Be sure to read the comments, especially about the tilted graph.

First, the graph you cite shows that the sea level change before human emissions of CO2 became material are no different than the change after they became material. That supports Morner and not the IPCC. A 2008 paper by Jevrejeva, Moore, Grinsted, and Woodworth shows that the global sea level acceleration began more than 200 years ago, long before human emissions of CO2 could impact oceans.

http://www.ulapland.fi/home/hkunta/jmoore/agucopywrite.html?pdfs/Jev2008GL033611.pdf

Second, the University of Colorado agrees with Morner. It has used to the TOPEX/POSEIDON and Jason-1 satellites to measure sea level since 1992 and shows that sea levels have not gone up in the last three years and are not ‘accelerating’ as Church and White claim.

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

I wish that you would actually do some research and examine the literature rather than look for papers that happen to tell you what you are hoping to hear. For the record, I am very sceptical of desk jockeys who do little work in the field and prefer old hands who understand the pitfalls in the real world.

In the case of Church and White, we have people who missed some obvious issues in their hurry to refute Moroner. As Easterbrook writes,

“As Morner points out, Church,, White, and Hunter applied a number of regional ‘corrections’ to the basic tide gauge record and calculated averages of a large region to arrive at their conclusion that sea level was rising in the Maldives. This is akin to putting one foot in a bed of hot coals and the other in a bucket of ice, averaging the temperature, and concluding that you should be quite comfortable! Putting aside the arguments around tide gauge levels, the geologic evidence appears to be indisputable and indicates conclusively that the sea levels at the sites shown in Morners paper cannot be submerging. You’re a smart guy–look at the geologic evidence in the two attached photos and judge for yourself.
Figure 1 shows a post-1970 wave-cut notch eroded into the pre-1970 shore platform. You cannot do that with a submerging coastline. (The platform should be under water if the island is submerging, not being eroded at a lower level). This is a classic example of an emergent shoreline, the kind you can see in any geologic textbook.
Figure 2 shows the present high tide line, the 1970 shoreline, and a pre-1970 shoreline. If the island has been submerging since 1970, as contended by Church,, White, and Hunter, the present high tide line should be above the 1970 shoreline, not below it!

Any regional analysis of average sea level changes cannot trump the geologic evidence at the two sites shown. The geologic evidence is site specific, just like each foot in the coals and ice bucket. The average is meaningless.”

I guess if you are sitting at a desk making adjustments to data on a screen it is easy to miss the fact that the tide line is below the 1970 shoreline.

We also have William Gray, who notes,

Vincent Gray weighed in:

Have you heard of the Australian study on 12 Pacific islands, some of them mentioned by Church? They used much more reliable equipment than the others. They claimed an upward trend but this was done by the dishonest use of a linear regression which made use of the temporary depression on all the records caused by the 1988 hurricane. If you look at the actual records in their report (attached) and ignore this temporary event you will find that there was no change for the last sixteen years. The website of the Australian Bureau of meteorology has individual and summarizing reports on this project at http://www.bom.gov.au/pacificsealevel/“

Once again, the evidence is against Church and White and for Morner.

Sorry but your blog got a few things wrong and missed much of the literature that is clearly against the IPCC position. Of course, the IPCC and AGW leadership depends on extreme and unfounded predictions to drum up interest and justify the transfer of wealth from taxpayers to political activist scientists. Church and White are hardly alone. We have had Schneider warn us about ice ages and tell Discovery magazine that stories need to be spiced up to get public involvement. We have also had Hansen make some ridiculous claims that have clearly not come close to becoming true.

http://dir.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/index.html

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year-old-climate-change-prediction-by-dr-james-hansen/

Instead of paying attention to the hype you would be much better off looking at the EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE that links climate change to CO2 emissions. The last time I looked, all of you warmers could not provide any such evidence and were way off on the periphery.

http://dir.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/index.html

[DC: I'm letting this through, but it is quite meandering and getting way off topic.

If you want to claim that the peer-reviewed scientific literature supports Morner, you must give references that explicitly support and cite Morner. Otherwise, this digression is at an end, I'm afraid.]

…and humiliated himself by misrepresenting his standing with INQUA in front of the Russian Academy of Sciences:

http://www.edf.org/documents/3868_morner_exposed.pdf

To add injury to insult: one of the supposed observational evidences for higher sea levels on the Maldives in the past, the so-called Reef Woman, was later related, in another paper by Mörner, to a tsunami. Sorry, Nils-Axel, but one ‘observational evidence’ cannot be evidence for two separate issues. His whole Maldives paper is based on similar one-off time points. In other words: shoddy science. One wonders whether he actually may be better at dowsing.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/the_australians_war_on_science_42.php

Be sure to read the comments, especially about the tilted graph.

Nils-Axel Mörner is one of leading scientists who works in the area of sea level changes. He has studied the subject for decades and uses observational evidence rather than faulty models to explain what has gone on and to predict what is likely to happen in the future. The predictions of the observational scientists are documented and available for review. They do not agree with those of the IPCC.

Permits to make his own cores of federally protected ancient bristlecone pines.

The attempt was to find the trees that were cored because their locations were not provided by the authors of the studies. Remarkably, he identified several of the sites and used the data and photos in his lecture on the subject.

Do you think that the Australians who cut down the Viligili tree in the Maldives had permission?

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/maldives3.jpg

We obtained a permit from the Forest Service and, if nothing else, we proved the Starbucks Hypothesis. The real leaders of the expedition were Pete Holzmann, a Climate Audit reader, and his wife and the sampling is primarily due to their efforts. We ended up with 64 cores, which were measured and analyzed at the University of Guelph, with myself and Climate Audit readers paying for the analysis without subsidy. I placed all the measurements online in Oct 2007 as soon as I received them and within a few months of taking the sample. Almagre is (for now) the highest millennium-length tree ring chronology in the world!

http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/ohioshort.pdf [Warning 1.5 Mb]