Monday 30 March 2009

Sea levels

I generally skip the Sunday papers these days, prefering to spend my weekends catatonic in existential angst, but via EU referendum, Booker in The Sunday Telegraph reports that the sea-level rise thing is all a big lie.
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.

Its nice the way that this scientist's work is based on actual real-world measurements rather than computer models.

The other week when I was looking over BBC coverage of sea-level rises, I was somewhat concerned about the inhabitants of Tuvalu, who ten years back were going to have their island washed away by the rising sea levels predicted, luckily EU Ref is reassuring.
To that effect, the climate hysterics have recruited the government of the Maldives, and indeed the leaders of Tuvalu – another of the supposedly threatened Pacific islands - where the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. By lining their pockets with gold has the "international community" kept the island leaders "on-side" willing to promote the myth which sustains the whole scam.

I've read up the IPCC report with its sea level rise predictions, and they do say that sea level rises will be accelerating, which is possibly when we don't see any rise now, but as soon as the Greenland icesheet melt, then seas will bubble up and we'll all be moving to the highlands. But one thing that nags at the back of my heid is that the predictions are all for the year 2100, by which time most of the reports authors will have passed away, and thus be unaccountable. Actually, by that time, two and a bit generations, the world's populations will have gradually drifted away from the present day coasts anyway, like how people don't buy houses on flood plains in the UK so much.

Anyhoo, my point that I drifted away from is that there are few published predictions of sea level rises within lifetimes, say twenty or fifty year timescales, where you'd be able to measure the sea level now, hold your breath for a few years, then check back and say to the authors of the IPCC reports "you were so wrong, get the hell out of my way" or as may be more appropriate "you were right, please take this mountaintop palace and all our country's riches.

I want a sea level rise prediction that we can actually hold people to account on.

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