Monday, December 14, 2009

An expert on sea level change somehow escaped from the computer laboratory and has been observing actual sea levels for years. Can't someone from the Climate Research Unit please shut this guy up?
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".
Read the whole sad story here.

HT: Mangan

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is this the same Dr Mörner that is a big proponent of dowsing?

Anonymous said...

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

Martin Cothran said...

Anonymous,

I looked him up, and, in fact, do find references to the dowsing thing. It's goofy, I'll admit. But on the issue of whether one goofy belief necessarily overturns all of the person's non-goofy beliefs, I was just wondering if we could also go ahead and throw out the scientific findings of people who also believe in astrology, alchemy, and, oh, say, sun-worship?