With the climate control meetings in Copenhagen going on, this got me to wondering how fast sea levels are expected to rise. After all, isn’t that the bottom line problem that is supposed to occur due to global warming? I have been hearing all week that the rich countries are going to cause the sea levels to rise, because of the melting ice near the poles, and the poor countries are going to get flooded as sea waters creep over their shores.
So with all the press coverage of the climate control event, you would expect indisputable data regarding rising sea levels. Well, hmm. This is from a 2007 interveiw with Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner:
I am a sea-level specialist. There are many good sea-level people in the world, but let’s put it this way: There’s no one who’s beaten me. I took my thesis in 1969, devoted to a large extent to the sea-level problem. From then on I have launched most of the new theories, in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. I was the one who understood the problem of the gravitational potential surface, the theory that it changes with time. I’m the one who studied the rotation of the Earth, how it affected the redistribution of the oceans’ masses. And so on.
… So, we have this 1 mm per year [rise in sea levels] up to 1930, by observation, and we have it by rotation recording. So we go with those two. They go up and down, but there’s no trend in it; it was up until 1930, and then down again. There’s no trend, absolutely no trend.
… Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their (IPCC’s) publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something, but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original data which they suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge.
So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences meeting in Moscow—I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!
Of course, you can find tons of articles that say the global sea level is rising steadily. It gets hard to know what to believe. Thousands of scientists are in group think mode regarding global warming. They are just convinced it is real and don’t want to hear anything that challenges this. So I don’t trust the scientist-activists.
Personally, I’m still trying to learn what is really going on. One thing I know is this: All of the claims that existing climate prediction models have certitude in predicting temperature and sea levels 100 years from now are crap. I think the most that can be said is that there is a possibility that significant global warming will occur. What I am trying to learn is - what is probability? We are dealing with probabilities here, not certitudes - regardless of what some scientists, politicians, and celebrities say.