If you listen to the global warming alarmists working for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or folks like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore, sea levels across the globe are rising at a rate that will eventually doom us all.
According to Swedish paleogeophysicist Nils-Axel Moerner, who's been studying and writing about sea levels for four decades, the scientists working for the IPCC have falsified data and destroyed evidence to incorrectly prove their point.
Moerner was recently interviewed by Gregory Murphy of Executive Intelligence Review, and began by making it clear that the sea level claims made by the IPCC are a lot of nonsense (emphasis added throughout, h/t Eduardo Ferreyra):
[W]e can see that the sea level was indeed rising, from, let us say, 1850 to 1930-40. And that rise had a rate in the order of 1 millimeter per year. Not more. 1.1 is the exact figure. And we can check that, because Holland is a subsiding area; it has been subsiding for many millions of years; and Sweden, after the last Ice Age, was uplifted. So if you balance those, there is only one solution, and it will be this figure.
That ended in 1940, and there had been no rise until 1970; and then we can come into the debate here on what is going on, and we have to go to satellite altimetry, and I will return to that. But before doing that: There's another way of checking it, because if the radius of the Earth increases, because sea level is rising, then immediately the Earth's rate of rotation would slow down. That is a physical law, right? You have it in figure-skating: when they rotate very fast, the arms are close to the body; and then when they increase the radius, by putting out their arms, they stop by themselves. So you can look at the rotation and the same comes up: Yes, it might be 1.1 mm per year, but absolutely not more.
1.1 mm per year? That means that if this were to continue for 1000 years, sea levels would be 1.1 meters higher. Doesn't sound very catastrophic, does it?
Moerner then addressed what in his view was a ridiculous error by the IPCC:
Another way of looking at what is going on is the tide gauge. Tide gauging is very complicated, because it gives different answers for wherever you are in the world. But we have to rely on geology when we interpret it. So, for example, those people in the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], choose Hong Kong, which has six tide gauges, and they choose the record of one, which gives 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level. Every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It's the compaction of sediment; it is the only record which you shouldn't use. And if that figure is correct, then Holland would not be subsiding, it would be uplifting. And that is just ridiculous. Not even ignorance could be responsible for a thing like that.
But that was just the beginning of Moerner's problems with the IPCC:
Now, back to satellite altimetry, which shows the water, not just the coasts, but in the whole of the ocean. And you measure it by satellite. From 1992 to 2002, [the graph of the sea level] was a straight line, variability along a straight line, but absolutely no trend whatsoever. We could see those spikes: a very rapid rise, but then in half a year, they fall back again. But absolutely no trend, and to have a sea-level rise, you need a 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 one which they had 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 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!
That is terrible! As a matter of fact, it is a falsification of the data set. Why? Because they know the answer. And there you come to the point: They "know" the answer; the rest of us, we are searching for the answer. Because we are field geologists; they are computer scientists. So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations. The observations don't find it!
Pretty extraordinary, wouldn't you agree? A "correction factor." Honestly, the way these folks manipulate data is nothing less than astounding. Yet, Moerner wasn't finished, as he later detailed an incident when IPCC scientists actually destroyed evidence which refuted their rising sea level claims:
This tree, which I showed in the documentary, is interesting. This is a prison island, and when people left the island, from the '50s, it was a marker for them, when they saw this tree alone out there, they said, "Ah, freedom!" They were allowed back. And there have been writings and talks about this. I knew that this tree was in that terrible position already in the 1950s. So the slightest rise, and it would have been gone. I used it in my writings and for television. You know what happened? There came an Australian sea-level team, which was for the IPCC and against me. Then the students pulled down the tree by hand! They destroyed the evidence. What kind of people are those? And we came to launch this film, "Doomsday Called Off," right after, and the tree was still green. And I heard from the locals that they had seen the people who had pulled it down. So I put it up again, by hand, and made my TV program. I haven't told anybody else, but this was the story.
They call themselves scientists, and they're destroying evidence! A scientist should always be open for reinterpretation, but you can never destroy evidence. And they were being watched, thinking they were clever.
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The very "Green" founder of The Whole Earth Catalog believes the environmental movement will eventually reverse its position on four core issues
The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces -- romanticism and science -- that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.
There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That's fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed socie-ties see themselves as environmentalists. But it also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don't fit the consensus story line.
Take population growth. For 50 years, the demographers in charge of human population projections for the United Nations released hard numbers that substantiated environmentalists' greatest fears about indefinite exponential population increase. For a while, those projections proved fairly accurate. However, in the 1990s, the U.N. started taking a closer look at fertility patterns, and in 2002, it adopted a new theory that shocked many demographers: human population is leveling off rapidly, even precipitously, in developed countries, with the rest of the world soon to follow. Most environmentalists still haven't got the word. Worldwide, birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking. Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off. Nations already in a birth dearth crisis include Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Russia -- whose population is now in absolute decline and is expected to be 30 percent lower by 2050. On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birthrates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep on dropping. It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason. Any variation from the 2.1 rate compounds over time.
That's great news for environmentalists (or it will be when finally noticed), but they need to recognize what caused the turnaround. The world population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world's women didn't suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though. They had fewer kids because they moved to town.
Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it. In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning. Now is the time to put in place permanent protection for those rural environments. Meanwhile, the global population of illegal urban squatters -- which Robert Neuwirth's book Shadow Cities already estimates at a billion -- is growing fast. Environmentalists could help ensure that the new dominant human habitat is humane and has a reduced footprint of overall environmental impact.
Along with rethinking cities, environmentalists will need to rethink biotechnology. One area of biotech with huge promise and some drawbacks is genetic engineering, so far violently rejected by the environmental movement. That rejection is, I think, a mistake. Why was water fluoridization rejected by the political right and "frankenfood" by the political left? The answer, I suspect, is that fluoridization came from government and genetically modified (GM) crops from corporations. If the origins had been reversed -- as they could have been -- the positions would be reversed, too.
Ignore the origin and look at the technology on its own terms. (This will be easier with the emergence of "open source" genetic engineering, which could work around restrictive corporate patents.) What is its net effect on the environment? GM crops are more efficient, giving higher yield on less land with less use of pesticides and herbicides. That's why the Amish, the most technology-suspicious group in America (and the best farmers), have enthusiastically adopted GM crops.
There has yet to be a public debate among environmentalists about genetic engineering. Most of the scare stories that go around (Monarch caterpillars harmed by GM pollen!) have as much substance as urban legends about toxic rat urine on Coke can lids. Solid research is seldom reported widely, partly because no news is not news. A number of leading biologists in the U.S. are also leading environmentalists. I've asked them how worried they are about genetically engineered organisms. Their answer is "Not much," because they know from their own work how robust wild ecologies are in defending against new genes, no matter how exotic. They don't say so in public because they feel that entering the GM debate would strain relations with allies and would distract from their main focus, which is to research and defend biodiversity.
The best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it. I would love to see what a cadre of hard-over environmental scientists could do with genetic engineering. Besides assuring the kind of transparency needed for intelligent regulation, they could direct a powerful new tool at some of the most vexed problems in the field.
For instance, invasive species. Most of the current mass extinctions of native species is caused by habitat loss, a problem whose cure is well known-identify the crucial habitats and preserve, protect, and restore them. The second greatest cause of extinctions is coming from invasive species, where no solution is in sight. Kudzu takes over the American South, brown tree snakes take over Guam (up to 5,000 a square kilometer), zebra mussels and mitten crabs take over the U.S. waterways, fire ants and fiendishly collaborative Argentine ants take over the ground, and not a thing can be done. Volunteers like me get off on yanking up invasive French broom and Cape ivy, but it's just sand castles against a rising tide. I can't wait for some engineered organism, probably microbial, that will target bad actors like zebra mussels and eat them, or interrupt their reproductive pathway, and then die out.
Now we come to the most profound environmental problem of all, the one that trumps everything: global climate change. Its effect on natural systems and on civilization will be a universal permanent disaster. It may be slow and relentless -- higher temperature, rising oceans, more extreme weather getting progressively worse over a century. Or it may be "abrupt climate change": an increase of fresh water in the north Atlantic shuts down the Gulf Stream within a decade, and Europe freezes while the rest of the world gets drier and windier. (I was involved in the 2003 Pentagon study on this matter, which spelled out how a climate change like the one 8,200 years ago could occur suddenly.) Can climate change be slowed and catastrophe avoided? They can to the degree that humanity influences climate dynamics. The primary cause of global climate change is our burning of fossil fuels for energy.
So everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it's still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon "sequestration" (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it's just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.
Nuclear certainly has problems -- accidents, waste storage, high construction costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons. It also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel. Finally, they offer the best avenue to a "hydrogen economy," combining high energy and high heat in one place for optimal hydrogen generation.
The storage of radioactive waste is a surmountable problem (see "A New Vision for Nuclear Waste," December 2004). Many reactors now have fields of dry-storage casks nearby. Those casks are transportable. It would be prudent to move them into well-guarded centralized locations. Many nations address the waste storage problem by reprocessing their spent fuel, but that has the side effect of producing material that can be used in weapons. One solution would be a global supplier of reactor fuel, which takes back spent fuel from customers around the world for reprocessing. That's the kind of idea that can go from "Impractical!" to "Necessary!" in a season, depending on world events.
The environmental movement has a quasi-religious aversion to nuclear energy. The few prominent environmentalists who have spoken out in its favor -- Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, Friend of the Earth Hugh Montefiore -- have been privately anathematized by other environmentalists. Public excoriation, however, would invite public debate, which so far has not been welcome.
Nuclear could go either way. It would take only one more Chernobyl-type event in Russia's older reactors (all too possible, given the poor state of oversight there) to make the nuclear taboo permanent, to the great detriment of the world's atmospheric health. Everything depends on getting new and better nuclear technology designed and built.
Years ago, environmentalists hated cars and wanted to ban them. Then physicist Amory Lovins came along, saw that the automobile was the perfect leverage point for large-scale energy conservation, and set about designing and promoting drastically more efficient cars. Gas-electric hybrid vehicles are now on the road, performing public good. The United States, Lovins says, can be the Saudi Arabia of nega-watts: Americans are so wasteful of energy that their conservation efforts can have an enormous effect. Single-handedly, Lovins converted the environmental movement from loathing of the auto industry to fruitful engagement with it. Someone could do the same with nuclear power plants. Lovins refuses to. The field is open, and the need is great.
Within the environmental movement, scientists are the radical minority leading the way. They are already transforming the perspective on urbanization and population growth. But their radicalism and leadership will have to increase if humanity is to harness green biotech and step up to its responsibilities for the global climate. The romantics are right, after all: we are indi-visible from the earth's natural systems
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A relic of the days when the earth REALLY had global warming -- without a power station or motor vehicle in sight
The fossilised remains of a giant tropical penguin have been uncovered by paleontologists. The extinct creature was at least 1.5m taller than even the emperor penguin, and had the longest beak ever known among the aquatic birds. It would have swum in tropical waters 36 million years ago during one of the warmest periods on Earth since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Researchers were astonished by the size of the penguin, especially the beak, which, at 18cm, is more than twice as long as the rest of its skull. Remains of the Icadyptes salasi were unearthed on the southern coast of Peru along with another previously unknown, ancient tropical penguin, Perudyptes devriesi, which was alive 42 million years ago.
Until the fossils were found, penguins had been thought to have first swum in low-latitude equatorial waters 10 million years ago. But the new discoveries have put back the date by about 30 million years. The two fossilised penguins, the most complete and among the earliest discovered, are casting new light on the how the features of modern penguins evolved, and when and where they were distributed in the oceans.
Their appearance in equatorial waters took place long before the world started to cool, from about 34 million years ago, to the point where ice-caps formed at the poles. Julia Clarke, of North Carolina State University in the US, was one of the team of scientists from Peru, Argentina and the US who studied the fossils, which were discovered in 2005. She said: "We tend to think of penguins as being cold-adapted species - even the small penguins in equatorial regions today. "But the new fossils date back to one of the warmest periods in the last 65 million years of Earth's history. "The evidence indicates that penguins reached low-latitude regions more than 30 million years prior to our previous estimates." ...
Despite the two extinct species showing a willingness to leave the cooler waters of the high, southern latitudes, Dr Clarke cautioned against assuming that modern penguins will be able to cope with the warmer temperatures predicted through climate change today. "These Peruvian species are early branches of the penguin family tree - comparatively distant cousins of living penguins," she said. "In addition, current global warming is occurring on a significantly shorter timescale. The data from these new fossil species cannot be used to argue that warming wouldn't negatively impact on living penguins." [Religion speaking: There already ARE penguins in warmer waters right now. Below is a picture of a Galapagos penguin. The Galapagos Island are right on the equator. You can't get more tropical than that]
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GROWING CARBON DIVIDE IN THE USA
Anyone who thinks that climate change is purely a partisan issue isn't paying attention. Increasingly, the national debate on global warming is breaking down between carbon states - those that produce coal, oil and automobiles - and those that see a future beyond fossil fuels. Republicans and Democrats are all over the map.
This carbon-state split flared up in Washington last week when Rep. Rick Boucher, a Democrat from the coal state of Virginia, unveiled draft energy legislation that would prevent California and other states from enacting their own greenhouse gas laws. The legislation would also restrict the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions - a reaction to a Supreme Court ruling in April that said the EPA must treat these gases as a pollutant, regulate them or explain why it won't.
U.S. Rep. John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, is also mulling energy legislation that could block California from implementing its "clean-car" law - enacted in 2002 and opposed by auto manufacturers in his state. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a strong statement Tuesday aimed at Boucher and Dingell. "Any proposal that affects California's landmark efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or eliminate the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions will not have my support," Pelosi said.
The speaker's statement effectively kills any chance that Boucher's bill will reach the House floor. But the issue isn't going away. Although polls show that U.S. residents are increasingly concerned about global warming, the nation remains divided over how to control industrial emissions. The divisions do not align themselves with the red-state, blue-state checkerboard. They are aligned based on a presumption of politicians that their home states and districts could win or lose with mandatory caps on greenhouse gases, or with an increasingly warming climate.
You can see this trend playing out in the presidential race. Some Republicans running for president - John McCain comes to mind - are stronger on climate policies than many Democrats in Congress, particularly those who represent carbon states such as Michigan, West Virginia, Alaska and Texas. On the Democratic side, Sen. Christopher Dodd has a stronger climate platform than Sen. Hillary Clinton, who seems as hesitant to affiliate herself with Al Gore as Al Gore did in affiliating himself with Bill Clinton back in 2000.
While Democrats hope to position themselves as the counterpoint to President Bush and his dithering policies on global warming, they have yet to unify their ranks behind a coherent strategy for responding to this threat. To do this, leaders such as Pelosi must not only blunt the clumsy legislative efforts of fossil fuel apologists, such as Boucher and Dingell, they need to rebuke the false choice that climate laws are sure to doom places such as Detroit and the Appalachian coalfields.
FULL STORY here
MORE GLOBAL COOLING
Record chill blitzes Tasmania. If record hot weather anywhere proves global warming (as the newspapers and Greenies so often tell us), then the story below must surely prove global cooling. Or am I missing something?
THE spate of chilly weather is set to ice southern Tasmania's coldest June on record. Grove, just south of Hobart, has had 21 mornings in a row when the mercury plunged to 2C or below, the Bureau of Meteorology said yesterday. And the average minimum for Hobart this month has been just 3.1C -- a dramatic low compared to the usual 5.2C.
A balmy May and 20 years of mild winters made the chill more of a shock, said Ian Barnes-Keoghan, from the bureau's climate section. "It's been very dramatic," he said. "Overnight temperatures have been creeping up in the past couple of decades, so cold nights have become less common and this is a bit of a flashback."
Southern Tasmania's figures were a standout for June. "And May was so warm, the temperature didn't drop below 5C," Mr Barnes-Keoghan said. "A couple of places are on track for the coldest June on record, although the temperatures might pick up during the rest of this week."
The frost has been good for fruit-growers. Huon Valley grower and Fruit Growers Tasmania spokesman Thomas Frankcomb said apples and cherries needed the chill. "It helps the fruit buds mature so when they pop in the spring they pop evenly and with good, strong flowers," Mr Frankcomb said.
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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