Daily Archives: 10 April 2009

Climate Change Book Reviews

Of all the issues I cover here on LostRepublic, voicing doubts about human-induced climate change earns me by far the most consternation from friends and readers.

From the website realclimate.org:

“RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.”

Sorry, they do not take a stand on the issue. They only critique various news stories and individual studies.

Here is a book review of three climate change books: Winds of Change, Catastrophe, and The Weather Makers.

Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told’

Regarding the controversial Dr. Nils-Axel Morner.

“If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And 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), 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.

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’.

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown. . . .

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”.

When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an “expert reviewer” on the IPCC’s last two reports, he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one”. Yet the results of all this “deliberate ignorance” and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.” (Read more from telegraph.co.uk)

The Civil Heretic – Dyson Freeman, climate change skeptic

“FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming ‘out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,’ as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. . . .

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that ‘all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.’ . . .

A particularly distressed member of that public was Dyson’s own wife, Imme, who, after seeing [Al Gore’s] film in a local theater with Dyson when it was released in 2006, looked at her husband out on the sidewalk and, with visions of drowning polar bears still in her eyes, reproached him: ‘Everything you told me is wrong!’ she cried.

‘The polar bears will be fine,’ he assured her.” (Read more from nytimes.com)