out publicly for the first time to dissent from the Al Gore, UN IPCC and media driven man-made climate fears. In addition, a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further decimated the claims of man-made global warming fear activists. Americans are finally catching on in large numbers that the UN IPCC is a POLITICAL -- not scientific organization. Man-made global warming fears have proven simply unsustainable – to use a nice green term.

Man-made climate fears may soon follow the previous failed eco-scares like the disappearing rainforest claims of the 1980’s and 1990’s. The New York Times recently reported about how the green groups and media promoted fears of the disappearing rainforests from that era may have been severely overblown. (See Rainforest fears fading away: “For every acre of rainforest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics” as once farmed land is returning to nature. Jan. 2009. – The fading rainforest scare inspired this global warming spoof of the year 2019. See: Spoof : “Scientists Now Say Global Warming Fears Fading Away - Claim Warming Consensus Never Existed” ) –

If new peer-reviewed studies are to be believed, today’s high school kids watching Gore’s movie will be nearing the senior citizen group AARP’s membership age (50 years) by the time warming allegedly “resumes” in 30 years! See: Climate Fears RIP…for 30 years!? – Peer-Reviewed Study Finds Global Warming could stop 'for up to 30 years! Warming 'On Hold?...'Could go into hiding for decades' study finds – Discovery.com – March 2, 2009 – Final quote: Dr. John Brignell, a skeptical UK Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton wrote in 2008: “The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date.” End Morano note. ]


BREAKING: Gallup Poll: 'Record-High 41% of Americans 'now say global warming is exaggerated!' - 'Highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting' in more than a decade – March 11, 2009

Key Quote: “A record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject. Key Quote: Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year.”

Key Quote: “However, the solitary drop in concern this year about global warming, among the eight specific environmental issues Gallup tested, suggests that something unique may be happening with the issue.”

Key Quote: “It is not clear whether the troubled economy has drawn attention away from the global warming message or whether other factors are at work.”

Key Quote: “Importantly, Gallup's annual March update on the environment shows a drop in public concern about global warming across several different measures, suggesting that the global warming message may have lost some footing with Americans over the past year.”

More Excerpts: The 2009 Gallup Environment survey measured public concern about eight specific environmental issues. Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year. […] A record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject. As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38% vs. 30%. Now, according to Gallup's 2009 Environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimated, 41% vs. 28%. The trend in the "exaggerated" response has been somewhat volatile since 2001, and the previous high point, 38%, came in 2004. Over the next two years, "exaggerated" sentiment fell to 31% and 30%. Still, as noted, the current 41% is the highest since Gallup's trend on this measure began in 1997. Since 1997, Republicans have grown increasingly likely to believe media coverage of global warming is exaggerated, and that trend continues in the 2009 survey; however, this year marks a relatively sharp increase among independents as well. In just the past year, Republican doubters grew from 59% to 66%, and independents from 33% to 44%, while the rate among Democrats remained close to 20%. […] Importantly, Gallup's annual March update on the environment shows a drop in public concern about global warming across several different measures, suggesting that the global warming message may have lost some footing with Americans over the past year. Gallup has documented declines in public concern about the environment at times when other issues, such as a major economic downturn or a national crisis like 9/11, absorbed Americans' attention. To some extent that may be true today, given the troubling state of the U.S. economy. However, the solitary drop in concern this year about global warming, among the eight specific environmental issues Gallup tested, suggests that something unique may be happening with the issue. Certainly global warming has received tremendous attention this decade, including with Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." It is not clear whether the troubled economy has drawn attention away from the global warming message or whether other factors are at work. It will be important to see whether the 2009 findings hold up in next year's update of the annual environmental survey.

Full Gallup Results with charts and graphs:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/116590/Increased-Number-Think-Global-Warming-Exaggerated.aspx

Dr. Hansen Over the Top

Dr Hansen’s utterances have recently gone way over the edge into the land of fanaticism and faith based positions and certainly is not the voice of science. His colleagues are quite right to call him out on this and he would be quite right to back of and apologize.

Of course Mother Nature has called him on the weakness of his science and his explanations have collapsed with each passing month of really lousy weather as he finds himself supporting the unsupportable.

The global temperature needs to rebound and we have seen no evidence of that this winter. It was worse than last winter, and I think that we are going to have a good growing season this year across North America.

Oh well, he probably thinks he is important enough to challenge someone who will bite his head off.

NASA's Chief Climate Scientist Stirs Controversy with Call for Civil Disobedience

Thursday, February 26, 2009
By Joshua Rhett Miller

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,501064,00.html

Dr. James Hansen at a Capitol Hill press conference in 2008.

NASA's chief climate scientist is in hot water with colleagues and at least one lawmaker after calling on citizens to engage in civil disobedience at what is being billed as the largest public protest of global warming ever in the United States.

In a video on capitolclimateaction.org, Dr. James Hansen is seen urging Americans to "take a stand on global warming" during the March 2 protest at the Capitol Power Plant in Southeast Washington, D.C.

"We need to send a message to Congress and the president that we want them to take the actions that are needed to preserve climate for young people and future generations and all life on the planet," says Hansen, who has likened coal-fired power plants to "factories of death" and claims he was muzzled by the Bush administration when he warned of drastic climate changes.

"What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet. The only practical way to solve the problem is to phase out the biggest source of carbon — and that's coal."

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.

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But critics say Hansen's latest call to action blurs the line between astronomer and activist and may violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from participating in partisan political activity.

"Oh my goodness," one of Hansen's former supervisors, Dr. John Theon, told FOXNews.com when informed of the video. "I'm not surprised ... The fact that Jim Hansen has gone off the deep end here is sad because he's a good fellow."

Theon, a former senior NASA atmospheric scientist, rebuked Hansen last month in a letter to the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, saying Hansen had violated NASA's official position on climate forecasting without sufficient evidence and embarrassed the agency by airing his claims before Congress in 1988.

"Why he has not been fired I do not understand," Theon said. "As a civil servant, you can't participate in calling for a public demonstration. You may be able to participate as a private citizen, but when you go on the Internet and call for people to break the law, that's a problem."

Officials at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which investigates possible Hatch Act violations, disagreed, saying Hansen is in the clear since it's an "issue-oriented activity," according to Hatch Unit attorney Erica Stern Hamrick.

The majority of federal government employees are allowed to take an active part in political activities, while workers at other departments like the FBI, Secret Service and National Security Council are subject to more restrictions on their political activities.

NASA spokesman Mark Hess also defended Hansen.

"He's doing this as a private citizen on his own time and there's nothing wrong with that," Hess told FOXNews.com. "There's nothing partisan here. You don't give up your rights to free speech by becoming a government employee."

Matt Leonard, a project coordinator for Greenpeace, one of more than 90 organizations endorsing the protest, said several thousand people are expected to participate and "peacefully disrupt operations" at the plant just blocks from Capitol Hill.

Participants are willing to "put their bodies on the line to stop climate change," including risking arrest, Leonard said.

"Our intention is to completely surround the facility, basically sending a message that these types of power plants can't be a part of our future," Leonard said. "They're destroying our environment."

Hansen will be in attendance and is expected to speak at the "completely nonviolent, peaceful" protest, Leonard said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., urged Hansen to rethink his plans.

"If he wants to have a demonstration concerning global warming, coming to the Capitol is not a right choice," Rohrabacher told FOXNews.com. "The bottom line is if Hansen wants to protest global warming, he should go to the National Cathedral and take it up with God rather than going to Capitol Hill."

Rohrabacher, a member of the House's Committee on Science and Technology, called on Hansen to "step out" of his role.

"He obviously doesn't feel comfortable with the restraints that come with being a scientist rather than a political activist," Rohrabacher said. "Most of us have always thought he has been hiding behind a scientific facade, and really, he was a political activist all along."

Chris Horner, author of "Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed," also denounced Hansen's latest call to arms against climate change.

"He's providing ample cause to question his employment on the taxpayer dime," Horner told FOXNews.com. "He's clearly abused his platform provided to him by the taxpayer, principally by the way he's been exposed of manipulating and revising data with the strange coincidence of him always found on the side of exaggerating the warming."

Horner claimed that Hansen doctored temperature data on two occasions in 2001 and once in 2007 in attempts to show an impending climate catastrophe.

"He's creating an upward slope that really wasn't there," Horner said. "At some point you have to say these aren't mistakes."

Hansen, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story, was most recently honored for his work last month with the 2009 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the American Meteorological Society.

"Jim Hansen is performing a tremendous job at communicating our science to the public and, more importantly, to policymakers and decision-makers," Franco Einaudi, director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release.

"The debate about global change is often emotional and controversial, and Jim has had the courage to stand up and say what others did not want to hear. He has acquired a credibility that very few scientists have. His success is due in part to his personality, in part to his scientific achievements, and in part to his refusing to sit on the sidelines of the debate."

Former Vice President Al Gore, who toured with Hansen while promoting "An Inconvenient Truth," did not return repeated requests for comment for this article.

David Evans Recants

This article out on the clear lack of any linkage between CO2 and global warming can hardly be starker. David Evans direct involvement in the science and data gathering around the global warming – CO2 hypothesis put him in the position of been an informed apologist for the theory. Thus his recanting any support for the position is very important. It is always difficult to pry oneself loose from a position that you have loyally supported in good faith. It was surely difficult for him.

Again, shifting global temperatures and rising CO2 is not disputed. The idea that they are linked is in question as I have always maintained in this blog.

What this article adds that I find new is that a CO2 causation hypothesis as with any other hypothesis must have a hotspot that is a direct result of the predicted behavior. As he makes very clear, that signal is completely missing.

This does not take away from the fact that the environment has failed to suck up all the CO2 that we have produced or that responsible husbandry means that we do something about it. Which over the next generation we certainly can.

The globe, and let us be a little more precise and say the northern hemisphere, has warmed about a half degree to a degree over the last one hundred years. Our unreliability over land measurements creates an error range that could even account for this apparent gain.

The only fact that we can be sure does not simply fit inside the historical range of conditions over the two hundred years, is that the severe cold of the little ice age has now fully abated. Growing grapes in England is surely once again an option and once the permafrost is gone in Greenland, the dairy industry can restart.
The loss of perennial sea ice fits this scenario very nicely.

In the meantime our satellites have observed a recent temperature drop of .6 degrees. They had observed a modest rise since they began back in 1979. This will be worth monitoring over the next year to see how responsive it really is and how sustained this drop is.

I do not want to sound suspicious, but one of the most insidious problems with computer supported continuous data gathering is that baseline algorithms that are updated without independent correction systems can accumulate rounding errors. This usually leads to a positive or negative trend line that eventually leads to a recalculation and an abrupt reset.

Of course I do not have the data to look at, so we have assumed this abrupt change is real. Is it sustainable? Why is such an abrupt change possible? Where did the heat go?

The only thing that we can be sure of this year is that the perennial sea ice is continuing its collapse. The press is now starting to call it a death spiral which it is. Unless that purported .6 degree temperature decline turns into a three to four degree drop in the Arctic, there is nothing to halt this trend. We shall see.

I had thought that the historical land temperature work up had been largely settled, including the urban island problem. However, we have already had recent corrections that put the current regime on a par with the 1930’s. He does reopen the issue and I would like to see more on it. A corrective fudge factor could produce a lot of error all by itself.

Why I recanted

'There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming'
David Evans, Financial Post Published: Saturday, August 30, 2008

I devoted six years to carbon accounting when I built models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.
When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas; the old ice core data; no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon governments and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999, new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most intensely. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.

Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hot spot. If you believe that you'd believe anything.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6 degrees Celsius in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses.

Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context, our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician's assertion.

Until now, the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest. Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn't noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?

The world has spent $50-billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Australian Labor government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy. - David Evans was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005.