Day: October 19, 2009

The Maldives Cabinet met underwater last Saturday to draw attention to the tiny nation’s fate if global warming and accompanying rapid sea level rise continues. All very cute and colourful.

Maldives Cabinet Meets Underwater

Except for a couple of small points:

1. The world isn’t getting any warmer. That hasn’t stopped the WWF, who are still shouting the world will come to an end if the global economy is not shut down in the next four years.

2. There is no recorded rise in sea level at the Maldives over the last 40 years.

That links opens a PDF document by IPCC author Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project.

Interestingly, he says the same thing about Tuvalu – no recorded sea level rise. He also notes that of the 22 authors reponsible for claims about sea level in the 2000 and 2006 IPCC reports, not one is a sea level specialist.

The whole article is well worth reading.

Lucia at The Blackboard has an interesting article on how a global warming scientists can justify the kind of massive cherry-picking that went into the infamous hockey-stick.

First, an explanation of ‘proxies.’ Proxies are so called because we cannot measure past temperatures directly, but have to use stand-ins. These stand-ins (or proxies) may be growth rings or changes in glaciers or sea level or other indirect measures of temperature. The problem with all of these proxies is that temperature is not the only thing that affects them. So they need to be cross-checked and recorded very carefully.

Lucia points out that you can cherry-pick without even meaning to, simply by removing the proxies (sets of tree rings or whatever) that do not correlate with other records of temperature.

I am sure this is possible, but I am not so sure this is what happened in the Mann / Briffa hockey stick invention. The cherry picking in that case seems so clear it is hard to avoid the notion that it amounted to scientific fraud.

To be fair, Briffa insists there was no deliberate pre-selection of data. He now says there were problems with the methodology. We are working on it, he says. In the mean time, everyone should still believe it.

Right.