Sea level: level heads needed
From Professor Nils-Axel Mörner
On December 16, Nature published an article by Richard A. Lovett entitled Sea level rise may exceed worst expectation. The timing is calculated for maximum impact and minimum discussion. The article has already been referred to as an argument for immediate action in Copenhagen.
The facts are different, however.
The author claims that sea level at the Last Interglacial 125,000 years ago was 10 m higher than the present. This figure is not in accordance with present knowledge among sea-level specialists. If it were correct, all of our knowledge and long-term analyses of vertical tectonics would be wrong – and this is certainly not the case. A sea level 10 meters higher than today in the Last Interglacial is simply wrong. Sea-level specialists know this, and so do global tectonic specialists.
A 10 m rise would – under Ice-Age deglacial conditions – take at least 1000 years; under interglacial climatic conditions, many times more.
In the text (not quoted by climatic agitators in the press), the author gives the rate of sea level rise at 75 ±17 cm per century. This would imply a sea-level rise by 2100 of about 70 cm (±17 cm) – and not the 10 m the news media are widely claiming.
For comparison, the IPCC (2007 Fourth Assessment Report) give 37 cm (±30 cm) in a century. My own expert sea-level group gives 5 cm (±15 cm) in a century.
This implies that the article by Lovett is primarily another piece of disinformation, arriving just in time to influence the discussions at Copenhagen. The question is how Nature can stand behind this paper. One feels the cold wind of the CRU Climategate scandal.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley writes:
It is an honor to publish this communication from Professor Niklas Mörner, the world’s pre-eminent expert on sea-level change, who – at at an age when most scientists of his distinction would have merely retired – is traveling the world to tell the truth that sea level will rise this century not by meters, not by feet, but by inches only.
I had the pleasure to meet Professor Mörner when he and I were fellow-speakers at the St. Andrews University Debating Union in Scotland in the spring of 2009. Professor Mörner made one of the most charming and brilliant speeches I or the House had heard.
One of the ill-tutored dumplings on the other side of the debate had made the mistake of not doing any research about his opponents. He suggested that if the Professor thought he knew so much about sea level he might perhaps try his hand at getting a paper published in the peer-reviewed learned journals.
Professor Mörner won us the debate by his reply to this dumb suggestion. He smiled broadly and said, “Madame President, I must apologize to the House that I have only had 520 papers published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, many of them on sea-level rise. In the light of the Hon. Member’s comment, I shall undertake to try harder.”
The House collapsed into helpless laughter, and – by three votes – we defeated the motion That this House believes “global warming” is a global crisis. This is believed to be the first and only time that such a motion has been defeated before a student audience in the UK.
In the months since the debate, this most active of Professors has found the time and energy to do as he promised at St. Andrews. He has published a further ten papers in the scientific literature – a publication rate of more than one paper a month.
Recently I had the honor to hear the Professor speak again, this time at an alternative climate conference at the Danish Architectural Institute in Copenhagen. An environmental columnist from the British newspaper The Guardian asked why no one at the conference had bothered to go to Bangladesh, which, he said, he had visited recently, and which was visibly disappearing beneath rising seas.
Professor Mörner replied that he had visited Bangladesh the previous month with many other sea-level specialists. The only part of the Bangladesh coastline that had suffered noticeable erosion was Sunderban, where the imprudent clearance of nine-tenths of the mangrove swamps to make way for shrimp-farms had left the coastline exposed to storms from which the mangroves had previously protected it.
Sea level along the Bangladesh coast, said Professor Mörner, had in fact fallen slightly in recent years. He had discovered this using a GPS altimeter, and he had been the only one of the scientists on the visit who had bothered to calibrate his altimeter to the nearest inch by taking two separate readings at least 10 meters apart in altitude.
The land area of Bangladesh has in fact increased by an impressive 70,000 sq.km since satellites first began monitoring it 30 years ago.
Professor Mörner also leads an international multi-disciplinary team of investigators which, since 2000, has been carrying out the most detailed survey of sea-level trends anywhere in the world. The Maldives sea-level survey shows that, contrary to the propaganda of the Maldivian regime (including a much-publicized underwater cabinet meeting timed to impress the Copenhagen delegates), there has been no sea-level rise in the Maldives for half a century. Sea level today is much as it was 1250 years ago.
Professor Mörner, on one of his visits to the islands, noticed that a 40-year-old tree standing just feet from the shore had been uprooted and was lying on its side, still in leaf. The tree was good evidence that sea level in that part of the coastline had not risen during the lifetime of the tree, which would have been swamped by a sea-level rise of only a few inches.
The Professor enquired what had happened to the tree. Had a storm-surge uprooted it? No, said the locals at the nearby restaurant. A team of Australian environmentalists had seen the tree, had realized that it provided compelling proof that there had been no sea-level rise in the Maldives during their lifetime, and had uprooted it to destroy the evidence. But they had failed to remember to remove the leaves, which gave the Professor the clue that allowed him to expose their deception.
According to satellite altimetry, which is believed to be considerably more reliable than the tide-gages that it has largely replaced, mean global sea level has been rising by approximately 1 ft (0.3 m) per century during the 16 years since the first satellite began measurements. During the past four years, there has been no statistically-significant sea-level rise at all. These dull but verifiable facts have not been mentioned during the Copenhagen climate conference.
