just rebuttals of Morner:
[quote]I wouldn’t accept Morners’ criticisms without checking them out first. He has made claims against the IPCC in the past that were easily verified as being baseless.
I have commented on his claims made to the Telegraph (apparently clarified in the interview)
telegraph.co.uk/comment/colu … -told.html
Morner says:
“One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”.”
This isn’t actually true, Morner’s paper on the satelite evidence makes no mention of the specific claim regarding the single tide gauge; however he does demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the processing of satelite altimetry data (and a fair bit of Dunning-Kruger effect). For instance he doesn’t reference the papers that quite clearly explain how the adjustments have been made to the raw data from the instrument. It appears that he is basing his claims on a figure without a verifiable source that is likely to be some sort of calibration plot (and not what he thinks it is). His paper is here:
dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0921-8181(0300097-3
and is debunked here:
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2006.08.002
his response is here
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2008.03.002
note Morner STILL doesn’t explain the origin of his “raw data” or explain his methodology in a way that would allow his results to be reproduced (I did try and track down his references, but they no longer exist and the closest I could find were not what he claimed them to be).
Morner also claims:
“When asked to act as an “expert reviewer” on the IPCC’s last two reports, he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one”.”
However one of those 22 is Any Cazenave, who is a sea level specialist (there may well be others), however Booker obviously could be bothered to verify Morner’s claims before publishing them.
Morner elsewhere claims:
“I am a sea-level specialist. There are many good sea-level people in the world, but let’s put it this way: There’s no one who’s beaten me. I took my thesis in 1969, devoted to a large extent to the sea-level problem. From then on, I have launched most of the new theories, in the '70s, '80s, and '90s.”
iceagenow.com/Claim_that_sea … _fraud.htm
However his work has received very little attention, his publications give him a Hirsch index of 9 (meaning he has nine publications with more than 9 citations), which is hardly consistent with his claim to be a top sea level specialist. My Hirsch index appears to be about 12 (according to Google Scholar), and I wouldn’t claim to be a leading scientist in my own field.
In short, one needs to be very skeptical when reading claims of fraud (“perversion”), they are easily made, and sometimes quite easily refuted.[/quote]
skepticalscience.com/Visual- … -Rise.html