It has now become traditional for climate change summits to open with a new, dazzling prediction of impending catastrophe. The UN Climate Conference under way in the South African coastal town of Durban is no exception. This year’s focus is on a familiar and certainly arresting argument: that sea levels are rising at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate mainly due to man-made global warming.

No one makes this point with quite so much panache as Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives. In the run-up to the summit, he declared that he leads ‘an island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon’.

… I may be able to help. As someone with some expertise in the field, I can assure the low-lying countries that this is a false alarm. The sea is not rising precipitously. I have studied many of the low-lying regions in my 45-year career recording and interpreting sea level data. I have conducted six field trips to the Maldives; I have been to Bangladesh, whose environment minister was claiming that flooding due to climate change threatened to create in her country 20 million ‘ecological refugees’. I have carefully examined the data of ‘drowning’ Tuvalu. And I can report that, while such regions do have problems, they need not fear rising sea levels.

Dr. Mörner quotes the International Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, from 2007:

‘Even under the most conservative scenario, sea level will be about 40cm higher than today by the end of 21st century and this is projected to increase the annual number of people flooded in coastal populations from 13 million to 94 million. Almost 60 per cent of this increase will occur in South Asia.’

Sounds dire. But wait:

This is nonsense. The world’s true experts on sea level are to be found at the INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Reseach) commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (of which I am a former president), not at the IPCC. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an ‘inconvenient truth’: it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries. This is not due to melting glaciers: sea levels are affected by a great many factors, such as the speed at which the earth rotates. They 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.

… At Tuvalu in the Pacific, I found no evidence of flooding — despite claims in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth that it was one of those ‘low-lying Pacific nations’ whose residents have had to ‘evacuate their homes because of rising seas’. In fact the tide gauge of the past 25 years clearly shows there has been no rise.

But the best-known ‘victim’ of rising sea levels is, without doubt, the Maldives. This myth has been boosted by the opportunism of Mohamed Nasheed, who stars in a new documentary called The Island President. The film’s tagline is ‘To save his country, he has to save our planet’. It is a depressing example of how Hollywood-style melodrama has corrupted climate science. Nasheed has been rehearsing his lines since being elected in 2009. ‘We are drowning, our nation will disappear, we have to relocate the people,’ he repeatedly claims.

But if sea levels in the Maldives really aren’t rising, why would the island nation’s leader go around raising false alarms? The question one must ask, as always, is: Cui bono?

If this is what President Nasheed believes, it seems strange that he has authorised the building of many large waterside hotels and 11 new airports. Or could it perhaps be that he wants to take a cut of the $30 billion fund agreed at an accord in Copenhagen for the poorest nations hit by ‘global warming’?

But what about all that satellite data we keep hearing about?

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that ‘there is strong evidence’ of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: ‘Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data with nearly global coverage. This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr–1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century. Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates have occurred in some earlier decades.’

Almost every word of this is untrue. Satellite altimetry is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface. But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends.

“Hijacked and distorted”? That’s strong stuff. What have you got?

In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’

This is a scandal that should be called Sealevelgate. As with the Hockey Stick, there is little real-world data to support the upward tilt. It seems that the 2.3mm rise rate has been based on just one tide gauge in Hong Kong (whose record is contradicted by four other nearby tide gauges). Why does it show such a rise? Because like many of the 159 tide gauge stations used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it is sited on an unstable harbour construction or landing pier prone to uplift or subsidence. When you exclude these unreliable stations, the 68 remaining ones give a present rate of sea level rise in the order of 1mm a year.

Read the whole thing here.

Can we have our light bulbs back?

Traffic’s up around here lately, and this might be a good moment to reiterate our position on Global Warmism for new readers. We break the issue into four questions:

1) Is the Earth currently getting warmer?

It may well be; we have no idea. The Earth has certainly has got warmer and colder many, many times in the past — most of them long before humans could possibly have had anything to do with it. No reason it mightn’t be doing so now.

2) If the Earth actually is warming, is it due to human activity?

Given that the Earth’s climate has fluctuated continuously throughout the eons, then any current warming trend isn’t necessarily due to human activity. But if the Earth is indeed in a warming spell, it’s certainly possible that human activity may be partly or even largely responsible this time around.

3) If the Earth is warming, and that warming is in large part due to human activity, can it be ameliorated or halted by curtailing that activity?

We don’t know. Perhaps it can. On the other hand, if any ongoing warming is simply the latest of the natural fluctuations that Earth’s climate has always been subject to, perhaps not.

4) If the Earth is warming, and that warming is in large part due to human activity, and can in fact be ameliorated or halted by curtailing that activity, is it worth it to do so?

We’re stacking up a pretty big pile of “ifs” by this point. To answer this question we need to weigh, as best we can, the adverse social, political, and economic costs of taking action, against the negative (and positive!) consequences of doing nothing. (We also need to factor in the chance that whatever we try to do, at terrible cost, may not even be effective.) There are all sorts of hidden agendas and ulterior motives in play here, and most of the remedies on offer are burdensome indeed, mainly in terms of economic cost and bureaucratic infringement on national sovereignty and individual liberty.

Our position, then, is best described as conservative: distrustful of grand, disruptive schemes, mindful of the fragility of prosperous, happy societies, and keeping a cynic’s wary eye on the various Utopians, collectivists, grant-recipients, professional uplifters, and “green-energy” grifters who see all this as little more than a juicy opportunity for self-advancement, and a “crisis” not to be wasted.

We set the bar, then, rather high: to justify the drastic responses that many currently seek, we will need to be convinced beyond any doubt 1) that the Earth is indeed in a warming phase, 2) that we are the cause, 3) that drastic measures can actually make a meaningful difference, and 4) that the consequences of not taking drastic action are clearly worse than the costs of doing so.

Jim Lacey discusses them over at NRO, and Alana Goodman does the same at Commentary.

See also this searchable database — and this item too, over at Duff and Nonsense.

Regarding the latter, the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley comments here.

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.

Zip forward a decade or so, and we have this:

Coldest December since records began as temperatures plummet to minus 10C bringing travel chaos across Britain.

From Lord Monckton’s testimony:

Warming at the very much reduced rate that measured (as opposed to merely modeled) results suggest would be 0.7-0.8 K (1.3-1.4 F°) at CO2 doubling. That would be harmless and beneficial – a doubling of CO2 concentration would increase yields of some staple crops by 40%. Therefore, one need not anticipate any significant adverse impact from CO2-induced “global warming”. “Global warming” is a non-problem, and the correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

There are clips of the other witnesses here, and you can download video of the entire hearing here. Read also Rep. James Sensenbrenner’s trenchant opening remarks, here.

It is about what you would expect: a reminder that even if the scientific claims of the global-warming industry are wrong, it shouldn’t matter, because the things they want us to do are for our own good anyway; some hand-waving about the objections lately raised by skeptics, and assurances that the subjects of those objections — which include such things as the CRU scandal, the disappearance of primary data, the unreliability of the latest GISS report due to the removal of many of the reporting stations from the data set, and a great deal more — are negligible trivialities; an insistence on referring to carbon dioxide, which we exhale with every breath, and which Earth’s food-chain depends on for its very existence, as a “pollutant”, including a metaphorical comparison of CO₂ to feces; castigation of the media as pawns of scurrilous corporate and conservative interests for not serving as compliant propaganda outlets; characterization of public skepticism and free debate as “hatred and divisiveness”, and so forth.

But what stood out above all was this:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Well, that certainly puts the cards on the table. This is perhaps the clearest expression yet of the liberal worldview as a kind of secular religion, in which, having rejected the prospect of salvation through God, we must instead achieve salvation here below, by becoming Divine ourselves.

Al Gore, then, is the Redeemer. If we will just come to our senses, smite the unbelievers, and place the flaming sword of Justice in his hands, we shall all be saved.

If you had any lingering doubt that this man is a dangerous megalomaniac, this ought to settle the matter.

Meanwhile, the inquiry into the Climate Rearch Unit’s malfeasance continues. Here is the memorandum just presented to Parliament by the independent Institute of Physics.

Krauthammer explains why Global Warmism has become the Swiss Army Knife of the activist Left:

Politically it’s an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man’s guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt. But the idea of shaking down the industrial democracies in the name of the environment thrives not just in the refined internationalist precincts of Copenhagen. It thrives on the national scale, too.

Read the article here.

It is important to keep in mind that while W and A are empirical claims, having to to with facts about the actual world, R is a normative assertion; it is about what we ought to do. The “Climategate” kerfuffle that has provided such lively entertainment in recent weeks is about W, and to a lesser extent A, while R is irreducibly a matter of opinion — though of course one that depends very sensitively upon W and A. With me so far?

At the root of all of this Sturm und Drang, then, is the truth or falsity of W. Is the Earth actually warming? This is a central issue in the Climategate flap: obviously, if W is false, there is no crisis, and A and R become moot.

It may well be that the Earth is warming, though even this claim is controversial (and what would be amusing, if the stakes weren’t so high, is that all of this is rich not only in controversy but what I shall call meta-controversy: even the extent to which the claims of the various parties are controversial is itself controversial). My understanding had been that for the first years of this century, at least, there had been no warming at all, and perhaps some slight cooling. The Times published a story yesterday, however, about a new report declaring that the first decade of this century was indeed warmer than the last. (I’m sure there will be a good deal of back-and-forth about this, and I will be following it attentively.) Certainly it is fair to say that the naked-eye evidence seems to indicate that something is afoot with the world’s glaciers, permafrost, and ice sheets, though even that has been attributed by some to be the result of changing patterns of moisture, and not warming. But let’s assume, arguendo, that there is indeed some warming taking place.

Next comes A: is W primarily the result of anthropogenic influences? Note that the word “primarily” is key here; if any anthropogenic influence is dwarfed by natural processes, then an attempt to control W by moderating those influences is not likely to accomplish much.

If A is true, then it seems that W should be exceptional, because the conditions set forward for A — the Industrial Revolution, the use of fossil fuels, clearing of rainforests, and the various activities of modern civilization in general — are recent, and unique in the world’s history, and so could not have been the cause of any climate fluctuations in ancient times.

So how can we examine the historical record? Scientists have developed some very clever tools for this. One of them is the interpretation of ice cores taken from places that have lain under thick ice for thousands of years. Here’s how it’s done.

The ice in the Earth’s cold places is deposited as water precipitated from the atmosphere — water that had previously entered the atmosphere by evaporation from the Earth’s rivers, lakes, seas and oceans.

Water is a molecule that consists of three atoms: two of hydrogen and one of oxygen. Each of these atoms, in turn, comes in several forms, or isotopes, differing only in the number of neutrons. By far the commonest forms of each (for reasons having to do with stellar evolution) are oxygen-16 (¹⁶O), with 8 protons and 8 neutrons, and hydrogen-1 (¹H), with one proton and no neutrons.

But there are other stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen as well, and a very small part of the world’s water molecules are made of these rare atoms. For hydrogen, there is an isotope ²H, called deuterium (often written as D); it has one extra neutron. And for oxygen, there are several, including ¹⁸O, which has two extra neutrons. Because these are all stable isotopes — they are not subject to spontaneous decay — the proportion of these atoms in the world’s water inventory is assumed to be constant.

Water molecules containing these exotic isotopes weigh more than ordinary water, but react chemically and electrostatically in exactly the same way, and this is what makes ice-core studies possible. Because of their additional mass, “heavy” water molecules are more reluctant to evaporate than ordinary water. But the warmer it gets, the more of them do in fact enter the atmosphere — and therefore, during warmer times more of them accumulate in the world’s ice sheets. So by examining the relative proportion of these isotopes in ice cores (which are striated in annual layers, like tree rings) we can read off historical changes in average global temperatures.

These data are publicly available; you can, for instance, download one such record here, courtesy of NOAA: a Greenland core that goes back several thousand years.

So: are we entering an unprecedented period of warming, or is it that the world simply warms and cools from time to time? If you look at the famous (or infamous, depending on your view) “hockey stick” graph, or get your information only from certain sources, you might think that the former is true.

This is almost certainly not the case, however, as we can see, for example, in this article from the Foresight Institute [hat tip: LA], which examines the ice-core record at the time-scale of thousands of years — still an eyeblink, in geological terms. What we see is what archaeologists and paleontologists have always known: that the Earth oscillates periodically between cold and “interglacial” periods, with warm spells like the one our species has enjoyed for the past few millennia — the entire span, in other words, of human history — being comparatively brief.

The author of the article, the nanotech expert J. Storrs Hall, points out that the present warming, such as it is, might well be seen as a return to the average, slightly warmer temperatures of our current interglacial period, after a recent dip often referred to as the “Little Ice Age“:

In fact, for the entire Holocene — the period over which, by some odd coincidence, humanity developed agriculture and civilization — the temperature has been higher than now, and the trend over the past 4000 years is a marked decline. From this perspective, it’s the LIA that was unusual, and the current warming trend simply represents a return to the mean. If it lasts.

Dr. Hall sums up:

In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history. But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t even stand still on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.

Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.

Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.

Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. ) And that will be a very good thing to have done if we do fall back into an ice age, believe me.

For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.

So: if the points made here, and similar points being made by heretics elsewhere, are valid, then we have considerable reason to doubt the truth of A, even if we accept W. And if A — which, amongst Global Warmism’s priesthood and its millions of progressivist acolytes, has become the Reichstag fire that justifies an audacious bureaucratic takeover of the world’s economic enterprises, and forced redistribution of the wealth of great nations — is false, then R is revealed to be without any rational foundation.

Students of history need no reminding that progressivist ideologues like nothing better than a crisis, or an external enemy; they are just the thing for suspension of pesky individual economic and social liberties, and provide an unbeatable rationale for collective action at the broadest possible scale. In times past the broadest possible scale was that of a nation, or a continent — but Global Warming, affecting, as it is alleged to do, the entire Planet, expands “broadest possible scale” to its literal maximum.

Sometimes crises come ready to hand. For example, Woodrow Wilson made splendid use of the Great War to impose, albeit briefly, a stifling statist regime here in America, in which many cherished freedoms were simply laid aside, and individualism itself became a grave moral transgression. FDR was similarly fortunate: the Great Depression, and then the Second World War, gave him everything he needed. His National Recovery Administration, under the stern leadership of Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson (who actually distributed Mussolini’s writings to his staff) was a Fascist apparatus in all but name — as witness propaganda clips like this, featuring FDR and the Blue Eagle as only a compliant, complicit Hollywood could present them.

In quiter times, when the moment simply must be seized, crises can also be made to order. But whether bespoke or off-the-rack, crises have been essential, again and again, to the subductions and upthrusts of history’s seismic shifts.

To those modern reformers, then, whose eyes glitter with collectivist and redistributionist ambitions of Earth-girdling scope, a truly global emergency was needed. And by a splendid stroke of luck, they have found one.

Again I will say that it may very well be that the Earth is warming, and it may even be that our profligate consumption of fuel and forest is, at least in part, the cause. I really don’t know (though I do know that the Earth appears not to have got any warmer during this century, and has warmed and cooled many times in the past, long before we sinners appeared on the scene).

I won’t trot out here the many other inconvenient data presented by skeptical scientists, but I do have a feeling they haven’t been given an entirely impartial hearing — a view well supported, it seems, by recent whistle-blowing. Above all, though, I feel one should ask, given the current political climate: cui bono?

That there are powerful ulterior motives in play is obvious enough. Some of them are laudable, chief among them being an impetus to wean ourselves from oil, and a wish to be more efficient generally, and more forward-looking in our stewardship of natural resources. But some older, and far more familiar, motives are quite blatantly on view in this article from last week’s Times, about how Europe has big plans already in place to profit from the New World Order. We read (emphasis added):

BRUSSELS — No political entity has pushed harder for the Copenhagen conference on climate change to succeed than the European Union.

Europeans say they have gone further than anybody else in moving toward a low-carbon economy that could serve as a model for the rest of the world. But the bloc’s ability to exercise global influence through progressive standards and moral leadership, rather than through superpower status, is facing a key test.

“The E.U. frankly doesn’t have the political clout to determine the outcome at Copenhagen,” said Peter Haas, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The E.U. still has much at stake in Copenhagen, however. It is facing huge pressure, Mr. Haas added, to “keep the prospects of a global deal alive so that European business leaders and voters believe they are on track to take advantage of green technology markets of the future.”

Ah yes: “Huge pressure to keep the global deal alive”, so as to “take advantage of green technology markets”. What could be more impartial?

It’s all about the science, of course. And the Planet.

Update: In today’s Times we read that a newly published study has announced that the current decade is, contrary to what we’ve been hearing, the warmest on record. If so, this is obviously an important bit of information, at least as regards claim a) above (though obviously it has no bearing whatsoever on the other two).

Meanwhile, another item bears the headline Climate Deal Likely to Bear Big Price Tag. Here.