Doomsday predictions on sea level rises are 'false alarm' - levels always fluctuate, says expert as climate change row heats up
Satellite data 'tilted to distort figures'
Historical data suggests sea rises and fall naturally
UN 'expert' admits 'We had to adjust data, otherwise there would be no new trend'
Climate expert describes sea levels as 'artificial crisis'
Predictions that rising sea levels will swallow up low lying islands are a 'false alarm', an expert has claimed.
Apocalyptic warnings that islands such as the Maldives will sink beneath the waves are far-fetched, said Nils Axel-Morner, former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University.
He says that any rise in sea levels is to do with natural historic fluctuations.
Opening this year's UN Climate Conference Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives, warned this his country was 'an island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon'.
While, in his briefing to the convention, Rajenda Pachauri, head of the International Panel on Climate Change, outlined the dangers science anticipates unless carbon emissions are curbed.
Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives (pictured) said that he leads, 'An island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon.'
'It is clear that sea levels rise and fall independently of so-called climate change'
He said that coastal areas and islands are threatened with inundation by global warming.
But in a provocative article in the Spectator, Axel-Morner says: 'I have conducted six field trips to the Maldives. I can report that while such regions do have problems, they need not fear rising sea levels.'
Axel-Morner said that cycles from the 18th and 17th century proved that current rises were not related to global warming.
He said that the IPCC's views on sea-level rises were invalid..
'Sea level rises are affected by a great many factors, such as the speed at which the earth rotates. They rose in the order of 10cm to 11cm between 1850 and 1940.'
'It is clear that sea levels rise and fall entirely independently of so-called 'climate change',' he said.
Alex-Morner claims that data from satellites has been 'tilted' to distort figures - and that a member of the IPCC admitted to him, 'We had to do so otherwise there would be no new trend.'
Monyombo Nomphelo, 13, speaks at the UN Climate Change talks in Durban
Pachauri's claims also included that within a decade, up to 250million more people will face the stress of scarce water.
Increasingly frequent weather disasters have imposed heavy financial burdens, with some poor countries running up 90 perc ent of their national debt to deal with the aftermath of storms, droughts and floods, he said.
'Developed countries as a whole are not taking climate change seriously as a global issue,' Seyni Nafo, of Mali, said.
'Look at the U.S. We use and we welcome their leadership on democracy, on access to markets, on human rights issues. We would want to have the same leadership to tackle climate change, because for us in the developing world the biggest threat, the biggest enemy, is climate change.”
Rajendra Pachauri gave no explicit deadlines but the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change implied that the world only has a few years before the Earth is irreversibly damaged by accumulations of carbon in the atmosphere.
This image, created with sea surface height data from Nasa satellites, shows the change in ocean surface heights since 1993
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