Much debate, less certainty.

By Lyle Dunne

I tell you naught for your comfort

Yea, naught for your desire

Save that the sky grows darker yet

And the sea rises higher.

 — I couldn’t resist that, it’s from one of my favourite poems: GK Chesteron’s The Ballad of the White Horse.

But before you race out to put the beach house on the market, let me assure you that it’s metaphorical – and set a millenium ago, with King Alfred besieged on the on the Isle of Athelney (now a hill in Southwest England).

Nevertheless, claims of rising sea levels have been a staple of the climate-change alarmists for decades. Our Pacific neighbours are about to disappear beneath the waves – and it’s All Our Fault. Our benefactors at the IPCC are very worried, and NSW local governments have been sufficiently concerned to try to stop people improving beachside properties.

Now, I always worried about the accuracy of measuring sea levels to millimetric accuracy, what with tide, waves, tectonic shifts and passing dugongs. But we have been assured that the Science was Settled.

However in the lead-up to the recent UN Climate Conference in Durban (3−11 December) a couple of dissident voices have appeared – and been duly attacked.

First, in the Spectator of 3 December, Nils-Axel Mörner states quite unequivocally that the notion of catastrophic anthropogenic sea-level rises is complete nonsense.

There are variations, he claims – quite significant ones – but they are in the nature of fluctuations, whose timing rules out human causes; sea levels on average rose in the order of 10 to 11cm between 1850 and 1940, stopped rising or maybe even fell a little until 1970,  and have remained roughly flat ever since.

According to Mörner, the tide data of the last 25 years “clearly shows there has been no rise” in Tuvalu — nor in the Maldives, whose President has been talking up this phenomenon in the lead-up to the UN Climate Conference ­- the sea level in nearby Goa show has been stable for 50 years, after falling 20cm in about 1960. Nevertheless the President is sufficiently concerned to claim that “we are drowning, the nation will disappear” – though not sufficiently concerned to stop building waterside hotels and airports.

(In a similar vein, Ray Hadley had an interesting article in the Telegraph in November about Tim Flannery’s waterfront property on the Hawkesbury, about which he seems a little embarrassed.)

Mörner says the IPCC claim that “sea level has been rising at about 3mm a year” – remember that figure, it’ll be important later — was wildly exaggerated, apparently based on a tide gauge in Hong Kong, in an unstable location, which was in disagreement with four nearby gauges.

Mörner is described as “head of paleophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University (1991−2005), president of the INQUA [International Union for Quaternary Research] Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, leader of the Maldives Sea Level project (2011−11), chairman of the INTAS project in geomagnetism and climate (1997−2003)”.

His best guess for the overall rate of change is more than 1mm a year, in fact probably significantly less than 0.7mm.

This didn’t go unchallenged, of course. In the Manchester Guardian, and the Spectator of 10 December, our old chum George Monbiot (the pro-nuclear environmentalist who the previous week attacked the European Greens for abandoning nuclear power) attacked Mörner’s credibility, calling this story “the biggest blunder of [Spectator publisher Fraser Nelson’s] career”, and quoting the chair of the Swedish Sceptics Society denouncing all Mörner’s work as “high-grade woo”. (Given Monbiot’s insistence on scientific rigour, I can only assume this is a technical term.)

Much of the article consists of general ad hominem bucketing: Mörner believes in water-dowsing, apparently, and was allegedly once reprimanded by a county archaeologist for damaging an iron-age cemetery during an attempt to show it was an ancient Hellenic trading centre. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were outstanding parking tickets too.

Monbiot accuses Mörner in turn of cherry-picking the Maldives data – but, confusingly, states that data from the other side of the island would have shown sea levels falling. He claims that Mörner has produced the most comically distorted illustration ever produced in the annals of climate change denial… it rotates the graph of satellite-observed sea levels until the line appears flat, whereupon the illustration declares that there is “no trend”!

It’s true that the illustration – the original graph rotated anticlockwise, axes and all – looks weird. But if it’s an attempt at, if you’ll pardon the expression, spin — then it’s an exceptionally ham-fisted one. Mörner explains that this was done to counter the satellite altimetry group’s earlier “corrections” to the data, required because once the El Niño- Southern Oscillation effect had been eliminated, no trend remained.

Monbiot points out that original article had been published in the journal of a fringe group; doubtless Mörner would say that he had been reduced to this because “respectable” journals wouldn’t publish “deniers”.

Are you still with me? I’m sorry this is all a bit “he-said-she-said”. But there are a couple of important points.

There is no evidence of consistent, accelerating long-term increases that would confirm the anthropogenic hypothesis, let alone justify the near-panicked response of Australian governments.

First, I don’t claim to be able to adjudicate – maybe Mörner does have a few polar bears loose on the ice floe — but it appears the science is not altogether uncontested. The claims that data have been “adjusted” for no legitimate reason, and claims (on both sides) that data sources (tidal gauges in this case) have been chosen selectively and tendentiously, sound disturbingly familiar to those of us who remember the climategate Emails.

It does at least seem that anyone with a view on what’s happening with sea levels can find a data set (i.e. a location and time period) to support that view: with any long-term variable, there are likely to be periods where it’s going your way, however brief.

Secondly, remember I told you to bear in mind that the Mörner argument was about whether the claims of a 3mm annual rise were plausible?

Well, here in Australia, Jo Nova has an article linked to Malcolm Holland’s story in the Daily Telegraph of 2 December stating that in NSW, environmental bureaucrats have been prevented from publishing an analysis of data from Fort Denison, in Sydney Harbour, showing a sea-level rise of around 1mm annually – which has been broadly constant [but see below] for the 120 years of the data series.

Why was this suppressed? Because the figure was too optimistic. Not content with the IPCC claim of 3mm a year, governments in Australia are predicting rises of 900mm to 1.1metres by the end of the century (apparently based on the CSIRO’s 2009 Climate Change Risks to Australia’s Coast) – ie at least 10mm a year!

Let no-one claim that Australia is not leading the world in this important area of what might perhaps be called science.

Note that this suppression of papers, revealed by retired environment bureaucrat Doug Lord (frustrated at being censored through his co-authors, still employees of the environment department, being leaned on to pull papers – which he says has happened five times since 2009) is occurring in NSW: governments come and go, but bureaucracy goes on forever.

Finally, there is also the question about whether any increase is stable, accelerating (as we might expect if it were linked to carbon generation) or decelerating.

Ken Stewart, in a detailed analysis of the data suggests that the rate of increase of sea levels around Australia has if anything been slowing.

He does make the point noted above about selectivity: given long-term fluctuations, a few decades worth of data are not enough to make long-term predictions, but one can produce graphs showing rises of several mm annually (though nothing like the CSIRO predictions) by selecting sites and start-years.

However – and this is the real point — there is no evidence of consistent, accelerating long-term increases that would confirm the anthropogenic hypothesis, let alone justify the near-panicked response of Australian governments.

Perhaps there’s room for an animated film in which a group of plucky kids discover a conspiracy by a group of environmentalists to spread rumours of sea rises and buy up beachfront property cheap? It’d make a change…