40 million people are now already at risk of severe coastal flooding. That number could well triple within the next half-century or so. Even wealthier countries are not immune to the impacts. In the United States, for example, particularly vulnerable areas are: Miami Beach, the Chesapeake region, coastal Louisiana, and coastal Texas . . . This will have implications that extend right up to the steps of our nation’s Capitol. A recent study found that sea level rise of only a tenth of a meter would lead to $2 billion in property damage and affect almost 68,000 people in Washington, D.C.
—Al Gore, 1993
You have heard this sad story umpteen times before. Even if you were not tuned in to see Al Gore on the Today Show on May 24, 2006, you have a pretty good idea of what he told Katie Couric. He said then that if his global warming carbon abatement agenda were not enacted, within fifteen to twenty years, “Yes, in fact the World Trade Center memorial site would be underwater.” In short, this is the cartoon version of The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich’s 2004 climate disaster movie, but without the sex appeal of Emmy Rossum.
The scenario of melting polar ice caps flooding the world is an impossible exaggeration that meshes with Al Gore’s other efforts to Hollywoodize your understanding of climate. Remember the catchy graphics in Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, showing all of South Florida and much of San Francisco disappearing under water? This geophysical counterfactual provides one of the prime rationalizations for the campaign to spend tens of trillions of dollars—of which Gore stands to pocket many millions—to prevent global warming supposedly caused by carbon dioxide emissions.
The idea that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels was propagated so that you would not resist efforts to have our pockets picked under the guise of “saving the planet.” You were told that the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps were destined to melt and that warmer oceans would expand with catastrophic results, threatening shore dwellers the world over, particularly around important areas of the United States where rich people live and among poor, low-lying island nations.
Without a doubt, inundation by rising sea levels has become the catastrophe of choice in the twenty-first century. Not the least reason is that rising sea levels are to this point an almost entirely hypothetical menace. In a 2007 report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that by the 2080s, many millions more people than today are projected to experience floods every year due to sea level rise, particularly those in densely populated and low-lying megadeltas of Asia and Africa, along with those on small islands.1
If you are going to be smitten by catastrophe, it is more rewarding and convenient to have your million-dollar oceanfront villa in Hilton Head—much less your two-bit tropical country—forecasted to be swamped by rising sea levels some sixty or seventy years in the future than it is to fall prey to an actual hurricane, much less an earthquake or a volcano, today. For one thing, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes are dangerous. They kill people. And cleaning up after them involves lots of work. Your car could be washed away or buried in ash. Volcanoes spew out gases like sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, hydrogen fluoride, and even mists of hydrochloric acid. Clouds of these gases, emitted by actual volcanoes, sometimes settle in low-lying areas and asphyxiate people and livestock.
By comparison, inundation by rising sea levels is tidy. No one has to breathe noxious gases, or even get wet. It is all a matter of computer simulations, like a video game. That is why the president of the Maldives and the prime minister of Tuvalu, among others, have opted to be victimized by rising sea levels experienced through computer simulations rather than wait for some actual catastrophe that might justify supplication for compensation from wealthy countries.
Professor Niels-Axel Mörner, the former head of the Institute for Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics at Stockholm University, a world expert on sea level changes and coastal evolution, reports that, in recent years, former Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed maintained that the Maldives would be submerged under the sea. Mörner refers to this claim as “sheer nonsense.”2 A decade ago, while Mörner was the president of the INQUA commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, he conducted a sea level research project in the Maldives, finding that the sea level was not rising and had been stable for the last thirty to forty years. He stated that the 1970s sea level even fell by approximately twenty centimeters.
Former president Nasheed is not alone in seeking to win compensation for a projected rise in sea levels. In a July 2014 interview with CNN, Anote Tong, the former president of Kiribati, stated that rising sea levels, due to global warming, would lead to the total annihilation of the thirty-three coral islands in the Central Pacifica that make up Kiribati.3
Part of the explanation for the eagerness of the leaders of small island countries to proclaim that they have no future is that they are responding to the promise of lots of money to say so. According to the Climate Policy Initiative, global North-South climate cash flows were estimated at between $39 billion and $62 billion as of October 2013.4 In addition, they were promised up to $30 billion more at the Copenhagen and Cancun climate talks in exchange for backing for international treaties to completely revamp world energy markets. As reported in the Guardian, details of this bribe were included among the revelations released by WikiLeaks. One tantalizing tidbit said that the accord promised $30 billion in aid for the poorest nations hit by global warming they had not caused. Within two weeks of the Copenhagen meeting, the Maldives foreign minister wrote to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, expressing the country’s eagerness to back the plan.5 Strangely, for a country whose leaders believed it had no future, the Maldives are now planning to build sixty-four resorts, at an estimated cost of $40 million each, along with eleven new airports.
Not to be outdone in the competition for victimhood, Ian Fry, the delegate of Tuvalu to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, gave a tearful speech suggesting that Tuvalu needed to be saved from rising sea levels. In the speech, he said, “I woke this morning, and I was crying, and that’s not easy for a grown man to admit. The fate of my country rests in your hands.”6 Sincerity is the key in this type of presentation. As they say, if you can fake that you’ve got it made. (Fry is actually an Australian who lives in Canberra.)
Lest you waste any tears over low-lying island nations whose leaders are all worked up over the computer-simulated threat of inundation due to carbon dioxide emissions, causing sea levels to rise, the fact that this is a nonthreat was clearly explained by Charles Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839).7 He saw that rising sea levels created and expanded coral atolls. It did not destroy them. Notwithstanding the fact that they never reach much above about one foot in height, coral atolls have survived a sea level rise of more than 330 feet over the last 20,000 years. As Darwin showed, they rise up higher when water levels rise. So there is no danger to the many island nations that are maneuvering to get on the global warming gravy train.
In his autobiography, Darwin explained that his insight into the geology of barrier reefs and atolls was one of his proudest scientific accomplishments, developed on the west coast of South America before he had ever even seen a coral reef. He then wrote, “No other work of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this; for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of S. America before I had even seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be observed that I had during the two previous years been incessantly attending to the effects on the shores of S. America of the intermittent elevation of the land, together with its denudation and deposition of sediment. This necessarily led me to reflect much on the effects of subsidence, and it was easy to replace in imagination the continued deposition of sediment by the upward growth of coral. To do this was to form my theory of the formation of barrier reefs and atolls.”8
Darwin could see 175 years ago that there was no danger of rising sea levels destroying low-lying atolls. But of course, Darwin was an actual thinking scientist, whose research was financed by his father, not by government grants. Darwin was thinking for himself, not pimping for the global warming gravy train, and more recent research confirms his insight.9
Notwithstanding the logic clearly spelled out by Darwin, Tuvalu officials claim that their islands are being flooded. Where is the evidence? There is none. Professor Mörner reports that there is a clear indication of stability over the last thirty years.10
Australia’s National Tide Facility (NTF) reported that the historical record shows “no visual evidence of any acceleration in sea level trends.” Nonetheless, in 2010, former Tuvalu Prime Minister Koloa Talake (who actually lives in Tuvalu), announced that Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Maldives were planning legal action in the International Court of Justice against Western nations emitting carbon dioxide, claiming they are raising the sea level in the Pacific.
The Right Honorable Koloa Talake did not wish to be outdistanced in the scramble for carbon abatement billions by the Federated States of Micronesia’s lawsuit against the Czech Republic. The Micronesian environment minister confessed in an interview with a Czech business newspaper that his government had been put up to suing the Czech Republic by Greenpeace, which provided details of a plan to retrofit two inefficient, Communist-era, coal-powered generating plants at Prunerov, in North Bohemia, the largest electricity suppliers in the country. Even if everything claimed by global warming alarmists about CO2 emissions were true, the Prunerov power stations could account for no more than a couple of microns of sea rise in Micronesia.
Greenpeace bravely solicited a number of low-lying countries to sue Western nations as a publicity stunt over carbon emissions. Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that neither Greenpeace nor the island governments apparently so agitated over CO2 would dream of importuning India and China, where 900 new coal-fired power plants are in the planning stages or already under construction.11
Furthermore, you would think that if the Tuvalu government actually believed that CO2 emissions were causing the atmosphere to heat, resulting in their country sinking beneath the waves, they would not be adding to CO2 emissions themselves. But they have neglected alternative energy and are almost entirely dependent on burning foreign oil. Their policy seems to be to take money for whatever purpose from wherever they can get it. Among their successes, they got money from Japan to import new diesel generators in 2006. You can bet they won’t sue themselves over CO2 emissions.
Professor Mörner detects the same fake hysteria about rising sea levels in Vanuatu, where the tide gauge indicates a stable sea level over the last fourteen years.12 Vanuatu is claiming compensation on the global warming gravy train based on a prediction that there will be no one living on the main island of the Maskylines by the year 2090.
Professor Mörner characterizes the notion that sea levels are rapidly rising due to global warming as the “greatest lie ever told.”13 “The sea is not rising,” he tells everyone. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” Professor Mörner is an unusual researcher in this respect. He is willing to give voice to politically incorrect sentiments. As he says, “You have to say sea level is rising to get money and get published.”
Of course, Professor Mörner has two advantages that have enabled him to critique the official view that sea level is rising due to climate change caused by CO2 emissions from burning hydrocarbon fuels. As the retired head of the Institute for Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics at Stockholm University, Mörner was a distinguished scholar who had the standing to speak out. And because he was born in 1938, and was nearing the end of his career, he was not held hostage by his ambition to the corrupt considerations of government funding for his work.
Thinking citizens will note that there is strong evidence that sea levels have risen by about 390 feet since the last ice age. But by about five thousand to six thousand years ago, glacial melting in temperate zones had more or less ceased. The balance between sea and land has been essentially stable since the low-altitude glaciers in the Earth’s temperate zones finished melting. (Remember, in the last ice age, Detroit, Glasgow, and Stockholm were buried beneath a mile of ice.)
There is good reason to doubt that there has been any substantial shift in “eustatic” sea levels—levels due to greater volumes of water as compared to displacement by falling land—in the past several thousand years. Eustatic sea levels were formerly thought to be global as compared to local sea levels. But it is now understood that they are local or regional. Contrary to what you have been told, the uncertainties of sea level measurement are greater than the supposed margins of change over just about any time interval during the past few thousand years.
Let’s look at it more closely.
In the first place, it is misleading to think of sea level as a singular noun. It should be recognized that there are many sea levels. If you are like most people and your geophysical intuition was informed by experiences in a body of water no larger than a bathtub, you have probably formed the wrong idea that there is a sea level that is a simple surface. Not true.
The globe on your desk is a sphere. The world is not. This has long been recognized. In Sir Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia, he spelled out his laws of motion, including a proof that a rotating fluid body takes the form of an “oblate ellipsoid of revolution” which he termed “an oblate spheroid.”
Then there are “reference ellipsoids.” As the name implies, reference ellipsoids are mathematical models of the Earth in rotation that geodesists have used as a reference frame for recording geophysical information. Mean sea level (MSL) can be calculated from reference ellipsoids. In the old days, MSL was calculated from tide gauges as the arithmetic mean of hourly water elevations observed over a nineteen-year cycle in reference to some fixed benchmark. Contrary to what you might suppose, sea level calculated in Amsterdam was not the same zero elevation as sea level calculated in Miami. Sea level measured in Rio de Janeiro was yet another value, as were those from Mumbai and Hong Kong. There was not one sea level. There were many.
Among the many reference ellipsoids that have been calculated, perhaps the most important is the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84) ellipsoid. That one is incorporated as the default datum in the Global Positioning System (GPS) that enables you to find your way around unfamiliar neighborhoods. In most places in North America, GPS is accurate enough for driving instructions. But it would not enable you to measure even the upper range of projected sea level rise at 3.2 mm per year if you drove onto a ferry today and again twelve months later.
Your GPS receiver uses the reference ellipsoid model of sea level, so the number you see on the screen is the elevation above the model and not the real sea level. The shape of the ellipsoid is a smooth squished sphere, but the shape of real sea surface is riddled with irregularities.
You can get a hint of the error margin from the fact that GPS elevation calculations diverge significantly for areas on land shown on accurate topographic maps. Geodesist Witold Fraczek reports that his office in California is shown on topographic quadrangle maps and high-resolution digital elevation models at 1,312 feet above MSL. But the GPS reading is 1,207 feet—a 105 foot difference.14 The reason for the discrepancy is the irregular shape of the Earth that is only approximated by the WGS 84 ellipsoid.
To improve accuracy, geodesists employ another reference frame for the shape of the Earth: the geoid. The geoid approximates MSL. And get ready for it: the geoid is defined as “the hypothetical, equipotential gravitational surface” that the Earth would assume if it were covered entirely by water.15 Because the Earth’s mass is not evenly distributed, different parts of the Earth’s surface are subject to stronger gravitational forces than others.
The geoid was calculated to reflect the gravitational force variation over the surface of the Earth. The geoid is usually depicted as a contour chart using approximately sixteen feet contour intervals to depict deviations from the ellipsoid. In other words, think of the geoid as a lumpy gravity map. While the geoid is a more realistic approximation of the real shape of the Earth, incorporating irregular features, it is only an approximation. Its accuracy is limited and varies according to latitude. The absolute error at well-surveyed satellite sites is approximately plus or minus 3.3 feet to 6.5 feet.
The takeaways from this detour into the rough waters of geophysics are several:
The surface of the sea, even at its calmest, is not level. Now read that sentence again, because judging by the reaction of other readers, you are may have misunderstood it. I do not mean merely that the bottom of the sea is uneven. The reality is more interesting. Both the bottom of the ocean and its surface—the sea level—are marked by big hills and deep valleys. The deepest valley on the surface of the ocean is off the coast of India where the geoid descends 344.5 feet below the ellipsoid. In other words, you could say that in that part of the Indian Ocean, MSL is 629.9 feet lower than it is in the Indonesian Archipelago, where the biggest known hill in the ocean rises about 285 feet above the ellipsoid.
Clearly, sea level is more complicated than Nobel Prize–winner Al Gore lets on. Given the fact that there are many different sea levels, few of which have ever been measured, there are manifold opportunities for cherry picking or distorting data to present any trend you are paid to show (especially when the rate of change is a matter of millimeters). The global warming vigilantes are drawing heroic conclusions compounded from an array of insignificant figures.
Note that gravitational highs that can raise sea levels by hundreds of feet occur where masses of basic and ultrabasic rocks form in an upwelling of magma onto the seafloor. Basic and ultrabasic rocks that have the highest gravitational attraction form in regions of undersea volcanic activity, such as in the Indonesian archipelago. The significance of ultrabasic rocks like dunite and peridotite, which are very low in silica and rich in iron and magnesium, is that they exert strong gravitational attraction. Equally, sedimentary basins account for gravity lows. So it seems plausible that sea levels are influenced more by developments on the sea floor than by the atmosphere. The constant shifting of tectonic plates should be expected to alter local sea levels far more than any possible effect of CO2 emissions from the power plants at Prunerov, much less your car.
Not only do gravity variations reflect variations in the Earth’s crust and mantle, but in many areas where global warming activists complain that rising sea levels are a big issue, such as Venice, the real problem is not the sea getting higher, but subsidence—the land getting lower. Furthermore, the normal year-to-year variation of climate in any given locale is far greater than any overall trend due to global warming. Therefore, you would expect that global warming would be undetectable in the climate record of any given location.
It is also well established that sea level varies according to barometric pressure and shifts in ocean currents. The considerations outlined above capture some of the complexity and uncertainty in attempting to calculate and measure trends in average global sea level to a resolution of a millimeter. Given that much of the sea has not been measured in the past, and many of the areas where tide gauges were deployed, such as the North Sea, are characterized by tectonic subsidence, the selection criteria for picking which tide gauge records to count, and how to integrate them with satellite altimetry data, are far from obvious.
As Professor Mörner points out, clear observational field measurements indicate that sea levels are not rising in the Maldives, Bangladesh, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, or French Guiana.16 The IPCC and its associates, however, name these as key sites in the debate on sea level and have predicted terrible flooding in these areas, despite the reality being different than the IPCC’s claims.17 Professor Mörner further states that the satellite altimetry group undertook reinterpretation of the raw data in order to obtain results they desired, opining that the “global sea level factor” is never clear and trustworthy, but rather a matter of opinion.18
This is where Al Gore might object and tell us again as he told the Senate Environment Committee on March 21, 2007, “The science is settled.”19 And he further said that carbon dioxide emissions, if left unchecked, “could lead to a drastic change in the weather, sea levels, and other aspects of the environment.”
This is where Sir Francis Bacon and I would say in unison, “What rubbish.” OK, Sir Francis Bacon, the father of the Scientific Revolution, would not say, “What rubbish,” but only because he’s been dead for the better part of 400 years. But in 1620, when very much alive, Bacon rubbished Al Gore’s views about “settled science,” which strangely echo the view of the medieval Scholastics who opposed free inquiry and the scientific method. In the preface to the Novum Organum Scientiarum,20 Bacon wrote: “Those who’ve taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. Whereas they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men’s efforts than good by their own.”
Al Gore’s “settled science” is not really science at all. Programming a syllogism into a computer does not make it science. He and the other global warming vigilantes are merely brandishing a computer-aided syllogism of the sort that Bacon sought to transcend:
While it is true that the melting of major land stores of glacial ice would result in a significant rise in sea levels, contrary to Al Gore, there is little, if any, prospect that the World Trade Center memorial site would be underwater seven to twelve years from now, as he told you in 2006. The “settled” opinion of oceanographers is that sea levels have risen at an average rate of no more than three millimeters per year. The ground floor of the World Trade Center memorial site is twelve feet above sea level. For it to be underwater, as Gore predicted, by 2026, much less 2021, would require that sea levels rise by one foot per year.
That is ten times faster than the outside estimates of the historic rise of sea levels. Even during the most rapid meltwater pulse following the end of the Ice Age about 14,200 years ago, evidence suggests that the sea level rose about sixty-six feet over a 500-year period. Gore is telling you that sea levels will rise more than 7.5 times faster than they did during the most rapid phase of major sheet ice melting after the last Ice Age.
That is nonsense. The depth of the permafrost and the altitude of the ice fields in both Greenland and Antarctica mean that the temperature of the Earth would have to rise much higher than any forecast effect of higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 could explain. Greenland Summit is approximately 10,500 feet above sea level. The average annual temperature there is -25.6 °F. Global warming alarmists project an increase in global temperatures of 7.2 °F. Permafrost is safe. You won’t need a kayak to navigate the area around Wall Street. The current hysteria over a projection of an ongoing dramatic rise in sea levels from melting glaciers is remote from the facts.
As the austral winter came to an end on October 7, 2014, Antarctic sea ice, far from melting away, had set a new high record of 7.76 million square miles—about 2.750 million square miles greater than had ever been recorded by satellites since they began tracking sea ice in 1979.21 At that point, CO2 was measured at 336 ppm. Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by 20 percent globally. According to scholastic Al’s syllogism, that sea ice shouldn’t be there.
But don’t worry. You don’t have to study the philosophy of science or slog through Geophysics 101 to figure out that rising sea levels are not an imminent threat. All you have to do is watch Al Gore. Look at how he spent some of the outsized fortune he pocketed as the chief crony capitalist on the global warming gravy train: He plopped down $8.875 million to buy a villa on the Pacific Ocean in swanky Montecito, Santa Barbara County, California.
That is the metamessage to take to heart.
1 Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report WGII 6.4, 6.5, Table 6.11, SPM.
2 Mörner, Niels-Axel, “Sea Level Is Not Rising.” See https://www.scribd.com/doc/54200036/Sea-Level-is-Not-Rising-by-Professor-Nils-Axel-Morner.
3 Watts, Anthony, “Remember the Threat of Flooded Atolls and Climate Refugees Due to Sea Level Rise? Never Mind,” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/31/remember-the-threat-of-flooded-atolls-and-climate-refugees-due-to-sea-level-rise-never-mind/.
5 “WikiLeaks Cables Reveal How US Manipulated Climate Accord,” see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-us-manipulated-climate-accord.
6 Johnson, Brad, “Tuvalu to Obama and the Senate: The Fate of My Country Rests in Your Hands,” http://grist.org/article/2009-12-14-tuvalu-to-obama-and-the-senate-the-fate-of-my-country/.
7 See Darwin, Charles, The Voyage of the Beagle (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997).
8 Darwin, Charles, Autobiography (1887), 98–99.
9 See Oskin, Becky, “Was Darwin Wrong about Coral Atolls?,” LiveScience, May 13, 2013, http://www.livescience.com/31975-how-coral-atolls-form.html.
10 Mörner, “Sea Level Is Not Rising.”
11 Carrington, Damian, “More than 1,000 New Coal Plants Planned Worldwide, Figures Show,” The Guardian, November 19, 2012.
12 Mörner, “Sea Level Is Not Rising.”
13 See Mörner, Niels-Axel, “The Greatest Lie Ever Told” (available from morner@pog.nu), http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/sea-levels/ollier2007-26.php.
14 Fracczek, Witold, “Mean Sea Level, GPS and the Geoid,” ArcUser Online (July–September 2003). See http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0703/geoid1of3.html.
16 Mörner, “Sea Level Is Not Rising,” 8.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 13.
19 For a colorful introduction to Gore’s testimony, see http://drtimball.com/2013/is-al-gore-the-latter-day-pardoner-carbon-credits-are-modern-indulgences/.
20 Bacon, Sir Francis, Novum Organum Scientiarum, trans. G. W. Kitchin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1855).
21 “Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches New Record Maximum,” NASA Science News, October 7, 2014, http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/07oct_antarcticseaice/.