And now the IPCC is promoting its fake "science" at the Durban COP 17 conference:
This year’s focus is on a familiar and certainly arresting argument: that sea levels are rising at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate mainly due to man-made global warming.
No one makes this point with quite so much panache as Mohamed Nasheed, President of the Maldives. In the run-up to the summit, he declared that he leads “an island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon”.
Since chairing a meeting of his Cabinet underwater, Nasheed has been busy rallying other low-lying countries to make similar points. He chaired a summit of them in Bangladesh, to compare notes ahead of the Durban summit, and they agree to limit their own carbon emissions.
Ban Ki-moon, the head of the United Nations, was delighted — saying that it was unfair to ask “the poorest and most vulnerable to bear the brunt of the impact of climate change alone” and called for them to be given subsidies by richer countries to adapt. Such funds do not seem to be forthcoming. It seems the summit in Durban will, like so many climate summits, be disappointing.
I may be able to help. As someone with some expertise in the field, I can assure the low-lying countries that this is a false alarm. The sea is not rising precipitously. I have studied many of the low-lying regions in my 45-year career, recording and interpreting sea level data.
I have conducted six field trips to the Maldives; I have been to Bangladesh, whose environment minister was claiming that flooding due to climate change threatened to create in her country 20 million “ecological refugees”. I have carefully examined the data of “drowning” Tuvalu. And I can report that, while such regions do have problems, they need not fear rising sea levels.
My latest project was a field expedition to India, to the coast of Goa, combining observations with archeological information. Our findings are straightforward: there is no ongoing sea level rise.
The sea level there has been stable for the last 50 years or so, after falling some 20cm in around 1960; it was well below the present level in the 18th century and some 50 to 60cm above the present in the 17th century. So it is clear that sea levels rise and fall entirely independently of so-called “climate change”.
Dr. Mörner then compares the facts with the IPCC´s version:
But the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) tells a different story: “Even under the most conservative scenario, sea level will be about 40cm higher than today by the end of 21st century and this is projected to increase the annual number of people flooded in coastal populations from 13 million to 94 million. Almost 60 per cent of this increase will occur in South Asia.”
This is nonsense. The world’s true experts on sea level are to be found at the International Union for Quaternary Reseach (INQUA) commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, not at the IPCC. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an “inconvenient truth”: it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries.
This is not due to melting glaciers: sea levels are affected by a great many factors, such as the speed at which the earth rotates. They rose in the order of 10 to 11cm between 1850 and 1940, stopped rising or maybe even fell a little until 1970, and have remained roughly flat ever since.
So any of the troubles attributed to “rising sea levels” must instead be the result of other, local factors and basic misinterpretation. In Bangladesh, for example, increased salinity in the rivers has in fact been caused by dams in the Ganges, which have decreased the outflow of fresh water.
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that “there is strong evidence” of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: “Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data... This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr–1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century.”
Almost every word of this is untrue. Satellite altimetry is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface. But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends.
In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: “We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.”
This is a scandal that should be called Sealevelgate.
Read the entire article here
9 comments:
If Nils-Axel Mörner wants a "Sealevelgate", my contribution is at:
http://www.members.iinet.net.au/~johnroberthunter/www-swg/morner_emails.txt
- a series of emails between me and Morner from 2004.
You will have to draw your own conclusion of Morner from these, but I don't see a "true expert on sea level" - I see a prevaricating duffer who, after a year of obfuscation, provided nothing to substantiate his wild claims.
To John Hunter:
You are probably the same John Hunter who wrote this on the Climate Audit blog:
"Incidentally, why do you think I would be putting myself out to
provide papers to people whose only aim is to knock down my work……?"
Somebody then reminded readers about another scientist, who used similar language:
"We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the
data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something
wrong with it." (Jones’ reply to Warwick Hughes, 21. Februar 2005;
confirmed by P. Jones)
http://climateaudit.org/2006/05/12/john-hunter-on-sea-levels/
And, as you certainly must know, Mörner is not the only scientist, who has come to the conclusion that sea levels are not rising significantly:
AGAINST all the odds, a number of shape-shifting islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean are standing up to the effects of climate change.
For years, people have warned that the smallest nations on the planet - island states that barely rise out of the ocean - face being wiped off the map by rising sea levels. Now the first analysis of the data broadly suggests the opposite: most have remained stable over the last 60 years, while some have even grown.
Paul Kench at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and Arthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji used historical aerial photos and high-resolution satellite images to study changes in the land surface of 27 Pacific islands over the last 60 years. During that time, local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres, or 2 millimetres per year on ...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627633.700-shapeshifting-islands-defy-sealevel-rise.html
NNoN: You are behaving just like the "climategate" vultures whose modus operandi is to take short statements out of context. The quote from Climate Audit related to a request for one of my (publicly-available) papers. My words immediately preceding this quote were:
"Can you ask John A to give me his REAL name and REAL address and I’ll gladly send him a PDF or a hardcopy (I’m not interested in sending things to ghosts)."
- which I believe is a perfectly reasonable way for me to have proceeded. As you have found, I provide my name quite openly and it is very easy to find out who I am. It's called openness - why don't you try it?
In the last part of your response, you are confusing two discussions: (1) about the rate of sea-level rise (in which Morner is way out of line with the scientific community) and (2) whether the projected rate of sea-level rise will have a serious impact on low-lying islands (I know and respect the work of Kench and Webb - it agrees with my own more limited observations of the PAST impacts of sea-level rise - but it doesn't say a lot about FUTURE impacts).
For those who are interested in knowing more about John Hunter´s way of debating these questions I recommmend the Climate Audit link in my first comment.
The quote from The New Scientist says enough for me about the "impact on low-lying islands".
NNoN: My apologies if you don't like my "way of debating" - most scientists would call it "robust discussion" (we don't "debate" - "debating" is all about winning, not seeking after the truth). However, I would think that most people would find my "way of debating" extraordinarily mild compared with the vicious character assassination of climate scientists that is now being routinely carried out, based on highly selective reading of the stolen and private "climategate" emails.
OK, For those who are interested in knowing more about John Hunter´s way of discussing these questions I recommmend the Climate Audit link in my first comment.
@John Hunter :
"Can you ask John A to give me his REAL name and REAL address and I’ll gladly send him a PDF or a hardcopy (I’m not interested in sending things to ghosts)."
Can't you just post and permalink it somewhere ?
It is pretty hard to interpret much of what I have seen from the newest Climategate e-mails any other way than they are stated, regardless of how large the word count surrounding them. It is pretty clear from the thousands of e-mails that this is quite a scientific scandal. I have had concerns for a very long time about the premature closure of discussion among scientists and interested laymen about so-called "anthropogenic global warming," but after plowing through only some of the e-mails, I will never trust one of these "scientists" involved again. They sold their birthright for a bit of golden pottage. They ruined their own careers. It's time to own up and move on.
To John Hunter;
You seem to have sidestepped your comment about "putting yourself out to make data available to those who's aim is to knock down my work".
I don't pretend to know the truth about what the IPCC (and you) are putting out, but as Elisheva Hannah Levin stated, "it's pretty hard to interpret what I've seen from the latest Climategate e-mails any other way than they are stated."
I am aware, however that the following statement was never agreed to by consensus of the IPCC scientists... and therefore (in my mind) lessens the credibility of the entire IPCC process.
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations,"
Gene Horner
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