By Matt Ridley, The Canberra Times and the Australian
THIS month, after a three-year investigation, Harvard University suspended a prominent professor of psychology for scandalously overinterpreting videos of monkey behaviour.
The incident has sent shock waves through science because it suggests a body of data is unreliable. The professor, Marc Hauser, is now a pariah in his field and his papers have been withdrawn. But the implications for society are not great; no policy had been based on his research.
This week, after a four-month review, a committee of scientists concluded that the Nobel prizewinning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has “assigned high confidence to statements for which there is very little evidence, has failed to enforce its own guidelines, has been guilty of too little transparency, has ignored critical review comments and has had no policies on conflict of interest”.
Enormous and expensive policy changes have been based on the flawed work of these scientists. Yet there is apparently to be no investigation, blame, suspension or withdrawal of papers, just a gentle bureaucratic fattening of the organisation with new full-time posts.
IPCC reports are supposed to be the gold standard account of what is - and is not - known about global warming. The panel boasts that it uses only peer-reviewed scientific literature.
But its claims about mountain ice turned out to be anecdotes from a climbing magazine, its claims on the Amazon’s vulnerability to drought from a Brazilian pressure group’s website and 42 per cent of the references in one chapter proved to be to reports by Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund and other “grey” literature.
This week’s review finds guidelines on the use of this grey literature “are vague and have not always been followed”.
For instance, the claim that glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035 seems to have been based on a misprint (for 2350) in a document issued by a pressure group. When several reviewers challenged the assertion in draft, they were ignored.
When Indian scientists challenged it after publication, they were not just dismissed but vilified and accused of “voodoo science” by IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri.
By contrast, when two academics, Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels, found a strong link between temperature rise and local economic development - implying that recent warming is partly down to local, not global factors - their paper was ignored for two drafts, despite many review comments drawing attention to the omission. It was finally given a grudging reference, with a false assertion that the data was rebutted by other data that turned out to be nonexistent.
We now know the back story of this episode: the emails leaked from the University of East Anglia include this from professor Phil Jones, referring to exactly this paper: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” (Note that the IPCC had appointed Jones as co-ordinating lead author to pass judgment on his own papers as well as those of his critics. Learning nothing, it has appointed one of Jones’s closest colleagues for the next report. This is asking not to be taken seriously.)
These are not merely procedural issues. They have real consequences for science and society. All the errors and biases that have come to light in recent months swerve in the direction of exaggerating the likely effect of climate change.
According to economist Richard Tol, one part of the 2007 report (produced by Working Group 2) systematically overstated the adverse effects of climate change, while another section (written by Working Group 3) systematically understated the costs of emissions reduction. Indur Goklany, an independent science scholar, likewise noticed that the report had quoted a study that estimated the number of people at increased risk of (reduced? BB) water shortage in the future as a result of climate change, but omitted to mention the same source’s estimate of the number of people at decreased risk.
The latter number was larger in all cases, so that “by the 2080s the net global population at risk declines by up to 2.1 billion people”.
This is not a new problem. The unilateral redrafting of IPCC reports by lead authors after reviewers had agreed them, and the writing of a sexed-up “summary for policymakers” before the report was complete, have discomfited many scientists since the first report. It is no great surprise that the experts who compiled one part of the 2007 report included three from Greenpeace, two Friends of the Earth representatives, two Climate Action Network representatives and a person each from the activist organisations WWF, Environmental Defence Fund and the David Suzuki Foundation.
Frankly, the whole process, not just the discredited Pachauri (in shut-eyed denial at a press conference this week), needs purging or it will drag down the reputation of science with it. One of the most shocking things for those who champion science, as I do, has been the sight of the science establishment reacting to each scandal in climate science with indifference or contempt. The contrast with the thorough investigation of the Hauser affair is striking.
Three years ago, not having paid much attention, I thought IPCC reports were reliable, fair and transparent. No longer. Despite coming from a long line of coalmining entrepreneurs, I’m not a denier: I think carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. I’m not even a sceptic (yet): I think the climate has warmed and will warm further.
But I am now a “lukewarmer” who has yet to see any evidence saying that the present warming is, or is likely to be, unprecedented, fast or tending to accelerate. So I have concluded that global warming will most probably be a fairly minor problem - at least compared with others such as poverty and habitat loss - for nature as well as people.
After watching the ecologically and economically destructive policies enacted in its name (biofuels, wind power), I think we run the risk of putting a tourniquet around our collective necks to stop a nosebleed.
Scientific Alliance Newsletter
The world of mainstream climate change science and policy has been severely discomfited over that last year by a number of issues which have knocked the seemingly-unstoppable juggernaut off-course. One of these - the failure of governments to agree a post-Kyoto deal at last December’s Copenhagen summit - had little to do with the behaviour of the IPCC and its core scientists (although it was widely predicted and almost inevitable). But two other issues were self-inflicted wounds directly attributable to those at the heart of the climate establishment.
What will forever be remembered as climategate (surely about time for someone to find something to replace the allusion to a scandal now more than 35 years’ old. . .) shook faith in the behaviour of some of the key scientists responsible for reconstructing the historical temperature record. Attempts to prevent inclusion in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report (AR4) of papers which conflicted with the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, collusion in deleting sensitive emails and clear failures to comply with Freedom of Information requests all raised doubts about the integrity of the scientific effort.
Two somewhat perfunctory internal inquiries at the University of East Anglia, and a report by the House of Commons Science and Technology select committee (with time for only one day of evidence-taking) all cleared the Climate Research Unit team of any serious wrong-doing. In reality few hard questions were asked, important issues were glossed over, and many observers saw the whole process as a whitewash: the normal outcome of official inquiries into contentious issues.
But the other own goal was caused by the IPCC itself, which was beset by a series of scandalettes regarding inaccuracies in the AR4 itself. One of the high profile ones was the statement that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 (apparently a misprint for 2350), but there were a number of others which suggested that undue credence was given to the ‘grey’ (non-peer reviewed) literature if it gave the right messages, while inconvenient findings were ignored or dismissed.
A recent inquiry by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, commissioned by the Dutch government, was somewhat critical, accusing the IPCC of being too opaque in its workings and for issuing a report which tended to emphasise worst-case scenarios. Nevertheless, the inquiry concluded that there were no errors which would weaken the conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions were the main driver of climate change. Depending on their position in the debate, commentators disagreed on whether the Dutch report was essentially supportive of the IPCC or not, but such independent criticism of its workings were in reality a significant blow. They could no longer be dismissed as the fantasies of a bunch of right-wingers in the pay of the oil industry.
But even more significant was an inquiry conducted by the InterAcademy Council (representing national academies of science such as the Royal Society) on behalf of the UN and the IPCC itself. Given previous solid support by the IAC members for the IPCC position and the tendency for such inquiries towards exoneration, hopes for an objective, critical report were not high. To the surprise of many, the report they released on 30th August was significantly more critical in tone than the Dutch inquiry.
Harold Shapiro of Princeton, who chaired the panel conducting the inquiry, wrote in the report preface ‘Our task was to broadly assess the processes and procedures of the IPCC and make recommendations on how they might be improved in order to enhance the quality and authoritative nature of future assessments.’ So, although this was not a review of the scientific evidence and judgements made by the IPCC, neither was it tied to overly narrow terms of reference which often reduce the value of such an exercise.
The IPCC is often criticised for ignoring or dismissing alternative hypotheses since, in the view of the core clique of lead authors, there is only one right answer. How refreshing then to see Professor Shapiro write ‘Indeed climate science is a collective learning process as data are accumulated, interpreted, and used to construct models, and as alternative hypotheses are tested until we have increased confidence in our measurements and models and as a subset of ideas survive careful testing and competing explanations are eliminated.’ Although couched in careful and diplomatic language, this should be a loud wake-up call for IPPC lead authors to open their minds to other possibilities.
One of the headline recommendations is for the formation of an Executive Committee empowered to make decisions on behalf of the Panel between plenary sessions, and for this to be led by a full-time Executive Director, appointed for one six-year term only. This has been widely interpreted as a direct call for Rajendra Pachauri, the current part-time director, to stand down. He is already well into his second term of office and his inept handling of criticisms has won him few friends.
The IAC report also calls for all reviewers’ comments to be properly considered and for genuine controversies to be adequately reflected, something which Phil Jones and the team at the University of East Anglia seemed to be trying to avoid at all costs. There is criticism also of the use by Working Group I of spurious quantitative likelihood scales: for example defining ‘extremely likely’ as a greater than 95% confidence that an event would occur, based on little or no objective evidence.
The thrust of the IAC critique is that the IPCC has become a lobbying body for particular policy options based on a single, entrenched position. Restructuring it to be a body which takes an objective view of the evidence and comes up with trusted and authoritative reports will take time but is essential. Those at the centre of this have not only done their own cause a big disservice, but have further weakened the trust of an already cynical public in the integrity of science.
It is clear that the agenda has been to promote the ‘truth’ of man-made global warming at the expense of honesty and objectivity to ensure that politicians saw no option but to introduce stringent emissions control measures. Any questioning of this line was slapped down to avoid weakening their resolve. But this strategy - perhaps better described as a gamble - has failed. Not only that, but it has backfired and makes people even less willing to accept messages from sources they now view as tainted. And, despite still making the right noises, politicians are becoming less and less likely to introduce emissions reduction policies which hit taxpayers at a time when other taxes are being raised and public services cut.
How different it all might have been if IPCC lead authors had acted as scientists rather than an affiliate of Greenpeace. They may not have been any closer to their policy goals, but they would not have forfeited public trust. If the evidence for the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis had become more compelling, people would have been more willing to believe it and accept the policy consequences. As it is, the global warming industry has probably reached a high point in its influence, while science has suffered. It’s a hard way to learn again that honesty is the best policy.
By Carl Franzen, AOL
The Discovery Channel abruptly entered headlines Wednesday afternoon for an awful reason: a hostage crisis at the network’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., involving an armed gunman, who the Web quickly identified as James Jay Lee, 40, of San Diego (hat tip: The Business Insider). The latest report is that the suspect has now taken several hostages and is potentially strapped with explosives. As the situation continues to unfold, Surge Desk lists what is known about Lee so far.
1. He Wrote A Lengthy, Rambling Manifesto. In the document, Lee accused humans of being the “most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around.” It was posted at his website, which has crashed because of server overload. It can still be accessed via Google Cache.
2. He’s Been Arrested Outside Discovery Channel HQ Before. In early 2008, Lee was arrested by Montgomery County Police on charges of littering and disorderly conduct for throwing money to attract a crowd outside the channel’s headquarters, DCist reports. The blog also noted that “Lee appears to have spent thousands of dollars in advertising his protest plans in publications such as the Express,” a free D.C.-area newspaper, “and hiring homeless people to beef up his presence.”
3. He Went to Extraordinary Lengths to Protest the Channel. Elaborating on the DCist’s claims that Lee spent significant money to stage bizarre protests in front of the network, the Maryland County Newspapers Online Gazette reported back in 2008 that:
Lee was arrested with about $21,000 in cash in the duffel bag he had with him at the protest, Meng testified. Johnson told Lee that he would get his bag of money back. Lee said he had sold several inherited properties in Maui, Hawaii, where he lived prior to moving to San Diego, to pay for the protest, including about $30,000 for full-page advertisements in newspapers. Lee said he had one property left, worth about $200,000, and had plans to give it away in a ‘’save the planet contest.” Here’s video footage of Lee’s “money toss” back in 2008, via the Village Voice:
4. He Was Allegedly Influenced by Al Gore’s Film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Fox News anchor Shep Smith reported this afternoon that Lee experienced an “awakening” after seeing the former vice president’s film about global warming.
5. He Was Sentenced to a Mental Institution...For his previous Discovery Channel protest stunts, but never served time, instead being granted probation after 14 days in jail, TMZ reports.
See more here. See he is but one in a long line of ecoterrorists here. Read another take on the mainstream media discomfort reporting on enviromilitants.
By Paul Wornham, Environment Policy Examiner
It’s not been easy being green since the revelations of Climategate and mounting evidence that the science behind man’s influence on climate change is far from accurate, let alone settled. No wonder then that many greens chose to vent their frustration at skeptics and blame their ideological opponents for their troubles.
In the past decade, leaders of the global warming movement have won international fame and acclaim, including Nobel prizes and Oscars. They have been feted by celebrities and world leaders alike as a supportive press looked on and wrote glowing tomes about their wisdom and importance. Politicians and businesses were cowed into submission by the mighty green machine and eagerly adorned themselves with a green mantle to appeal to voters and consumers.
Despite this support and for no want of funding, time and again the green agenda stumbled and failed to achieve action. Despite regular and desperate cries of alarm that the conference du jour represented mankind’s ‘last hope’, nothing meaningful happens. The Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, but few industrialized western nations have come close to meeting their emission reduction targets. Since Kyoto there have been significant failures in Bali, Copenhagen, Bonn and next up is Cancun. There is no reason to suspect that the outcome will be different there.
The green movement is a conglomerate of many disparate causes, but one thing most agree on is that skeptics are to blame for any failure. According to greens, these ‘fringe’ people who oppose the theory that man influences climate are powerful enough to stop the entire world from taking action. In fact, this is just a lazy excuse to absolve themselves of blame for their own incompetence and ineffectiveness.
In the United States, Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress since 2008 with outright majorities, yet the ‘vital’ climate bill failed to pass. Democrats blame Republicans, but had the Democrats had the courage of their political convictions they could have passed any legislation they pleased, just as they did with health care reform. The climate bill failed because Democrats needed the political cover of a bipartisan vote and when they failed to get it, they simply walked away and in the process demonstrated that alarmist talk about global doom if the bill failed was so much hot air.
Al Gore this week blogged about the Koch brothers who have funded right-leaning causes to the tune of $100 million. The inference is that the Koch’s blocked climate change legislation by funding skeptics. Yet Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection have outspent the Koch’’s by a factor of 3 to 1. If it was just a question of money, Gore and his followers would have won a long time ago, so why haven’t they?
In large part, Gore must blame his own conspicuous consumption. Ordinary people looked at his mansions, his boat and the globe-trotting in private planes and limos and wondered how he could be so extravagant if there truly were a ‘climate crisis.’ Greens may blame skeptics for pointing out Gore’s hypocrisy, but it was his own decision to not lead by example and leave himself open to criticism.
A common argument against skeptics is that they are ‘flat-earthers’, the people who denied the Earth was round. This is a flawed view; the fact is it is the other way around. Those who believe in mans affect on global temperatures today are the ones who would think the Earth flat, for they are the followers of the popular consensus. It was skeptics that stood against the perceived wisdom of the day to teach the world that the ground they stood on was a sphere, a reminder that skeptics are vital to progress.
The inconvenient truth is that greens have failed to convince the world that man’s activity affects climate. They have tried bullying and emotional blackmail without success. It’s easy to blame those who disagree with them, but the failure to make progress on an issue they claim vital to man’s survival is entirely theirs.
Greens outspent skeptics, they had the ear of the political class, effectively demonized and even silenced opponents and still it was not enough to convince the world that anything was wrong with the weather. It’s hard to think of any movement in history that enjoyed the funding, support and momentum that the greens once had and yet achieved so little.
Now the momentum is gone, shattered by the revelations that climate science is little more than guesswork and bad statistical analysis. Celebrities are moving on to other, more fashionable causes and soon the only people left to rail against skeptics will be the ones with reputations or fortunes so heavily vested in their global warming theory that they can never retreat.
It’s not much of an end for ‘the greatest scam in history’, but it is the end. See post and comments here.
Alan Broone
BANGOR - In the year 2050, people will shake their heads in amazement when they read in history books that, back in 2010, some people thought mankind could “save the planet” by carbon-restricting legislation.
A generation from now, people will all see how we today were misled by scientists and journalists who pursued an agenda. It ended up by starving prosperous countries of needed energy supplies. A whole generation suffered unnecessarily from a sort of mass hysteria.
Science has been corrupted. That’s nothing new, but perhaps never before has it happened on the present scale. The National Academy of Sciences, until recently a respected congregation of the nation’s best minds, has published in a recent Proceedings a “blacklist” of climate researchers who have doubts about, or disagree with, the majority who believe that humankind is responsible for the recent warming of our planet.
This publication strives to diminish the reputations and credentials of “skeptics” or “deniers.” How shameful. Some believe this is a desperate attempt to counteract the growing doubt regarding “global warming,” now dubbed “anthropogenic climate change.” Can such an official act of defamation exist in the scientific establishment today? Unfortunately, yes.
This comes on the heels of several months of cascading revelations regarding data-doctoring and destruction, peer-review subversion, evasion of freedom of information requests, and outright fabrications perpetrated by the leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who crafted their reports on which many of our politicians base their support of carbon-restricting legislation (see Climategate, Amazongate, Himalayagate, etc.).
Little of this has been reported in our media. Recently the main actors in “Climategate” have been “cleared” of any wrongdoing in pathetic whitewashes of their actions.
Imagine an official review that didn’t go into the accuracy of the scientific findings, or in which none of the “doubters” was interviewed. Ah, but millions in research grants were at stake. Are you surprised?
There is an agenda, set up decades ago by the United Nations, with a mission to convict the Western World of despoiling the planet. The plan was and remains that of engineering a redistribution of wealth to poorer countries, while bringing ever more power and control to central governments.
What better way than to indict our “excessive” production of CO2, a minor greenhouse gas that is necessary for all life on Earth? This was demonstrated dramatically in Copenhagen last December. There was outrage in the African delegations when carbon-restricting mandates on developed nations failed adoption.
Be reminded that the global mean temperature has increased only 0.7 degrees C in the last century, which many believe is part of a natural cycle. We have historical evidence, long before CO2 levels rose, of the Roman optimum (warm), Dark Ages (cool), the Medieval Warm Period and the “Little Ice Age” ( approximately from the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries). And it’s noteworthy that higher CO2 levels have always followed temperature increases.
One of the most powerful criticisms is that while the truth of a scientific postulate is judged by observed fact in the real world, many of the alarmists’ predictions are derived from computerized models which may share false premises (and desired outcomes).
Apocalyptic scenarios may garner more public support for large governmental research grants than assurances that the world and its complex weather systems will somehow get along without help or hindrance from us - as they always have.
We learn about those who insist that something must be done now to save the planet, yet we never learn from our left-leaning media about the thousands of well-qualified scientists, including many distinguished names, who protest that the science is dubious.
Ignored is a petition to the U.S. government, signed by more than 31,000 well-qualified scientists, protesting that AGW is based on flawed ideas and that the use of hydrocarbons is not changing the climate.
Despite the revelations of scientific corruption, many who object are, often as not, vilified as far-out fringe types not worthy of serious attention.
The skeptics are smeared as funded by “big oil,” whether it is true or not, ignoring the fact that government grants dwarf all other support for research.
Here in north-central Maine, our only daily newspaper feeds us a steady diet of climate alarm, rarely publishing skeptical opinions other than an occasional letter.
The Portland Press Herald is commendable for its support of a lively debate on this important subject, so essential to an informed electorate. Thanks, and keep it up. See post here.
By Bob Tita, Dow Jones
CHICAGO -(Dow Jones)- Deere & Co. (DE) has quietly dropped out of a coalition of large companies that has supported a cap-and-trade program for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Deere, the world’s largest manufacturer of farm machinery, opted to leave the U.S. Climate Action Partnership in May because the group’s legislative strategy “no longer served as a foundation for moving forward” with climate change regulation, Ken Golden, a spokesman for the company said Tuesday.
“We came to the conclusion that Deere had other opportunities to be involved in climate change initiatives,” Golden said.
The Moline, Ill., company joins a handful of other companies that have left the partnership in recent months, as political support erodes for comprehensive energy legislation that includes a cap-and-trade program and stricter mandates for energy conservation. Other members to leave the group include construction machinery company Caterpillar Inc. (CAT), and energy companies BP PLC (BP.LN, BP) and ConocoPhillips Co. (COP)
A spokesman for the partnership, Tad Segal, offered no reaction to Deere’s reasons for leaving the group, but credited the company with “playing a valuable and significant role” in developing the group’s policy initiatives.
“As with every coalition, there have been membership changes, including departures and new memberships,” said Segal.
About two dozen companies remain in the group, including corporate heavyweights General Electric Co. (GE), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Siemens AG (SIE), and Alcoa Inc. (AA) The group also has picked up four new members in the past year, including Honeywell International Inc. (HON) and Weyerhaeuser Co. (WY) Icecap Note: Boycott targets!
The Washington-based coalition, which was founded in 2007, has been a lightning rod for opposition since its January 2009 Blueprint for Legislative Action recommended creating a phased-in cap-and-trade system for U.S. producers of carbon dioxide, the main ingredient in the heat-trapping greenhouse gas identified as the source of climate warming.
Under such a program, carbon dioxide producers, such as coal-fired power plants, would have their carbon emissions capped at a certain level by government-issued credits or allowances. Those that exceed their limits would have to purchase additional carbon credits from carbon producers whose emissions fall below their allowable amount.
A cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing carbon emissions by more than 80% by 2050 was included in energy legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009. But the House bill has been bogged down in the Senate by intense bipartisan opposition to cap-and-trade provisions. Carbon-emitting companies argue that a cap-and-trade system would put them at a disadvantage to competitors in other countries that don’t regulate carbon dioxide. The weak U.S. economy and the threat of job losses caused by cap-and-trade have added momentum to the cap-and-trade opposition.
Two conservative policy groups subjected Deere to public pressure tactics this spring in hopes of turning its employees against their company’s membership in the climate partnership.
In television commercials that aired in April in Moline, and Waterloo, Iowa--home of Deere’s tractor assembly plants--FreedomWorks and the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project said cap-and-trade legislation would put Deere’s U.S. employees at risk of loosing their jobs if the company pursues lower-cost manufacturing sites overseas.
The ads also accused Deere of supporting “back-room deals” by members of Congress to assemble enough votes to pass carbon regulation. The ads urged Deere employees to “stand up against back-room deals in Washington. Tell management: No more back-room deals.”
Tom Borelli, the director of the Free Enterprise Project, said the commercials helped convince Deere Chairman and Chief Executive Samuel Allen to depart the climate coalition.
“I really think we had an impact. We really hit a nerve,” said Borelli, who also confronted Allen about the Deere’s coalition membership at the company’s annual shareholders meeting in February.
Deere rejected the notion that groups such as Borelli’s influenced the company’s decision.
“Deere made a decision independent of the opinions of other organizations,” Golden, the company spokesman, said. “Our involvement with various trade and industry organizations is routinely reviewed.”
He added the company remains affiliated with other environmental groups that it believes can effectively influence climate change legislation. Deere is a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Leaders program and participates in the Business Environmental Leadership Council.
Deere’s stock was recently down 1.3% at $61.54 a share
By Joanne Nova on SPPI
Are the small islands of the South Pacific in danger of disappearing, glug, under the waves of the rising ocean? Will thousands of poor inhabitants be forced to emigrate, as desperate refugees, to Australia and New Zealand? Has any of this got anything to do with man-made emissions of CO2?
By looking closely at the records, it turns out that the much advertised rising sea levels in the South Pacific depend on anomalous depressions of the ocean during 1997 and 1998 thanks to an El Nino and two tropical cyclones. The Science and Public Policy Institute has released a report by Vincent Gray which compares 12 Pacific Island records and shows that in many cases it’s these anomalies that set the trends… and if the anomaly is removed, sea levels appear to be more or less constant since the Seaframe measurements began around 1993 (below, enlarged here).
Sea levels: The El Nino / tropical storm anomaly in 1997-1998 is clear. A long sustained rise is not. Take the infamous Tuvalu for example. It’s sea level rise was reported as 5.7 mm/year back in 2008. Now it’s calculated as 3.7mm/year. But look at the Seaframe Graph - its flat. It is universally forecast to disappear by 2050. New Zealand has even agreed to accept the “inevitable” rush of refugees, yet the best records available show that sea levels have not risen at all since 1993. It’s not that it will take decades, or hundreds of years to submerge, there’s no reason to suppose it will submerge at all (asteroid strikes excepted). It’s a place that naturally is reshaped and reformed as the ocean moves sand from one part to another, and the corals shift and grow with the changes (below, enlarged here).
Tuvalu sea levels show little trend.
There may indeed be legitimate refugees from some areas, but it’s most likely due to subsidence, rather than sea-level rises.
ABSTRACT
The SEAFRAME sea-level study on 12 Pacific islands is the most comprehensive study of sea level and local climate ever carried out there. The sea level records obtained have all been assessed by the anonymous authors of the official reports as indicating positive trends in sea level over all 12 Pacific Islands involved since the study began in 1993 until the latest report in June 2010. In almost all cases the positive upward trends depend almost exclusively on the depression of the ocean in 1997 and 1998 caused by two tropical cyclones. If these and other similar disturbances are ignored, almost all of the islands have shown negligible change in sea level from 1993 to 2010, particularly after the installation of GPS levelling equipment in 2000 (below, enlarged here).
The study includes the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
One of the big problems with measuring sea-levels is that everything is in motion. The tides shift, the sand moves, and even the bedrock can subside. The Seaframe stations are state of the art, and regularly checked to compensate for all these changes.
The Seaframe equipment used to measure sea levels is carefully re-calibrated every 18 months to take these factors into account.
Precise levelling of the height of the SEAFRAME sea level sensor relative to an array of land-based benchmarks is undertaken by Geosciences Australia every eighteen months where possible. The precision to which the survey must be performed is dependent on the distance Km (km) between the SEAFRAME sensor benchmark and the primary tide gauge benchmark (TGBM) and forms part of the project’s design specifications (below, enlarged here).
Seaframe for measuring sea levels:
The claimed sea level trends look alarmingly large, yet calculated trends can be misleading (below, enlarged here).
South Pacific Sea Levels 1992 - 2010
The people of Tuvalu are worried, and it appears, their anxiety and fears may simply be a product of those who want to draw attention to their own pet projects for their own selfish goals. Though the climate change fears have attracted some extra foreign aid to the country, how much of that filters through to the worried mums and dads, and how much just feeds the bureaucrats with their taxes?
We don’t want a mass migration but most people are worried for their kids. They see no future here in 50 years.
“If sea levels rise 0.5m in that time we won’t be entirely under water, but with king tides and storm surges we will be in severe trouble.”
The long-term future of Tuvalu as a viable nation is being considered by the Government.
The bottom line
No matter what was heating the Earth, sea levels would rise, the rise in and of itself tells us nothing about the cause of the warming. What’s amazing is that so much of our CO2 has been unleashed since 1993, yet at least in the South Pacific, it’s not clear that sea levels have risen.
See post here. Read the full assessment of the South Pacific Sea Levels thanks to the Science and Public Policy Institute.
By Ann McElhinney
Friends,
Last March James Cameron sounded defiant.
The Avatar director was determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the radical “solutions” being proposed.
Cameron said was itching to debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they were wrong.
“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” he said in an interview.
Well, a few weeks ago Mr. Cameron seemed to honor his word.
His representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media entrepreneur.
Mr. Cameron was attending the AREDAY environmental conference in Aspen Colorado 19-22 August. He wanted the conference to end with a debate on climate change. Cameron would be flanked with two scientists. It would be 90 minutes long. It would be streamed live on the internet.
They hoped the debate would attract a lot of media coverage.
“We are delighted to have Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Times and anyone else you’d like. The more the better,” one of James Cameron’s organizers said in an email.
It looked like James Cameron really was a man of his word who would get to take on the skeptics he felt were so endangering humanity.
Everyone on our side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the AREDAY agenda.
But then as the debate approached James Cameron’s side started changing the rules.
They wanted to change their team. We agreed.
They wanted to change the format to less of a debate - to “a roundtable”. We agreed.
Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.
Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed
Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he “wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out,” decided to ban the media from the shoot out.
He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.
No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way.
We all agreed to that.
And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. “shoot it out “ Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was cancelled.
James Cameron’s behavior raises some very important questions.
Does he genuinely believe in man made climate change? If he believes it is a danger to humanity surely he should be debating the issue every chance he gets ?
Or is it just a pose?
The man who called for an open and public debate at “high noon” suddenly doesn’t want his policies open to serious scrutiny.
I was looking forward to debating with the film maker. I was looking forward to finding out where we agreed and disagreed and finding a way forward that would help the poorest people in the developing and developed world.
But that is not going to happen because somewhere along the way James Cameron, a great film maker, has moved from King of the World to being King of the Hypocrites.
- Ann McElhinney
See blog post here.
Chicken Cameron Runs then Resorts to Ad Hominem Attacks
Friends,
Back in March James Cameron said, “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads.”
This put into motion the debate-that-was-not, starting with Cameron calling Ann McElhinney, Marc Marono, and Andrew Breitbart requesting a debate at the AREDAY summit.
But as soon as they accepted, Cameron started backtracking. His list of demands for the debate can only be described as diva behavior, changing by the hour and becoming more restrictive every time. Ban cameras, ban audio, ban the media, ban the public.
We met every unreasonable demand. Yet, when it finally came time to sit down and discuss Global Warming the outspoken environmentalist turned tail and ran, canceling while one of the debaters, Marc Marono, was in flight. “The whole house of cards is falling! Well done, Jimmy! I’m beginning to doubt the existence of the Titanic,” mocked Dennis Miller.
Canceling the debate didn’t stop Cameron from trash-talking skeptics at AREDAY. “James Cameron quickly went for the oft-traversed intellectual low road of ad hominem attacks, recently attacking skeptics of global warming as those of piggish DNA,” said Tim Daniel of The Daily Caller.
James Cameron at High Noon (enlarged here).
Read much more here.