A Reexamination of Climate Change Issues

Excerpts from an interview with sea-level expert Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner


updated November 18, 2009


This article is a summary and partial transcript of an interview with sea level expert Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, from the Executive Intelligence Review, June 22, 2007.  Mr. Mörner speaks about how sea levels have actually been relatively stable since the early part of the past century, and how the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been making use of inaccurate methods of sea level measurement, as well as not making use of actual sea level specialists as the authors for their reports.  Also explained is a well-known 50 year old tree in the Maldives that proves that the sea levels have not risen significantly during the life of the tree.

A larger excerpt from the article may be found in this four page PDF file.




Introduction



“Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner has studied sea level and its effects on coastal areas for some 35 years.  Recently retired as director of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Department at Stockholm University, Mörner is past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project.”

Mörner: “I am a sea-level specialist.  There are many good sea-level people in the world, but let's put it this way: There’s no one who’s beaten me.  I took my thesis in 1969, devoted to a large extent to the sea-level problem.  From then on I have launched most of the new theories, in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s.  I was the one who understood the problem of the gravitational potential potential surface, the theory that it changes with time.  I’m the one who studied the rotation of the Earth, how it affected the redistribution of the ocean's masses.  And so on.”





The Real State of the Sea Level

Mr. Mörner explains how the global sea level has been rising by the rate of 1.1 millimeters per year between the years 1850 and 1930, and how the sea level has been relatively stable since then.  He explains various methods of measurement as well as real world examples proving those rates of rising and decline.




Data Fudged



In 2003 the IPCC published a data set showing that the sea level has been rising by a rate of 2.3 mm per year, which Mr. Mörner explains has been the result of a “correction factor” taken from the tide gauge when the reality was that the sea level has not risen at all.  When he accused them of making the error at a meeting in Moscow they told him that “They had to do it, because otherwise they would not have gotten any trend!”

Mörner explains how the IPCC relies on the results of computer models rather than actual real world observations which generally are not finding a rise in the sea levels: “I have been an expert reviewer for the IPCC, both in 2000 and last year.  The first time I read it [the report], I was exceptionally surprised.  First of all, it had 22 authors, but none of them—none—were sea-level specialists.  They were given this mission, because they promised to answer the right thing.  Again, it was a computer issue.  This is the typical thing: The meteorological community works with computers, simple computers.  Geologists don’t do that!  We go out in the field and observe, and then we can try to make a model with computerization; but it’s not the first thing.”

...

“...  They work with computers; we geologists work with observations, and the observations do not fit with these scenarios.  So what should you change?  We cannot change observations, so we have to change the scenarios!”

“Instead of doing this, they give an endless amount of money to the side which agrees with the IPCC.  The European Community, which has gone far in this thing: If you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there must be a focus on global warming.  All the rest of us, we can never get a coin there, because we are not fulfilling the basic obligations.  That is really bad, because then you start asking for the answer you want to get.  That’s what dictatorships did, autocracies.  They demanded that scientists produce what they wanted...”

“You frighten a lot of scientists.  If they say that climate is not changing, they lose their research grants.  And some people cannot afford that; they become silent, or a few of us speak up, because we think that it’s for the honesty of science, that we have to do it.”




The Tree Issue

“This tree [see above photo], which I showed in the documentary, is interesting.  This is a prison island, and when people left the island, from the ‘50s, it was a marker for them, when they saw this tree alone out there, they said, ‘Ah, freedom!’ ...  I knew that this tree was in that terrible position already in the 1950s.  So the slightest rise, and it would have been gone.  I used it in my writings and for television.”

“You know what happened?  There came an Australian sea- level team, which was for the IPCC and against me.  Then the students pulled down the tree by hand!  They destroyed the evidence.  What kind of people are those?  And we came to launch this film ‘Doomsday Called Off,’ right after that, and the tree was still green.  And I heard from the locals that they had seen the people who had pulled it down.  So I put it up again, by hand, and made my TV program ...”

“They call themselves scientists, and they’re destroying evidence!  A scientist should always be open for reinterpretation, but you can never destroy evidence.  And they were being watched, thinking they were clever.”