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Torres Strait Islanders need to take a reality check – their islands are sinking
by staff writers
The inhabitants of Boigu, Poruma, Warraber and Masig Islands in the Torres Strait should take a reality check.
These poor people have been duped by the climate change cult, the ABC and the communists of the United Nations into believing their islands are being submerged by rising sea levels.
Geologists have long warned that some islands in the Torres Strait are actually sinking because of poor sub-strata and in some cases they are just sandy or coral cays which come and go over years.
There is no evidence anywhere in the world of significant, rising sea levels.
The Marxists of the UN have found that the Islanders are being denied their Human Rights because the Commonwealth Government of Australia has done nothing to prevent the islands from ‘rising sea levels.’
The Human Rights committee said Australia had violated two of their three human rights set out in a UN treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) — the right to enjoy their culture and be free from arbitrary interferences with their private life, family and home — but not their right to life.
Some 173 of the 193 UN member states have ratified the covenant, including Australia. Naturally the island inhabitants want compensation.
There is no enforcement mechanism but there are follow-up steps, and states generally comply with the committee’s findings.
The UN Human Rights Committee called for the Australian government to provide the islanders with an effective remedy to stop their islands from being submerged.
When the UN and Australian governments do not believe in God it is hard to fathom how they can stop the land form from sinking.
Already the State Labor Party and the Federal Liberal Party have wasted many tens of millions of dollars shipping several million tonnes of large rocks 1400 klms from Cairns to the Torres Strait to form sea walls, all to no avail.
Dumping massive amounts of rock on the beaches has exacerbated the problem by adding more weight to the land causing it to sink even more quickly.
Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said the Albanese government was committed to working with Torres Strait Islanders on climate change.
“Soon after the change of government, the Prime Minister, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy traveled to the Torres Strait to talk with elders and owners about the impacts of climate change on them,” Mr Dreyfus said.
The Indian Ocean to the north west of the Australian continent merges with the Timor Sea then further east with the Arafura Sea then Torres Strait waters. The Indian Ocean has recorded a 0.00mm sea level rise in the past 100 years.
Doesn’t water find its own level?
Indian Ocean sea levels rise 0.00mm over past century
By Vicki Batts
A scientific paper published by a team of Australian researchers has revealed a startling find: Scientists at the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) have been “adjusting” historical data regarding tide levels in the Indian Ocean. Their “highly questionable” activities have depicted rapidly rising seas — but the truth is that there is no reason to be alarmed at all. Scientists have found that sea levels are stable — and have been for the entirety of the 20th century.
To put it simply, these PSMSL “scientists” have been arbitrarily changing their data in order to create the illusion of a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
Sea levels have not risen one millimetre in past century
According to the Australian research team, sea levels in the Indian ocean have remained stable for decades. Dr. Albert Parker and Dr. Clifford Ollier recently published their astounding research in the journal Earth Systems and Environment; their extensive research gives an in-depth look at how this massive deception was undertaken.
PSMSL “realigned” stable sea level trends
As the researchers report, there are multiple lines of evidence that show sea levels in the Indian Ocean are completely stable. Further, the scientific duo explains that the data-adjusters at PSMSL were taking “misaligned or incomplete” sea level data (which showed no rise in sea levels, or even decreasing sea levels) and “realigning” them.
As Parker and Ollier contend, “It is always highly questionable to shift data collected in the far past without any proven new supporting material.” But what makes the PSMSL’s data shifts even more questionable is the fact that older datasets were adjusted to look lower while all newer sets of sea level data were re-configured to appear higher. When these arbitrary adjustments are taken together, it creates the appearance of a significant and concerning rise in sea levels — one that is entirely artificial.
As reported:
The sea levels in India, including Mumbai, and in Karachi, Pakistan, have been recently analysed and discussed in Parker and Ollier (2015) and in Parker (2016). In both cases, it was shown that the latest positive trends in the PSMSL RLR [revised local reference, adjusted] data are only the result of arbitrary alignments, and alternative and more legitimate alignments reveal very stable sea-level conditions.
Further, the researchers state that there are even greater concerns regarding the PSMSL’s so-called findings. They wrote:
What are more dangerous are the corrections recently introduced to the past to magnify the sea-level trend or the acceleration. As shown in the prior section, the adjustments introduced by PSMSL to make the RLR [revised local reference, or adjusted data] are arbitrary in Aden, Karachi, and Mumbai.
In one instance, Parker and Ollier referenced a 1991 study which showed that sea levels in Mumbai were falling by an average of 0.3 millimeters per year between the years of 1930 and 1980. The duo states that in PSMSL’s latest report, they declare that sea levels in Mumbai were rising by 0.52 millimeters per year during the same time period.
In other words, PSMSL completely changed data collected decades ago to show an increase in sea levels, rather than the decrease that was actually reported at the time.
To sum it up, Ollier and Parker have found there is no reason to believe that sea levels are rising — and that PSMSL has been wantonly adjusting sea level data to create the appearance of a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
Scientists use real data to show sea levels are stable
The Australian researchers declared in their paper, “Contrary to the adjusted data from tide gauges and the unreliable satellite altimeter data, properly examined data from tide gauges and other sources such as coastal morphology, stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, archaeological remains, and historical documentation indicate a lack of any alarming sea-level rise in recent decades for all the Indian Ocean.”
In other words, a non-biased look at the original data from the tide gauges indicates that there is nothing to be worried about; current sea levels are well within “normal” ranges. In fact, the pair states in the conclusion that sea levels across multiple sites of the Indian Ocean have been stable for “all of the 20th century.”
The pair of scientists also state in their paper that all key data collection points have shown a sea level rise of 0.0 millimeters for at least the last 50 years — which is an indicator of stability in ocean levels.
A recent report by NASA even showed that sea levels are actually taking a downward turn for the last few years — findings that lie in stark contrast to PSMSL’s alarmist report on sea level data.
There has been much controversy and fanfare over the alleged threat of rising sea levels, but it seems that much of this excitement is based on fiction rather than reality.
Ultimately, Parker and Ollier concluded that sea levels are, and have been, quite stable during the past century.
Sydney Harbour sea levels rise less than 1 mm since 1886
Cairns residents living on the coastline need not worry about going under water. You will have to wait for a few millennia. The $20 million given by the Federal Government to Torres Strait islanders for the construction of sea walls, ostensibly to keep out sea water from an alleged increase in sea levels is perplexing. Have the islanders investigated the natural geological occurrence of sinking islands?
Measuring sea levels
Posted: 22 Nov 2015 – by Don Aitkin
This is my last foray into the SCM document on ‘climate change’ that I have investigated twice before, here and here. But before I get into it, readers in New South Wales will have noticed that the Government of their State has issued drafts of a new approach to how local government councils should determine building regulations for coastal communities. The new approach simply ignores the IPCC’s predictions of rapidly rising sea levels. The Minister’s press release says: Since the original Coastal Protection Act was enacted in 1979 our understanding of coastal processes has improved dramatically. We know our coastline is not a fixed object, but a dynamic, ever-changing environment with a range of natural processes.
The new approach has a three-month consultation period, and my guess is that the Greens and others who believe in the orthodoxy will run a campaign against the draft. I hope the Minister is confident and determined. He would gain some support from a droll speech intended to be given by our PM at the Paris meeting, and written by Geoff Derrick, a sceptical geologist. You can get it from him at geoffd. Derrick includes a graph displaying the trend in sea-levels in Sydney Harbour over the period 1886 to 2010.
As you can see there are highs and lows, but the outcome is a tiny increase over a century and a quarter. The Sydney region is geologically pretty stable, and there’s not much sign of anything dramatic there.
OK, on to the SCM paper, or, for newcomers, a paper by the Société de Calcul Mathématique SA in France entitled ‘The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade’. What interests me about the long paper is that it is mostly directed at problems of measurement, and it assembles those problems in a succinct and accessible fashion. The paper points out, once again, that we don’t have a lot of accurate data that extend over time. If one wanted to make a case that the oceans were raising at a faster rate (than when?) one would need a good deal of data over time. We just don’t have it.
What we do have are tide gauges and satellite estimates. The gauges don’t go back past about 1800, and the satellite measurements start in 1992. It is estimated that the end of the last ice age, say 20,000 years ago, was followed by an irregular melting of ice, which increased the height of the oceans by about 120 metres. That’s an average of about 6.6 mm a year. That process stopped several thousand years ago, and since then there has been a much slower increase. Tide gauges put it at about 1 mm a year, the satellites at about 3 mm a year. Given that tidal changes can run at metres a day, that a warming sea will increase in volume and thus rise, and that the Antarctic and Greenland ice melts vary in output over time, to be able to say with hand on heart that sea-level rises of a millimetre or two are worrying is an extraordinary claim, one which needs extraordinary evidence. Alas, it just isn’t there.
Saibai Island Torres Strait
Coconut Island
Moa Island
The CSM paper goes on to pile even more possibilities on top of those already mentioned. Our planet is changing its shape as time goes on; an undersea mountain will have a higher sea level above it; the earth is rebounding following the loss of kilometres of ice above it; variations occur in the internal temperature of the planet; our rivers abrade the land, dumping earth onto the seabed and thereby raising it; el Ninos have a powerful effect on sea levels; and so on.
Why are we so exercised about sea levels, given the problems of measuring them accurately? Millions of human beings live on or close to the sea, and are naturally interested in what is happening there. Australia is an excellent example, with all our major cities save Canberra on the coastline. So it is easy to run a scary story about the possible flooding of coastal suburbs, the loss of great sections of Bangladesh, the submerging of Kiribati and Tuvalu, and other awful possibilities.
And, of course, so much these days comes from ‘what the models say’. About the use of models the SCM paper is politely scathing: Conclusions based on any kind of model should be disregarded. As the SCM specializes in building mathematical models, we should also be recognized as competent to criticize them. Models are useful when attempting to review our knowledge, but they should not be used as an aid to decision-making until they have been validated. Now, validating a climate model requires thousands of years.
I return to a question I have asked myself many time before. How did we get into this? How did our measuring instruments become subverted to assist in something else altogether? As Geoff Derrick shows, in the piece I mentioned at the beginning, William Dawes, who came with the First Fleet, established an observatory on what is now know as Dawes Point and, among other things, kept accurate temperature measurements for the new colony. They seem remarkably similar in their trend to the average for the last 150 years, but that’s not really the point. Dawes was a scientist and a competent astronomer. He was laying the foundations of knowledge regarding aspects of weather.
Early settlers inland did much the same. They measured river heights, took temperature measurements, and collected rainfall data. Why? They just didn’t know anything about this new land, or area. They needed to know when the rain came, how high the rivers went in flood, when was the right time to plough, how reliable was the water supply, and how cold it might get in winter. Their purpose was straightforward: we are new here and we need to know a lot.
Of course, some of their measuring instruments weren’t all that good, and they were not meticulous with when they took the measurements. Some of their data has been lost. There are great gaps. But slowly, over time, our society got better at it. Australia was one of the early investors in good data of all kinds, censuses, temperature, tide gauges and the like.
To take this great body of data of varying quality and quantity, and ‘homogenise’ it so that its truth, spotty though it is, is pushed aside, but the message of ‘climate change’ is somehow revealed, is to prostitute science — and to dismiss the work of numerous people who maintained the data in the past.
Those who do this do not seem to realise that they are thereby reducing the status that science and scientists have had in the past — to the cost of all of us.
Cairns residents should ignore rising sea level nonsense
I have spent 55 years in the engineering profession where ignoring the evidence often kills people. Thus I am predisposed to look at the evidence before drawing conclusions.
Many articles and claims about sea levels are in conflict with the evidence.
For instance, sea level has been rising at something between 2 and 3 mm per year since the end of the Little ice age. As you can see from the graph, there is no indication that the rate of sea level rise is increasing. There is some indication that the rate of rise has reduced slightly since 2006.
In addition, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology set up a chain of sea level measuring stations around Australia and in the Pacific that are the most accurate in the world. As you can see from the chart, the sea level at Tuvalu dropped markedly during the 1997 – 1998 El Niño and since 2000 it has been substantially constant. Claims that Tuvalu is sinking beneath rising sea levels caused by man-made carbon dioxide therefore cannot be true. it is most unfortunate that many people who choose to spread this rumour have not bothered to look at the data. It is particularly unfortunate for the population of Tuvalu because they have been told that their very real problems with erosion are beyond their control when, in fact, they have largely caused them by taking too much fresh water out of the water table and by mining the reef for coral to reclaim land. If the powers that be recognised that this is the case, then aid could be concentrated on solving the real problems, not the imaginary ones.
One division is 100 mm.
Others claim that Pacific Islands are disappearing. Once again, this does not stack up against the evidence:
ftp://soest.hawaii.edu/coastal/Climate%20Articles/Atolls%20Growing%20Kench%202010.pdf
Bryan Leyland MSc, FIEE(rtd), FIMechE, FIPENZ.
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