SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 29.3.09
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.
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.
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.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'
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