Over forty morons were arrested in Newcastle in New South Wales today.
It is not that stupidity is illegal in Australia. In fact the government relies on it for lottery income.
These particular morons, repesenting ‘Rising Tide Newcastle’ broke into an area of the Port of Newcastle where coal is stored, and climbed up coal piles, loaders and terminals with banners protesting climate change. They managed to shut down the operation of the world’s largest coal port for most of the day.
No one denies that sea level has risen. It has been doing so for the last 10,000 years. The rate of increase has slowed rather than risen over the last three decades.
John Daly, sadly missed, made this submission to an Australian Federal Parliamentary joint committee on the Kyoto Protocol.
In it, he notes that there are myriad reasons for local sea level rise and fall, and that records showed that there had actually been a slight decline in sea level at Newcastle over the period for which data was then available.
Changes in sea level are not correlated to short term changes in climate, just as changes in atmospheric or ocean temperature are not correlated to preceding changes in atmospheric CO2.
But hey, why let an annoying detail like the facts get in the way of a good protest?
Incidentally, seaframe measurements of sea level over the last eighteen years show virtually no sea level rise in the South Pacific, including for the supposedly ‘endangered by climate change’ Kiribati and Tuvalu.
No rise in sea level in the South Pacific
