Sea-level
Expert: It's Not Rising!
(The Daily Telegraph,
Christopher Booker)
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.
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.
Read
the full article at The Daily Telegraph - Click Here
Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner
has studied sea level and its effects on coastal areas for
some 35 years. Recently retired as director of the Paleogeophysics
and Geodynamics Department at Stockholm University, Mörner
is past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea
Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives
Sea Level Project. In addition to the article above that was
originally published in the Daily Telegraph, Mörner was
interviewed by 21st CENTURY Science & Technology Associate
Editor Gregory Murphy on June 6 2007. Read the interview (PDF)
by clicking on the link below.
Read
the 21st CENTURY Science & Technology interview with Dr.
Nils-Axel Mörner - Click Here |
