Sleep Tight

Remember the collective nightmare of Al Gore's vision of sea levels rising 20 feet? Well it was in An Inconvenient Truth, but I won't blame you if you forgot. It was just one of many claims in Gore's environmental shock doctrine.

Well, you can go to sleep tonight knowing that the concept of sea level increases is incorrect, to be generous. It didn't seem to matter to Gore that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicted a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, 20 feet sounds much more scary doesn't it?

An article in the Telegraph the other day detailed the findings of Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. INQUA for those not in the research know is the International Union for Quaternary Research, with the Quarternary period being the last 2.6 million years. The title of the article in the Telegraph was "Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told".

Here are some pertinent quotes to give you a good night rest tonight.

The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story. 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),

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".

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

Mmmm, truthiness.