Isle of the Dead
The ‘Isle of the Dead’ may yet prove to be another nail in the coffin of global warming and its gruesome companion, Disastrous Sea Level Rises.
The `Isle of the Dead’ is over two acres in size and is situated within the harbor of Port Arthur opening directly to the Southern Ocean. The isle itself is actually a graveyard (thus its eerie name), containing the graves of some 2,000 British convicts and free persons from the 19th century who lived and died at the nearby convict colony of Port Arthur between 1832 and 1870.
In 1841. renowned British Antarctic explorer, Captain Sir James Clark Ross, sailed into Tassy after a 6-month voyage of discovery and exploration to the Antarctic.
Ross and Governor Franklin made a particular point of visiting Port Arthur, to meet Thomas Lempriere, a senior official of the convict colony there, but who was also a methodical observer and recorder of meteorological, tidal, and astronomical data. It is important to note what Captain Ross wrote about it.
“My principal object in visiting Port Arthur was to afford a comparison of our standard barometer with that which had been employed for several years by Mr. Lempriere, the Deputy Assistant Commissary General, in accordance with my instructions, and also to establish a permanent mark at the zero point, or general meanlevel of the sea as determined by the tidal observations which Mr. Lempriere had conducted with perseverance and exactness for some time: by which means any secular variation in the relative level of the land and sea, which is known to occur on some coasts, might at any future period be detected, and its amount determined.
The point chosen for this purpose was the perpendicular cliff of the small islet off Point Puer, which, being near to the tide register, rendered the operation more simple and exact. The Governor, whom I had accompanied on an official visit to the settlement, gave directions to afford Mr. Lempriere every assistance of labourers he required, to have the mark cut deeply in the rock in the exact spot which his tidal observations indicated as the mean level of the ocean.
That mark is still there today, as can be seen in the photo.The photo was taken at midway between high and low tides.
There is intensive research presently underway by several institutions including the now corrupt CSIRO assisted by the head of the Inter-Agency Committee on Marine Science & Technology, Dr David Pugh, who is based at the University of Southampton, UK. But in spite of plenty of time we have yet to see their detailed explanation of just why this mark confounds all the predictions about sea level rise.
Dr. Pugh airily waves his hands and says in effect that poor old confused Lempriere, in spite of the detailed instructions about getting a Mean Sea Level (half way between high and low tide), he just put in the high water mark. This, of course, sounds logical to anybody steeped in the Green religion.
But not to anyone else and not to real scientists who look at evidence unflinchingly.
Be that as it may, the Australian National Tidal Facility at Flinders University in Adelaide published a `Mean Sea Level Survey’ in 1998 to establish sea level trends around the Australian coast from tide gauges having more than 23 years of hourly data in their archive. This survey was particularly relevant for global application since Australia is tectonically stable and much less affected by Post Glacial Rebound (the tendency of land to rise once the burden of billions of tons of ice goes) than Europe, Asia or North America.
It did not include Tasmania possibly because University types do not recognise Tasmania as part of Australia, possibly because somehow the dumb Tasmanians had not yet got around to measuring sea levels in 1975.
Since nearly two-thirds of the world’s total oceanic area is in the southern hemisphere, Australia is best placed to monitor southern hemisphere trends and probably best represents the true Mean Sea Level globally. Also, the Australian coast adjoins the Indian, Pacific, and Southern Oceans, making its data indicative of sea levels in three oceans, not just one.
The National Tidal Facility identified tide gauges in stations running anti-clockwise around Australia starting with Darwin.
Eleven of the 27 stations recorded a sea level fall, while the mean rate of sea level rise for all the stations combined is only +0.3 mm/yr, with an average record length of 36.4 years. This is only one sixth of the IPCC figure. There was also no obvious geographical pattern of falls versus rises as both were distributed along all parts of the coast.
But there’s more. It was shown earlier that Adelaide was a prime example of local sea level rise due to urban subsidence [3]. It’s two stations in the above list are the only ones to record a sea level rise greater than the IPCC estimate. The same NTF survey pointed out the Adelaide anomaly and directly attributed it to local subsidence, not sea level rise, on the grounds that the neighboring stations of Port Lincoln, Port Pirie and Victor Harbour only show a rise of +0.3 mm/yr between them. If we exclude Adelaide from the list, the averagesea level rise for the other 25 stations is then only +0.16 mm/yr, or less than one tenth of the IPCC estimate.
If this world tour, ending with the Australian survey, were not convincing enough, there is one further piece of evidence from Australia which demonstrates that the IPCC, and the ICE-3G model which underpins their predictions, is wrong about the magnitude of 20th century sea level rise.
So do your best to memorise this and whenever Fairfax runs its monthly big scare about burning cities, desert, and huge sea levels that will affect our (great x 15o) grandchildren if we leave the porch light on, write into them and point all this out.
Or write to the Councils around Australia who are running like Chicken Little drawing imaginary lines where the sea will come up to and forbidding anyone to build their home or repair it beyond them.
And a fat lot of good it will do you.
http://morningmail.org/isle-of-the-dead/
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