The Breaking Point

by James Dale Davidson

  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.)

  Darwin Debunks Hysteria about Disappearing Coral Islands

  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:

  1. It shows that calculations that purport to measure global MSL to a precision of millimeters are hypothetical approximations only. Nothing more. The applied math geeks say the geoid model is only accurate to plus or minus 3.3 feet to 6.5 feet. So how do they get away with claiming MSL rise measured in millimeters and fractions thereof? You don’t have to be a geophysicist to see that they are dealing in insignificant figures whose reliability is suspect.

  2. Sea level is more accurately understood as a local or regional geophysical quantity rather than a uniform global one.

  3. The irregularities in the surface of the sea controlled by the gravitational potential of the Earth are an order of magnitude greater than experts thought.

  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.

  CO2 or Basic and Ultrabasic Rocks?

  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.”

  Francis Bacon on Al Gore

  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:

  • Major premise: carbon dioxide emissions raise atmospheric temperatures.

  • Minor premise: warmer temperatures melt ice sheets and expand seawater.

  • Conclusion: CO2 emissions will raise sea level.

  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.