The Maldives are not sinking despite what the President of the Maldives is about to claim on 5Live - Sunday 05 December

I have emailed Kate Silverton show on 5Live this morning in advance of her interview with the President of The Maldives, somehow I don't think it will be used as the basis for a question...

'Please do not fall for this particular Man Made Climate Change myth. For some facts please take a read of http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/MornerInterview.pdf where Dr Nils Axel-Morner reports the facts on the ground:
'
'Then we went to the Maldives. I traced a drop in sea level in the 1970s, and the fishermen told me, “Yes, you are correct, because we remember”—things in their sailing routes have changed, things in their harbor have changed. I worked in the lagoon, I drilled in the sea, I drilled in lakes, I looked at the shore morphology—so many different environments. Always the same thing: In about 1970, the sea fell about 20 cm, for reasons involving probably evaporation or something. Not a change in volume or something like that—it was a rapid thing. The new level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years. You can trace it so very, very carefully. No rise at all is the answer there'

'Another famous place is the Tuvalu Islands, which are supposed to soon disappear because they’ve put out too much carbon dioxide. There we have a tide gauge record, a variograph record, from 1978, so it’s 30 years. And again, if you look there, absolutely no trend, no rise. So, from where do they get this rise in the Tuvalu Islands? We know in the Tuvalu Islands that there was a Japanese pineapple industry which extracted too much fresh water from the inland, and those islands have very little fresh water available from precipitation, rain. So, if you take out too much, you destroy the water magazine, and you bring seawater into
the magazine, which is not nice. So they took out too much freshwater and in came salt water. And of course the local people were upset. But then it was much easier to say, “No, no! It’s the global sea level rising! It has nothing to do with our extraction of freshwater.” So there you have it. This is a local industry which doesn’t pay.'

So why do the IPCC and others say that sea levels are rising? Dr Morner does not mince his words:

'where do they [the IPCC] get it from? They get it from their inspiration, their hopes, their computer models, but not from observation, which is terrible.
...

If you go around the globe, you find no rise anywhere. But they need the rise, because if there is no rise, there is no death threat. They say there is nothing good to come from a sea-level rise, only problems, coastal problems. If you have a temperature rise, if it’s a problem in one area, it’s beneficial in another area.
But sea level is the real “bad guy,” and therefore they have talked very much about it. But the real thing is, that it doesn’t exist in observational data, only in computer modelling....'

I have blogged about The Maldives 'sinking' before but here is a new claim from Dr Morner:

'When I came to the Maldives, to our enormous surprise, one morning we were on an island, and I said, “This is something strange, the storm level has gone down; it has not gone up, it has gone down.” And then I started to check the level all around, and I asked the others in the group, “Do you see anything here on the beach?” And after a while they found it too. And as we had investigated, and we were sure, I said we cannot leave the Maldives and go home and say the sea level is not rising, it’s not respectful to the people. I have to say it to
Maldive television.
So we made a very nice program for Maldive television, but it was forbidden by the government (!) because they thought that they would lose money. They accuse the West for putting out carbon dioxide, and therefore we have to pay for our damage and the flooding. So they wanted the flooding scenario to go on. This tree [see photo], which I showed in the documentary, is interesting. This is a prison island, and when people left the island, from the ‘50s, it was a marker for them, when they saw this tree alone out there, they said, “Ah, freedom!” ... I knew that this tree was in that terrible position already in the 1950s. So the slightest rise, and it would have been gone. I used it in my writings and for television. You know what happened? There came an Australian sealevel team, which was for the IPCC and against me. Then the students pulled down the tree by hand! They destroyed the evidence. What kind of people are those? And we came to launch this film “Doomsday Called Off,” right after that, and the tree was still green. And I heard from the locals that they
had seen the people who had pulled it down. So I put it up again, by hand, and made my TV program....'

Please do not allow your listeners to be misinformed, The Maldives are not sinking but they do want our money.'

Meanwhile the newspaper reviewer has picked for his non-FIFA stories, The Guardian and The Observer, just after some anti-Coalition texts were read out. Any criticisms of Labour or messages in supportof the Coalition.