Claim: IPCC lied about sea level data

Posted by: Sister Toldjah on December 6, 2007 at 1:51 pm

The UK Telegraph reports on an accusation from Dr. Nils-Axel Morner regarding sea level claims made by the Nobel-winning IPCC (h/t: McQ):

The IPCC falsified data showing a sea level rise from 1992-2002 according to Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. In an interview by George Murphy, Morner cites various examples of falsification of evidence claiming sea level rises.

“Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC's] publications, in their website, was a straight line – suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a ‘correction factor,’ which they took from the tide gauge” in an area of Hong Kong that had been subsiding, or sinking.

Morner says that the claim that salt water invasion of a fresh water aquifer indicated a sea level rise ignores the more likely cause due to draining the aquifer for the pineapple industry.

Sea level in the Maldives actually fell during the 70’s according to Morner, but the area is cited as evidence of a sea level rise. He accuses Australian global warming advocates of knocking down a tree on one island to attempt to prove sea levels were rising.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the accusation proved to be correct, considering the biased methodology the IPCC used for preparation and publication of its big report on impending doom issued earlier this year, which I wrote about here in a post about allegations of research fraud within the IPCC.

In related news which should be a cause for serious alarm, Noel Sheppard blogs today about how the UN climate conference in Bali is being used to promote “eco-socialism” on the intellectual property rights front. Make sure to read the whole thing.

Update 1: Love this headline from Bloomberg:

Hot Air Emitted by Climate Summit Equals 20,000 Cars

Are they talking about all the private jets, the speakers, or both? :-?

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7 Responses to “Claim: IPCC lied about sea level data”

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  1. Severian says:

    What else do you expect from people who believe that lying is not wrong if the goal is important enough, the old end justifies the means approach.

    Contaminated Data

    In a new article just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research — Atmospheres, a co-author and I have concluded that the manipulations for the steep post-1980 period are inadequate, and the above graph is an exaggeration. Along the way, I have also found that the United Nations agency promoting the global temperature graph has made false claims about the quality of its data.

    The graph at right comes from data collected in weather stations around the world. Other graphs come from weather satellites and from networks of weather balloons that monitor layers of the atmosphere. These other graphs don’t show as much warming as the weather-station data, even though they measure at heights where there is supposed to be even more greenhouse-gas-induced warming than at the surface. The discrepancy is especially clear in the tropics.

    The surface-measured data has many well-known problems. Over the post-war era, equipment has changed, station sites have been moved, and the time of day at which the data is collected has changed.

    Many long-term weather records come from in or near cities, which have gotten warmer as they grow. Many poor countries have sparse weather-station records and few resources to ensure data quality. Fewer than one-third of the weather stations operating in the 1970s remain in operation.

    Scientists readily acknowledged that temperature measurements are contaminated for the purpose of measuring climate change. But they argue that adjustments fix the problem. To deal with a false warming generated by urbanization, they have the “Urbanization Adjustment.” To deal with biases due to changing the time of day when temperatures are observed, they have the “Time of Observation Bias Adjustment.” And so forth.

    How do we know these adjustments are correct? In most studies, the question is simply not asked. A few studies argue that the adjustments must be adequate since adjacent rural and urban samples give similar results. But closer inspection shows some of these papers don’t actually give similar results at all, or when they do they define “rural” so broadly that it includes partly urbanized places. Other studies say the adjustments must be adequate because trends on windy nights look the same as trends on calm nights. But the long list of data problems includes issues just as serious under both windy and calm conditions.

  2. TheBrainGuy says:

    The climate change story is taking on water (no pun intended), slowly but surely. This explains why we’re seeing the hard-sell and suppression of dissent from the CC Kool-Aid crowd.

  3. Steve Skubinna says:

    It’s important to remember that the IPCC is a political, not a scientific organization. The MSM never gets around to mentioning this, instead glossing it over with inappropriate terms such as “scientific consensus.”

    I’m certain that these journalists and editors gleefully snort their lattes through their noses laughing about the apocryphal story that the Louisiana legislature (or some other redneck assembly) voted on the value of pi. Ha ha, stupid crackers! And yet these same people solemnly accept that if a panel of bureaucrats with a vested interest agree that Global Warm- uh, Climate Change is occurring, then ipso facto is is. Case closed. Debate over. Question it, and you’re worse than a Holocaust denier.

    Well, not your basic, unimpeachable head of state holocaust denier, I mean a purely nominal one invented to slander conservatives.