Subcontinent’s Sea Level Doomsayers Swamped in Tide of Skeptic Science
Eminent sea level experts from the Indian subcontinent are pulling the plug on alarmist media claims that the region is set to be awash with ever-rising sea levels due to man-made global warming.
In their sights are such science news stories typified by ‘Climate change forcing thousands in Bangladesh into slums of Dhaka’ appearing in The Star, Canada (February 17, 2013). Last week we reported how Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, a Swedish scientist and ‘The Golden Chondrite of Merit’ award winner from Algarve University, latched onto a similar junk story by The Star touting that sea level rises are due to humans.
This week Dr. Mörner, adviser to Principia Scientific International on sea levels, brings out the big guns to shoot down misguided journalists who continue to present a one-sided story. Particularly galling to the experts are those claims that climate change is due to humans, makes people poor and forces them to live in the slums of Bangladesh and India. The Star’s article supposedly addresses sea level rises but disingenuously asserts, “Every monsoon, when the slum is overrun with rainwater, cholera and malaria outbreaks are common.”
But as Dr. Mörner points out, linking monsoons to sea levels is not only unscientific but could even be dishonest. Rather than publish uniformed and irrelevant causes in these stories the Swedish professor suggests it is far more sensible to first consult the views of eminent scientists who live and work in the region. As such he references experts such as Dr. Chaphekar, former head of the department of Environmental Sciences, University of Pune. Dr.Sharad.B. Chaphekar is prominent among a growing list of home grown Indian experts dismayed by the alarmist nonsense still trumpeted in the press.
The Pune professor blames such poor reporting on self-serving activists and politicians promoting the global warming hype who are doubly at fault for also ignoring genuinely threatening issues such as global cooling. Chaphekar believes sinister bias against developing and poor countries growing their economies underpins many such stories. He says for the sake of the economy and it’s people India should forget about human-caused global warming and pursue the same freedom of choice as western countries did in the past.
Supporting Chaphekar’s message is Prof. R.R. Kelkar, a member of Governing Council of the Indian Institute of Meteorology, and former Director General of India Meteorological Department. Kelkar insists sea levels around the subcontinent are influenced by many factors with no evidence of any monotonic rising trend in sea levels.
Pointedly, Professor Kelkar blames over reliance on discredited climate models. Kelkar has repeatedly warned that there is no single climate model currently available nationally or internationally that can be truly relied upon because simplistic models are often cynically used to predict only alarmist outcomes.
When it comes to the impact that climate change has had on Indian agricultural production Dr. Ramesh.H. Kripalani,a faculty member at the Centre for Advanced Training in Earth System Sciences and Climate from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (Pune) is also very much among the skeptics. Dr. Kripalani’s research has shown that only 7 out of the 23 computer models used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict Indian summer monsoon precipitation and variability are better than poor predicters of future monsoon climate over India.
Dr. Rajesh Agnihotri, a scientist from the Radio and Atmospheric Science Division at the National Physical Laboratory (New Delhi) has conducted extensive studies of the role of Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) on Indian monsoons. Dr. Agnihotri found scientific results that demonstrate that the total radiation of the sun per square meter could well be a much greater driver of climate change than any rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. While Prof. B.K. Bala from the Bangladesh Agricultural University in Chittagong says climate change is shown to have little or no negative impacts on rice and wheat yields in Mymensingh and Dinajpur.
Experts who have conducted research into how climate change shows up in the geological and archaeological evidence include Prof. Arun Deep Ahluwalia, an Emeritus geologist at the Punjab University (Ludhiana), Prof. Rajinder K. Ganjoo, a geologist with the University of Jammu; Dr. Rohinton Avasia, a certified gemologist and ex-chairman of the Board of Studies in Geology at the Mumbai University and Dr. Kurush F. Dalal, archaeologist, and assistant professor at the Centre for Extra Mural Studies at Mumbai University.
Prof. Ahluwalia is “strongly opposed” to the view that alleged man made global warming is cause for alarm. Professor Ganjoo, has extensively studied the issue of melting glaciers and other environmental impacts in Nubra Valley (Ladakh). He found “no significant changes” and was of the opinion that in the absence of intensive weather data from the Nubra valley, it “would be premature” to speculate on what changes have occurred.
Dr. Avasia, who authored the study ‘Raised Beaches of Holocene Epoch occurring along the West Coast of India’ found compelling evidence that past sea levels in the region were “much higher than today.” Dr. Dalal is on record declaring, “climate change is just one of the irregularly regular constants in the history of man. Without historical climate change, man would not have been able to evolve so successfully.”
One outcome may well be predictable: unless or until journalists wake up to these cold, hard facts and write more even-handed stories they should not be surprised that independent sources such as Principia Scientific International are where their readers will go for more informed views.
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