Back 18 years ago, I was one of the Project Engineers on the Laser Airborne Depth Sounter project of the CSIRO. The ocean depth was being measured with lasers using a plane flying over the area. This because any OTHER method would’ve simply taken “too damned long”. Once the calibrations are done with and the geoid accounted for, the measurements using the lasers, doing one flight, in the presence of tides and waves, gave accuracies that matched hand measured calibrations and post tests

What about Aucklands very own Ken Ring, long range weather forecaster, and member of the NZ sceptics society. He has quite a bit to say on Global Warming (see http://www.predictweather.com/global_warming/index.asp)

In fact, Ken Ring explains why measuring sea levels can be a tricky thing to do:

“In comparing sealevel-days, when do they make their comparisons? It’s not good just looking at the tide high water mark and saying it looks higher than when I was a boy. Different lunar factors make for a higher or lower tide level - New or full moons, perigees, the 18.613 cycle, declination, the Moon crossing the equator twice a month going in opposite directions, wind forces, wind direction and high pressure zones which lower the sealevel or low pressure zones which tend to raise it. All of these factors are on the move all of the time and there is no one date which brings them all together so that they can be safely compared to another date”

Do we really know that the scientists that do the measuring of the sea-levels take all this into account?

The latest figures use satellite telemetry dating back to the 1950s to tell us that the sea is rising. How can they say this to an acuracy of 1mm? Are we to believe that the telemtry equipment availble in the 1950s was as accurate as the equipment today? What kind of error-bars are there on this data. If they are any more than 1mm then it is well within the results to say that the sea is NOT rising.

What I am trying to say is that we are focusing on something that may not even be real. While we are admiring the emperor’s clothes, more obvious and tangible problems exist with respect to the environment.

Let’s leave the scientists to battle it out over who’s right and who’s wrong. and we can focus our energies on core environmental issues. Reduce waste, reduce consumption, reduce energy-use, support local, non-polluting infrastructure. This is where we can really make the biggest difference.

Oops Dunk, you’ve let the cat out of the bag here… the vocal minority who say CO2 is not a problem, are NOT people who have very little to gain from it… follow the money… if you provide links to back up your School C science claims, I’ll bet most of them will be financed by the US energy industry. This has been my experience in such debates previously. There is good money to be made in spinning statistics for that crowd, it’s a wonder so few scientists give in to the temptation.

“Isn’t that an incredibly strong and simple argument that their entire approach is wrong?”

Perhaps the Emperor is not wearing any clothes after all!

Nice try, but NIWA will not corroborate your twisting of their findings.

“New Zealand’s glaciers are somewhat unusual because they have their source in areas of extremely high precipitation. West of the main divide in the Southern Alps, more than 10 metres (10 000 mm) of precipitation falls a year as clouds are pushed up over the sharply rising mountain ranges. This means the mass of New Zealand’s glaciers are sensitive to changing atmospheric circulation and both precipitation patterns and temperature. So, for instance, the glaciers advanced during most of the 1980s and 1990s when the area experienced about a 15% increase in precipitation, associated with more El Niño events. In most of the rest of the world (with the exception of parts of Norway), glaciers tend to be in areas of lower precipitation, so rising temperatures are affecting the glaciers there more directly and sooner.”

And this is why we have to continue to argue this issue. Because critics wll cherry pick any tiny oppositional point, however out of context, they can find and attack the entire ediface.

On the IPCC, do you really think that if their science is so flawed that they haven’t taken into account the ‘fact’ that CO2 doesn’t rise to create a Greenhouse Layer into account, that wouldn’t've been pointed out? Isn’t that an incredibly strong and simple argument that their entire approach is wrong? Why do you let the argument go so easily?

On Bellamy, I don’t know why he stuck his head out, but the 55% claim, while more reasonable than the doubly messed up 555 claim, was sourced from Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine 21st Century History and Science. yeah, THAT Lyndon LaRouche. The edition that Bellamy cites included the passage “We in LaRouche’s Youth Movement find ourselves in combat with an old enemy that destroys human beings … it is empiricism.â€?

Um, IPCC scientists or whacked out conspiracy theorist? Your choice.

OK, to be fair, the 55% claim surfaces elsewhere too, Singer puts it forward, half citing a Science article from 1989. Well, 1989 isn’t exactly cutting edge glaciology, but we’ll let that pass. But I challenge you to go to a library, look through every Science edition from 1989 and find that data. In fact find an article that discusses glaciers advancing at all.

And when you’ve done that, you can let the IPCC know about it, as well as their flawed understanding of CO2, because no one else can find that article…

Or you can start to believe that thousands of peer reviewed scientists maybe, just maybe, have more validity than a paranoid delusional conspiracy theorist, a climate change denier who probably invents sources, and an environmentalist who can’t type.

“As with any argument I tend to try and focus on the ultimate sources quoted by each side”

Yeah, well, try harder.

For ultimate sources on the zombie 55% (it just won’t die…) I am indebted to (shock, horror) Monbiot - http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1480373,00.html - it’s a fine read, funny as hell, and purely devastating.

The people I trust are the scientists I worked with. They’re scared. You should be.

The people I trust are the ones who understand that the US government lies to you regularly. It does. I know it, and have personally experienced it. The false information out there is so pervasive that one has to wonder if ANYTHING they say is true, but that’s another rant. The issue in this case is the peak-oil date. There’s exactly one group of optimists out there in the US government and a whole raft of pessimists everywhere else… including Aramco. Every single oil producer except Saudi Arabia has already demonstrated that they’ve peaked. *Every Single One* Saudi Arabia doesn’t let you see their books. So when a US Department of Egregious Prevarication tells you that its 30 years away, just WHAT are they really trying to do? Mind you, the US inflation figures don’t include energy prices. The US GDP is adjusted by that same inflation that isn’t measured. They just declared they’re going to hide the M3 measure of money supply and the housing industry is starting to correct. They’re politicians. They do not want people to realize that there is trouble until after the next election.

XOM will profit from peak oil as will BP and all the others. They’re raking it in. What else? Carbon taxes shouldn’t bother them much… but they are needed to put a price on the commons that the market can adjust to. If there’s no price for the use of the commons, the commons gets destroyed. It is as inevitable as death and taxes.

I worry about sea level rise over a longer term than most here do, because when I build something like a road I expect it to last longer (as a route) than most people here consider. It is not the lifetime of the road but of the route and the development along that route, that I consider. The roads built by Rome are still routes in much of Europe.

respectfully
BJ

But isn’t that exactly what has got us into the mess that is Peak Oil today?

Just as with the IEA with Peak Oil, why should we believe a huge beaurocratic organisation paid for by the governments of the world that the primary focus of the environmental movement should be the reduction of CO2?

Maybe, just maybe, reports that companies like Exxon (see http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/company/cnn22280.htm) will actually BENEFIT from carbon taxes, hold some truth.

A classic example is the outcry when glacial recession uncovered a man’s dead body that was thousands of years old. The global warming fraternity cited this as an example of how much the planet is warming. But hang on a minute. The fact that this man was ABOVE the surface of the glacier at the time he died means that the glacier was lower at that time. Indicating that the world has been warmer before.

As with any argument I tend to try and focus on the ultimate sources quoted by each side and try to look at what those sources will gain if the arguments are accepted. What has David Bellamy to gain by sticking out his head and laying it across the very public chopping block? Whereas, the IPCC is now a huge international beaurocartic juggernaut hurtling along at full-speed that employs thousands. Do you really think that it is about to say “Oops, sorry folks. We might be wrong on this CO2 thing. We’ll just find some other job to do”. And what about the huge quantities of IPCC research funding given to various organisations to ‘research’ global warming. DO you honestly think that the IPCC would continue funding those organisations if they found out that global warming is a myth or at least some natural climate cycle?

I liken this to the Peak Oil debate. The overwhelming consensus of opinion is that we are “swimming in oil” and we won’t peak until 2030 at the earliest. But a small minority of people who have very little to gain from their position are telling us that this consensus opinion is wrong. Why do the greens believe these people but not the vocal minority who say CO2 is not a problem.

Besides, David Bellamy is not saying that we should carry on burning fossil fuels and consuming the way we’ve always consumed. What he is saying (and I agree with him) is that our highest priority (and this fits with Peak Oil, too) should be to look at what we consume and drastically curtail our energy-intensive activities. We need to be more energy efficient and aim for a much more sustainable lifestyle/society. Carbon taxes do not do this. They just push money around, with the money-pushers directly benefiting financially.

Again, I re-iterate. I believe we are being distracted from much more important environmental issues by the IPCC hype-machine. We need to refocus on the issues where we can actually make a difference.

Besides, Brownian Motion as well as more atmospheric turbulence has a massive effect on molecules within the atmosphere and none or little on a balloon, your counter-example is a complete fallacy.

The real point about sea level increases is that they are accelerating. Because of what we did some time ago. How far and fast will they accelerate is a good question. But basing your projected outcome of an accelerating trend on a linear scale is silly, to put it mildly.

As an example, I suggest you run at a wall from, say 20 metres away. Just after you begin to accelerate you’ll be going pretty slowly, so it won’t hurt a bit, promise.

I’m sure scientists have corrected for tidal motion in both the sea and land in their measurements. They ain’t morons. But why don’t you write to Science and point out their mistake? It could make your name.

Bellamy is a good environmentalist, he is a crap climatologist.

Who is arguing whether sea level will rise a few millimetres? Really, I (and many others) would prefer not to, but it seems some people, like yourself, continue to argue with good evidence on specious grounds.

Doing something about climate change and immediate environmental issues are not mutually exclusive. They both need action RIGHT NOW!.