by Craig Kelly MP [Liberal]

Dangerous rising sea levels are one the biggest scare tactics used by the Global Warming Alarmist establishment.

This hysteria is used to justify; higher taxes, bigger government and more subsidies to their associates in the wind turbine industry – all in the belief that King Canute like we can hold back the seven seas from rising.

For example,

* The Rudd/Gillard/Rudd government’s official Climate Commissioner and former Australian-of-the-Year, Tim Flannery has prophesied of 25 metre sea level rises.

“Picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof,” Flannery terrifyingly warned of.

* ‘Our’ ABC runs alarmist headlines such as; “Brisbane, Sydney among cities that will slip under the waves with 2 degree Celsius global warming”, warning that an “estimated 90,000 Sydneysiders live in areas that would eventually become ocean …”

* Labor’s Deputy Opposition leader Tanya Plibersek tells stories of islands that have “already been swallowed by the rising ocean”. And when questioned on the claim, in parliament she farcically held up a picture of the open ocean as “proof” that the vanished island had been consumed by rising seas. (Although there was some confusion whether Ms Plibersek’s vanished island was called Eneko, Aneko or Atlantis)

However, to examine what’s really happening with “rising sea levels” perhaps Ms Plibersek could have checked out the Sydney Harbour foreshore in her own electorate, and looked at a few historical photo’s or examined the tide gauges which been measuring sea levels at Fort Denison ever since 1865.

FORT DENISON

Fort Denison, is one of eight islands in Sydney Harbour, and was originally named “Rock Island” by Governor Arthur Phillip soon after European settlement.

Noted for its distinctive, rocky topography, the island originally rose almost 15 metres above sea level.

In 1841, the island was levelled to the sea line to make way for a fortification in response to a perceived threat after two American warships entered the harbour at night and circled the Island.

The levelling of the Island can be considered one of the earliest ‘heritage issues’ in Sydney. The Presbyterian minster John Dunmore Lang derided its destruction as “the folly of man” and described the intact island as a ‘natural ornament of the harbour’ which had stood ‘like a sentinel keeping watch upon the harbour for thousands of years’.

The original construction plans were abandoned, and only resumed in 1855 due to fear of a Russian naval attack during the Crimean War.

The construction of Fort Denison was completed on 14 November 1857, and in 1865 a tide gauge was established by the Government Astronomer from the Sydney Observatory, and ever since, seas levels have been measured at Fort Denison, providing one of the longest running sea level records in the world.

No less an authority than the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records that the sea level rise at Fort Denison is “averaging 0.65 millimeters/year based on monthly mean sea level data from 1886 to 2010”.

That’s 0.65mm a year, or 6.5mm a decade, or 6.5cm (about 2.5 inches) over an entire century.

SEA LEVEL RISES DECELERATING

One of Australia’s foremost experts on the relationship between climate change and sea levels, Phil Wilson has written a peer-reviewed paper concluding that rises in sea levels are “decelerating”.

Based on the century-long tide gauge records at Fort Denison as well as; Fremantle, Western Australia (from 1897 to present), Auckland Harbour in New Zealand (1903 to present), and Pilot Station at Newcastle (1925 to present), the analysis finds there was a “consistent trend of weak deceleration” from 1940 to 2000.

Climate change researcher Howard Brady, at Macquarie University, said the recent research meant sea levels rises accepted by the CSIRO were “already dead in the water as having no sound basis in probability”.

“In all cases, it is clear that sea-level rise, although occurring, has been decelerating for at least the last half of the 20th century, and so the present trend would only produce sea level rise of around 15cm for the 21st century.”

Dr Brady said the divergence between the sea-level trends from (computer) models and sea-level trends from the tide gauge records was now so great “it is clear there is a serious problem with the models”.

Fancy that.

“A COLOSSAL SCARE STORY”

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change.

Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but “a colossal scare story.”

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”.

And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co “could not possibly come about”.