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Soldier4Christ
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« on: July 16, 2007, 05:14:46 PM » |
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Pacific Ocean Area
The tiny country of Tuvalu is not cooperating with global warming models. In the early 1990s, scientists warned that the Pacific coral atoll of nine islands - only 12 feet above sea level at its highest point - would vanish within decades, swamped by rising seas. Sea levels were supposedly rising at the rate of 1.5 inches per year.
However, new measurements show that sea levels have fallen 2.5 inches since that time. Similar sea-level declines have been recorded in Nauru and the Solomon Islands.
Indian Ocean
Nils-Axel Mörner and his colleagues published a well-documented paper showing that sea levels in the Maldives have fallen substantially – fallen! – in the last 30 years. I find it curious that we haven't heard about this.
"The Maldives in the central Indian Ocean consist of some 1,200 individual islands grouped in about 20 larger atolls," says Mörner. In-as-much as the islands rise only three to seven feet above sea
level, they have been condemned by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to flooding in the near future.
Mörner disagrees with this scenario. "In our study of the coastal dynamics and the geomorphology of the shores," writes Mörner, "we were unable to detect any traces of a recent sea level rise. On the contrary, we found quite clear morphological indications of a recent fall in sea level."
Mörner’s group found that sea levels stood about 60 cm higher around A.D. 1150 than today, and more recently, about 30 cm higher than today.
"From the shape and freshness," Mörner says, "one would assume that the sea level fall took place in the last 50 years, or so."
In the last 50 years!
I find it difficult to understand how the IPCC could have missed this information - unless they did it deliberately.
All they had to do was ask the locals.
"Local people report that the dhonis (local fishing boats) could pass straight across theMaduvvare Falhus thila in the 1970s and 1980s," Mörner reports, "whilst they in the last 15 years have had to make a detour around the thila, because it is now too shallow. The thila has not grown, so it must be the sea that has fallen."
"In the IPCC scenarios," Mörner concludes, "the Maldives were condemned to disappear in the near future." "Our documentation of actual field evidence contradicts this hypothesis."
Artic Ocean
Arctic sea level has been falling more than 2mm a year - a movement that [supposedly] sets the region against the global trend of rising waters. A Dutch-UK team made the discovery after analyzing radar altimetry data gathered by Europe 's ERS-2 satellite.
"We have high confidence in the results; it's now down to the geophysics community to explain them," said Dr Remko Scharroo, from consultants Altimetrics LLC, who led the study.
The European Space Agency's (Esa) ERS-2 satellite has been making observations of the Earth from its 800km-high polar orbit for over 10 years.
Correcting the data to take account of ocean tides, wave heights, air pressure, and atmospheric effects that might bias the signal, Dr Scharroo and colleagues established seasonal and yearly sea-level trends in the Arctic (from 60 to 82 degrees latitude) for the period 1995 to 2003. The analysis reveals an average 2.17mm fall per annum.
Taking a global view, ERS-2 still records a sea-level rise. It's interesting, how each study shows that that study's particular location is the only location where sea levels are falling.
Analysis of Russian tide gauges by Andrey Proshutinsky from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), US, also hinted at a sea-level fall during the 1990s. He said this seemed to fit with the phases of the so-called Arctic Oscillation, a seesaw pattern of change in atmospheric pressure over
the polar region and mid latitudes.
"This is something like decadal variability. Sea level goes up and down, up and down - but in general, it rises," Proshutinsky explained.
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