This is from The London Telegraph several months ago:
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.
But someone who actually measures sea levels thinks otherwise:
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.
Haha!
Do you think that Morner is the only person who measures sea levels, or that the IPCC didn’t bother including anyone who measures sea levels?
The commission that Morner served on was a commission of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA), and according to the President of INQUA most of its members disagree with Morner on climate change.
Here is a NASA map of recent sea level changes, which suggests that Morner is correct about the lack of recent sea level rise in Maldives (which is in the bluish-green area below India), but not about the broader pattern. You can click through to the NASA page or the Wikipedia article for more information about it.
My mistake – it looks like he’s wrong about Maldives too.
this whole supposed “scandal” thing sounds like just so much swiftboating or the so-called Dan Rather ratfuck to me.
Gore was not speaking of the same time frame as the IPCC – he said that sea levels would rise 20 feet if a big portion of Greenland melted. The quote of him by the newspaper (and its republication here) are shoddy and irresponsible.
Psychologist Stanton Peele (an expert on addiction) has an interesting take on climategate and related issues:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/addiction-in-society/200912/climate-gate-e-mails-science-and-psychology-usual
Alarmists insist the sun will “go down”, bringing “the dark”, but the glare from my window has been overwhelming all afternoon.
Everyone acknowledges that the IPCC report does not take into account increased lubrication under glaciers caused by melting, which has been observed to speed up their slide into the sea. It is therefore a strict lower bound on expected increased sea level.
Here’s a graph of reliable satellite data on sea levels: https://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/copenhagen_diagnosis.php
Seth, you are really disappointing me.
Al Gore as a whole is pretty shoddy and irresponsible.
@Seth
I am enjoying your take on ClimateGate. Have you seen this blog post?
Very reasonable and provides some great perspective. I think the “zooming” out of the temp data make for a strong narrative.
https://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553
Mass Psychosis of the empowered “elites”. Why is Seth “disappointing” — he’s never, ever follows the consensus (especially ones unbacked by data), he knows that academia is full of self-important defenders of a self-serving status quo.