External leaders not correctly briefed on sea level rises
Thursday, 8 September 2011, 10:43 pm
Opinion: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition
8 September 2011
External leaders not
correctly briefed on claimed sea level
rises
Prominent international political
figures like UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and European
Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso should get briefed
on the facts before coming to New Zealand and making
unfounded claims about sea level rises in the South Pacific.
This today from Hon Barry Brill, chairman of the New Zealand
Climate Science Coalition, commenting on references during
the Pacific Islands Forum made by both Messrs Ban and
Barroso about sea level rises in the vicinity of atoll
groups such as Kiribati.
“If either leader had
bothered to consult Julia Gillard about the results of her
Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology Seaframe
tidal gauge project, they would have learned that levels
have been stable since the installation of the first gauges
in 1990,” said Mr Brill.
“Our Coalition has
today asked for and received confirmation from a world
authority on global sea levels, Professor Nils-Axel Mörner,
former head of the Paleogeophysics and. Geodynamics
department at Stockholm University in Sweden, and past
president of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and
Coastal Evolution. Dr Mörner’s comments and a graph
showing the stability of levels recorded over the past 17
years by the Kiribati Seaframe tidal gauge can be found on
the Coalition’s website:
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"Obviously,
there is a major clash between scenario-based computer
simulations and reality in the form of observational based
facts and observations in nature itself," Professor Mörner
says. "There is no alarming sea level rise in either
Kiribati or Tuvalu".
Mr Brill said it is surprising that
local media have forgotten recent New Zealand research
showing that coral atolls maintain a constant height
relative to sea levels.
"The fact that Kiribati is
growing, not shrinking, was reported fully in June last
year. Paul Kench at the University of Auckland in New
Zealand and Arthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied
Geoscience Commission in Fiji released a study in 2010 on
the dynamic response of reef islands to sea level rise in
the central Pacific. Kiribati was mentioned in the study,
and Webb and Kench found that the three major urbanised
islands in Kiribati - Betio, Bairiki and Nanikai - increased
by 30 per cent (36 hectares), 16.3 per cent (5.8 hectares)
and 12.5 per cent (0.8 hectares), respectively.
“It is
remarkable that two major news media outlets highlighting Mr
Ban’s claims this week could forget that they themselves
published completely opposite stories just last year:
www.nzherald.co.nz/eloise-gibson/news/article.cfm?a_id=366&objectid=10649349
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/nz-research-shows-pacific-islands-not-shrinking-3577883
Mr
Brill said that other data from our own New Zealand sources
shows:
• No significant sea level change at
Kiribati, but large excursions related to El Nino events
(large falls) and La Nina (small rise);
• Sea
level rise decelerating globally since the 19th
century;
• Sea level rise decelerating for the
Southwest Pacific since about 1907-1920;
• Sea
level falling 2.8 cm for New Zealand so far this century;
• Pacific Ocean sea level falling last few
years;
• Global sea level falling sharply last
few years.
“The one bright spot is that neither Mr
Moon nor Mr Barroso have repeated the silly claim that we
humans are changing the climate by our almost unmeasurable
contributions to the tiny percentage that carbon dioxide
represents in Earth’s atmosphere; at 390 parts per million
it is less than 0.04%,” Mr Brill concluded.