Ian Bradford: Sea Level Rise - is it just more Propaganda?

The following scaremongering was put out several years ago.

This comes from Peter James Spielmann journalist, from 1989.

United Nations (AP): A senior UN environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000 - yes 2000!

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco refuges” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the UN Environmental Programme-UNEP.

He said governments had a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes out of control.  Yes that’s still by the year 2000!

As the warming melts the polar ice caps (that’s both ice caps) ocean levels will rise up to three feet-that’s nearly a metre, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations , Brown told The Associated Press in an interview. 

Coastal regions will be inundated , one sixth of Bangladesh will be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta will be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and US Environmental Protection Agency study. Ecological refugees will become a major concern.

Here we are 33 years later and has all this happened? NO not a scrap of it. The climate alarmists will say anything to get the general public extremely worried, and under control of their government.        

Just before Christmas 2023, the question of sea level rise reared its ugly head again.  TV 1, I think it was, produced an item about rise on the East Coast of the North Island, NZ.  Near the end of the item, there came the statement that “ the land on the East Coast was sinking at a significant rate.”  So not for the first time, land sinking is sea level rise.  All over the world, land is rising and sinking at various rates and has done so for millions of years.  All land masses are floating  and they move about and  they change their shape.  Below is a “map” of NZ as it was about 40 million years ago. 

Diagram from NZ Geological Survey

Is Sea Level Really Rising?

You have all seen ice skaters at work. At various stages they spin at high speed.  You may have noticed that to spin faster they pull their arms in close to their body and to spin more slowly they extend their arms. This is the principle of conservation of angular momentum at work. The skater’s mass doesn’t change obviously, but the radius and the velocity does.

So if the radius decreases then the speed increases. ( pulling the arms in)

If the radius increases then the speed decreases.  ( extending the arms)

So where does the earth fit in all this? The earth is a rotating object. There isn’t single small mass but millions of masses all clumped together. To work out the angular momentum of the earth we would need to use a branch of mathematics called calculus.  If the sea level rises, it means the radius of the earth increases.

What does that mean? Well the velocity of rotation must decrease. If the velocity of rotation decreases then the length of day must increase. Now we are not talking about minutes or seconds but a small fraction of a second so it would not be noticeable, except with special instruments. As information builds up over a number of years you can tell from the change in the length of a day or the speed of rotation what the sea level rise or fall would be.  Corrections may have to be made for other factors like El Nino and La Nina.  But this gives an alternative to tide gauges and satellite readings.

Well you might say what about the rise and fall of land areas?  Firstly, the rate is very slow generally.  Secondly, there are probably as many areas sinking as rising, so the effects will to a certain degree cancel each other out. So falling and rising land areas will not affect the earth’s rotation to any degree. Thirdly, the oceans occupy about 70% of the earth’s surface. The influence of the oceans is much greater than the influence of the land. 

According to research by Nils Morner (recently retired director of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Dept of Stockholm University), using a variety of sources, satellites and tide gauges plus the rotation of the earth as an additional check, the increase in sea level from 1850 to 1940 was 1.1mm per year. This gave a rise over that period of about 11cm.

Note: Nils Morner is a sea level specialist. He has been a sea level specialist since 1970, doing his PhD thesis on sea levels.     

From 1940 to 1970 the sea stopped rising and perhaps even fell a little. In the last 10-15 years Morner has seen no rise in sea level and certainly no accelerating sea level rise as claimed by the IPCC. This relates well to the findings of the Heartland Institute. The highest quality tide gauges around the world show no evidence of acceleration since 1920. A 2017 report released from the Heartland Institute by geophysicist Dennis Hedke analysed data from ten coastal cities with long and reliable sea level records. Hedke found there was no correlation between changes in sea level at these locations and rising Carbon Dioxide levels.

Nils Morner became president of commission on Sea Level Change and Coastal Evolution. He instituted a research project which was up for discussion at five international meetings. All the true sea level specialists agreed on the same figure. In 100 years from now we might have a sea level rise of 10cm. But in recent years Nils Morner has reduced that to 5cm + or – a few cm. Nils Morner has made this change because like Professor Zharkova he believes we will enter a mini ice age within ten years.  This is very different from the IPCC statement. Writing in Climate Change effects, Nsikak Benson States: “ Climate change MODELS have predicted  that a mean sea level rise as much as 85 cm (That’s close to a metre), is expected during the 21^st century. Accelerated sea level rise is expected to have far reaching and dramatic impacts in vulnerable regions of the earth.” 

Then we have Michael MacCracken writing under the title: “ The Increasing Pace of Climate change in 2009”,  and making more scaremongering projections, saying that by the end of this century sea level rise could be a meter or more.

So looks like we have a repeat of the predictions from 1989!

Remember, the Heartland Institute found no acceleration of sea level rise since 1920.

I have emphasised “Models” in Benson’s statement. That’s the key. Nils Morner and other sea level specialists obtain real figures. They do not use models as the IPCC does. You can put in any data you like to a computer in order to get the results you want.

Further evidence comes from the European satellite EVISAT. It showed falling sea levels since it was launched in 2002. And for the last two years decline is continuing at 5mm per year (that’s up to 2012). Unfortunately, Evisat broke down in 2012 but NASA had also reported from 2011 that sea level was about 6 mm lower in that year.

Islands Going Under Water?

Maldives

Michael Bastasch in 2018, wrote this in the Daily Caller, News Foundation:

30 years ago officials predicted the Maldives would be swallowed by the sea. It didn’t happen.  The Indian Ocean did not swallow up the Maldives Island chain as predicted by government officials in the 1980’s. 

In September 1988, the Agence France-Presse (AFP),  reported a gradual rise in sea level is threatening to completely cover this small Indian Ocean nation within the next 30 years based on predictions made by government officials. The article went on to suggest the Maldives along with its 200,000 inhabitants could end sooner than expected if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992 as predicted. Today more than 417,000 people live in the Maldives.

There was a study led by New Zealand scientist Paul Kench, who told the New Scientist that the Maldives were actually increasing in size. The study was published in 2018.  

Nils Morner visited the Maldives in 1970. He found a sea level drop of about 20cm in the 1970’s and this was backed up by observations by local fishermen.  This new level has not changed in the past 35 years. This takes us up to about 2015. But in 2024 the Maldives are still not under water.

Tuvalu

Tuvalu is soon supposed to disappear because of humans emitting too much Carbon Dioxide.  There was a Japanese pineapple industry which needed to extract freshwater from the underground reservoirs. Unfortunately, they removed too much fresh water and the reservoirs began to fill with salt water.  The Islanders simply said the sea level was rising, nothing to do with extraction of fresh water, they said.  

Then there is Vanuatu and the Island of Tegua. They said that these Islands may have to be evacuated due to rising sea levels. But the tide gauge record shows absolutely no rise in sea level.

The beach at Tarawa in Kiribati has seen the island rise nearly 0.5 metres since 1943. Iwa Jima since 1945 has risen about 15 metres and is still rising.

It seems the IPCC gets these Island nations worked up about sea level rise. Why do the Island nations go along with it? Because they hope to receive money from industrial countries to supposedly fight the non-existent sea level rise.

Storm Surges

Recently, an item on TV1 showed a house at the coast in Papua New Guinea.   It showed this small house with two end foundation piles dangling in the air after being washed out by the sea. Now this house had been built on a small terrace no more than 1.5m above high tide level and very close to the high tide level. The high tide must have lapped at the bottom of the terrace. The undermining of the house was all blamed on sea level rise. It was NOT sea level rise at all. It was an example of coastal erosion. Anyone who builds right near the high tide level is asking for trouble. Now and then king tides occur.  A king tide occurs when the orbits of the Earth, Moon and Sun combine to give the greatest tidal effects of the year. If a strong wind is behind an incoming tide, then waves can be pushed high up on the shore  eroding out the coast. It is nothing to do with sea level rise. This kind of coastal erosion can be found all over the world. Again, island nations are using storm surges to call for money to fight non- existent sea level  rises.

This is a black and white photo from 1903 showing serious coastal erosion. I have picked this to show that coastal erosion was occurring long before C02, sea level rise and any other reason could be given for the erosion, other than storm surges.   

I previously wrote about the findings of Astrophysicist Valentina Zharkova. Based on past records of the cycles of the sun she predicts a mini ice age in a few years.

Nils Morner also predicts a new solar minimum with a very cold phase by about 2040.

Both scientists have looked at the patterns of the solar cycles from the past.  

So if you live in a coastal region don’t bother shifting any time soon. There is no alarming sea level rise.  If we go into a cold spell, sea level will actually fall.     

Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.